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.