CHAPTER I

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GRANIA

VOL. I.

_By the same Author_

HURRISH: a Study

IRELAND (Story of the Nations Series)

MAJOR LAWRENCE, F.L.S.

PLAIN FRANCES MOWBRAY, &c.

WITH ESSEX IN IRELAND

[Illustration: ISLANDS OF ARAN

GALWAY BAY.]

GRANIA

THE STORY OF AN ISLAND

BY THE

HON. EMILY LAWLESS

AUTHOR OF ‘HURRISH, A STUDY’

ETC.

IN TWO VOLUMES

VOL. I.

LONDON

SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE

1892

[_All rights reserved_]

DEDICATION

To M. C.

This story was always intended to be dedicated to you. It could hardly,

in fact, have been dedicated to anyone else, seeing that it was with you

it was originally planned; you who helped out its meagre scraps of

Gaelic; you with whom was first discussed the possibility of an Irish

story without any Irish brogue in it--that brogue which is a tiresome

necessity always, and might surely be dispensed with, as we both agreed,

in a case where no single actor on the tiny stage is supposed to utter a

word of English. For the rest, they are but melancholy places, these

Aran Isles of ours, as you and I know well, and the following pages have

caught their full share--something, perhaps, more than their full

share--of that gloom. That this is an artistic fault no one can doubt,

yet there are times--are there not?--when it does not seem so very easy

to exaggerate the amount of gloom which life is any day and every day

quite willing to bestow.

Several causes have delayed the little book’s appearance until now, but

here it is, ready at last, and dedicated still to you.

E. L.

LYONS, HAZLEHATCH:

_January, 1892_.

PART I

SEPTEMBER

PART I

_SEPTEMBER_

CHAPTER I

A mild September afternoon, thirty years ago, in the middle of Galway

Bay.

Clouds over the whole expanse of sky, nowhere showing any immediate

disposition to fall as rain, yet nowhere allowing the sky to appear

decidedly, nowhere even becoming themselves decided, keeping everywhere

a broad indefinable wash of greyness, a grey so dim, uniform, and

all-pervasive, that it defied observation, floating and melting away

into a dimly blotted horizon, an horizon which, whether at any given

point to call sea or sky, land or water, it was all but impossible to

decide.

Here and there in that wide cloud-covered sweep of sky a sort of break

or window occurred, and through this break or window long shafts of

sunlight fell in a cold and chastened drizzle, now upon the bluish

levels of crestless waves, now upon the bleak untrodden corner of some

portion of the coast of Clare, tilted perpendicularly upwards; now

perhaps again upon that low line of islands which breaks the outermost

curve of the bay of Galway, and beyond which is nothing, nothing, that

is to say, but the Atlantic, a region which, despite the ploughing of

innumerable keels, is still given up by the dwellers of those islands to

a mystic condition of things unknown to geographers, but too deeply

rooted in their consciousness to yield to any mere reports from

without.

One of these momentary shafts of light had just caught in its passage

upon the sails of a fishing smack or hooker, Con O’Malley’s hooker, from

the middle isle of Aran. It was an old, battered, much-enduring sail of

indeterminate hue, inclining to coffee colour, and patched towards the

top with a large patch of a different shade and much newer material. The

hooker itself was old, too, and patched, but still seaworthy, and, as

the only hooker at that time belonging to the islands, a source, as all

Inishmaan knew, of unspeakable pride and satisfaction to its owner.

At present its only occupants were Con himself and his little

eleven-year-old daughter, Grania. There was, however, a smaller boat

belonging to it a few yards away, which had been detached a short while

before for the convenience of fishing. The occupants of this smaller

boat were two also, a lad of about fourteen, well grown, light haired,

fairly well to do, despite the raggedness of his clothes, which in

Ireland is no especial test of poverty. The other was a man of about

twenty-eight or thirty, the raggedness of whose clothes was of the

absolute rather than comparative order. The face, too, above the rags

was rather wilder, more unsettled, more restless than even West

Connaught recognises as customary or becoming. Nay, if you chose to

consider it critically, you might have called it a dangerous face, not

ugly, handsome rather, as far as the features went, and lit by a pair of

eyes so dark as to be almost black, but with a restlessly moving lower

jaw, a quantity of hair raked into a tangled mass over an excessively

low brow, and the eyes themselves were sombre, furtive, menacing--the

eyes of a wolf or other beast of prey--eyes which by moments seemed to

flash upon you like something sinister seen suddenly at dead of night.

Shan Daly, or Shan-à-vehonee--‘Shan the vagabond’--he was commonly

called by his neighbours, and he certainly looked the character.

Even this man’s fashion of fishing had something in it of the same

furtive and predatory character. Fishing, no doubt, is a predatory

pursuit; still, if any predatory pursuit can be said to be legalised or

sanctified, it surely is. Shan Daly’s manner of fishing, however,

carried no biblical suggestions with it. Every time his line neared the

surface with a fish attached, he clutched at it with a sudden clawing

gesture, expressive of fierce, hungry desire, his lips moving, his eyes

glittering, his whole face working. Even when the fish had been cleared

from the line and lay in a scaly heap at the bottom of the boat, his

looks still followed them with the same peculiarly hungry expression.

Watching him at such a moment you would hardly have been surprised had

you seen him suddenly begin to devour them, then and there, scales and

all, as an otter might have done.

For more than an hour the light western breeze which had carried the

hooker so rapidly to Ballyvaughan that morning, with its load of kelp,

had been gradually dying away, until now it was all but gone. Far and

wide, too, not a sign of its revival appeared. Schools of gulls rose and

dipped in circles here and there upon the surface of the water, their

screams, now harsh and ear-piercing, now faint and rendered almost

inaudible by distance. A few other fishing boats lay becalmed at widely

separated points in the broad circumference, and, where the two lines of

coast, converging rapidly towards one another, met at Galway, a big

merchantman was seen slowly moving into harbour in the wake of a small

tug, the trail of whose smoke lay behind it, a long coal-black thread

upon the satiny surface.

Leaning against the taffrail of his vessel, Con O’Malley puffed lazily

at his pipe, and watched the smoke disappearing in thin concentric

circles, his brawny shoulders, already bent, less from age than from an

inveterate habit of slouching and leaning showing massively against that

watery background. Opposite, at the further end of the boat, the little

red-petticoated figure of his daughter sat perched upon the top of a

heap of loose stones, which served for the moment as ballast. The day,

as has been said, was calm, but the Atlantic is never an absolutely

passive object. Every now and then a slow sleepy swell would come and

lift the boat upon its shoulders, up one long green watery slope and

down another, setting the heap of stones rolling and grinding one

against the other. Whenever this happened the little figure upon the

ballast would get temporarily dislodged from its perch, and sent

rolling, now to one side, now to the other, according as the boat moved,

or the loose freight shifted its position. The next moment, however,

with a quick scrambling action, like that of some small marmoset or

squirrel, it would have clambered up again to its former place; its feet

would have wedged themselves securely into a new position against the

stones, the small mouth opening to display a row of white teeth with a

laugh of triumphant glee at its own achievement.

A wild little face, and a wild little figure! Bare-headed, with unkempt

hair tossing in a brown mane over face and neck; a short red flannel

petticoat barely reaching to the knees; another, a whitish one, tied by

the strings cloak-fashion about the shoulders, and tumbling backwards

with every movement. One thing would probably have struck a stranger as

incongruous, and that was the small feet and legs were not, as might

have been expected, bare, but clad in comfortable thick knitted

stockings, with shoes, or rather sandals, of the kind known as

_pampooties_, made of cow’s skin, the hair being left on, the upper

portion sewn together and tied with a wisp of wool in more or less

classical fashion across the two small insteps.

Seen against that indeterminate welter of sea and sky, the little brown

face with its rapidly moving glances, strongly marked brows, vividly

tinted colouring, might have brought southern suggestions to your mind.

Small Italian faces have something of that same outline, that flash,

that vividness of colouring: gipsies too. Could the child by any chance,

you might have asked yourself, be a gipsy? But no: a moment’s

reflection would have told you it was impossible, for there are no

gipsies, never have been any, in Ireland.

Of course, the real explanation would soon have presented itself to your

mind. It lay in that long-unrenewed, but still-to-be-distinguished

streak of Spanish blood, which comes out, generation after generation,

in so many a West Irish face, a legacy from the days when, to all

intents and purposes, yonder little town was a beleaguered fortress,

dependent for daily necessities upon its boats and the shifting caprice

of the seas; the landways between it and the rest of the island being as

impracticable for all ordinary purposes and ordinary travellers as any

similar extent of mid-Africa to-day.

Hours pass unobserved in occupations which are thoroughly congenial to

our temperaments, and it would have been difficult to hit upon one more

congenial to such a temperament as Con O’Malley’s than that in which he

was at that moment engaged. Had wind, sky, and other conditions

continued unchanged, he would in all probability have maintained the

same attitude, smoked his pipe with the same passive enjoyment, watched

the horizon with the same vaguely scrutinising air, till darkness drove

him home to supper and Inishmaan. An interruption, however, came, as

interruptions are apt to come when they are least wanted. The fishing

that afternoon had been unusually good, and for a long time past the two

occupants of the smaller boat had been too busily occupied pulling in

their lines to have time for anything else. It was plain, however, that

strict harmony was not reigning there. Now and then a smothered

ejaculation might have been heard from the elder of the two fishermen

directed against some proceeding on the part of the younger one.

Presently this would die away, and silence again set in, broken only by

the movements of the fishers, the whisper of the water, the far-off

cries of the gulls, and the dull sleepy croak with which the old hooker

responded to the swell, which, lifting it upon its shoulders up one

smooth grey incline, let it drop down again with a stealthy rocking

motion the next moment upon the other.

Suddenly a loud burst of noise broke from the curragh. It was less like

the anger of a human being than like the violent jabbering, the harsh,

inarticulate cries of some infuriated ape. Harsher and harsher, louder

and louder still it grew, till the discord seemed to fill the whole

hitherto peace-enveloped scene; the very gulls wheeling overhead

sweeping away in wider circles as the clamour reached their ears.

Con O’Malley roused himself, lifted his gaze from the horizon, took the

pipe out of his mouth, and, standing erect, flung an angry glance at

the curragh, which was only separated from his own boat by some twenty

or thirty yards of water.

Evidently a furious quarrel was raging there. The two fishermen, a

minute ago, defined, as everything else, large or small, was defined

against that grey, luminous background of water, were now tumbled

together into an indistinguishable heap, rolling, kicking, struggling at

the bottom of the boat. Now a foot or hand, now a head, rose above the

confusion, as one or other of the combatants came uppermost; then the

struggle grew hot and desperate, and the fragile craft rocked from side

to side, but nothing was to be seen of either of them.

