‘Well, then, I will tell you what I did, yes I will, Grania O’Malley. I just shut my eyes tight, and I rowed, and I rowed. How I rowed and my two eyes shut tight, I cannot tell you, but I did. If I had opened them ever so little I made sure I should have seen—God alone knows what I would have seen, but something worse than any living man ever saw before. Once I heard a gull scream close to my head, and I screamed myself too, yes, I did, my faith and honour, never a word of lie. The clothes on my back they were wet as the sea itself with sweat, what with the fright and the way I was rowing, and when I got close to the rocks I just opened my eyes a little weeshy bit—like that—and peeped out between my eyelids, trembling all the while from head to foot with what I might see and saying every prayer I could remember, and—— Well! there was nothing there—nothing at all, no more than there is on the palm of my hand!’
And he opened it wide, dramatically, to demonstrate his assertion.
This time Grania listened without any protest, mental or otherwise. Like every Celt that ever was born she perfectly understood these sudden unexplainable panics, more akin to those that affect sensitive animals, horses particularly, than anything often felt by more stolid and apathetic bipeds. Though not overflowing in words, as Murdough’s did, her imagination was perhaps even more alive than his to those dim formless visions which people the dusk, and keep alive in the Celt a sense of vague presences, unseen but realisable—survivals of a whole world of forgotten beliefs, unfettered by logic, untouched by education, hardly altered even by later and more conscious beliefs, which have rather modified these earlier ones than superseded them.
The kelp fire was by this time made up, and after beating down the top of it so that it might keep alight all night, they turned and walked back together through the darkness. The wind, which had been rising for an hour past, blew with a dreary raking noise over the naked platforms. Stepping carefully, so as to avoid the innumerable fissures, slippery as the crevasses upon a glacier, they presently reached a narrow track, or ‘bohereen,’ which led between two lines of loosely-piled walls back to the neighbourhood of the O’Malleys’ cabin.
It was almost absolutely pitch dark. Below them the sea was one vast indistinguishable moaning waste. A single tall standing stone—one of the many relics of the past which cover the islands—rose up against it like some vaguely-warning sign-post. Stars showed by glimpses, but the clouds rolled heavily, and the night promised to be an unpleasant one.
Grania felt vaguely irritated and unhappy, she did not know why. That sense of elation with which she had run down over the rocks an hour ago had passed away, and was replaced by a feeling of discomfort quite as frequent with her as the other, especially when she and Murdough had been for some time together. Everything seemed to irritate her—the wind; the stones against which she stumbled; the clouds tossing and drifting over her head; even the familiar moan of the sea had an unexplainable irritation that night for her ear. Looking up at him as he strode along beside her, a dim but substantial shadow in the darkness, this sense of intense, though causeless, vexation was especially strong. There were moments when it would have given her the deepest satisfaction to have fallen upon him and beaten him soundly then and there with her fists, so irritated was she, and so puzzled, too, by her own irritation. Of all this, fortunately, he knew and suspected nothing. His own private and particular world—the one in which he lived, breathed, and shone—was as far apart as the poles from hers. A vast untravelled sea stretched between them, and neither could cross from one to the other.
They parted at last upon the top of the ridge, close to the head of the sprawling monster which always lay there, half buried beneath the rocks, Murdough keeping straight on along the bohereen towards Alleenageeragh, Grama turning short off across the lower platform, which speedily brought her home.
CHAPTER V
Honor was not asleep. Her cough had kept her awake; the restlessness, too, and weariness of illness making it difficult for her to find any position endurable for more than a minute or two at a time.
Grania lifted her up and remade the bed. It was a fairly good one, consisting of a mattress stuffed with sea-grass, a small feather bed over that again, with blankets and a single sheet, coarse but clean. This done, and the sick woman settled again, she pulled off her own pampooties and stockings, unfastened her skirt, muttered a prayer, and tossed herself without further ceremony upon her own pallet.