He cast about for a minute how to answer. What did she mean? What was she driving at? Who had been putting notions into her mind? Was it Honor, or who? That his wisest course would have been to be a little affectionate to her; to have appealed to her affection for him; to have put his arms round her; nay, if so wild, so utterly unprecedented a course had proved necessary, to have actually gone so far as to kiss her; thatthiswas what she wished, what she was waiting for, he did not know in the least. It was a great pity there was no one at hand to tell him so, for he was really an exceedingly intelligent young man, quick to take a hint, and would doubtless have essayed even this unpracticalmethod of argument had he known it to be the one most likely to succeed under the circumstances. He was by this time very much in earnest, and had no idea of being in his turn made abaulyoreof, as she had said, and a laughing-stock before all Inishmaan. He did not know it, however, and the result was that natural annoyance prompted him to take up quite a different line, one not nearly so well calculated to be successful. It was an error of judgment, but to such errors even intelligent people are occasionally liable.
‘Begorra, this is grand news you have for me this evening, Grania O’Malley, so it is!’ he exclaimed, with a loud laugh, though his face was red, and an angry look in his eyes betrayed some lack of indifference. ‘Grand news, glory be to God, and ’tis myself is obliged to you for telling it to me! And who is it that you’re going to take up with, now you’ve given me the go-by, if you’ll be sopolite as to tell me? ’Tis some rich gentleman over from the Continent, I’ll be bound, that you have been putting yourcometherupon, or, may be, a lord from Dublin? Gorra, ’tis the proud place Inishmaan will be when it sees him coming to carry you off! my faith, yes; the proud place and the proud people we’ll be, every one of us! Sure, how could a poor young fellow like myself have any chance with you, so grand and so proud as you’ll be? Musha, it’s not Irish will do you then to speak, I suppose, but the best of fine scholar’s English, and a grand house with a slate roof on it you’ll have no doubt to live in, and a servant, please God, or maybe two, to wait on you. Och, glory! glory! itwillbe the great day for Inishmaan when Grania O’Malley is seen sailing off with her new husband the lord from Dublin!Wurrah! Wurrah!the grand day, please God, and no mistake.’
The jeering tone, the laughter, the sting of all this from Murdough,Murdough, of all people in the world, lashed Grania to madness. She looked wildly round her for a weapon—physical or otherwise it mattered little—blind, helpless anger possessing her. Suddenly the remembrance of her thoughts a few nights before—of her momentary notion about Teige O’Shaughnessy—returned to her mind, and she seized upon it. It was a poor weapon, as she probably knew, but it was the only one visible upon the spur of the moment.
‘Then it is no gentleman I am going to marry, so it is not! no gentleman at all, for it is enough of fine, idle gentlemen I have had, God knows, and that is the sort I am tired of!’ she exclaimed. ‘It is a quiet boy, and a decent boy, and a poor boy that I am going to marry, one that will work hard, and not drink, drink, drink, day and night, till he doesn’t know his one hand from the other, or the floor fromthe roof over his head, or the sun from the moon, or the grass from the stones, or God’s green earth from the salt black bottom of the sea! It is a good man and a faithful man, and a man that will love me, and care me, that is the sort of man that I want and that I am going to be married to, so I am. And if you wish to know the name of him, it is Teige O’Shaughnessy, andthatis the man I have chosen, and whom I am going to marry, so it is, Murdough Blake; the very same, no other!’
Murdough stared at her for a moment in open-eyed astonishment. Then he burst into a still louder laugh, a laugh that might have been heard right across the island. This time it was quite a genuine one. His vanity, which would have been touched to the quick if Grania had thrown him over for someone whom he could by any possibility have looked upon as a rival, was left untouched, was evengratified, by the mention of Teige O’Shaughnessy, between whom and himself no such rivalry was in his eyes possible; nay, the very juxtaposition of their images was a sort of indirect compliment to himself. His sense, therefore, of the ridiculous was genuinely tickled. Besides, to do him justice, he did not believe her in the least.
‘Auch! then, glory, glory! Glory to God! and more power to you, Grania O’Malley, but itisthe grand man, sure enough, you have chosen, so it is! The grand man, the handsome man, and the rich man, glory be to God! Och! but it is the right sight and show you will be when you and Teige O’Shaughnessy are married! Glory to God! the right sight and show, and the fine, straight, handsome husband it is you will have, bedad! Arrah! will you be so obliging as to tell me was it the handsome, straight legs of him, or the beautiful spotty faceof him, or the fine colour of his hair that first took the fancy to? Or maybe it was the beautiful big house he has to give you on top of the rocks yonder? or the nice, sweet-tempered aunt he keeps in it, that will be such pleasant company to talk to when you are sitting there by yourself? My faith and word, Grania O’Malley, it is myself will laugh to see you and Teige O’Shaughnessy when you are man and wife! Gorra, I will tell you now what I will do—then I will, please God!—I will go out in a curragh, and will bring with me every bouchaleen upon Inishmaan, and we will all go out together on to the sea, and will follow you to watch and look at you, when you are on your way to Aranmore to be married to Teige O’Shaughnessy. Glory be to God! Glory be to God! itisthe match you have got hold of, sure enough! my faith and word, the match! Och! ’tis killed I’ll bewith the laughing!’ And he rolled to and fro upon the rocks.
Grania’s face was scarlet. She sprang forward till she was within half a foot of him. Blind rage possessed her. She shook from head to foot, and clenched her fists in his face. A little more and she would have pummelled him soundly with them.
‘Out of this! Out of this! Out of it with you this very minute!’ she cried. ‘Get off this ground, and get off this rock, and go laugh somewhere else, for it is not here you shall laugh, so it is not! It is not here you shall come ever again, for I do not want to have you, and I do not want to see you, and I do not want to hear you, nor to have anything to do with you!—never again, so long as I live—never, so help me! And for my money, which is all you come for, and all you want, you need not be asking me for any of it again—not for Micky Sulivan, or anyoneelse—for I will not give you one thraneen more of my money, so I will not—I will throw it into the sea first. I will not do anything for you, and I will not see you, and for marrying you, I would not marry you, not if you were made of solid gold from head to foot, and were crowned King of all Ireland or of the world itself! For it is not such a husband asyouI want, and so I tell you!’
She was back into the cabin and had shut the door before Murdough the fluent could utter another word. He stood for a minute or two longer upon the platform, then walked away rather soberly, scratching his chin as he went. In his sense of the intense, the delightful, the utterly convulsive absurdity of any comparison between himself and Teige O’Shaughnessy he had momentarily forgotten the rather important errand upon which he had come to speak to Grania. He remembered it now, and it was with anuneasy sense that he had not perhaps managed his interview quite as judiciously as he might have done. It is all very well to be excessively witty and brilliantly sarcastic, but, then, it interferes sometimes rather seriously with business.
