Complete Works of Bram Stoker (45 page)
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Authors: Bram Stoker
I had certain duties to attend to with regard to my English property, and this kept me fairly occupied. Each few months I ran over to the Knockcalltecrore, which Dick was transforming into a fairy-land. The discovery of the limestone had, as he had conjectured, created possibilities in the way of building and of waterworks of which at first we had not dreamed. The new house rose on the table rock in the Cliff Fields. A beautiful house it was, of red sandstone with red tiled roof and quaint gables, and jutting windows and balustrades of carven stone. The whole Cliff Fields were laid out as exquisite gardens, and the murmur of water was everywhere. None of this I ever told Norah in my letters, as it was to be a surprise to her.
On the spot where she had rescued me we had reared a great stone — a monolith — whereon a simple legend told the story of a woman’s strength and bravery. Round its base were sculptured the history of the mountain, from its legend of the King of Snakes down to the lost treasure and the rescue of myself. This was all carried out under Dick’s eye. The legend on the stone was:
NORAH JOYCE A BRAVE WOMAN ON THIS SPOT BY HER COURAGE AND DEVOTION SAVED A MAN’S LIFE
At the end of the first year Norah went to another school at Dresden for six months; and then, by her own request to Mr. Chapman, was transferred to an English school at Brighton, one justly celebrated among Englishwomen. These last six months were very, very long to me; for as the time drew near when I might claim my darling the suspense grew very great, and I began to have harrowing fears lest her love might not have survived the long separation and the altered circumstances. I heard regularly from Joyce. He had gone to live with his son Eugene, who was getting along well, and was already beginning to make a name for himself as an engineer. By his advice his father had taken a sub-section of the great ship canal, then in progress of construction, and with the son’s knowledge and his own shrewdness and energy was beginning to realise what to him was a fortune. So that the purchase-money of Shleenanaher, which formed his capital, was used to a good purpose. At last the long period of waiting came to an end. A month before Norah’s school was finished, Joyce went to Brighton to see her, having come to visit me beforehand.
His purpose and mine was to arrange all about the wedding, which we wanted to be exactly as she wished. She asked herfather to let it be as quiet as possible, with absolutely no fuss — no publicity, and in some quiet place where no one knew us.
“Tell Arthur,” she said, “that I should like it to be somewhere near the sea, and where we can get easily on the Continent.” I fixed on Hythe, which I had been in the habit of visiting occasionally, as the place where we were to be married. Here, high over the sea level, rises the grand old church where the bones of so many brave old Norsemen rest after a thousand years. The place was so near to Folkestone that, after the wedding and an informal breakfast, we could drive over to catch the mid-day boat. I lived the requisite time in Hythe, and complied with all the formalities. I did not see my darling until we met in the church-porch, and then I gazed on her with unstinted admiration. Oh, what a peerless beauty she was! Every natural grace and quality seemed developed to the full. Every single grace of womanhood was there; every subtle manifestation of high- breeding; every stamp of the highest culture. There was no one in the porch — for those with me delicately remained in the church when they saw me go out to meet my bride — and I met her with a joy unspeakable. Joyce went in and left her with me a moment — they had evidently arranged to do so — but when we were quite alone she said to me, with a very serious look: “Mr. Severn, before we go into the church answer me one question — answer me truthfully, I implore you!” A great fear came upon me that at the last I was to suffer the loss of her I loved — that at the moment when the cup of happiness was at my lips it was to be dashed aside; and it was with a hoarse voice and a beating heart I answered: “I shall speak truly, Norah. What is it?” She said, very demurely:
“Mr. Severn, are you satisfied with me?” I looked up and caught the happy smile in her eyes, and for answer took her in my arms to kiss her; but she said: “Not yet, Arthur, not yet. What would they say? And, besides, it would be unlucky.” So I released her, and she took my arm, and as we came up the aisle together I whispered to her: “Yes, my darling! Yes, yes, a thousand times! The time has been long, long; but the days were well spent.” She looked at me with a glad, happy look as she murmured in my ear:
“We shall see Italy soon, dear, together. I am so happy!” and she pinched my arm. That was a very happy wedding, and as informal as it was happy. As Norah had no bridesmaid, Dick, who was to have been my best man, was not going to act; but when Norah knew this she insisted on it, and said, sweetly: “I should not feel I was married properly unless Dick took his place. And as to my having no bridesmaid, all I can say is, if we had half so good a girl friend, she would be here, of course.” This settled the matter, and Dick, with his usual grace and energy carried out the best man’s chief duty of taking care of his principal’s hat. There were only our immediate circle present: Joyce and Eugene, Miss Joyce (who had come all the wayfrom Knocknacar), Mr. Chapman, and Mr. Caicy (who had also come over from Galway specially). There was one other old friend also present, but I did not know it until I came out of the vestry, after signing the register, with my wife on my arm.
There, standing modestly in the background, and with a smile as manifest as a ten-acre field, was none other than Andy — Andy, so well-dressed and smart that there was really nothing to distinguish him from any other man in Hythe. Norah saw him first, and said, heartily: “Why, there is Andy! How are you, Andy?” and held out her hand. Andy took it in his great fist, and stooped and kissed it as if it had been a saint’s hand and not a woman’s:
“God bless and keep ye, Miss Norah darlin’, an’ the Virgin and the saints watch over ye both!” Then he shook hands with me.
