“In about half an hour from now.”
“How long will it take us to get across?” asked Dermod. “Ten hours?”
“God look on yer wit!” exclaimed Jim. “If there’s a fog on the Clyde it will maybe take three days—maybe more. Ye can never know what a boat’s goin’ to do. Ye can no more trust it than ye can trust a woman.”
CHAPTER XIII
A WILD NIGHT
I
THE dance came to an end, and, worn out with their exertions, the women picked up their shawls and wrapped them round their shoulders. Then getting their bundles they went towards the wharf, Willie the Duck leading, his fiddle under his arm and his bundle tied over his shoulders with a string. Coming to the quay they passed through a gloomy grain-shed, where heating bags of wheat sent a steam out into the air. Suddenly, gazing through the rising vapour, Norah saw horses up in the sky and she could hear them neighing loudly. For a moment she paused in terror and wondered how such a thing could be, then recollected that in a town, where there was no God, anything might be possible. Once out in the open Maire a Glan pointed to the fall-and-tackle, hardly distinguishable at a distance, which was lifting the animals off the pier and lowering them down to the main deck of the boat. The horses were turning round awkwardly and snorting wildly, terrified by the sound of the sea.
Bags of grain were being lifted on long chains; dark derricks shoved out lean arms that waved to and fro as if inviting somebody to come near; cattle lowing and slipping were being hammered by the drovers’ blackthorns into the hold; a tall man with face fierce and swarthy, eyes bright as fire, and mouth like a raw, red scar, was roaring out orders in a shrill voice, and suddenly in the midst of all this Norah saw Micky’s Jim leaning against the funnel of the boat, his hands deep in his trousers’ pockets and the eternal pipe in his mouth, apparently heedless of all that was going on around him.
Beside Jim stood one whom Norah knew, but one who had changed a great deal since she had seen him last. As she went up the gang-plank, stepping timidly, cowering under the great derrick that wheeled above, she felt that a pair of eyes were fixed upon her, piercing into her very soul. She turned her gaze towards the deck and found Dermod Flynn looking straight at her as she made her way aboard. In an instant her eye had taken the whole picture of the youth, his clothes, the coat, much the worse for wear, his trousers, thin at knee and frilly at the shoe-mouth, his cap torn at rim and crown, the stray locks of hair straggling down his forehead, the bundle lying at his feet, and the hazel stick which he held in his hand, probably even yet in imitation of the cattle drovers who went along Glenmornan road on the way to the fair of Greenanore. These things Norah noticed with a girl’s quick intuitive perception, but what struck her most forcibly was Dermod’s look of expectation as he watched her come up the gang-plank towards him.
“Dermod Flynn, I hardly knew ye at all,” she said, putting out her hand and smiling slightly. “Ye’ve got very big these last two years.”
“So did you, Norah,” Dermod answered, looking curiously at the small white hand which he gripped in his own. “You are almost as tall as I am myself.”