Itwas one of those victories, nevertheless, that cost more to the winner than the loser. The first rapture, the first keen tingling satisfaction of her explosion over, Grania was more miserable than ever. What had she done? she asked herself, aghast. Done? She had done the very thing, the mere thought, the momentary dread, of which had all but scared her out of her senses a few nights before. Broken with Murdough! Of her own accord, actually of her own free will she had broken with him; refused to marry him, refused to see him, refused to speak or have anything more to do with him.Broken with Murdough!Refused to marry Murdough! It was like breaking with life, it was like refusing to breathe the air, refusing to eat or to drink, refusing to move a limb! How could she do it? What! live on, on, and on; thirty, forty, fifty years, perhaps, and in all that time, in all these years, the interminable years that stretched ahead of her, no Murdough!No Murdough?Murdough wiped out of her life?—it was the sun and the stars, it was life itself wiped out! Nothing could make such a vision endurable—nothing could make it even conceivable!
She went about her work, therefore, like a dazed creature; saw to the house, cared for Honor, fed the beasts; but it was as a body with no soul inside it—a mere shell. Was she herself, she sometimes wondered dully, or was she someone else? She really hardly knew.
Oddly enough, Honor seemed scarcely tonotice that anything was specially amiss with her. This came partly from sheer physical weakness, and partly from that absorption in her own drama which all souls, even the tenderest, seem to feel at the coming on of death. Grania, besides, had always been a bit ‘queer’; given to extremes—now elated, now depressed—and it did not seem to her that she was very much more so than usual. As to her being specially unhappy about Murdough Blake, that was a trouble quite out of Honor’s ken, and not one of the things she would have dreamed of worrying herself over. That Murdough was lazy and wasteful, was given occasionally to getting drunk, was rather good for nothing and worthless generally, these were facts which, even if anyone had called her attention to them, she would probably have accepted placidly enough. No doubt he was most of these things. Why not? Wasn’t it only to beexpected that he would be, seeing that he was a man and a young one? Why wouldn’t he be? Didn’t God Almighty, for some mysterious reason of His own, make them mostly so?
A view so general, and at the same time so tolerant in its pessimism, was not likely to be disturbed by any particular illustration of it. If anyone had, further, proceeded to point out that Grania was not likely to be happy, married to such a man, Honor, for all her sisterly devotion, would probably have replied, equally placidly, that no doubt she would not be happy. Why, again, should she be? People as a rule were not happy, nor meant apparently to be happy, and the married state especially stood before her mind as a state of natural and inevitable discomfort—one in which there was always a more or less troublesome and unmanageable male to be fed, looked after, and put up withgenerally. That it possessed any counter-balancing advantages; that it could, even at the start, be, for a woman, a state of especial happiness, she simply did not, for a moment, believe. She would have been too polite to contradict anyone who had chosen to put forward such an assertion, but in her own mind she scouted it utterly. ‘Arrah, holy Bridget! what could there be in it to make any woman in this earthly worldhappy?’ she would have said to herself. Her own private opinion was that all that was an invention got up by the men.Theypersuaded the women to believe there was something pleasant in it, and the silly creatures were fools enough to believe them. That was all. The whole thing was really exceedingly simple!
This being her standpoint it followed that the pangs of unrequited love were the last that would have been successfully laid barebefore her. Of Grania’s future she did, indeed, think incessantly, but it was a future that skipped over the next forty, fifty, or sixty years, and fixed itself only upon what lay beyond that trifling interregnum. Day and night her thoughts fixed themselves more and more in this direction; hoping, interceding, imploring for the one that had to be left—left in a cold, ugly world—pleading that she might be brought in; that her heart might turn; that, sooner or later, they two might stand together safe—safe, as she put it to herself, in Glory—a place which, if it had no name, no inhabitants, no conceivable whereabouts, was still at least as real and as definite to her as those rocks, as yonder sea that she habitually looked at. It was the one thing that still troubled her; the one thing that kept her from her peace; perturbed her poor soul, and brought the tears into her patient eyes.
So they went on together, as others beside them have gone on, and will go on, till all things end, till all the books are written, and every story finished; loving one another, that is to say, with a love which, on one side, at least, had gathered to itself all that, under other circumstances, might have spread over a considerable field, understanding one another as much—well, about as much as most of us contrive to understand one another—as much, in other words, as if they had never met, never grown up in the same nest, never eaten off the same loaf, never touched hands, or exchanged a syllable in their lives.
Poor Honor’s sisterly petitions were not, it must be owned, prospering, for Grania in these weeks was certainly not improving. A new recklessness had got hold of her. It was in her blood—for she came, upon both sides, of a wild, untameable stock—but it had never risen so near to the surface before. Circumstances had tamed her, as they tame most people; a certain sense of responsibility had tamed her; doubts and self-perplexities had tamed her; of late, too, that keen, hungry clutch at the heart had tamed her. Now she no longer cared, or thought that she no longer cared. The barriers were completely broken down; the floods were out and away; there was no knowing yet how far, or how furiously, they might travel.
One afternoon, about a week after her last interview with Murdough Blake, she had been up to Allyhaloo, the village at the extreme south end of the island, to get some straw for Moonyeen, and was coming down the path with a great load of it on her back. The wind swept round and round her head with a sort of fickle, clamorous insistence, now rising to a wailing climax, then suddenly sinking, then as suddenly wailing out again. The sea was of a uniform grey,a few darker lines being drawn here and there across it as if by somebody’s fingers. The Cashla coast, Spiddal, the whole line of the Connemara hills were lost and muffled in swathing, formless bands of mist.
Grania fixed her eyes steadily upon the path, which was all she could see, bent down as she was under her bundle. Her mind, except now and then under strong emotion, still worked only as a child’s mind works—vaguely, that is to say, with a sort of dim diffuseness—stirred by what came to her through her senses, but lapsing into vagueness again as soon as that direct impression had worn off. In this respect she was just what she had always been. The events that had recently happened had been events belonging to and affecting quite another region. Her mind stood aloof, uninfected, unenlarged, untouched by them.
A real event, by the way, had happenedthat afternoon. A party of people—English people, it was reported—had come over from Galway in a pleasure yacht, and had made the tour of the islands, visiting not Aranmore only, but the other two islands as well—a rare event at the present day, twenty-five years ago an almost unprecedented one.
As she came down, picking her way carefully over the stones, her mountain of straw towering behind her, Grania suddenly perceived that this party were coming right towards her up the path. It was the direct way to Dun Connor, the chief, if not the only, lion of the island, which the strangers, no doubt, were then on their way to visit. A ragged tangle of children followed them, shouting and clamouring for half-pence.
A vehement feeling of annoyance made Grania long to rush away, to hide herself behind a boulder, to do anything rather than have toencounter these strangers—gentry, the sort of people that Murdough was always talking about and envying—people who lived in big white houses with staring windows like those she had seen in Galway. Pride, however, and a sort of stubbornness hindered her from running away. She went on accordingly down the path, and, when the contact became imminent, merely stepped a little aside, on to a piece of flat rock beside a stunted thorn-bush, and stood there—her cumbersome burden rising behind her—waiting till the visitors should have passed.