“Thank you, Andy,” we said, both together, and then I beckoned Dick and whispered to him. We went back to breakfast in my rooms, and sat down as happy a party as could be, the only one not quite comfortable at first being Andy. He and Dick both came in quite hot and flushed. Dick pointed to him: “He’s an obstinate, truculent villain, is Andy! Why, I had to almost fight him to make him come in. Now, Andy, no running away; it is Miss Norah’s will.” And Andy subsided bashfully into a seat. It was fully several minutes before he either smiled or winked. We had a couple of hours to pass before it became time to leave for Folkestone; and when breakfast was over, one and then another said a few kindly words. Dick opened the ball by speaking most beautifully of our own worthiness, and of how honestly and honorably each had won the other, and of the long life and happiness that lay, he hoped and believed, before us. Then Joyce spoke a few manly words of love for his daughter and his pride in her. The tears were in his eyes when he said how his one regret in life was that her dear mother had to look down from Heaven her approval on this day, instead of sharing it among us as the best of mothers and the best of women. Then Norah turned to him and laid her head on his breast and cried a little — not unhappily, but happily, as a bride should cry at leaving those she loves for one she loves better still.
Of course both the lawyers spoke, and Eugene said a few words bashfully. I was about to reply to them all, when Andy got up and crystallised the situation in a few words.
“Miss Norah an’ yer ‘an’r, I’d like, if I might make so bould, to say a wurrd fur all the men and weemen in Ireland that ayther iv yez iver kem across. I often heerd ivfairies, an’ Masther Art knows well how he hunted wan from the top iv Knocknacar to the top iv Knockcalltecrore, and I won’t say a wurrd about the kind iv a fairy he wanted to find — not even in her quare kind iv an eye — bekase I might be overlooked, as the mastherwas; and, more betoken, since I kem here Masther Dick has tould me that I’m to be yer ‘anVs Irish coachman. Hurroo! an’ I might get evicted from that same houldin’ fur me impidence in tellin’ tales iv the Masther before he was married; but I’ll promise yez both that there’ll be no man from the Giant’s Causeway to Cape Clearwhat’ll thry, an’ thryhardher, to make yerfeet walk an’ yer wheels rowl in aisy ways than meself. I’m takin’ a liberty, I know, be sayin’ so much, but plase God, ye’ll walk yer ways wid honor an’ wid peace, believin’ inaichotheran’ in God; an’ may he bless ye both, an’ yer childher, and yer childher’s childher to folly ye. An’ if iver ayther iv yez wants to shtep into glory over a man’s body, I hope ye’ll not look past poor ould Andy Sullivan!” Andy’s speech was quaint, but it was truly meant, for his heart was full of quick sympathy, and the honest fellow’s eyes were full of tears as he concluded.
Then Miss Joyce’s health was neatly proposed by Mr. Chapman and responded to in such a way by Mr. Caicy that Norah whispered to me that she would not be surprised if aunt took up her residence in Galway before long.
And now the hour was come to say good-bye to all friends. We entered our carriage and rolled away, leaving behind us waving hands, loving eyes, and hearts that beat most truly.
And the great world lay before us with all the possibilities of happiness that men and women may win for themselves. There was never a cloud to shadow our sunlit way; and we felt that we were one.
THE END
THE WATTER’S MOU’
This is Stoker’s third novel. The title means “the water’s mouth” in Scottish dialect, referring to a river emptying into the ocean. The novel was first published in 1895 by A. Constable and Company of Westminster as part of their
Acme Library
series. It is the story of a woman in love with a man whose job it is to stop poor fishermen smuggling – one of whom happens to be her father.
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
It threatened to be a wild night. All day banks of sea-fog had come and gone, sweeping on shore with the south-east wind, which is so fatal at Cruden Bay, and indeed all along the coast of Aberdeenshire, and losing themselves in the breezy expanses of the high uplands beyond. As yet the wind only came in puffs, followed by intervals of ominous calm; but the barometer had been falling for days, and the sky had on the previous night been streaked with great ‘mare’s-tails’ running in the direction of the dangerous wind. Up to early morning the wind had been south-westerly, but had then ‘backed’ to south-east; and the sudden change, no less than the backing, was ominous indeed. From the waste of sea came a ceaseless muffled roar, which seemed loudest and most full of dangerous import when it came through the mystery of the driving fog. Whenever the fog-belts would lift or disperse, or disappear inland before the gusts of wind, the sea would look as though swept with growing anger; for though there were neither big waves as during a storm, nor a great swell as after one, all the surface of the water as far as the eye could reach was covered with little waves tipped with white. Closer together grew these waves as the day wore on, the angrier ever the curl of the white water where they broke. In the North Sea it does not take long for the waves to rise; and all along the eastern edge of Buchan it was taken for granted that there would be wild work on the coast before the night was over.
In the little look-out house on the top of the cliff over the tiny harbour of Port Erroll the coastguard on duty was pacing rapidly to and fro. Every now and again he would pause, and, lifting a field-glass from the desk, sweep the horizon from Girdleness at the south of Aberdeen, when the lifting of the mist would let him see beyond the Scaurs, away to the north, where the high cranes of the Blackman quarries at Murdoch Head seemed to cleave the sky like gigantic gallows-trees.
He was manifestly in high spirits, and from the manner in which, one after another, he looked again and again at the Martini-Henry rifle in the rack, the navy revolver stuck muzzle down on a spike, and the cutlass in its sheath hanging on the wall, it was easy to see that his interest arose from something connected with his work as a coastguard. On the desk lay an open telegram smoothed down by his hard hands, with the brown envelope lying beside it. It gave some sort of clue to his excitement, although it did not go into detail. ‘Keep careful watch tonight; run expected; spare no efforts; most important.’
William Barrow, popularly known as Sailor Willy, was a very young man to be a chief boatman in the preventive service, albeit that his station was one of the smallest on the coast. He had been allowed, as a reward for saving the life of his lieutenant, to join the coast service, and had been promoted to chief boatman as a further reward for a clever capture of smugglers, wherein he had shown not only great bravery, but much ability and power of rapid organisation.