Suddenly Shan Daly’s face appeared. It was convulsed with rage; fury and

a sort of wild triumph shone in his black eyes; one skinny arm, from

which the ragged sleeve had fallen back, rose, brown, naked, and

sinewy, over the edge of the boat. He had pinned the boy, Murdough

Blake, down with his left hand, and with the other was now feeling

round, evidently for something to strike him with. Before he could do

so, however, Con O’Malley interfered.

‘_Cred thurt_, Shan Daly? _Cred thurt?_’[1] he exclaimed in loud,

peremptory tones.

There was an instant silence. Shan Daly drew back, showing a very ugly

face--a face spotted green and yellow with passion, teeth gleaming

whitely, rage and the desire of vengeance struggling in every line of

it. He stared at his interlocutor wildly for a minute, as if hardly

realising who he was or what he was being asked, his mouth moving as if

he was about to speak, but not a word escaping from his lips. In the

meantime, the boy had shaken himself free, had got upon his feet, and

now proceeded to explain the cause of the quarrel. His face was red with

the prolonged struggle, his clothes torn, there was a bad bleeding

bruise upon the back of one of his hands, but though he breathed hard,

and was evidently excited, it was with a volubility quite remarkable

under the circumstances that he proceeded to explain the matter in hand.

Shan Daly, he said, had quarrelled with him about the fish. The fish

would roll together whenever the boat moved, so that the two heaps, his

and Shan’s, got mixed. Could he, Murdough Blake, help their rolling? No:

God knew that he could not help it. Yet Shan Daly had sworn to have his

blood if he didn’t keep them apart. How was he to keep them apart? It

was all the fault of the fish themselves! Yes, it was! So it was! He had

done his best to keep them apart, but the fish were slimy and they ran

together. Did he make them slimy? No, he did not! It was God Himself

who had made them slimy. But Shan Daly....

How much longer he would have gone on it is difficult to say, but at

this point his explanations were cut summarily short.

‘_Bedhe hushth, agus tharann sho_,’[2] Con O’Malley said curtly.

The smaller boat was then pushed up to the other and the boy obeyed. No

sooner was he upon the deck of the larger vessel than Con O’Malley

silently descended into the curragh. The two boats were again pushed a

few yards apart, and Murdough Blake found himself left behind upon the

hooker.

CHAPTER II

Hardly had the smaller boat pushed away from the larger one and regained

its former place, before the little girl upon the ballast scrambled

hastily down from her perch, mounted the deck, and went up to the boy as

he stood there astonished, furious, red to the roots of his hair with

anger and indignant surprise.

She had been watching the struggle between him and Shan Daly with

breathless interest. She hated Shan with all the hate of her fierce

little heart. She loved Murdough. He was their nearest neighbour, her

playfellow, her big brother--not that they were of any kin to one

another--her hero, after a fashion. She adored him as a small schoolboy

adores a bigger one, and, like that small schoolboy, laid herself open

to be daily and hourly snubbed by the object of her adoration.

‘Is it hurt you are, Murdough? Murdough dheelish, is it hurt you are?

Speak, Murdougheen, speak to me! Did the beast stick you? Speak, I say!’

she asked in quick, eager Irish, pouring out a profusion of those tender

diminutives for which our duller English affords such a meagre and a

poverty-stricken equivalent.

But the boy was too angry, too profoundly insulted by the whole

foregoing scene, especially the end of it, to make any response. He

pushed her from him instead with a quick, angry gesture, and continued

to stare at the sea and the other boat with an air of immeasurable

offence.

The little girl did not seem to mind. She kept pressing herself closely

against him for a minute or two longer, with all the loving,

not-to-be-repulsed, pertinacity of an affectionate kitten. Then, finding

that he took no notice of these attentions, she left him, and trotted

back to her former perch, clambering over the big stones with an agility

born of practice, and having dived into a recess hidden away between a

couple of loose boards, presently found what she was in search of, and,

scrambling back, came close up to him and thrust the object silently

into his hands.

It was only a bit of bread, perfectly stale, dry bread, but then it was

baker’s bread, not griddle, and as such accounted a high delicacy upon

Inishmaan, only to be procured when a boat went to the mainland, and

even then only by the more wealthy of its citizens, such as Con

O’Malley, who had a fancy for such exotic dainties, and found an eternal

diet of potatoes and oatmeal porridge, even if varied by a bit of

cabbage and stringy bacon upon Sundays and saints’ days, apt at times to

pall.

It seemed as if even this treasured offering would not at first

propitiate the angry boy. He even went so far as to make a gesture with

his hand as if upon the point of flinging it away from him into the sea.

Some internal monitor probably made him refrain from this last act of

desperation, for it was getting late, and a long time since he had eaten

anything. He stood still, however, a picture of sullen irresolution: his

good-looking, blunt-featured, thoroughly Irish face lowering, his

under-lip thrust forward, his hands, one of them with the piece of bread

in it, hanging by his side. A sharper voice than Grania’s came, however,

to arouse him.

‘_Monnum oan d’youl! Monnum oan d’youl!_’[3] Con O’Malley shouted

angrily from the curragh. ‘Go to her helm this minute, ma bouchaleen, or

it will be the worse for you! Is it on to the Inishscattery rocks you’d

have us be driving?’

Murdough Blake started; then, with another angry pout, crossed the deck

of the hooker, and went to take up his place beside the helm, upon the

same spot on which Con O’Malley himself had stood a few minutes before.

The big boat was almost immovable; still, the Atlantic is never exactly

a toy to play with, and it was necessary for some hand to be upon the

helm in case of a sudden capricious change of wind, or unlooked-for

squall arising. Little Grania did not go back to her former place upon

the ballast, but, trotting after him, scrambled nimbly on to the

narrow, almost knife-like edge of the hooker, twisting her small

pampootie-clad feet round a rope, so as to get a better purchase and be

able to balance herself.

The afternoon was closing in quickly now. Clouds had gathered thickly to

northward. The naked stone-strewn country between Spiddal and Cashla,

the wild, almost unvisited, wholly roadless region beyond Greatman’s

Bay, were all lost to sight in dull, purplish-brown shadows. Around the

boat the water, however, was still grey and luminous, and the sky above

it clear, but the distance was filled with racing, hurrying streaks of

darker water; while from time to time sudden flurries of wind broke up

the hitherto perfect reflections.

Usually, when these two companions were alone together, an incessant

chattering went on, or, to be accurate, an incessant monologue; for

Murdough Blake already possessed one of the more distinctive gifts of

his countrymen, and his tongue had a power of building up castles in the

air--castles in which he himself, of course, was chief actor, owner,

lord, general person of importance--castles which would sometimes mount

up, tier above tier, higher and higher, tottering dizzily before the

dazzled eyes of his small companion, till even her admiration, her

capacity for belief, failed to follow them longer.

Neither of them knew a single word of English, for the schoolmaster had

not in those days even casually visited Inishmaan, which is still, at

the moment I write, the most retrograde spot, probably, within the four

seas. The loss was none to them, however, for they were unaware of it.

No one about them spoke English, and had they spoken it, nay, used it

habitually, it would have been less an aid probably than a hindrance to

these architectural glories. To-day, however, Murdough was in no mood to

exhibit any of his usual rhetorical feats. He was thoroughly out of

temper. His vanity had been badly mauled, not so much by Shan Daly’s

attack upon him--for, like everyone in and around Inishmaan, he despised

Shan Daly--as by the fashion in which Con O’Malley had cut short his own

explanations. This had touched it to the quick: and Murdough Blake’s

vanity was already a serious possession, not one to be wounded with

impunity. Con being out of reach, and too high in any case for

reprisals, he paid back his wrongs, as most of us do, in snubs upon the

person nearest at hand. The _tête-à-tête_, therefore, was a silent one.

From time to time the hooker would give a friendly, encouraging croak,

as if to suggest a topic, sloping now a little to the right, now to the

left, as the soft air began to be invaded by fresher currents coming in

from the Atlantic--wild nurse, mother, and grandmother of storms, calm

enough just then, but with the potentiality of, Heaven only knows how

many, unborn tempests for ever and for ever brooding within her restless

old breast.

Occasionally Murdough would take a bite out of the slice of white bread,

but carelessly, and with a nonchalant air, as much as to say that he

would just as soon have been doing anything else. Whenever he did this,

little Grania would watch him from the ledge upon which she had perched

herself, her big dark eyes glistening with satisfaction as the mouthful

disappeared down his throat. Now and then too she would turn for a

moment towards the curragh, and as she did so and as her eye caught

sight of Shan Daly’s slouching figure a gleam of intense rage would

sweep across the little brown face, the soft upper lip wrinkling and

curling expressively as one may see a small dog’s lips curl when it

longs to bite. Ill would it have fared with Shan-à-veehonee or

Shan-à-gaddy (‘Shan the thief)--which was another of his local

names--had her power to punish him been equal to her wish to do so. Her

hates and her loves ranged at present over a ridiculously narrow

compass, but they were not at all ridiculous in their intensity. It was

a small vessel, but there was an astonishing amount of latent heat, of

latent possibilities, alike for good and ill, in it.

CHAPTER III

On board the curragh, meanwhile, the silence had been equally unbroken.

Con O’Malley did not care about this commonplace hand-line fishing. He

always took a prominent part in the herring fishery, which is the chief

fishing event of the year in Galway Bay, and is carried on on board of

the hookers, upon the decks of which a small windlass is generally

rigged up by the fishermen, so that the net may be more easily hauled on

board, when the fish, being cleared from it, tumble down in a great,

scaly, convulsive heap upon the deck. The herring fishing was over,

however, for this year; there were no mackerel in the bay at present;

and this stupid hand-line fishing hardly, in his opinion, brought in

enough to make it worth while to interest himself in it. He was vexed,

too, at having had to leave his comfortable perch and open-eyed

afternoon snooze in order to separate these two fighting idiots. Though

he was not in the least drunk, as you are, please, to understand, he had

certainly taken two or three glasses of undesirably raw whisky in pretty

quick succession before leaving Ballyvaughan, and this, added to the

sleepiness engendered by a whole day in the open air, naturally disposed

him to the passive, rather than more active, forms of occupation.