There were three of them—two ladies, and a young man escorting them. They came up laughing, evidently amused, and enjoying the sense of discovery—for Inishmaan was all but untrodden ground—a flutter of skirts and parasols, of hat-ribands and waterproof cloaks filling up the pathway.
Grania stood doggedly waiting—her head a little thrown back; something of the stir and stress that filled her visible in her whole look and bearing; a wild, untamed vision of strength and savage beauty standing beside that crooked and stunted thorn-bush.
The visitors to the island were a little taken by surprise by it. One of the two ladies put up an eyeglass to look at her, at the same time touching her friend’s arm so as to call her attention.
With an angry sense that she was being stared at, Grania on her side turned and gazed fiercely at them, her great slumberous eyes, so Southern in their darkness, filled with a curious lowering light.
The visitors passed hastily on up the track.
‘Did you notice that girl standing above the pathway?’ one of the ladies said to theother. ‘How she stared! Did you observe? Not quite pleasant, was it?’
‘Yes,’ the other answered, clutching rather feverishly at her skirts. ‘Don’t go so quickly, dear. What stones! Yes, I noticed her. A fine, handsome creature, I thought—picturesque, too, in her red petticoat—but, as you say, not exactly pleasant-looking. Generally they have such good manners, poor creatures—quite decent, you know!’
They hurried on, for a storm was clearly coming up, and the yacht was not built for heavy weather. Quick, hot gusts of wind kept following one another over the grey, treeless surface of the island. The sea, too, sent up an occasional growl—a hint as to what might be coming. The visit to Dun Connor had accordingly to be cut short, and, with a hasty glance at the wilderness of stone around them, the visitors turned down thepath again, and betook themselves to the shore.
From her usual post beside the cabin Grania watched them stumbling over the stones in their haste and rapidly embarking, with a feeling of satisfaction in her own fierce sea and sky which had scared away these fine people so suddenly.
A dull wrath, like that of the coming storm itself, was in the girl’s veins. She had passed Murdough early the same day—one of the O’Flaherties and Phil Garry were with him at the time—and he had ostentatiously gone on talking and laughing, without paying the smallest attention to her presence. She, on her side, had passed him without a glance, but it had seemed to her as if every drop of blood in her veins had turned in that instant to boiling lead, and she could have killed all three of them then and there, without ruth or hesitation, had her means been onlyequal to her wishes. It was still burning dangerously in her, that dull wrath, made up of anger, inarticulate despair, of love turned for the time being into a sort of sombre hatred. The necessity, too, of concealing it from Honor made it all the worse and all the more perilously pent up within her.
As it happened, a mode of expending it came that very night, and the long mystery of the stolen turf was at the same time cleared up.
The promised storm came on to blow unmistakably about six o’clock, and by nine or ten o’clock it had grown to a regular tempest. North and south, east and west, it seemed to come from all directions at once. Warm scuds of rain fell as if from a bucket. Then the Atlantic joined the concert, its hollow, bull-voiced roar, full of suggestions of shipwreck, terror, and death, coming up unceasingly to them from below.
Poor Honor was rather frightened. The suddenness of the storm disturbed and distressed her. It seemed unnatural, this combination of heat and of rushing wind. It was a new thing to her experience, and seemed to forebode evil. From time to time the sound of her prayers could be heard coming from her own dusky corner, the words caught and carried off, as it were, before they were half uttered by the rushing wind, which tore down the chimney and seemed to be bent, this time, upon dislodging the sturdy, much-enduring little house from its deeply-set foundations upon the rocks.
Grania remained huddled beside the hearth, without approaching the bed. She was conscious that she was not good company for Honor that evening, so kept away from her as far as possible. Suddenly, as they satthere, with the width of the cabin dividing them, a loud, piercing scream seemed to break between them. It was so close that both believed for a moment that it was inside the house. It was only the scream of a passing gull or gannet, scared, like the rest of the world, by the suddenness and peculiarity of the storm, but it had an oddly human, oddly articulate sound. It had hardly ceased, too, before, with a thump and creak of its hinges, the door swung suddenly open, with that peculiarly eerie effect characteristic of doors which open of themselves.
Honor uttered a low wail of dismay, and, clasping her hands together, began nervously to pray aloud—a queer mixture, half of Irish, half of Latin, escaping her lips. Grania got up and went to the door, picking up the iron poker from the hearth as she did so, and taking it with her, probably from a recollection of the well-known superstition that ironis a safe thing to have at hand if there is anything uncanny in the air.
She was turning back and was about to shut the door, when she noticed, to her surprise, a man’s figure, rather the shadow of a man’s figure, passing behind the low wall which divided the little yard from the unenclosed waste of rock without. Suddenly a thought shot through her, a vivid thought, a thought which grew like lightning into a certainty. Could it be? was it?—yes, it was—Murdough!Murdough repenting; Murdough come to see after them in the storm! It was—it must be! A flood of hope, bounding, tumultuous, almost painful; a sudden confused rush, first of vehement love, then of equally vehement anger, then of love again, broke across her brain, making her reel and stagger as she stood upon the threshold.
Telling Honor that she was only going tosee that the beasts were all right, and would be back in a minute, she hurried outside, closing the door softly behind her.
Sure enough a figure was there, for she could still see it moving, the dim silhouette of a man’s figure thrown against the rock. Grania watched and waited. Her heart was beating now so that it was an agony. The expectation of Murdough’s approach, the thought of his coming, the touch of his hands, the nearness of his presence was so strong, so convincing, that it had already become a reality. A reality, alas and alas! it certainly was not. Another moment showed that no one was coming, no one at least to the door or anywhere near the door. In the dim light she could still distinguish the figure of a man, but it was a small man, consequently it was not Murdough; moreover, this man, whoever he was, was creeping stealthily behind the low wall that enclosed the cabin, and gettinground to the back of it—to that part where the turf-stack stood piled.
Grania remained standing where she was, the poker clutched in her hand—all her hopes dashed; all the thoughts of a moment ago turned forcibly back into a different channel. Her face, could it have been seen in the darkness, would have been a curious study. Passion was written on it, and passionate anger; hungry, baffled love was there, and a not less hungry or less baffled desire for revenge. They were all there; all working and struggling together. Suddenly she made a bound forwards; she had crossed the yard; she had seized the trespasser—had clutched him by the back of his neck—and was holding him as a mastiff holds a burglar. It was like Vengeance descended miraculously from the sky itself, so unexpected was it, so startling in the hurly-burly of that hot, wild night. An involuntary yell of terrorbroke from the turf-stealer, and he turned, wriggling like a worm, and struggling vainly to escape from her clutch, a clutch which was for the moment like iron. It was, as the reader will hardly need to be told, Shan Daly! An old basket was beside him, already half full of turf, and there was a lump of it in each hand. Never was criminal caught more feloniously red-handed.
