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.