REGRETS
I
In the June of the following year Norah Ryan received a letter from
Scotland. It ran:
“47, Ann Street,
“Cowcaddens,
“Glasgow.
“MY DEAR NORAH,
“It is a long while now since you heard a word from me. I often
intended to write to you, but my hand was not used to the pen; it
comes foreign to my fingers. I am not like you, a scholart that was
so long at the Glenmornan school-house with Master Diver.
“I am working away here in Scotland, the black country with the
cold heart. I have only met one of the Glenmornan people for a long
while. That was Oiney Dinchy’s son, Thady, and he’s a dock labourer
on the quay. He told me all about the people at home. He said that
poor Maire a Crick, God rest her soul! is dead. Do you mind the
night on Dooey Head long ago? Them was the bad and bitter times. He
said that Father Devaney has furnished his new house and the cost
of it was thousands of pounds, a big lot for a poor parish to pay.
He also told me that you were over with the potato squad in
Scotland and that you were looked on with no unkindly eyes by a
rich farmer’s son. But whoever he is or whatever he is, you are too
good for him, for it is yourself that was always the comely girl
with the pleasant ways. Whatever you do, child, watch yourself
anyway, for the men that are in black foreign parts are not to
have the great trust put in them.
“Mac Oiney Dinchy was saying that no word has come from Dermod
Flynn for a long time. He didn’t send much money home to his own
people and they think that he has gone to the bad. Well, for all
they say, Dermod was a taking lad when I knew him.
“And old Farley McKeown--the Lord be between us and harm!--got
married! What will we see next? I wonder what an old dry stick like
him wants to get married for; and Mac Oiney Dinchy says that he
gave his wife sixty thousand pounds as a wedding present. Well,
well!
“I do be lonely here often, and I am wishful that you would take up
the pen and write me a long letter when you get this one, and if
ever you come to Scotland again come to Glasgow and spend a couple
of days with me.
“Hoping that yourself and your mother is in good health,
“SHEILA CARROL.”
“Who would that letter be from?” asked Mary Ryan from her seat in the
chimney corner. A pile of dead ashes lay on the hearth; the previous
summer had been wet and the turf was not lifted from the bog.
“It’s from Sheila Carrol, mother.”
“From that woman, child! And what would she be writing to you for,
Norah?”
“She’s dying to hear from the Frosses people,” answered the girl. “And
it is very lonely away in the big city.”
“Lonely!” exclaimed the mother. “If she is lonely it’s her own fault.
It’s the hand of God that’s heavy on her because of her sin.”
“That’s no reason why the tongue of her country people should be bitter
against her.”
“Saying that, child!” cried the woman. “What’s comin’ over you at all,
girsha? Never let me hear of you writing to that woman!”
Norah went to the door and looked at the calm sea stretching out far
below. The waves were bright under the glance of the sun; a dark boat, a
little speck in the distance, was moving out towards the bar.
“Where are you going, Norah?” asked the woman at the fire.
“Down to the sea, mother,” answered the girl as she made her way towards
the beach.
II
Between the ragged rocks the grass was soft to the feet and refreshing
to the eyes. Two lone sycamore trees showed green against the sky; a few
stray leaves, shrivelled and filed through by caterpillars, were
fluttering to the earth. A long fairy-thimble stalk, partly despoiled by
some heedless child but still bearing three beautiful bells at the
extreme top, whipped backwards and forwards in the wind, and Norah,
reaching forward, pulled off one of the flowers and pinned it to her
breast.
The tide was on the turn. The girl sat on a rock by the shore and put
her small brown feet in the water. Down under the moving waves they
looked as if they didn’t belong to her at all. Here it was very quiet;
the universal silence magnified the tranquillity of things. Under the
girl’s feet it was very deep, very dark, and very peaceful; there, where
a reflected swallow swept through a wide expanse of mirrored blue, in
the sea under her, were no regrets, no heart-sickness, and no sorrow.
When the tide went out a fair young body, a white face with closed eyes
would lie on the strand. Then the Frosses people would know why the
terrible phantom, Death, was courted by a girl.
“It was all a great mistake,” she said to herself, and in the
excitement caused by the stress of thought she sank her nails into her
palms. The memory of a night passed seven months before came vividly to
her mind. How many tearful nights had gone by since then! How many times
had she written to Alec Morrison telling him of her plight! No answer
had come; the man was indifferent.
“I wasn’t the girl for the likes of him, anyway,” said Norah, looking at
her feet in the water. “But why has all this happened to me?”
As in all great crises of a person’s life, there came a moment of vivid
consciousness to Norah and every surrounding object stamped itself
indelibly on her mind. The tide was sweeping slowly out; the seaweed in
the pool beneath swayed like the hair of a dead body floating in the
water. Two little fish with wide-open eyes looked up and seemed to be
staring at her. Beneath in the water the fleecy clouds looked like
little white spots against the blue of the mirrored sky, and the bar
moaned loudly on the frontier of the deep sea.
“No matter what I do now, no one will think me worse than I am,” said
the poor girl. “I’ll have no joy no more in my life, for there’s no
happiness that I can look forward to.”
She pulled the fairy thimbles from her breast and crushed them in her
hand. Out near the bar she could see the little black boat heaving on
the waves. Norah rose to her feet.
How dark the water looked under her. The sand sloped sharply from her
feet to the bottom of the pool, which was bedded with sharp rocks
covered with trailing, slimy seaweed. She peered in, catching her breath
sharply as she did so. Then one little brown foot went further into the
water, afterwards the other. She bent down, cut the water apart with her
hands; a slight ripple spread out on both sides and was lost almost as
soon as it was formed.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, pray for me a sinner now and at the hour of my
death, Amen,” she said, repeating a prayer which had flowed countless
times since childhood from her lips.
A sudden thought struck her and a look of perplexity overspread her
face. “This is pilin’ one sin on top of the other,” she said in a low
voice and looked round, fearing that somebody had overheard her.
Everything about was silent as if in fear; in that moment she thought
that the sea had ceased to move, the swallow to circle, herself even to
live; the world seemed to be waiting for something--an event of great
and terrible purport, hidden and unknown.
Suddenly the child that was in her leapt under her heart and a keen but
not unpleasant pain swept through her body. She drew back from the pool,
horror-stricken at the thing which she intended to do.
“I’ll go home,” she said meekly, as if obeying some command. “Maybe
he’ll have pity on me when I go over again beyond the water. This day
week Micky’s Jim, he goes again. And I can go to Sheila Carrol. She
knows and she has the good heart. God in His heaven have pity on me and
all that’s like me! for it’s the ignorant girl that I was.... If anyone
had told me.... But I knew nothin’, nothin’, and I’m black now in the
eyes of God as I’ll soon be black in the eyes of the world, of Dermod
Flynn, of me mother and everybody that knows me. Nobody will speak to me
then atall, atall!”