Grania’s pent-up wrath had now found its channel. The barriers were all up. The current was at the full. The wild blood of the O’Malleys, the wild blood of the Joyces—neither of them names which, for those who know the West, carry any mild or merciful associations with them—was hot in her veins like fire. Desperate rage, that rage for which killing seems the only alleviation, for the time being possessed her wholly. Her head swam, her teeth were clenched together, her right arm rose; the storm itself was not morereckless of consequences for the moment than she. A little more, another five minutes, and blood would have flowed over the rocks: for that iron poker in Grania’s hands was no plaything.
A mere chance hindered it. A plaintive cry broke suddenly from the cabin. It was Honor’s voice calling to her sister to come in, to come back, not to leave her. What was she doing? It was frightened she was of being alone by herself in the wild night. Grania! where was Grania? What was Grania doing at all?
The cry, so pitiful in its weakness, reached the other’s ear even in all the height of her fury. What was she to do? she asked herself in the rapidly concentrated thought of the moment. Could she kill Shan Daly without disturbing Honor? That, probably, was the form in which the question practically presented itself to her mind. To kill him, orat least to beat him then and there within an inch of his worthless life, was clearly the thing to do, but to disturb Honor, to frighten Honor, that, under all circumstances, was to be avoided. The result was that in the indecision of the moment her grip probably relaxed, for, with a sudden tug and the wriggle of an escaping conger eel, Shan Daly contrived to shake it off, writhed himself a few inches away over the stones, dragged himself beyond her clutch, half fell over the big boulder in his panic, then, picking himself up, fled down the hill, terror in all his limbs, but an intense sense of escape, of deliverance, tingling through every inch of his frame. For a moment he had seen the figure of Death standing over him with a poker in its hand, and the sight had scared him. If ever that dusky soul of his sent out a genuine ejaculation of thankfulness heavenwards, it was probably at that moment!
Themonth of September had begun, but the breach between Grania and Murdough was still unhealed. He, on his side, was feeling less at ease than his jaunty air or undisturbed manner might have led anyone to suppose. This unlooked-for decision upon Grania’s part was, he could not but own, startling. So far he had kept the fact to himself, not choosing it to be known, and knowing that she was extremely unlikely to speak of it. It might have entailed unpleasant consequences had it leaked out. In Inishmaan, as in more imposing places, there are inconveniences likely enough to fall upon a brilliant young man when amarriage which is to set him upon his legs is known to be broken off.
What ailed her? he asked himself again and again. What an extraordinarily queer girl she had grown of late! he next reflected, thinking over the scene of their quarrel. What queer eyes she had!—‘’Tis as if the devil himself was sitting at the bottom of them, and staring at you—the devil himself, no better—enough to scare a man, so they are! quite enough to scare a man!’ he repeated several times to himself, as he recalled the look of concentrated rage with which she had sprung upon him and swept him, as it were, out of her path in her fury. ‘’Twasn’t safe she looked, so she didn’t then—not safe at all. And what did I do to make her so mad? Only laughed at her about Teige O’Shaughnessy! My God, and who wouldn’t laugh at her about Teige O’Shaughnessy?Teige O’Shaughnessy, wisha!’
That Grania would seriously dream of marrying Teige he did not for a moment believe, but that, even in anger, she should throw such a rival in his teeth was an insult very difficult to stomach. Murdough had never asked himself for a moment whether he cared for Grania or not, the question would probably have seemed to him utterly superfluous. Ofcoursehe cared for her. Had she not always been there; always, in a fashion, belonged to him? Why in the worldwouldn’the care for her?
That he had liked her better in the old days when she was still the little Grania of the hooker, before she had shot up into this rather formidable woman she had so suddenly become, there is no denying. The little Grania had admired him without criticism; the little Grania had no sombre moods; the little Grania never gazed at him with those big, menacing eyes—eyes such asa lioness might turn upon someone whom she loves, but who displeases her—the little Grania was natural, was comprehensible, was just like any other littlegirshain the place, not at all like this new Grania, who was quite out of his range and ken; an unaccountable product, one that made him feel vaguely uneasy; who seemed to belong to a region in which he had never travelled; who was ‘queer,’ in short; the last word summing up concisely the worst and most damning thing that could be said of anyone in Inishmaan.
He brooded over all this a good deal, sitting and swinging his legs upon the steps of the old villa, which, since his grandmother’s death, he had taken pretty constantly to inhabit, it being preferable, in his mind, despite its bareness, to the overcrowded family cabin up at Alleenageeragh. That there was a sense of relief in being free from Grania andher ‘queerness’ he was aware, but, on the other hand, there was a yet greater sense of failure and of defeat. His vanity was badly hurt by it, likewise his pocket, and the two together acted as a powerful counter-poise. He was ‘used,’ moreover, to Grania. His future had always held her as a matter of course, just as hers had always held him, and use, more than all the other ingredients of existence, possesses a tremendous leverage upon beings of Murdough’s type. The end of his brooding was that one evening, about a fortnight after their quarrel, and a couple of days after the scene between Grania and Shan Daly, he waylaid her as she was coming back from the kelp fire, hiding for that purpose in an old clump of hawthorn bushes till she should pass by.
This clump stood upon the flattest bit of land in the whole island, so that from it, as from a post of vantage, he could see a longway, miles it seemed, over the dim, still faintly-gleaming surface. Where he had hidden himself was the only spot that broke this flatness, a flatness sloping imperceptibly till it merged into the sea at high-water mark. It was a fine warm evening, though there had been heavy rain in the daytime. A quantity of small brown moths flew round his head, other and much larger white ones kept emerging one after the other from the nettles and brambles that covered the fallen stones, for, like almost every clump on the islands, this too held a well and a scrap of old ruined church hidden somewhere away at the bottom of it.
After waiting half an hour, he saw Grania coming towards him, the only living thing far as the eye could reach, everything else being either stone, or else vegetation hardly less grey and arid. As she came near an unexpected qualm seized Murdough, a sudden alarmas to what she might be going to say or to do; how she would behave when she saw him there. It was quite a new idea for him to dream of being afraid of Grania, or to doubt his own unquestionable superiority over her; but since their quarrel she had assumed rather a different aspect in his eyes, and this evening she looked, he thought, bigger and more imposing, somehow, than usual, as she came walking slowly towards him, solitary and empty-handed, her eyes staring straight in front of her as if she were seeking something that was not there. The impression was so strong that it even occurred to him for a moment that he would let her pass, as he easily could do, and stay hidden away in his lair until she had gone by.
‘Arrah, great King of Glory, ’tis the mortal queer-looking girl she has grown to be, sure and certain!’ he muttered uneasily. ‘My soul from the devil, what ails her thesetimes, at all at all? She that used to be the nice, easy, littlegirsha.’