He hardly made a pretence, therefore, of fishing; merely sat with a line

in his hand, staring at the water with an air of almost preternatural

sobriety. Shan Daly, on the contrary, for whom this fishing was the

chief event of the day, and whose own share of the fish was his

principal payment for such services as he was able to render, had

resumed his previous attitude of watchful expectation, glancing up from

time to time as he did so at his employer with a furtive, somewhat

shame-faced expression; conscious that he was in disgrace, conscious,

too, that he somehow or other deserved to be in disgrace, but with too

limited a realisation of things in general, especially of the things we

call right and wrong, to be able to define to himself very clearly in

what his offence consisted. Beings of so eminently elementary an order

as that presented by Shan Daly are apt to be more or less offenders

against whatever society they chance to be thrown into; nay, are apt to

belong in a greater or less degree to what we call the criminal classes;

but their criminality is pretty much upon a par with the criminality of

mad dogs or vicious horses. Punish them we must, no doubt, for our own

sakes; restrain them still more obviously, if we can; but anything of a

high tone of moral and abstract condemnation is, I am apt to suppose,

sheer waste of good material in their case. Like most of our poor,

overburdened, and underprovided humanity, this luckless Shan was not,

after all, entirely bad, or, to be accurate, his badness was not of an

absolutely consistent and uniform character. He had a wretched, sickly,

generally starved wife at home upon Inishmaan; a wretched, sickly,

generally starved family, too, and some, at least, of these fish he was

so anxious to obtain, and for the preservation of which he would hardly,

in the mood, have stopped short at murder, were destined that night for

their supper.

Not much time was given him on this occasion to follow his pursuit, for

Con O’Malley was beginning to want to get back to Inishmaan, where he

intended to put his small daughter, Grania, ashore, previous to sailing

on himself to Aranmore, the largest of the three islands, in the harbour

of which he kept his hooker, and where there was a certain already

distantly gleaming attraction in the form of the ‘Cruskeen

Beg’--largest, best kept, most luxurious of the public-houses upon the

three islands, and the chief scene of such not, after all, very wild or

seductive conviviality as was attainable upon them.

Signalling, therefore, to Murdough Blake to pull the two vessels closer

together, he presently mounted the hooker, followed by the reluctant

Shan, the curragh was let drop back into its former place, and they were

soon scudding westward over the bay, all the four sails--mainsail,

foresail, jib, and a small triangular one above the mainsail--being

expanded to their utmost to catch the still light and capriciously

shifting afternoon breeze.

CHAPTER IV

Tired of trying to conciliate her not-to-be-conciliated companion,

little Grania by-and-by trotted over to her father and cuddled up to

him, as he lounged, pipe in mouth, one hand upon a rope, his eye as

usual upon the clouds. He was good-natured to her in his way, liked to

have her with him on these occasions, would even now and then when they

landed take her for a walk amongst his compeers, the other hooker-owners

at Galway, Roundstone, or Ballyvaughan, though, at home upon Inishmaan

he took no heed to her proceedings, leaving the whole charge, trouble,

and care of her bringing up upon the hands of his elder daughter.

Leaning there, idly scanning the grey masses overhead, with floating,

carrotty beard, loose-lipped mouth, indeterminate other features, and

eternal frieze coat dangling by a single button, this big,

good-tempered-looking Con O’Malley of Inishmaan might have passed, in

the eyes of an observer on the look-out for types, as the very picture

and ideal of the typical Connaught peasant--if there are such things as

typical peasants or, indeed, any other varieties of human beings, a

point that might be debated. As a matter of fact, he was not in the

least, however, what we mean when we talk of a typical man, for he had

at least one strongly-marked trait which is even proverbially rare

amongst men of his race and class--so rare, indeed, that it has been

said to be undiscoverable amongst them. His first marriage--an event

which took place thirty years back, while he was still barely

twenty--had been of the usual _mariage de convenance_ variety, settled

between his own parents and the parent of his bride, with a careful,

nay, punctilious, heed to the relative number of cows, turkeys,

feather-beds, boneens, black pots and the like, producible upon either

side, but as regards the probable liking or compatibility of the

youthful couple absolutely no heed whatsoever. Con O’Malley and Honor

O’Shea (as in western fashion she was called to the hour of her death)

had, all the same, been a fairly affectionate couple, judged by the

current standard, and she, at any rate, had never dreamt of anything

being lacking in this respect. Sundry children had been born to them, of

whom only one, a daughter, at the present time survived. Then, after

some eighteen years of married life, Honor O’Shea had died, and Con

O’Malley had mourned her with a commendable show of woe and, no doubt,

a fair share of its inner reality also. He was by that time close upon

forty, so that the fires of love, if they were ever going to be kindled,

might have been fairly supposed to have shown some signs of their

presence. Not at all. It was not until several years later that they

suddenly sprang into furious existence. An accident set them alight, as,

but for such an accident, they would in all probability have slumbered

on in his breast, unsuspected and unguessed at, even by himself, till

the day of his death.

It was a girl from the ‘Continent,’ as the islanders call the mainland,

who set the spark to that long-slumbering tinder--a girl from Maam in

the Joyce country, high up in the mountains of Connemara--a Joyce

herself by name, a tall, wild-eyed, magnificently handsome creature,

with an unmistakable dash of Spanish blood in her veins. Con had seen

her for the first time at old Malachy O’Flaherty’s wake, a festivity at

which--Malachy having been the last of the real, original O’Flaherties

of Aranmore--nearly every man in the three islands had mustered, as well

as a considerable sprinkling of more or less remotely connected Joyces

and O’Flaherties from the opposite coast. Whole barrels of whisky had

been broached, and the drinking, dancing, and doings generally had been

quite in accordance with the best of the old traditions.

Amongst the women gathered together on this celebrated occasion, Delia

Joyce, of Maam in Connemara, had borne away the palm, as a Queen’s yacht

might have borne it away amongst an assembly of hookers and canal

barges. Not a young man present on the spot--little as most of them were

apt to be troubled with such perturbations--but felt a dim, unexplained

trouble awake in his breast as the young woman from Maam swept past

him, or danced with measured, stately steps down the centre of the stone

floor; her red petticoat slightly kilted above her ankles, her head

thrown back, her great, dark, slumberous eyes sweeping round the room,

as she looked demurely from one strange face to another. Upon Con

O’Malley--not amongst the category of young men--the effect was the most

marked, most instantaneous, most overwhelming of all! Delia Joyce, as

everyone in the room discovered in ten minutes, had no fortune, and,

therefore, obviously was no match. She was the orphan niece of a man who

had seven living children of his own. She had not a cow, a gridiron, a

penny-piece, an inch of land, not a possession of any sort in the world.

Regardless of this utterly damning fact, regardless of his own age,

regardless of the outrage inflicted upon public opinion, regardless of

everything and everybody, Con O’Malley fell hopelessly in love with her;

clung to her skirts like a leech the whole evening; followed her the

next day as she was about to step on board her curragh for the mainland;

carried her, in short, bodily off her feet by the sheer vehemence of his

love-making. He was still a good-looking man at the time; not bent or

slouching, but well set up; a ‘warm’ man, ‘well come’ and ‘well-to-do;’

a man whose pleadings no woman--short, that is, of a bailiff’s or a

farmer’s daughter--would disdain to listen to.

Delia Joyce coyly but gladly consented to respond to his ardour. It was

a genuine love-match on both sides--that rarest of rare phenomena in

peasant Ireland. That it would, as a matter of course, and for that very

reason, turn out disastrously was the opinion, loudly expressed, of

every experienced matron, not in Inishmaan alone, but for forty miles

around that melancholy island. A ‘Black stranger,’ a ‘Foreigner,’ a girl

‘from the Continent,’ not related to anyone or belonging to the place!

worse than all, a girl without a penny-piece, without a stool or a

feather-bed to add to the establishment! There was not a woman, young or

old, living on the three islands but felt a sense of intense personal

degradation whenever the miserable affair was so much as alluded to

before her!

Marriages, however, are queer things, and the less we prophesy about

them the less likely we are perhaps to prove conspicuously wrong. So it

was in this case. A happier, more admittedly successful marriage there

never was or could be, save, indeed, in one important and lamentable

respect, and that was that it came to an end only too soon. About a year

after the marriage little Grania was born, two years after it a boy;

then, within a few days of one another, the mother and the baby both

died. From that day Con O’Malley was a changed man. He displayed no

overwhelming or picturesque grief. He left the weeping and howling at

the funeral, as was proper, to the professional mourners hired upon that

occasion. He did not wear crape on his hat--the last for the excellent

reason that Denny O’Shaughnessy made none, and Denny O’Shaughnessy was

much the most fashionable of the weavers upon Inishmaan. He did not

mope, he did not mourn, he did not do anything in particular. But from

the day of his wife’s death he went to the dogs steadily and

relentlessly--to the dogs, that is, so far as it is going to the dogs to

take no further interest in anything, including your own concerns. He

did not even do this in any very eminent or extravagant fashion: simply

became on a par with the most shiftless and thriftless of his

neighbours, instead of being rather noticeably a contrast to them in

these respects. Bit by bit, too, the ‘Cruskeen Beg,’ which had hitherto

regarded him as only a very distant and unsatisfactory acquaintance,

began to know him better. He still managed to keep the hooker afloat,

but what it and his farm brought him in nearly all found its way across

the counter of it or some kindred shebeen, and how Honor O’Malley

contrived to keep herself and the small Grania, not to speak of a tribe

of pensioners and hangers-on, upon the margin left was a marvel to all

who were acquainted with the family. Nine years this process had been

going on, and it was going on still, and, as the nature of things is,

more and more rapidly of late. Poor Con O’Malley! He was not in the

least a bad man; nay, he was distinctly a good man: kindly, religious,

faithful, affectionate, generous--a goodly list surely of the virtues?

But he had set his foot upon a very bad road, one which, all over the

world, but especially in Ireland, there is rarely, or never, any turning

back upon.

CHAPTER V

The hooker had by this time got into the North Sound, known to the

islanders as Bealagh-a-Lurgan. Tradition talks here of a great

freshwater lake called Lough Lurgan, which once covered the greater part

of Galway Bay. This may be so or it may not, the word anyhow is one for

the geologist. What is certain, and more important for the moment, is,

that from this point we gain the best view that is to be had of the

three Aran isles as a whole, their long-drawn, bluntly-peaked outlines

filling the whole eye as one looks to westward.

Taken together in this fashion, the three isles, with the two sounds

which divide them, and an outlying fringe of jagged, vicious-looking

rocks and skerries, make up a total length of some fifteen miles,

containing, roughly speaking, about eleven thousand acres. Acres! As one

writes down the word, it seems to rise up, mock, gibe, laugh at, and

confound one, from its wild inappropriateness, at least to all the ideas

we commonly associate with it. For, be it known to you, oh prosperous

reader--dweller, doubtless, in a sleek land, a land of earth and water,

possibly even of trees--that these islands, like their opposite

neighbour, the Burren of Clare, are rock, not partially, but absolutely.

Over the entire surface, save the sands upon the shore and the detritus

that accumulates in the crannies, there is no earth whatsoever, save

what has been artificially created, and even this is for the most part

but a few inches deep. The consequence is, that a droughty season is

the worst of all seasons for the Aranite. Drench him with rain from

early March to late November, he is satisfied, and asks no more. Give

him what to most people would seem the most moderate possible allowance

of sun and dry weather, and ruin begins to stare him in the face! The

earth, so laboriously collected, begins to crack; his wells--there are

practically no streams--run dry; his beasts perish before his eyes; his

potatoes lie out bare and half baked upon the stones; his oats--these

are not cut, but plucked bodily by hand out of the sands--wither to the

ground; he has no stock, nothing to send to the mainland in return for

those necessaries which he gets from there, nothing to pay his rent

with; worse than all, he has actually to fetch the water he requires to

drink in casks and barrels from the opposite shore!

