He stooped to the floor, and gathered the drowsy body in his arms. On the landing, one floor below, the little sister cried aloud. "No, no, no, no!" he crooned, in a passion of apprehension: "Brother will show Winny the bright moon."
They came safely to the street; the moon indeed was there, flooding the world with splendor. When Nora had buttoned Winny's coat, and the boy had posted his letters, they took her by either hand, and started.
Hughey had planned out his difficult campaign to the end, and his brain was quiet and clear. Passing through Church Street, he raised his hat with reverence, as he had always done since he came to Dublin, to a blank stone on the south side in the ancient yard of Saint Michan's; for under that stone, according to a tradition, Robert Emmett's sentinel dust reposes. There on the old Danish ground, at the crisis, Winny's fiery Gaelic temper came again to the fore. Struck with the solitude and the dark, the dread faces of unusual things, and jostled by the wind which pounced at her from its corner lair on the north bank of the river, she hung back and rebelled. "Let me go, let me—go! Hughey! Oh!..." The little silver lisp arose in very real, in irresistible alarm.
Never once, in all his mistaken planning, had Hughey paused to consider that she had a voice in the matter. If she were unwilling to die for his dearest, why, what right had he, Hughey, though scornful and disappointed because of it, to compel her? After all, she was only seven, and silly! He looked at Nora over the capped head between them. Then he fetched a deep, deep sigh, and the tears came to his eyelids, burned, and dried.
They went on, ever slower; and at Richmond Bridge Hughey spoke to Winny, as he felt that he could do at last, tenderly, and even with humorous understanding. "Now 'tis the end o' your walk, an' ye'll trot home wid Nora, and niver moind me at all, dear. Some day she'll be tellin' ye phwhat ye missed." But to Nora herself he said softly:
"Take care o' mother, mavourneen."
"Oi will, Hughey."
She kissed him twice; her smooth cheek against his was cold as a shell. He made a gesture of dismissal, which she did not disobey; and he watched them go, without further sign. The two childish figures were swallowed by the blue-black shadows, and the pavement under their naked feet gave forth no receding sounds. Yet Hughey, bereft of them so quickly and utterly, listened, listened, tiptoeing to the central arch of the bridge.
The autumnal Sabbath breath of the slumbering capital floated in a faint white mist against the brick and stone. Every high point was alive with light: the masts in port, the roof of the King's Inns, the Park, the top of the Nelson monument, the Castle standard, the nigh summits of the gracious Wicklow hills. Below were the dim line of Liffey bridges, processional to the sea, and the sad friendly wash of the chilly water. Clear of any regret or self-pity, he would have his farewell grave and calm, and he would set out with the sign of faith. So he knelt down, in prayer, for a moment, and with his eyes still closed, dropped forward.
In another eternal instant, he came into the air. He had a confused sense of being glad for Winny, and otherwise quite satisfied and thankful. There, next the wall, was a rotten abandoned raft, a chance of life within clutch; he saw it, and smiled. Then Hughey sank, and the black ebb-tide took him.