Whether he would have called to her or have let her pass unchallenged, it is impossible to say, but it happened that as she drew near to the clump she slackened her already slow pace, and looked directly towards him; her eyes, as it seemed to him, piercing right down to where he stood hidden in the centre of the thorny thicket. Concluding, therefore, that he was discovered, he got up and in rather a quavering voice, called to her, and asked her to stop.
She started violently, and stopped dead short, then looked again, not directly towards him, but a little farther on, as if doubtful whether she had really heard a voice, or only imagined that she had done so. Murdough’s head and shoulders rising out of the clump was a piece of evidence not to be mistaken. Still she stood rooted to the same spot, staringat him, not speaking; staring as if he had been his own ghost.
What were they going to say to one another? What, after their stormy parting, after that fortnight of silence and alienation, was the footing upon which they were to meet? Neither of them knew, and it was probably accident that decided that point. Murdough’s inspiration was at any rate a happier one than his last had been.
‘Then it was waiting to walk back to the house with you I was—yes, indeed—just waiting to walk back with you, that was all, Grania O’Malley,’ he said, with a decided quaver in his voice, and an air of mild deprecation.
The tone and look, more even than the words, disarmed the girl utterly; further than this, they filled her with a sudden, a delicious sense of happiness. She said nothing, but when he had stepped over the mass ofbranches, and through an outer circumvallation of nettles, and had come up to her, she was trembling violently, and it was silently and still tremblingly that she turned and walked back beside him through the dusk, as they had so often walked before.
It was the only explanation between them, but it seemed to suffice. The first awkwardness of the meeting over, Murdough’s tongue soon regained its nimbleness, and he began telling her a long tale about a curragh which he had bought or proposed to buy, if so be, God willing, he could find the money. It was Malachy O’Flaherty’s own curragh, and the best in the islands, barring one, and that was Phil Garry’s father’s big curragh which had gone to the bottom in the great storm on the twenty-eighth of January last. Poor old Mick Garry’s heart would have broken to lose it, so it would, honest man, only, thankGod, he hadn’t long to fret about it, for he was drowned himself at the same time, and only that Phil Garry and his brother Teddy had stayed at home and hidden themselves, they would have been drowned too, as the little bouchaleen Pat was, who had been the only one of the family the old man could get hold of when he went out in such a hurry to save the nets. But Malachy O’Flaherty’s curragh was a picture, fit for a king, and had been the first in of seven that had started at the Ballyvaughan races last March; at least seven would have started only that two never got off, for one of them broke her rudder the day before, and the other had a big hole stove in her side, through Thaddeus Doonan, that owned her, leaping into her in a hurry, the fool, with his boots on. She was the handsomest boat on the whole bay, and had been newly caulked and canvassed by Malachy himself only that very year. There was nocurragh like her in Galway or out of it, and it was raging mad the Claddagh men were about it, for whoever owned her would be sure to win the big race that was coming on next month, with twenty boats starting and three shillings down to every boat. Twenty times three shillings would be sixty shillings, that was three pounds, and if he had to sell the coat off his back, and the shirt too, he’d do it rather than not have her to race in, for it was a sin and a shame letting her go to those who didn’t know how to row no more than black crabs down at the bottom of the sea. That was what Malachy O’Flaherty had said, and he had said, too, that he would give it to him dirt cheap, because he’d like to see her coming in first at the big race, and not let everything good go to strangers. What was the good, Malachy had said, of stinting and saving for ever? Was it when a man was old that he wanted the money most? No, it wasnot, it was when he was young, for how did he know he would ever live to be old at all, at all? Could you take the money into the grave with you? No, you could not, for money was of no use there, nor anything else either, when you would be dead and buried! That was what Malachy O’Flaherty had said, and it was quite true, so it was, quite true. It is not in the grave, nor in heaven either, with all the grandeur and glory you’d findthere, you would be wanting money, whether it was much or whether it was little.
To all this Grania listened silently, as usual, turning her eyes upon him from time to time with a curiously lingering expression. There was a look of inquiry in her glance, a look of entreaty and expectation, a look of impatience, too, only it was impatience curbed and restrained by something stronger than itself. So they walked on side by side until they had reached the cabin. Here Murdough, whosetale was finished, was turning away, but she made a quick sign to him to stop; went in with resolute steps, came out again and thrust something hurriedly into his hands. It was a bank-note, and all the money that she had at that moment in the world with the exception of a few shillings, and what must be kept absolutely sacred for the expenses of Honor’s funeral.
Murdough’s astonishment and delight burst out then and there like a fountain; burst into a torrent of words—vague, iridescent, incoherent. Projects of every sort—races to be won, victories over rivals, money, much money, to be earned in the future—they all poured forth; flew and hurtled through the air; one golden scheme jostling against another in its hurry to express itself. Grania listened, but her eyes never lost that oddly intent, wistful expression. She stood perfectly still while he capered about the rocks, waving hishands and snapping his fingers as he descanted first on one project then on another. Suddenly she turned, and, leaving him to finish his flights by himself, went in, closing the door behind her; not this time, however, with a bang, but slowly, with a gradual and, as it seemed, a reluctant pressure from within.
It was with a more conscious strut than usual that, after waiting a minute to see if she would return, Murdough marched off towards the old villa, the note she had given him making sweet music against his pocket as he did so. Money! Not a few paltry shillings, but a whole large sum at once. He was a king! There were no possibilities that were not open to him, no dream that might not be fulfilled, no hopes that might not suddenly bloom into life. Where was Teige O’Shaughnessynow? he asked himself with derision. How long would it be before anyone gavehimmoney like that?—the poor, mean, scraping, saving littleboccach.
Through all this satisfaction there returned, however, from time to time the same vague uneasiness about Grania. She had only done what she ought; had given him the money right off in a lump, without any lecturings or bargains; that was all quite natural and proper, but, upon the other hand, what sort of wife would she be, this Grania, for a quiet, easy-going boy, who only wanted to live in peace and quietness? Wasn’t she queer? Mother of Moses! shewasqueer! the queerest girl in the whole world! That was the burden, refrain, summing-up of all his meditations about her.