A cheerful picture, you say! Difficult perhaps to realise, still more

difficult, when realised, to contemplate placidly. Who so realising it

can resist the wish to become, for a moment even, that dream of

philanthropists--a benevolent despot, and, swooping suddenly upon the

islands, carry off their whole population--priests, people, and all--and

set them down in a new place, somewhere where Nature would make some

little response, however slight, to so much toil, care, love, so

fruitlessly and for so many centuries lavished upon her here?

‘But would they thank you?’ you, as an experienced philanthropist,

perhaps, ask me. I reply that, it is, to say the least, extremely

doubtful. Certainly you might carefully sift the wide world, search it

diligently with a candle from pole to pole, without hitting upon another

equally undesirable, equally profitless place of residence. Climate,

soil, aspect, everything is against it. Ingenuity might seek and seek

vainly to find a quality for which it could be upheld. And yet, so

strangely are we made, that a dozen years hence, if you examined one of

the inhabitants of your ideal arcadia, you would probably find that all

his, or her, dreams of the future, all his, or her, visions of the past,

still clung, limpet-fashion, to these naked rocks, these melancholy dots

of land set in the midst of an inhospitable sea, which Nature does not

seem to have constructed with an eye to the convenience of so much as a

goat!

The four occupants of our hooker naturally troubled their heads with no

such problems. To them their islands--especially this one they were

approaching, Inishmaan--were to all practical purposes the world. Even

for Con O’Malley, whom business carried pretty often to the mainland,

the latter was, save on the merest fringe, to all intents and purposes

an unknown country. The world, as it existed beyond that grey wash of

sea, was a name to him, and nothing more. Ireland--sometimes regarded by

superior persons as the very Ultima Thule of civilisation--hung before

his eyes as a region of dangerous novelties, dazzling, almost wicked in

its sophistication, and he had never set foot on a railroad in his life.

Inishmaan has no regular harbour, consequently it was necessary to get

the curragh out again so as to set little Grania ashore. The child had

been hoping the whole way back that Murdough Blake, too, would have come

ashore with her, but he remained sitting, with the same expression of

sulky dignity, upon the deck of the hooker, and it was the hated Shan

Daly who rowed her to the land; which done, with a quick, furtive glance

towards a particular spot a little to westward, he turned and rowed as

quickly as he could back to the larger vessel again.

While the boat was still on its way, before it had actually touched

shore, a woman who had been waiting for it on the edge might have been

seen to move hastily along the rocks, so as to be ready to meet them

upon their arrival. This woman wore the usual red Galway flannel

petticoat, with a loose white or yellowish flannel jacket above, known

as a ‘baudeen,’ and worn by both sexes on the islands, a handkerchief

neatly crossed at her neck, with blue knitted stockings and pampooties

upon her feet. At first sight it would have been difficult to guess her

age. Her hair, better brushed than usual, was of a deep, unglossy black,

and her skin clear and unwrinkled; yet there was nothing about her which

seemed to speak of youth. It was a plain face and a sickly one, with

little or nothing of that play of expression which redeems many an

otherwise homely Irish face, yet, if you had taken the trouble to

examine it, you would have been struck, I think, with something peculiar

about it, something that would have arrested your attention. Elements

not often seen in combination seemed to find a meeting-place there. A

look of peculiar contentedness, an indescribable placidity and repose,

had stamped those homely features as with a benediction. The mild brown

eyes, lifting themselves blinkingly to the sunlight, had something about

them, chastened, reposeful, serene, an expression hardly seen beyond the

shelter of the convent; yet, at the same time, there was something in

the manner in which the woman ran down to the shore to meet the child,

and, lifting her carefully over the edge of the boat, set her on her

feet upon the rocks, a manner full of a sort of tender assiduity, a

clinging, caressing, adoring tenderness, not often, hardly ever indeed,

to be found apart from the pains and the joys of a mother.

This was Honor O’Malley, little Grania’s half-sister, the only surviving

daughter of Con O’Malley’s first marriage. She had been little more than

a half-grown girl when her mother died, but for several years had kept

house for her father. Then had come the short-lived episode of his

second marriage and his wife’s death, since which time Honor’s one aim

in life, her whole joy, her pride, her torment, her absorbing passion,

had been her little sister.

The child had been an endless trouble to her. Honor herself was a

saint--a tender, self-doubting, otherwise all-believing soul. The small

sister was a born rebel. No priest lived on Inishmaan, or, indeed, lives

there still, so that this visible sign of authority was wanting. Even

had there been one, it is doubtful whether his mere presence would have

had the desired effect, though Honor always devoutly believed that it

would. The child had grown up as the young seamew grows. The air, the

rocks, the restless, fretting sea; a few keen loves, a few still keener

and more vehement hates; the immemorial criss-cross of wishes,

hindrances, circumstances--these and such as these had made her

education, so far as she had had any. As for poor Honor’s part in it!

Well, the child was really fond of her, really loved her, and that must

suffice. There are mothers who have to put up with less.

Taking her by the hand the elder sister now attempted to lead her from

the shore. It was a slow process! At every rock she came to little

Grania stopped dead short, turning her head mutinously back to watch the

hooker, as, with its brown patched sails set almost to the cracking

point, it rounded the first green-speckled spit of land, on its way to

Aranmore. Whenever she did so, Honor waited patiently beside her until

her curiosity was satisfied and she was ready to proceed on her way.

Then they went on again.

There were rocks enough to arrest even a more determined laggard. The

first barnacle-coated set crossed, they got upon a paler-coloured set,

out of reach of the tide, which were tumbled one against another like

half-destroyed dolmens or menhirs. These stretched in all directions far

as the eye could reach. The whole shore of this side of the island was

one continuous litter of them. Three agents--the sea, the weathering of

the air, the slow, filtering, sapping action of rain--had produced the

oddest effect of sculpturing upon their surface. From end to end--back,

sides, every atom of them--they were honey-combed with holes varying

from those into which the two clenched fists might be thrust to those

which would with difficulty have accommodated a single finger. These

holes were of all depths too. Some of them mere dimples, some piercing

down to the heart of the blocks, five, six, seven feet in depth, and as

smooth as the torrent-worn troughs upon a glacier.

Ten minutes were spent in clearing this circumvallation; then the

sisters got upon a waste of sand sprinkled with sickly bent, through

which thin patches of white flowering campion asserted themselves. Here,

invisible until you all but brushed against its walls, rose a small

chapel, roofless, windowless, its door displaced, its gable ends

awry--melancholy to look at, yet not without a certain air of invitation

even in its desolation. Sand had everywhere invaded it, half hiding the

walls, completely covering the entrance, and forming a huge drift where

once the altar had risen. Looking at it, fancy, even in calm weather,

seemed involuntarily to conjure up the sweep of the frightened yellow

atoms under the flail of the wind; the hurry-scurry of distracted

particles; the tearing away of the frail covering of bent; the wild rush

of the sand through the entrance; and, finally, its settling down to

rest in this long-set-aside haven of the unprotected.

West of the chapel, and a little to the left of the ruined entrance,

stood a cross, though one which a casual glance would hardly have

recognised as such, for there were no cross arms--apparently never had

been any--and the figure upon the upright post was so worn by weather,

so utterly extinguished, rubbed, and lichen-crusted by the centuries, as

hardly to have a trace of humanity left. Honor never passed the place

without stopping to say a prayer here. For her it had a special

sanctity, this poor, shapeless, armless cross, though she would

probably have been unable to explain why. Now, as usual, she stopped,

almost mechanically, and, first crossing herself devoutly, bent her head

down to kiss a small boss or ridge, which apparently once represented

the feet, and then turned to make her sister do the same.

This time Grania would willingly have gone on, but Honor was less

compliant than before, and she gently bent the child’s reluctant head,

coaxing her, till her lips at last touched the right place. Grania did

not exactly resist, but her eyes wandered away again in the direction of

the hooker, now fast disappearing round the corner. Why had Murdough

Blake gone to Aranmore, instead of coming back with her? she thought,

with a sense of intense grievance. The disappointment rankled, and the

salt, gritty touch and taste of the boss of limestone against her small

red lips could not, and did not, alter the matter an atom, one way or

other.

Leaving the chapel they next began to climb the slope, first crossing a

sort of moraine of loose stones which lay at its foot. Like all the Aran

isles, Inishmaan is divided into a succession of rocky steps or

platforms, the lowest to eastward, the highest to westward, platforms

which are in their turn divided and subdivided by innumerable joints and

fissures. This, by the way, is a fact to be remembered, as, without it,

you might easily wander for days and days over the islands without

really getting to know or understand their topography.

A curious symmetry marked the first of these steps, that up which the

sisters were then mounting: you would have been struck in a moment by

its resemblance to the backbone of some forgotten monster, unknown to

geologists. A python, say, or plesiosaurus of undetermined species, but

wholly impressive vastness, stretching itself lazily across about a

third of the island, till its last joint, sinking towards the sea,

disappeared from sight in the general mass of loose stones which lay at

the bottom of the slope.

It was at the head of this monster that the O’Malleys’ cabin stood,

while at the other--the tail-end, so to speak--was hidden away that foul

and decaying hovel in which the Shan Daly family squatted, lived, and

starved. Though far above the level of the average stamp of Aran

architecture, the O’Malleys’ house itself would not, perhaps, have

struck a stranger as luxurious. It was of the usual solid,

square-shaped, two-roomed type, set at the mouth of a narrow gorge or

gully, leading from the second to the third of those steps, steps whose

presence, already insisted upon, must always be borne in mind, since

they form the main point, the ground lines upon which the whole island

is built.

A narrow entrance between two rocks, steep as the sides of a well, led

to the door of the cabin, the result being that, whenever the wind was

to the west or south-west--the two prevailing winds--anyone entering it

was caught as by a pair of irresistible hands, twirled for a moment

hither and thither, and then thrust violently forward. Impossible to

enter quietly. You were shot towards the door, and, if it proved open,

shot forward again, as if discharged from some invisible catapult. So

well was the state of affairs understood that a sort of hedge or screen,

made of heather, and known as a _corrag_, was kept between the door and

fire, so that entering friends might be checked and hindered from

falling, as otherwise they assuredly would have fallen, prone upon the

hearthstone. There were a good many other, and all more or less futile

contrivances upon that little group of wind-worn, wind-tormented islands

against their omnipotent master.

