‘It is not long Honor O’Malley will be in this world, marrying or no marrying,’ said another old woman, many years younger than the last speaker, Molly Muldoon by name, a brisk, apple-faced little spinster of fifty-seven or thereabouts. ‘It was only yesterday I was with her at their own house yonder, and it was the death-streak I saw plainly under her left eye, the death-streak that no one can live two months once it comes out on them. Oh, a good woman Honor O’Malley is, as you say, Mrs. Dowd, ma’am, none better in this world, nor beyond it either—a real saint, and a credit to Inishmaan and all belonging to her. It is myself has promised to be with her at the last, and at her laying out and at everything, so I have. “Keep Grania away,” says she to me only yesterday. “’Tis broke the child’s heart will be any way, and what good is it to be tearing the life out of her and I past knowing anything about it? Send for Murdough Blake,” says she, “the minute the breath is out of my body, and bid him take her with my blessing and comfort her.” Those were the very words she said. Oh, yes, a good woman, and a kind woman, and a tender woman is Honor O’Malley, a real saint. It is the loss she will be to Inishmaan, the great loss entirely.’
Mrs. Dowd grunted. She was not much of a devotee of saints, certainly not of contemporary ones.
‘And if it isn’t the real out-and-out right wake and funeral she gets it will be the shame of the place, no better,’ Molly Muldoon went on in a tone of enthusiasm. ‘Candles—the best wax ones—with tobacco and spirits for the men, and a plate of white salt to lay on her breast, and the priest, or may be two priests, over from Aranmore. That is the least she should have, so it is, for none ever deserved it better than Honor O’Malley, so they did not.’
‘They’re rich too, the O’Malleys,’ remarked Deb Cassidy from her side of the path—‘money laid by, and warm people always from first to last, no warmer anywhere. Oh, a real rich girl is Grania O’Malley—my God! yes, rich. There are not three girls on Inishmaan as rich as she is—no, not two, nor any other at all, I am thinking.’
‘Trath, and it is none too rich she’ll find herself when she is married to Murdough Blake!’ old Peggy Dowd said bitterly. ‘’Tis down from the sky or up from the sea those Blakes of Alleenageeragh do expect the money to be coming to them. A gosthering, spending, having brood they are and always have been. Rich is it? Gorra! ’tis eight days in the week she’ll find herself working for all her money if she means to keep a roof over her head and Murdough Blake under it—yes, and going a shaughraun most like at the tail of it all, so she will. Mark my words, women, so she will, so she will!’
No one ventured to contradict this prophecy, Peggy O’Dowd’s age and reputation making the course perilous. There was a few minutes’ silence, after which Molly Muldoon was the first to break up the conclave. She was the chief rearer of chickens on Inishmaan, and now got up briskly to see after the various broods to which every corner of her cabin was dedicated. One by one, most of the other women, too, got up and moved indoors on various domestic duties, till at last only old Peggy herself remained behind. She had no household duties to see to. She was a mere visitor, a sitter beside other people’s hearths and a sharer of other people’s victuals. She remained, therefore, squatting in the same place upon the doorstep, her big blue patched cloak hitched about her shoulders, her knees nearly on a level with her big projecting chin, her broad face, once immensely fat, now fallen into deep furrows and hollows, growing gradually impassive as the momentary excitement of recalling her old grudge against the Blakes faded away or got merged in other and probably equally long-remembered grudges. Sitting there hunched in her big cloak, she might at a little distance have been taken for some sort of queer vegetable growth—a fungus, say, or toadstool, which had slowly drawn to itself all the qualities—by preference the less benignant ones—of the soil from which it had sprung. In places like Inishmaan, where change has hardly any existence, the loves, hates, feuds, animosities of fifty or sixty years ago may often be found on examination to be just as green and just as unforgotten as those of yesterday.
CHAPTER III
Grania and Murdough had parted meanwhile upon the top of the ridge close to the old Mothar Dun, he going west, she east. When she reached home she found the cabin door still shut, a hen and clutch of chickens sitting upon the step waiting to be let in. It was evident that no one had been either in or out since she left it five or six hours before.
Inside the cabin was very dark, and Honor’s thin white face showed ghost-like against this setting. She was half sitting, half lying, upon her bed, with her eyes closed, though she was not asleep, a board and a pillow covered with a bit of old striped cotton supporting her. Everything around had the peculiarly chocolate hue of peat. The cabin was clean—for an Irish cabin commendably clean—but the whole had the deeply-dyed, almost black, hue of a Rembrandt background. The face of the sick woman herself might have come from the canvas of quite a different master. Early Italian painters have all tried their hands at it. How well we know it!—that peculiar look, a look of toil-worn peace—peace caught as it were out of the inmost heart of pain;—the hollow cheek, the deeply-marked eye-sockets, the eyes looking out as prisoners’ eyes look from their dungeon bars;—we all recognise it when great art shows it to us, though rarely, if ever, otherwise. Upon a canvas Honor O’Malley’s face might have been the face of a saint or a martyr. It was the face of a saint or a martyr, as saints and martyrs find their representation in these days of ours. Three long years the poor woman had lain there dying. Consumption had its hold upon her. It had been very slow and deliberate in its approaches—nay, in its earlier stage might have been arrested altogether had there been any means at hand of attempting anything of the sort, which, of course, there were not. Who can say what hours of pain had worn themselves out in that smoke-dyed corner? Who can say how many supplications had risen out of its recesses, how often the eternal complaint of the sea licking the base of the cliffs had seemed to Honor the voice of her own silent complaining, the unresting cry of the night wind her own dumb cries made audible? She had won peace now. She was dying comparatively quickly. Mercy was fast coming nearer and nearer, and would presently touch her with its wings.
Grania’s step sounded on the rocks without, and she looked up suddenly, a smile of welcome waking in her hollow eyes.