Once in the course of these meditations he chanced to look up and catch Shan Daly’s ferrety eyes peering at him from their red-rimmed sockets as if he were trying to make out what he was thinking of, for Shan, too, hadgot into the habit of creeping into the old villa, preferring its shelter to the mud-banks and sides of walls which of late had been his habitual resting-places. The relative standing of these two had become exactly reversed since Murdough had grown to be a man, and a strong one. Formerly, Shan, we know, had bullied him unmercifully whenever he got the chance; now, Shan was his henchman, his jackal, the patient partaker of all his moods. It spoke a good deal for Murdough’s good temper and inherently unresentful way of looking at things, that he never showed the slightest inclination to avenge himself upon Shan, or to pay back his old wrongs as he easily might have done. On the contrary, though he despised him, as everyone did, he seemed rather to enjoy his society than otherwise. He was ‘used’ to him, you see, and that counted for so much. Have we not seen that he was also‘used’ to Grania O’Malley? Between a man with no scruples whatever, no character to lose, no qualms of any sort save fear for his own skin, and a mere convivial young gentleman who has never done anything worse than get drunk and run into debt, the sense, too, of superiority is perhaps never wholly upon one side. Murdough knew nothing of Shan’s latest adventure, but he had long had cause to suspect that Shan, for some reason, hated Grania. Several times he had been aware that it was Shan who had prevented him from going to see her, or who had egged him on to doing things she disliked. This, and a slight feeling of embarrassment upon the subject, kept him from telling him of her recent donation. All the same he was genuinely grateful for it, and in the first flush of his gratitude laid out a variety of schemes which he would, could, or might carry out in the course of the next few weeks to gratifyher. ‘Queer’ she undoubtedly was, mysteriously, unaccountably queer, but at least her queerness had, this time, taken a right instead of a wrong direction!
Asit turned out, there was no opportunity for any of these amiable schemes to be carried into effect, for the very next day Honor was taken suddenly worse about nine o’clock in the evening, and to all who saw her it seemed clear that the end had at last really come. There was great dismay amongst those who were drawn to the cabin by the news, not so much on account of the fact itself, as on account of the difficulty, the perennial difficulty at Inishmaan, of getting a priest across from the larger island in time. Grania had wanted to send Teige O’Shaughnessy for Father Tom that very morning, but Honor had forbidden her to do so, wishing to delay a little longer,so that the last rites might be received as near the end as possible. Now that end had plainly come, but to get a priest across the sound before the next morning was clearly out of the question.
It was a thick night, with showers of rain at intervals, but upon the first intimation of the change old Molly Muldoon had travelled faithfully across the rocks from Ballinlisheen, according to her promise, and after the other women had gone she remained to share in the task of nursing, and to aid Grania in what both believed to be the last night of Honor’s life. Towards three o’clock, every moment, it was thought, must see the end, but the chilly, fatal hours passed by, and Honor still lived. About five o’clock Molly had to go to see after her chickens, which ‘would be mad,’ she explained, ‘the creatures, with hunger,’ but promised shortly to return. Grania merely nodded. She was sitting, as she hadsat all night, close beside the bed, gazing upon her sister with eyes from which even the desire for sleep seemed to be permanently banished.
About seven o’clock Honor herself sank into a doze of exhaustion, and Grania thereupon stole out of the cabin to go and look for little Phelim Daly, and send him for Murdough Blake, or in default of Murdough, for Teige O’Shaughnessy, so as to get one or other of them to go at once to Aranmore, and implore Father Tom for the love of Heaven to come to Inishmaan without delay.
She had hitherto been too absorbed to notice or think about the weather, but now, as she stepped outside the cabin and down the gully, she found that a sudden fog had come on, a dense waving curtain of mist, under which everything in front of her was already submerged. It was a fog that seemed to be coming to them from the Connemara side ofthe bay, and had evidently only recently reached the island, for the sea to the south of it was quite clear. In the direction in which she was going vast cloud armies, still more or less detached one from another, were marching steadily onward to the assault. Height over height, fold upon fold, on they came; clinging to the rocks, following the little indentations of the shore, smothering every object the instant they touched it in a thick, cloying, inextricable embrace. It was curious to see how partial was still this invasion. Here, to the left, the sea was clear, the pale rays of sun lighting up the wash of the waves as they broke over the outlying rocks and skerries; there, to the right, the bays and cooses were already choked to the very brim. Overhead at one moment she could see a sky, clear, seemingly, to the zenith; another minute and the thick woolly masses had swept over her, lower and lower still, pouring on andon from their inexhaustible fog cauldrons away to the north and the north-west.
She hastened down the track, and along the lower ridge to the Dalys’ cabin; found the boy and despatched him on his errand, with strict orders not to rest or come back until he had found either Murdough or Teige O’Shaughnessy. Then she returned, to take up her place again beside Honor’s bed.
So the day wore on. Molly Muldoon did not return for a long, long time, and she remained therefore quite alone in the cabin. There was hardly any change. Honor continued to doze, and Grania, absorbed in watching her, had almost ceased to notice the passage of time. Suddenly, about three in the afternoon, she was startled by an extraordinarily rapid accession of darkness, almost like the coming on of night, a darkness so great as to make it all but impossible to see across the cabin.
Going to the door and opening it, she found herself facing a solid-looking wall of vapour in which every detail of landscape seemed to be lost. To the south indeed the sea was still visible, but even here the whole surface was covered with a shroud of mist, dense in some places as wool, and curdling momentarily thicker and thicker, as battalion joined battalion, the more scattered ones stretching fleecy arms to one another across the still visible spaces of water. Evidently this was no morning mist, likely to disperse, but a dense sea fog such as now and then in autumn and early spring, rarely at this season, enclosed the islands in its folds, rendering all communication from one to the other well-nigh impossible for days at a time.
Startled, she turned to look towards the larger island, by this time utterly lost to sight. What was to be done? she thought anxiously. How was Father Tom to be brought, andwould he ever be persuaded to venture across the sound in such a fog? What too could have delayed Murdough or Teige? Had Phelim failed to find either of them? Surely, if one happened to be away the other would have been at home? Here was another day passing, and that Honor could survive this night also was hardly to be expected.
That the nearness of the end was troubling the sick woman herself was clear, for when Grania got back to the bed Honor’s eyes were open and fixed themselves instantly upon her with a longing expression. Seeing that she wished to speak, Grania stooped and leaned over her. Honor’s white lips parted with a great effort.
‘Is he coming? allanah?’ she muttered breathlessly. ‘Auch, Grania dear, don’t be delaying! ’Tisn’t long I’ll be in it now, and you wouldn’t let me go without the good words at the last?’
‘No, no, Honor; don’t think of it. Don’t be afraid. He’ll come, sure enough. Be easy, dear; he’ll come.’
Honor’s eyes closed again patiently with a satisfied expression, but Grania’s mind was a prey to desperate anxiety. What was to be done? Where could Phelim be? Was no one coming to them? She hurried back to the entrance and stood there, straining her eyes into the fog, her heart wrung with passionate anxiety.
Presently a movement made itself seen in it, and a figure was visible dimly struggling up the track towards her. Her whole soul went out in a prayer that it might be Murdough; surely it must be Murdough? But no, another moment showed that it was not a coat but a petticoat that was moving through the fog. It was only, in fact, the faithful Molly Muldoon come back to take her turn at the nursing. Grania beckoned toher eagerly, and, having explained the situation in a few words, picked up her own petticoat and ran off through the fog in the direction of the old villa. If Murdough Blake was to be found anywhere, it would be there, she knew.