CHAPTER VI

Blocking the mouth of the already narrow gully stood a big boulder of

pink granite, a ‘Stranger’ from the opposite coast of Galway. Leaning

against this boulder as the sisters mounted the pathway, a group of five

figures came into sight. Only one of these was full grown, the rest were

children--babies, rather--of various ages from five years old to a few

weeks or less. Seen in the twilight made by the big rock you might have

taken the whole group for some sort of earth or rock emanation, rather

than for things of living flesh and blood, so grey were they, so wan, so

much the same colour, so much apparently the same texture as what they

leaned against.

Honor started forward at a run as soon as she caught sight of them, her

pale face lit with a warm ray of kindliness and hospitality.

‘Auch, and is it there you are, Kitty Daly?’ she exclaimed. ‘But it is

the bad place you have taken to sit in, so it is, and all your poor

young children too! And it is you that look bad, too, this day, God love

us!--yes indeed, but bad! And is it long that you have been sitting

there? My God, I would have left the door open if I had thought you

would come and I not in it! Yet it is not a cold day either, praise be

to God!--no it is a very fine, warm day. There has not been a finer day

this season, if so be it will last till his reverence comes next week

for the pathern. But what brings you up this afternoon at all, at all?

It is too soon for you to be coming up the hill, and you so weak

still--too soon altogether!’

While she was speaking the woman had got up, her whole little brood,

save the baby which she held in her arms, rising with her as if by a

single impulse. Seen in the strong light which fell upon their faces

over the top of the gully they looked even more piteous, more wan and

wobegone than when they were squatting in the comparative shadow at the

base of the rock. She made no direct reply to Honor’s question, but

looked up at her with a dumb, wistful appeal, and then down at the

children, who in their turn looked up at what, no doubt, was in their

eyes the embodiment of prosperity standing before them. There was no

mistaking what that appeal meant. The answer was written upon every face

in the whole group. Hunger was written there; worse--starvation; first,

most clamorous of needs, not often, thank Heaven! seen so clearly, but

when seen terrible--a vision from the deepest, most elemental depths, a

cry to pity, full of ancient primordial horrors; heart-rending;

appalling; impossible not to hasten to satisfy.

That this was the only possible answer to her question seemed to have

immediately struck the kindly-natured Honor. For, without wasting

further time, she ran to her own door, taking out a big key as she did

so from her pocket. Another minute and she had rummaged out a half-eaten

griddle-loaf, and was hacking big morsels off it with a blunt, well-nigh

disabled dinner-knife.

Manners, however, had to be observed, let the need for haste be never so

great, and no one was more observant of such delicacies than Honor

O’Malley.

‘Then, indeed, it is not very good bread to-day, so it is not,’ she

observed apologetically. ‘It was last Tuesday week I would have wished

to ask you to taste of it, Mrs. Daly. The barm did not rise rightly this

time, whatever the reason was, still, after your walk you would, maybe,

eat a bit of it, and I would be much obliged to you, and the young

children, too. But it is some cow’s milk that they must have. Run,

Grania, run quick and fetch some out of the big mether, it is on the top

shelf, out of the way of the cat. It is good cow’s milk, Mrs. Daly,

though it has been skimmed once; I skim it now in the morning, after

Grania has had her breakfast. The child grows so fast it is the best

milk she must have, but it is not at all bad milk, only skimmed once, or

I would not offer it you, no, indeed, I would not, Mrs. Daly, ma’am.’

But the poor visitor was past responding to any such friendly efforts to

shield her self-respect. She tried to thank her entertainer, but the

tears came too fast, and fairly choked her. One after another they

gathered and ran down her thin white cheeks, fresh tears continually

brimming her poor eyes, once a brilliant blue--not a common colour in

the west of Ireland--and which still, though their brightness had

waned, seemed all too blue and too brilliant for the poor faded face

they shone out of.

‘Och, then! Och, then! Och, then!’ Honor O’Malley said in a gentle tone,

at once soothing and remonstrating. ‘Och, then, Mrs. Daly, will you

please give me the baby for a minute, ma’am? for it is not lucky, they

say, to cry over such a young child. The _sidh_--God forgive me for

naming such a wicked, heathen word!--the _sidh_, old people say, do be

looking about, and if they see tears drop on a baby it is they will get

it for themselves, so they will--God stand between us and all such work

this night, amen! Well, Phelim sonny, and what ails you? Is it the milk

that is sour? Then it is not very sour it can be, for it was only milked

the morning before last. Grania, fetch some sugar and put it in the

child’s milk. Bless me, Mrs. Daly, but he does grow, that child Phelim!

only look at the legs of him!’

The boy she was addressing was the eldest of the pitiful little group, a

wistful-faced, shadowy creature of about five. His eyes were blue, like

his mother’s, though of a paler shade and more prominent. Big, startled

eyes they were--the eyes of a child that sees phantoms in the night,

that starts in its sleep and cries out, it knows not why or about what.

With those big eyes fixed full upon her face he was staring hard at

Grania O’Malley, the pannikin of milk which had been put into his hands

remaining untasted in the intensity of his contemplation.

‘Indeed and indeed it is too good you are to them, Honor O’Malley--too

good entirely!’ poor Mrs. Daly managed to say, finding her voice at

last, though still speaking through the sobs which choked her. ‘But it

is yourself knows where to look for the blessing so it is! And may God

shield you and keep you in health and sickness, in joy and sorrow, in

this world and in the world to come--yes, indeed, and beyond it too, if

need be, amen! It is ashamed I am, sorry and ashamed, to be troubling

you, and you not well yourself. But Shan, you see--it is very bad times

Shan has had lately. There is no work at all to do, he says, not

anywhere on Inishmaan, no, nor upon Aranmore even. There was some fish

he was to bring in this afternoon, but he has not come back yet, and the

evening it is late, and if he did catch the fish itself, it is not young

children that can eat fish alone, so it is not. And me so weak still, it

is but little I can do; for it is not, you know, till next Friday will

be three weeks that--’

She stopped and looked bashfully down at the poor little bundle in her

neighbour’s arms. Though this was her fourth child she had a feeling of

delicacy about alluding to the fact of its birth which would have seemed

not merely inconceivable, but monstrous to a woman of another race and

breeding. Honor, however, knew as much, or more, about the matter than

she did herself. She had been with her at the time, although old Mrs

Flanaghan, Phil Flanaghan’s mother, was the chief official in command on

the occasion. It was Honor, however, who had baptised the baby--this

poor little white-faced object then in her arms, whose birth and death

had seemed likely to be contemporaneous. It was an office for which she

was in great demand on Inishmaan, where, as explained, there was no

priest, and where her peculiar piety made her seem to her neighbours

specially fitted for such semi-sacerdotal duties. Of course such a

baptism was only meant as a preliminary, to serve till the more regular

sacrament could be bestowed, but, from the difficulties of transport, it

often happened that weeks and months passed before any other could be

given; nay, not infrequently, the poor little pilgrim had found its way

to the last haven for all such pilgrims, near to the old church of

Cill-Cananach, unguarded from future perils by any more regular rite.

Looking down at the small waxen face upturned in her lap, Honor O’Malley

felt that such a consummation was not in this case far off. She did not

say to herself that it was so much the better, for that would have been

a sin, but her thoughts certainly ran unconsciously in that direction

as, having given it back to its mother, she bustled to and fro in the

cabin, putting together all the available scraps of food she could find;

which done, she tied them into a bundle and deposited the bundle in the

passive arms of little Phelim, who accepted it from her with the same

dim, wondering stare of astonishment in his pale china-blue eyes--a

stare with which every event, good or ill, seemed alike to be received

by him. Five years’ experience of a very troublesome world had evidently

not yet accustomed him to any of its peculiar ways or vicissitudes.

CHAPTER VII

The Daly brood departed with their booty, Honor next bustled about to

get their own meal ready. Grania meanwhile had promptly dumped herself

down upon her two small heels and sat doing nothing, except staring

sulkily at the fire. The child was thoroughly cross. She wanted her

playfellow, and poor Honor by no means filled the blank. An old hen,

sitting upon a clutch of eggs in a hole in the wall a little to the left

of the fire, put its head out, and uttered a friendly interrogative

cluck, by way of suggestion that it was there and would not object to a

handful of oatmeal if it came in its way. Grania, however, took no

notice, but sat, with her small brows drawn close together, staring at

the ash-covered heap of turf, below which a dull red glow still

smouldered.

Inside the cabin everything was warm, turf-scented, chocolate-tinted.

Walls, roof, hearth, furniture--what furniture there was--all was dim

and worn, blackened with time, smoke, and much friction. Little light

came in at the small, closely-puttied windows; much smoke down the wide,

imperfectly-fashioned chimney. It suited its inmates, however, and that,

after all, is the main thing. To them, as to the old speckled hen, it

was home--the one spot on earth that was theirs, which made the

difference between warmth, self-respect, comfort, and a desolate, windy

world without. Solid at least it was. There was no scamped work about

it: no lath and plaster in the walls; no dust and rubble in the

foundations. Had there been it would not have stood out against the

first of the ten thousand storms that had beat against its solid little

walls since the first day that they were planted in the mouth of that

wicked, squally gully.

Supper over, Grama watched her opportunity. With a sudden slide, a run,

a quick scramble, and a dart through the open door, she managed, while

Honor was scouring out the black pot, to escape and run off at the top

of her speed to a spot where she knew she would be safe, for some time

at least, from pursuit.

This retreat of hers was a stone fort known as the _Mothar dun_, one of

seven or eight so-called Cyclopean forts which stud the islands. This

one, which was only a few hundred yards from their own door, was small,

as Cyclopean forts go--not towering in air like a great natural cliff,

as Dun Aengus does, nor yet covering the whole top of the island, like

Dun Connor or Conchobhair, but forming a comparatively modest circle,

set half-way up the slope--an absurd position, if you reflect on it from

a military point of view, since it must have been dominated by any enemy

who happened to stand above it. Nobody on Inishmaan troubled themselves,

however, about such matters, and little Grania O’Malley naturally least

of all.

Clambering over the big blocks, excited with the sense of escape, and

breathless from her run up the perpendicular, ladderlike face of the

slope, she had just reached the innermost enclosure when, out of the

darkest part of it, a figure bounced against her so roughly as to cause

her to spring backwards, striking her foot, as she did so, against one

of the sharp-pointed stones.

It was a big, red-headed lad of fourteen or, perhaps, fifteen years old,

extremely, almost painfully, ugly, possessing one of those faces which

confront one now and then in the west of Ireland, and which seem to

verge to a cruel degree upon the grotesque. So freckled was he that his

face seemed all freckle; an utterly shapeless, and at the same time

ridiculously inconspicuous, nose; a shock head, tangled enough to

suggest the historic ‘glibbe’ of his remote progenitors; with all that,

a harmless, amiable, not even particularly stupid face, but so dull, and

at the same time apprehensive-looking, that its very amiability seemed

to provoke and invite attack. Attack was certainly not spared on this

occasion.

‘Auch, and is it you then, Teige O’Shaughnessy! And why must you be

sticking there in the dark, knocking me down for nothing at all--yes,

indeed, for nothing at all?’ the child exclaimed as soon as she had

recovered her breath. ‘Augh, but it is yourself, Teige O’Shaughnessy,

that is the ugly, awkward boy! the ugliest and awkwardest in all

Inishmaan! My word, just wait till Murdough Blake comes back from the

sea, till I tell him how you run out at me in the dark and I doing

nothing! It is Murdough Blake will give you the real good beating, so he

will!--yes, indeed, the best good beating ever you got in your life,

just to learn you manners! That he will, and more too, you ugly, clumsy

_omadhaun_!’

She stopped, breathless, exhausted by her own volubility.

The boy so belaboured with words only stood still, his poor ugly face

growing redder and uglier in his confusion.

‘Arrah, is it hurt you are, Grania O’Malley?’ he stammered sheepishly at

last.

‘And if it is hurt I am or not hurt, it is not to _you_ I will be

telling it, Teige O’Shaughnessy,’ she replied haughtily. ‘And I will be

glad for you to go away, so I will, for I do not want to be looking at

your ugly face, nor at your red hair, nor at any piece of you, so I do

not!’ And she flung herself face downwards upon the nearest stone.

Poor Teige found apparently no effective rejoinder to these

observations, for, after staring stupidly at her for about a minute, he

turned and proceeded obediently to depart, his heavy feet--heavy even in

their soft cow’s skin pampooties--lumbering along over the rocks, the

sound growing fainter and fainter as he disappeared down the stony

hillside.

Little Grania waited where she was till he was out of sight, then she

jumped up from the stone upon which she had thrown herself and clambered

nimbly up, till she had reached her favourite perch on the top of the

fort, where a small portion of the parapet still existed. Seating

herself upon this she let her feet dangle out over the smooth flagged

platform which stretched for some distance beyond.

She was still sobbing, from anger, however, rather than pain, her

suffering being of the kind known in nursery parlance as a pain in the

temper, the previous vexation about Murdough having been deepened and

brought into fresh prominence by the recent encounter.

Teige O’Shaughnessy was an orphan, and lived with an uncle and aunt, an

old brother and sister who inhabited a cabin upon one of the outlying

rocks, one which became an island at high tide and therefore was then

unapproachable. The two were twins, and earned their bread, or rather

the old man earned it for both of them, by weaving. Apparently it was a

sorry trade, for the cabin in which they lived was so twisted,

sea-battered, brine-encrusted, and generally miserable that, by

comparison, most of the other houses upon the island might have been

regarded by their owners as quite architectural and dignified domiciles.

This, one would say, ought to have been a source of popularity, but, for

several reasons, the O’Shaughnessys were rather pariahs upon Inishmaan.

This was not on account of their poverty, which is never a really

damning reproach in Ireland, and probably, therefore, was due partly to

the fact that, compared to most of its inhabitants, they were

new-comers--at least, there were several very old people on Inishmaan

who pretended to remember a time when there were no O’Shaughnessys

there--partly to their extreme ill-favouredness, and, still more, to the

fact that the two old people were deaf and dumb, and could therefore

only communicate with their neighbours and the rest of the world by

signs--a sufficient reason surely in a much less superstitious

community than that of Inishmaan for regarding them as lying peculiarly

under the disfavour of Heaven, and likely enough to bring that contagion

or blight of disfavour upon other, and more fortunate, people if unduly

encouraged and associated with.

Grania, a born aristocrat--all children are born aristocrats--shared

this feeling in the strongest degree, and was well aware that Teige was

in some way or other immensely inferior to herself, and therefore a

person only to be tolerated when no more attractive company was to be

had. She sat for some time longer with her feet dangling over the top of

the fort, a quaint little red-petticoated figure, the solitary spot of

colour in all that desolate greyness. Immediately beneath her the ridged

platforms of rock showed their upturned edges, one below the other,

fluted, worn, and grooved into every variety of furrow. Hardly a speck

of green to be seen anywhere. Here and there an adventurous spray of

honeysuckle or bryony, grown deep in the hollows, showed perhaps a few

inches of foliage above the wrinkled surface of the rocks, but that was

all.

The winds were all hushed for that evening, but their power and prowess

was written at large upon every worn crag, torn fissure, and twisted

stump; upon the whole battered, wind-tormented scene. Inishmaan might

from this point have suggested some weather-beaten old vessel, a raft or

hulk given over to the mercy of winds and waves, keeping afloat still,

but utterly scarred and defaced, a derelict, past all possibility of

recovery.

After sitting for about a quarter of an hour upon the same spot, the

child began to tire of her solitary perch. A new impulse seized her,

and, leaving the rath, she clambered down the wall, over the loose

blocks scattered outside--remains of a still discernible _chevaux de

frise_--ran across the level slabs of rock, till she reached the end of

the one she was upon, when she dropped suddenly down-hill, over, as it

were, a single gigantic stair, thereby attaining the one below.

This brought her to a totally different aspect of the island, and,

comparatively speaking, a cheerful and sheltered one. A narrow _coose_,

or horseshoe-shaped bay, running some little way inshore, had created a

sort of small sea-facing amphitheatre, backed by a semicircle of rocks,

at the bottom and sides of which mountain ash, holly, and fuchsia--the

latter still red with flower--grew and flourished, enclosing and

sheltering a small, perfectly level green stage or platform.

At the end of this platform, which served it for a terrace, stood a

house--not a cabin, and the only habitable abode on Inishmaan that could

be called by any other name. It was said to have been built for a

relation of the owner of the islands, who, fifty years before, had found

here an asylum from his creditors. Whatever its history may have been,

it formed undoubtedly an odd contrast to every other form of

architecture to be found in the place. In shape it seemed to have been

intended to imitate some small Greek or Roman temple, the front

consisting of four cut granite pillars supporting a roof, and led up to

by three wide, shallow steps, which steps were also of granite, the

reddish feldspathic granite of West Galway. The back and sides of the

building, however, were only of the ordinary blue limestone of the

island, once plastered with stucco, and white, but long since blistered

and broken away. Damp and decay had, in fact, got possession of the

whole building. Not only had the stucco almost entirely fallen off, but

even the scrolled iron banisters of a flight of steps which led from the

end of the terrace to the sea were in many places worn to a mere thread

by the constant friction of water and rust-producing action of the

spray.

No one lived there now, though an old woman, the grandmother of Murdough

Blake, was paid a trifle for looking after it, and was pretty generally

to be found there in the daytime. With Grama it had always been a chief

haunt and playground, partly because Murdough Blake had a prescriptive

right to go there to dig bait and loaf about generally, but also because

there was a fascination for her in the tumble-down old house itself, so

utterly unlike any other within the range of her experience.

As might have been expected, it was all shut up now; so, having vainly

tried each of the doors and windows, and rapped impatiently at two or

three of them, she went down the steps and squatted disconsolately upon

a bit of rock at the foot of them.

The air, mild as milk, had something about it that evening which seemed

to touch the cheek like a caress. There had been no sunset worth

speaking of, but the western sky and sea above and below the rim of the

horizon were tinged with faint salmon, through which the grey broke, and

into which it was gradually melting. To the north, behind the child’s

head, the great grey profile of Dun Conchobhair lifted its frowning

mass, well defined against the sky--a dark, sinister fragment of a

long-forgotten past, looking gloomily down upon the poor, squat, and

weather-worn habitations of to-day.

The sea seemed to have grown curiously small. The ‘Old Sea,’ as the

islanders call the Atlantic, was here hidden completely out of sight,

and only the sound between the middle and smallest island, with a

fragment of the bay beyond, was visible. To the left lay the remains of

a small pier, where the owner of the villa had once moored his boats,

now broken down and half destroyed by storms. Seagulls floated hither

and thither in the still water, tame as ducks upon a farmyard pool.

Cormorants passed overhead with black outstretched necks, and now and

then the white-barred head of a diver rose for a moment, to disappear

again into the depths of the water the next.

As it grew darker, the shapes of everything began to change, blend, and

melt into one another. The crooked iron supports, bent and red with

rust, took on new and more fantastic forms. They seemed now a company of

spindle-legged imps, writhing, twisting, tugging to right and left, so

as to escape from the weight of what they had undertaken to carry. Red

flakes, fallen from them, lay in all directions upon the ground, mixed

with fragments of black oarweed, like so many twists of old worn-out

tobacco. Everything breathed a dull calm, a half-stupefied melancholy.

The swell slid lazily up one side of the little pier, hiding its stones

and rat-holes for a moment, then fell heavily back again down the other,

with a movement that was almost suggestive of a shrug, a gesture, of

somewhat bored resignation.

For nearly an hour the child sat on and on, heedless of poor Honor’s

anxieties, dreaming dim, formless dreams, such as visit alike all young

heads, whatever the measure of so-called education that may have fallen

to the lot of their owners.

She thought over the incidents in the boat that afternoon, and clenched

her two little rows of white teeth afresh at the recollection of Shan

Daly’s attack on Murdough. Then she took to wondering where Murdough

was, and whether he was on his way back, a vague dream of floating away

somewhere or other in a boat, only he and she together, rising

blissfully before her mind. A momentary qualm as to Honor came to cross

these delights, quickly dispersed, however, by the reflection that Honor

had her prayers and her cross, and that she really wanted nothing else,

whereas she, Grania, wanted many things, while as for Murdough Blake,

that hero’s wants were simply insatiable--grew and multiplied, in fact,

with such rapidity that even his most faithful admirer could hardly keep

pace with them.

By-and by, as she sat there, the tide began to creep higher up, and

nearer and nearer to her feet. There was a smell of salt and slimy

things, which seemed to be mounting upon the rising water. A rat

scuffled and squeaked not far off, and bats flew darkly to and fro

overhead. Grania began to think of going home. She was not afraid of

rats, bats, sea-water, or anything else. She was used to being alone at

all hours, and, as for the sea, it was almost her element. Still, as one

had to go back and to bed some time or other, it seemed almost as well

to go now.

On her way home she had to pass close to the half-peninsula, half-island

upon which the O’Shaughnessys’ cabin stood, barely visible at this

distance under its load of black thatch, and looking rather like the

last year’s nest of some shore-infesting crow or chough. The tide was

still low enough to get to it, and the fancy took the child to go across

and peep in at the window, which, like every other window upon

Inishmaan, was sure to be unshuttered. Teige, no doubt, would be at

home at this hour, and she would be able, perhaps, to give him a fright,

in return for the fright he had given her an hour before.