Shewas out of the cabin and the fog had closed around her almost before the words were uttered. It was like a pall, only a white pall instead of a black one, a pall that seems to get through and through and round and round you, to swathe the limbs, to enfold you to the very skin. Down from the sky in white masses it came, and up from the sea—a new sky, a new sea—the very air appeared to be half solid, air that seemed to choke, yet which was light enough and cool enough as you swallowed it.
Grania, as she sped along the familiar track, seemed hardly to know where she was, so rolled round and isolated from everything and everyone was she by this strange enveloping fleecy stuff. As she went on something, too, seemed to happen to her. It was as if the fog had got between her and everything she had come out to do. She hardly thought now of Father Tom. The sick bed, with the white drawn face and the anxious eyes so near death, watching, always watching the door; the hot race between death and the priest—all this, that had so filled her mind the whole day and the previous night, seemed to melt now and to disappear. A new set of images had arisen. It was a new goal towards which she seemed to be hurrying, for which she was fighting the fog, to which she was struggling on and on through this blinding whiteness.
More and more as she warmed with the struggle her old self emerged, as a rock emerges which has been temporarily hidden by the waves. The thought of Murdoughrose with it. It was Murdough whom she had so often gone along this path to meet; it was Murdough whom she was going to meet now. The old love, the old dumb, unquenchable desire rose in her, as it had so often risen before. The remembrance of that evening in the boat—the one evening of evenings in her life—stood out before her like a vision. With it rose the remembrance of two evenings ago when she had looked up suddenly and seen him standing in the middle of the big thorn clump. In the isolation created by the fog, in the glow of her battling with it, in the stress of her own feelings, he seemed to be already with her, to be beside her, to be touching her; not the every-day indifferent Murdough either; the unsatisfactory, conversational Murdough, the Murdough who got tipsy and mocked at her, the Murdough who was always wanting money, but the real Murdough, the Murdough she had never ceasedto believe in; who looked up at her suddenly, and then stretched out his arms to her; who caught her in them and held her; the Murdough who loved her, even as she loved him.
If this Murdough had melted a hundred times when confronted with the real one, he had at least grown again a hundred times when the other Murdough had removed himself. To Grania’s mind—to her inmost feelings—hewasthe real Murdough, ten thousand proofs to the contrary notwithstanding. She had known him, seen him, recognised him twice; once for ten minutes in the boat, again for half a minute the other evening when he called to her upon the rocks, and as for the rest of their time together it was nothing—gustho—not to be accounted.
That she was going to see this real Murdough became more and more of a conviction with every step she advanced. The emergency seemed to call him into existence.It was now or never! He must and would be found equal to it, it was impossible to believe otherwise. Her faith grew stronger minute by minute, cried aloud in her ears, and pushed itself more and more strenuously upon her with every yard she advanced.
By the time she reached the villa it had become a certainty. As she came round the last corner and dropped into the little hollow—now a smoke-filled cauldron from which all detail had vanished—she could hear a sound of voices coming up from the invisible depths below. The house itself was completely lost to sight until she all but touched it, when it suddenly emerged, its massive three-cornered front rising white out of the dimness. She went hurriedly up to the door, which stood wide open. To the left lay the sea, half covering the rocks, invisible but audible, a dull grinding noise rising from time to time, then ceasing altogether. On the other side of thehouse there were a couple of windows, broken, and patched with dirty bits of paper, but upon this side there were none, and never had been any, only three wide low steps which led up to the door, and which were of granite like the house itself, solid granite steps, the homes of flourishing sea spurreys and saxifrages, springing thickly from a dozen clefts and gaping fissures.
Something of the dignity of the type to which it belonged, and which had survived all vicissitudes, seemed to be stamped upon it to-day. Grania had always felt this dignity vaguely, and even now in her hurry a dim sensation of respect began to creep over her as she came within sight of those solidly-cut granite steps, that low, solidly-carved doorway. It was a tribute to a different order of things, to a different way of life from her own, a feeling increased, no doubt, by old Durane’s tales of the bygone glory andgrandeur of its owner, but also inherent, born in her race, and not, therefore, easily dissevered from it.
A sudden lull in the tumult of voices showed that her coming had been observed, and the next minute her heart gave a great bound and then seemed to stand still, for Murdough himself came out of the house and stood upon the top of the steps looking down at her.
For the last half-hour her thoughts had been rushing to meet him; she had been mentally throwing her arms round him; merging all their late differences, appealing to their old love, their old childish affection; telling him all that she had not been able to find words to say the other evening; telling him that she knew he would help her now in her great trouble, that he would come with her to Aranmore; forcing him, in fact, by her urgency to do so. Instead, however,of doing anything of the kind, a sudden feeling of diffidence came over her—a feeling of being there a suppliant, a beggar—of being at a disadvantage, she could not tell how or why. Probably it was something in their mutual attitude which suggested it. She had never in her own person known the feeling of being a suppliant, for in her time there had never been any gentry on Inishmaan, and she and Honor stood quite on the summit of such social altitudes as she was acquainted with. All the same, she did know it instinctively, and it arose without any bidding now. This fine young man standing at ease upon the top of the steps—at his own hall door, as it were—the girl—herself—with her petticoat over her head, appealing from below. Where had she seen those two figures that they seemed so familiar? She did not know, but it had the effect of changing all her previous thoughts, and bringing quite a new element of confusion into her mind.
Possibly Murdough was similarly affected by the accidental juxtaposition; in any case, all situations of personal importance came naturally to him, and it was with none of the diffidence he had shown the other evening, on the contrary, with an air quite in accordance with this imaginary picture, that he asked her, in a tone of astonishment, what upon earth was the matter, and what had brought her out in such weather? It was not a fit day for decent people to be out of their houses at all; couldn’t she see that for herself?
Grania put her hand suddenly up to her head. A momentary vertigo seemed to assail her: a feeling of confusion, as if everything, herself and Murdough included, had got wrong, and were out of place. What had happened to them both? she wondered.
‘Arrah, Murdougheen, don’t you know? Didn’t the child tell you? Didn’t you getthe word from Phelim?’ she stammered at length.
Murdough looked slightly embarrassed.
‘Is it little Phelim Daly you mean?’ he asked, in a tone of some hesitation. ‘Well, yes, Grania; the child did come to me three hours ago, or maybe something better, I will not deny it. But it was not much I could understand of what he said, not much at all. It is no better than a natural he is, you know, and getting worse, I think, the creature, every day, God help him! His father was here at the time, and he said that it was allgusthohe was talking, so he did—something about going to the big island to look for a priest. Arrah, my God! as if any man in his senses, or out of them, would think of going to the big island in such weather, no matter if it was for a priest, or for anything else! It was just waiting I was for the fog to clear a bit, and then it was up to yourhouse, Grania, I was going, to see if there was anything I could do for you. Yes, indeed, up to your very own house I was going, so you may believe me. But it would be walking over the cliffs, or into a hole in the rocks, I would be, if I was to try and go there now, so I just waited till it should clear. That was how it was, and no lie at all—ask the boys inside, and they will tell you. Arrah, how in God’s name did you get here yourself at all, at all? It was the mad woman you were to come out in such weather. Is it your legs you want to break, or your neck, maybe? There has not been such a fog on Inishmaan not for this seven years back—Moriarty O’Flanaghan was just saying so—not for this seven years back and more.’