The seaweeds were more than usually slimy upon the rocks covering the

space which separated this small outlying fragment of Inishmaan from the

rest of the island, and even in her pampooties little Grania found some

difficulty in getting across, and stumbled more than once before she

reached the rocks on the other side. No one came to the door, or seemed

to hear her footsteps, and, as the door itself was shut, there was

clearly nothing to be done but to go up to the cabin and apply her small

nose to the one narrow, closely-puttied square of glass which in the

daytime gave light to the dwelling.

Any illumination there was was now from within, not from without, for a

bright turf-fire was blazing redly upon the hearth. At first sight the

most prominent object visible was the loom, which practically filled up

the whole interior of the cabin. Beyond it the child could presently

distinguish two figures, a white figure and a red figure, both of them

extraordinarily ugly--a frightful little old man, a hideous little old

woman--both of them, too, though utterly, strangely silent, were

nevertheless, as she saw to her dismay, gesticulating violently at one

another. Now it was the old man who, squatting down towards the ground,

would spread out his arms widely, then springing suddenly erect wave

them over his head, apparently imitating some one engaged in rowing,

fishing, or what not, the whole performance being carried on with the

most breathless vehemence and energy. Then the old woman would take her

turn, and go through a somewhat similar evolution, expressive seemingly

of weaving, spinning, walking, eating, or whatever she wanted to

express, while, whichever was the principal performer, the other would

respond with quick comprehensive jerks of the head, sudden enough and

sharp enough apparently to crack the spinal column.

It was less like a pair of human beings communicating together than like

a pair of extraordinary automata, some sort of ugly, complicated toy set

into violent action by its proprietor and unable to leave off until its

mechanism had run down. To the child, standing outside in the dark, the

whole thing, lit as it was by the fitful illumination of the fire, and

doubled by a sort of second performance on the part of a still more

grotesque pair of shadows painted on the ceiling overhead, had something

in it quite extraordinarily terrifying, quite indescribably mysterious

and horrible. She knew, of course, perfectly well that it was only dumb

Denny and dumb Biddy O’Shaughnessy; that they always gesticulated like

that to one another--not having any other way, poor souls, of

communicating. She knew this perfectly well, but as she stood there, a

little, quailing, shaking figure, peering in through the unshuttered

window, she became a prey to all the indescribable terrors, all the

dumb, inexplicable, but at the same time agonising, horrors of

childhood. She longed as she had never longed before in her life to get

her head under some blanket, under somebody’s skirt, anywhere, with

anyone, no matter where, so only she had somewhere to hide, some hand to

cling to. Her heart beat, her knees knocked together, her teeth

chattered, and with that sudden sense of the necessity of finding some

refuge stinging her through and through like a nettle, she turned and

fled--as a scared rabbit flies--down the rocky way, across the slippery

tide rocks, over the slimy, evil-smelling oarweeds, which seemed to be

twining deliberately round her feet and trying to stop her, up hill and

down hill till she once more found herself inside their own cabin, and

within the sheltering arms of the faithful Honor, who had been watching

for her for an hour past from the threshold.

As for Con O’Malley, the hospitality of Kilronan proved, on this

occasion as often before, too much for him, and he had to stay and sleep

off the effects of it under the friendly, sheltering roof of the

‘Cruskeen Beg.’

PART II

APRIL

PART II

_APRIL_

CHAPTER I

Six years have come and gone since that September evening, and our

little twelve-year-old Grania has grown into a tall, broad-chested

maiden, vigorous as a frond of bracken in that fostering Atlantic air,

so cruel to weaklings, so friendly to those who are already by nature

strong. Other changes have followed of a less benignant character. Con

O’Malley is dead. Sundry causes, but chiefly, alas! whisky, have made an

end of the stout master of the hooker, and in consequence that good ship

has had to be sold, and Inishmaan has been left hookerless. Honor

O’Malley, always delicate, had become a confirmed invalid, had not for

many months left her own dusky corner of the cabin, nay, was only too

likely before long to change it for a yet duskier abode. The Shan

Dalys?--well, there is not much to say about the Shan Dalys. Shan

himself had grown even a more confirmed vagrant than before. He lived no

one knew how, or where, for he was given to disappearing from Inishmaan

for a week or more at a time, reappearing more ragged, if possible, than

usual, with bloodshot eyes, tangled beard, and all the signs of having

slept in holes or under the banks of ditches, a vagrant upon the face of

the earth. The poor wife was, if anything, more of a moving skeleton

than when we saw her last. Of the many children born to them only two

survived, Phelim and a little girl of five. Happy for the rest that

fate had been pitiful, for in any less kindly country those left would

literally have starved. Phelim was supported almost wholly by the

O’Malley sisters, and not a day in the week passed without his coming,

as a matter of course, to share their rations.

To turn to a more cheerful subject. Murdough Blake had grown up, as he

had promised to do, into a tall, active, lissom young fellow. In his

archaic clothes of yellowish flannel, spun, woven, bleached, made upon

the island, in the cow’s skin pampooties which give every Aranite his

peculiarly shuffling and at the same time swinging step, he ought to

have rejoiced the inmost heart of a painter, had a painter ever thought

of going to the Aran isles in search of subjects, a ridiculous

supposition, for who would dream of doing so? He was anything but

satisfied, however, with his own clothes, his own standing, his own

prospects in life, or, for that matter, with anything else about him,

excepting with young Murdough Blake himself, who was clearly too

exceptional a person to be wasted upon such a spot as Inishmaan.

A quarter of a century ago no golden political era for promising young

Irishmen of his class had yet dawned, and, even if it had done so, the

Aran isles are rather remote for recruits to be sought for there,

especially recruits who are innocent of any tongue except their own

fine, old useless one. There was, consequently, nothing for Murdough to

do except to follow in the old track, the same track that his father and

grandfather had followed before him--namely, fish a little, farm a

little, rear a little cattle for the mainland, marry and bring up a

‘long’ family like his neighbours, unless he was prepared to make a bold

start for the land of promise on the other side of the Atlantic--a

revolutionary measure for which, despite his many dissatisfactions, he

lacked, probably, the necessary courage.

Whether he would have cared to do so or no, Grania certainly would not,

and they were shortly to be married. To her Inishmaan was much more than

home, much more than a place she lived in, it was practically the world,

and she wished for no bigger, hardly for any more prosperous, one. It

was not merely her own little holding and cabin, but every inch of it

that was in this peculiar sense hers. It belonged to her as the rock on

which it has been born belongs to the young seamew. She had grown to it,

and it had grown to her. She was a part of it, and it was a part of her,

and the bare idea of leaving it--of leaving it, that is to say,

permanently--would have filled her with nothing short of sheer

consternation.

Perhaps to one whose lot happens to be cast upon an island--a mere brown

dot set in an angry and turbulent ocean--the act of leaving it seems a

far more startling piece of transplantation than any flitting can seem

to one who merely shares a mainland dotted over with tens of thousands

of homesteads more or less similar to one’s own. To sail away, see it

dimly receding behind you, becoming first a mere speck, then vanishing

altogether, must be a very serious proceeding, one which, since it is

not within our power to exchange habitations with a native, say, of

Saturn or of Mars, it is not very easy to imagine exceeded in gravity.

If all humans are themselves islands, as the poet has suggested, then

this tall, red-petticoated, fiercely-handsome girl was decidedly a very

isolated, and rather craggy and unapproachable, sort of island. In her

neighbours’ eyes she was a ‘Foreigner,’ just as her mother had been a

foreigner before her, and there was much shaking of heads and lifting

of hands amongst the matrons of Inishmaan whenever her name was

mentioned. Even to her own sister who adored her, who had adored her

from the cradle, she was a source of much disquietude, much sisterly

anxiety, less as regards this life--which, from the good Honor’s

standpoint, was an affair of really no particular moment one way or

other--than as regards the future, the only future worthy in her eyes of

the name.

Probably she was right enough. Such a frame as Grania’s is a good,

ready-made home for most of the simpler, more straightforward virtues.

Honesty, strength, courage, love of the direct human kind, pity for the

weak--especially the weak that belong to you, that are your own kith and

kin, and dependent upon you--these were born in her, came to her direct

from the hands of Nature. For other, the more recondite, saintlier

virtues--faith, meekness, holiness, patience, and the rest--she

certainly showed no affinity. They were not to be looked for--hardly by

a conceivable process to be acquired or engrafted.

This, rather than her own broken health, her own fast-approaching death,

was the real sting and sorrow of Honor’s life, the sorrow that, day

after day, impaled her upon its thorns, and woke her up pitilessly a

dozen times in the night to impale her afresh. Like some

never-to-be-forgotten wound it would be upon her almost before she was

well awake. Herself saved, and Grania, perhaps--not! It was a nightmare,

a permanent terror, a horror of great darkness, worse a hundred times to

her than if the anticipation had been reversed.

That in some mysterious way, she could not have explained how, her

sister, rather than herself, might benefit by her own present

sufferings, was the only counter-hope that ever for a moment buoyed her

up. She had ventured, after long hesitation, to consult Father Tom of

Aranmore upon this subject the last time she had been able to go to

confession, and if he had not encouraged, he had not absolutely

discouraged, her from treasuring the notion. She did treasure it

accordingly. Every new pang, every hour of interminable, long-drawn

weakness being literally offered up upon a sort of invisible altar, with

much trembling, much self-rebuke at the worthlessness of the offering,

and yet with a deep-seated belief that it might somehow or other be

accepted, little promising as, it must be owned, matters looked at

present. Poor Honor! poor faithful sisterly soul! We smile at you,

perhaps, yet surely we envy you, too, and our envy cuts short and half

shames us out of our smiles.

As for Murdough Blake, his views about Grania were of the simplest

possible description. She was immensely strong he knew, the strongest

girl on Inishmaan, as well as the best off, and, for both reasons

evidently, the most suitable one as a wife for himself. If she was

‘Foreigner,’ out of touch and tone with her neighbours, no such

accusation could certainly be laid at his door. A more typical young man

it would be difficult to find--typical enough to excuse some abuse of

the term--typical in his aspirations, typical in his extravagances,

typical, nay conventional, even in his wildest inconsequences, his most

extravagant rhodomontades, paradoxical as that may seem to one unused to

such flowers of speech. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Murdough Blakes

had talked just as big, and done just as little, strutted their hour in

just the same fashion over the self-same rocks, and felt themselves

equally exceptionally fine young fellows long before this one had come

into existence. That Grania would be doing very well, really

exceptionally well for herself in marrying him he honestly believed,

though it would have been difficult to show any particular grounds for

the conviction. In any case they would have been married before this,

only that it happened there was no roof ready for them, Honor being too

ill for another inmate to be brought into the O’Malleys’ house, while,

on the other hand, Grania would not leave her, even if she could have

made up her mind to share the two-roomed cabin up at Alleenageeragh in

which Murdough himself lived, in company with a widowed mother, a

grown-up sister, a couple of younger brothers, sundry domestic animals,

and a bedridden great aunt.

As regards his marked desirability as a husband, she fortunately

thoroughly agreed with him. To marry anyone but Murdough Blake would

have seemed to her as impossible as to be herself anyone but Grania

O’Malley. True, there had been troubles between them of late, some of

them rather serious troubles, but no troubles, however serious, could

touch that central point, the keystone and cardinal fact of her

existence. For money, for instance, Murdough showed a perfectly

perennial thirst--money, that is to say, earned by anyone in the world

but himself. Another thirst, too, he already showed symptoms of

possessing, more apt even than this to deepen and increase as the years

rolled on. These, and some other matters besides, were a source of no

little trouble to Grania, all the more that she never spoke of them to

Honor. She had one great panacea, however, for any and every trouble--a

panacea which it were well that we all of us possessed. Oh, troubled

fellow-mortals, self-tormented, nerve-ridden, live incessantly in the

open air, live under the varied skies, heedless, if you can, of their

vagaries, and, if you do, surely sooner or later you will reap your

reward! Grania O’Malley had reaped hers, or rather it had come to her

without any sowing or reaping, which is the best and most natural way.

She had a special faculty, too, for such living--one which all cannot

hope either to have or to acquire. She could dig, she could chop, she

could carry, she could use her muscles in every sort of outdoor labour

as a man uses his, and, moreover, could find a joy in it all. For words,

unlike Murdough, she had no talent. Her thoughts, so far as she had any

conscious thoughts, would not clothe themselves in them. They stood

aside, dumb and helpless. Her senses, on the other hand, were

exceptionally wide awake, while for sheer muscular strength and

endurance she had hardly her match amongst the young men of the three

islands. This was a universally-known fact, admitted by everyone, and a

source of no small pride to herself, as well as of prospective

satisfaction to Murdough. A wife that would work for you--not

spasmodically, but from morning till night--a wife that would take all

trouble off your hands; a wife that actually _liked_ working!--could

brilliant young man with a marked talent for sociability desire anything

better?

Upon that particular morning, as upon nearly every other morning

throughout the year, Grania had left the cabin early, after settling

Honor in her usual corner for the day, and had taken down the cow to

pasture it upon the bent-grass growing upon the seashore at the foot of

the hill, not far from where the two sisters owned a small strip of

potato-ground.

It was a bleak, unfriendly day, bitterly cold, with driving showers,

though the month was already April. The sea, whenever she chanced to

raise her head to look at it, was of a dull blackish purple, varied with

vicious, windy-looking streaks of white along the edges of the rocks

over which the rollers were sweeping heavily. ‘Moonyeen,’ the

short-horned cow, was eagerly cropping the scanty grass, her head turned

intelligently away from the blast. It was strictly forbidden, by the

way, for anyone to pasture cattle on this bent-grass, and that for the

excellent reason that a breach once made in it the wind got in, and the

whole became once more a mere driving waste of sand. The agent for the

property, however, lived away on Aranmore, at a safe distance across

Gregory’s Sound, and everyone upon the Middle island did, therefore, as

they pleased in this respect, and Grania O’Malley did like the rest.

She had been digging hard in her potato-patch ever since breakfast-time,

and her drills were now nearly finished, and she herself felt

comfortably tired, and satisfied. There is no room for ploughs upon

Inishmaan, since no horse or even pony could turn upon the tiny spots

of tillage so hardly captured from its stones. Donkeys and ponies are,

indeed, kept by many of the islanders, but chiefly to carry the loads of

kelp to and from the coast. Grania O’Malley had neither one nor the

other, though many poorer neighbours possessed both. She was so strong

that it would have seemed to her a sheer waste of good fodder, and she

carried her own loads of kelp and seaweed persistently up and down the

hill, till towards evening she would often find her eyes shutting of

themselves from sheer fatigue, and she would fall asleep before the

cabin-fire like a dog that has been all day hunting.

She was only waiting now to begin her midday meal of cold potatoes and

griddle-bread for little Phelim Daly, who came with the regularity of a

winter-fed robin to share them with her. She wondered that he had not

yet appeared, and sat down upon a piece of rock to wait for him. Before

she had been sitting there many minutes she saw the wild little figure

coming towards her, across the slabs of rock. He was rather tall for his

age, with the air of some sickly, ill-thriven plant that has run to

waste, his pale blue, restless eyes looking up with the piteous

expression of a forlorn, neglected animal for which no one cares, and

which has almost ceased to care about itself. He came and squatted down

close to her side upon a smaller bit of rock which rose out of the sandy

soil, his thin legs stretched out in front of him, his eyes looking

piteously up at her out of his small white face.

‘Is it hungry you are, acushla?’ she asked, noticing his expression;

then, without waiting for an answer, went and fetched a cake of

griddle-bread tied up in a handkerchief which she had left at a little

distance.

‘Phelim is hungry; yes, Grania O’Malley, Phelim is very, _very_ hungry,’

the boy answered in a curiously forlorn, far-away voice, as if the

subject had hardly any special reference to himself.

‘Here, then; God help the child! Here!’ and she thrust a large lump of

griddle-bread into his limp, unchildish hands.

He began breaking off pieces from it and thrusting them into his mouth,

but carelessly and as if mechanically, looking before him the while with

the same vacant, far-away gaze.

‘Phelim’s legs hurt,’ he presently said dreamily. ‘The wind was bad to

Phelim last night. Phelim was asleep and the wind came and said, “Get

up, Phelim; get up, sonny.” So Phelim got up. It was dark--och, but it

_was_ dark; you couldn’t see anything only the darkness. Phelim wanted

to crawl back to his bed again, but the wind kept calling and calling,

“Come out, Phelim! Come out, Phelim!” so he went out. And when he got

outside the clouds were all running races round and round the sky, and

he set off running after them, and he ran and he ran till he had run all

round Inishmaan. And when he could run no further he fell down. But the

wind wouldn’t let him lie still, and kept saying, “Get up, sonny! Get

up, Phelim!” Then when Phelim couldn’t get up it went away, quite away.

So Phelim lay still a while, and thought he was back in his bed. But

by-and-by big crawling things, white things and red things and black,

came crawling, crawling up, one after the other, out of the sea and over

the rocks and over the sands and over Phelim, up his legs and along his

back and into his neck. Then Phelim let a great screech, for the fright

had hold of him. And he screeched and he screeched and he screeched

and--and that’s why Phelim’s legs are so bad to-day,’ and he began

slowly rubbing them up and down with one skinny, claw-like hand.

Grania shivered and crossed herself. She knew it was all nonsense, that

he had been only dreaming, still, everyone was aware that there often

_were_ wicked things about at night, and it made her uncomfortable to

listen to him.

‘Och, ’tis just the cold that ails you; nothing else, avic,’ she said

decisively. ‘Here, wrap yourself up in this. God help the child! ’tis a

mere bundle of bones he is,’ she added to herself as she put the white

flannel petticoat, which served her as a cloak, round the boy as he sat

crouched in a bundle upon the bit of rock, the cold wind scourging his

legs and blowing the sand into his weary-looking pale blue eyes.

She left him to go and fetch her spade, which was at the other end of

the ridge. When she came back he had slipped behind the larger of the

two pieces of rock, and, with her petticoat huddled about him like a

shawl, was lying flat upon his stomach, engaged in picking out small

morsels of white quartz which had got mixed with the other pebbles, and

ranging them in a row, whispering something to each of them as he did

so.

Grania stopped to look at him. ‘What are you doing now, avic?’ she asked

curiously.

The boy turned at her voice, and looked up with the same vague, forlorn

expression, not having evidently heard or understood. Then when she had

repeated her question:

‘It was the little stones,’ he said dreamily.

‘Well, and what about the little stones, child?’

‘’Twas something the little stones was telling Phelim. The wind is bad

to the little stones. The stones cry, cry, cry. There is one little

stone here that cries most of all; there is no other stone on Inishmaan

that cries so loud.’

Grania stooped and looked at the pebbles as if to discover something

more than common in them.

‘Do all the things speak to you, Phelim?’ she asked inquisitively.

‘Then they do not; no, Grania O’Malley. Once Phelim heard nothing. The

wind was gone; there was nothing--nothing at all, at all. All at once

something said, “There is nothing now on Inishmaan but Phelim.” Then

Phelim was more afraid of Phelim than of anything else, and he began to

screech and screech. He screeched--och, but he screeched! Phelim _did_

screech that night, Grania O’Malley!’

‘Arrah, ’tis worse you are getting every day, child, with your

nonsense,’ she said with a sort of rough motherliness. ‘Here, come away

with you; we’ll go look for Murdough Blake on the rocks yonder: maybe

he’ll give you a fish to take to your mammy. Come!’ She stuck her spade

upright in the soil as she spoke and held out her hand.

Phelim got up and trotted obediently beside her down the slope. Having

crossed the sandy tract, under the broken walls of the old church of

Cill-Cananach, they got out upon the rocks beyond, half hidden now by

the rising tide.

At the extreme end, where these rocks broke suddenly into deep water, a

figure was standing fishing, a tall, broad-shouldered figure, looking

even larger than it actually was, as everything did against that vacant

background.

Grania hastened her steps. A curious look was beginning to dawn in her

face: an habitual, or rather a recurrent, one, as anyone would have

known who had been in the habit of watching her. It was a look of vague

expectation, undefined but unmistakable; a look of suppressed

excitement, which seemed to pervade her whole frame. What there was to

expect, or what there was to be particularly excited about, she would

have been puzzled herself to explain. There the feeling was, however,

and so far it had survived many disappointments.

Murdough Blake turned as they came up, vehement displeasure clouding his

good-looking, blunt-featured face.

‘It is the devil’s own bad fishing it is to-day, so it is!’ he

exclaimed, pointing to the rock beside him, upon which a few small

pollock and bream were flapping feebly in their last agonies. ‘Two

hours, my God! it is I am here--two hours and more! I ask you, Grania

O’Malley, is that a proper lot of fish for two hours’ catching? And

Teige O’Shaughnessy that caught seven-and-forty in less time

yesterday--seven-and-forty, not one less, and he a _boccach_![4] Is it

fair? My God! I ask you is it fair?’

Phelim had squatted down like a small seal upon a flat-topped bit of

rock, evidently expecting to wait there for another hour at least.

Murdough, however, was delighted at their coming. He had been only

pining for an excuse to break off his occupation.

‘It is not _myself_ will stop any longer for such fishing as that, so it

is not!’ he exclaimed indignantly. ‘My faith and word no! Why would I

stop? Is it to be looking at the sea? God knows I have seen enough of

the sea! Enough and more than enough!’

Grania offering no objection to this very natural indignation, he rolled

up his line, collected the fish, and they turned back together across

the rocks.