Grania pushed her hair feverishly off her face, and let the petticoat she wore as a cloak drop from her shoulders. She felt hot and stifled. Murdough’s words seemed to becoming to her out of a dream; his very personality, as he stood there, big, solid, and self-satisfied, seemed unreal. In this confusion her thoughts had come back to the one fixed and absolute reality—her errand! That, let what would happen, must be carried out.
‘It is dying Honor is, that is what she is doing,’ she said, simply. ‘And it is a priest she must have before she can die—yes, a priest now, this very minute, Murdough! And if you cannot go with me, it is someone else I must get, for it is not till the fog clears she can wait, for the fog may not clear, God knows, all the long night through, and it is not till the morning she will last, and she cannot die till she gets the priest, so she cannot. And that is why I have come to you, Murdough, because I do not think you would let my sister Honor die and no priest near her, you would not have the heart. And it is myself will go in the curragh withyou to Aranmore, only you must come too, you or someone, for I could not row it all by myself. And as for our not going out in the fog, sure, my God! if we were to be drowned itself, the two of us, isn’t that better any day of the week than for her to die and no priest near her—she that is such a real saint, and has always set her heart upon having one at the last? Arrah, ’tis only joking you are, I know; you wouldn’t refuse me, Murdough, you couldn’t! Haven’t we two been always together since the time when we were a pair of little prechauns, no higher than a kish—always together, you and me, always? Sure, I wouldn’t ask you, God knows, if there wasn’t the need—the burning, burning need. Isn’t your life dearer to me a hundred times than anyone else’s, let alone my own? Arrah! come, then, Murdough, dear, come! Don’t let us be wasting any more time. ’Tisdying, I tell you, she is—dying fast. My God! who knows but ’tis in the death-grips she is this minute up on the rocks yonder, and not a creature nigh her, only Molly Muldoon, and we two not even started yet!’
Murdough Blake was really to be pitied! He was put in a most unpleasant position, one for which great allowance must be made. To begin with, he was excessively good-natured, a fact which even his most casual acquaintances knew well, and knew that nothing in the world was easier than to tease or coax him into doing anything that was required—so long as it did not entail too troublesome an effort upon his part. For Grania, too, if she had filled him several times of late with a sense of discomfort, if her claims and her ‘queerness’ had made her irksome and incomprehensible, he had at least a very old feeling of comradeship, one which went back to the very roots of life andwas as strong probably as any feeling he was capable of; which had been strengthened and warmed, too, into fresh energy by her unexpected generosity the day before. To refuse her, therefore, now, when she was so extremely urgent, was a real discomfort to him, a real worry and disturbance. Her will, moreover, was much the stronger of the two, and he experienced, therefore, a distinct physical inclination to yield to it and obey without further question. On the other hand, there was something about this particular task to which she was urging him that was peculiarly daunting and disquieting to his mind, the very thought of which sent cold shivers of discomfort through and through him. Had it been a question of taking out a boat in the middle of a storm, no matter how violent, his manhood would probably have risen to the occasion and he would have gone. He was no coward, certainly no commonplacecoward, and it was not, therefore, any prosaic fear of death in itself that held him back. It was something else; something in the look, in the very touch and thought of this dank, close, unnatural whiteness that deterred, and as it were sickened, him by anticipation. He had a sense of its having come there for no good; of its being the abode and hiding-place of who could tell what ugly, malignant spirits. A whole hoard of ancestral terrors, unexplained but unmistakable, awoke and stirred in his mind as he looked abroad from the steps, and thought of himself out there, adrift and helpless in a boat; lost and smothered up in this horrible white blanket of a fog; a prey to Heaven alone knew who or what! A cold shiver ran through him from head to heels. No, hecouldnot, he reallycouldnot go. Grania must be reasonable. To-morrow, or any time, even in the night, as soon as the fog cleared, he was ready tostart. Meanwhile Honor must abstain, for this one evening, from dying, or, if she would be so unreasonable as to die just now, well, die she must for once without a priest, for no priest could he, or any man, in his opinion, bring her in such weather. He set himself to put all this clearly before his petitioner. He was really exceedingly vexed to have to refuse her, but plainly there was no help for it.
‘Then, indeed and indeed, Grania, ’tis mortal sorry I am to go against you, so I am,’ he said, scratching his head with a vigorous gesture, less dignified, but probably a good deal more natural, than his previous airs of superiority. ‘And if it was any way possible—any way possible at all—to get to the big island, it is myself would go with you this minute, yes, indeed, and gladly, rather than disappoint you. Why not? it would be only a pleasure. But sure, my God! how can I, or any man in this mortal world, goout in such weather? It is not in reason to ask such a thing. Merciful powers! only look at it over there!—thicker and thicker, and queerer and queerer, and more wicked-looking every minute it’s getting, curling and gathering itself up into great heaps as if it was a mountain made of smoke—real Hell smoke, it is—yes, indeed, my faith and word—real Hell smoke, no other! God knows that I am not afraid, so you need not thinkthat. God who is up there in glory knows whether I am afraid or not—right well He knows it, no one upon this earth better, or as well. But there are some things that it is not right for any man to attempt to do, no, nor be asked to do, either, so there are. Arrah! my faith and word, I wonder you can’t see it for yourself? Sure, even if I were to get out the boat to oblige you, how in the name of reason could I find the way to Aranmore in such weather as this? Is itby smelling at it with my nose I would find it? There is no seeing it, no, nor seeing anything else in such unnatural weather, so there is not, no more than if you were looking about you in the middle of a cave in the black inside heart of a mountain. And, if you did get there itself, no priest would come out with you, not one foot of it, so he would not! No, but he would tell you that you had no business to come out at all on such a day, that he would, for there is no knowing what may happen to people if they will do what they are not meant to do. It is straight up out of the boat in the middle of the bay a man would maybe find himself taken, and carried away God knows where, so he might, for there are things about on a day like this that it doesn’t do to speak of, no, nor to think of either, as everyone that is sensible knows right well. And as for Honor dying, sure, what would ail her to die to-night? Isn’t itmonths upon months she has been at it, and why would she choose such weather as this to die in? ’Twouldn’t be decent of her, so it wouldn’t, and ’tis the decent woman she has always been! Arrah! then, be a good girl, Grania agra, and just go home and stay quietly in the house till to-morrow, and begorrah! by the first streak of day, or sooner, so long as it’s anyway decent weather, I’ll come to you, and we’ll go off for the priest, sure enough, and bring him back with us in the curragh. Won’t that content you, Grania, dheelish?—say it will, and go home quickly, there’s a good girl, for, indeed, ’tis wickeder and wickeder looking it’s getting every minute.’