‘Arrah! whist! child, I know it, I know it. You needn’t be telling me, for I’ve told myself so a hundred times,’ Honor answered eagerly. ‘And maybe it’s all for the best now the way it is; anyhow, the end is not far off, and God and the Holy Virgin will know it was not my fault. I had the heart in me to be a nun, if ever a woman had, and it’s the heart that’s looked to there—the heart and nothing else. And as to my not thinking of you! why, you little rogora dhu, you black rogue of the world, God forgive me if I’ve thought of anything else, child, since the first hour I had you to myself! ’Twasn’t in it nor thought of, you were at all, in those times I’m speaking of, nor would have been but for father seeing your mother, a stranger come over from the Joyce country, dancing at old Malachy O’Flaherty’s wake, and all the young fellows in the place after her. What ailed him to think of marrying her I never could fancy! A man past forty years of age and a widower, too! An extraordinary thing and scarce decent! No fortune to her, neither, nothing but a pair of big black eyes—the very same as those two shining in your own head this minute—and the walk, so people said, of a queen. A good girl she was—I’m not saying anything against her, poor Delia—and I cried myself sick the day she died, for she was a kind friend to me. But there was yourself, Grania, screeching and kicking, and making the devil’s own commotion with wanting to be fed. Somehow, once I got you into my arms, and no one near you but myself, I disremember ever wanting again to be a nun, so I do.’
Grania’s fierce look softened. ‘’Tis a mother you’ve been to me, sure enough, all my life, sister,’ she said gently.
‘“Mother”! Wisha! child, with your “mother”! ’Tisn’t much I think of mothers, I can tell you! There’s mothers enough in the world and to spare, too! Anyone can be a mother—small thanks to them! Oh, no, Grania sweet, acushla machree, love of my heart, ’tis your soul, ’tis the precious, precious soul of you that I’ve always wanted, and cried after, and longed for, ever since first I had you to myself. Sure, if I could only feel easy about that I’d die the happiest woman ever yet had a footboard laid on her face. Oh, my pet, my bird, my little deerfoor asthore, won’t you try to turn to Him when I’m gone? Remember, I’ll be near, maybe, though you won’t see me. Sure, if it was to do you any good, I’d stop a hundred years longer than need be in the place Father Tom tells of, or a thousand either, for I don’t mind pain, being so used to it, and think it all joy and sweetness.’ Honor lifted her head a little in the bed and raised her soft brown eyes imploringly towards her sister. ‘Oh, Grania dheelish, pulse of my soul, what’s this life at all, at all, short or long, easy or hard—what is it, what is it but a dream? just a dream, no better!’ she cried with sudden passion, that sisterly passion into which everything else had long been merged. ‘If I could only make sure of meeting my bird in heaven, if it was a thousand years off and a thousand on the top of that, and ten thousand more at the hinder end of that, sure, what would it matter? Oh, child asthore, think of us two, you and me, standing up there together, holding one another by the two hands, and knowing we’d never be separated no more!—never, never, sun or shine, winter or summer—never as long as God lived, and that’s for ever and ever! Oh, child, child! when that thought comes over me, ’tis like new life in my veins and new blood in my poor heart. I feel as if I could get out of my bed, and go leaping and dancing over the rocks to the sea, or up into the air itself like the birds, so I do.’
Her strength, momentarily sustained, suddenly broke down, and her voice sank so as to be almost inaudible. ‘You wouldn’t disappoint me, Grania, dear? Sure you wouldn’t disappoint your poor old Honor, that never loved man or woman, chick or child, only yourself?’ she whispered, the words coming out one by one with difficulty.
Grania’s eyes filled, and she let Honor take her hand and hold it in her two worn ones, which were grown so thin that they seemed made of a different substance from her own toil-roughened one. But though she was touched and would have done anything to please Honor, she could not even pretend to respond to the sick woman’s eager longing. She would have done so if she could, but it was impossible. The whole thing was utterly foreign and alien to her. There was nothing in it which she could catch hold of, nothing that she could feel to attach any definite idea to. Fond as she was of Honor, unwilling as she was to vex her, her whole attitude, her excessive urgency, worried her. What ailed her to talk so, to have such queer ways and ideas? Was it because she was sick, because she was dying? Did all sick people talk and feel like that? Was it possible that she would ever feel anything of the sort if she were sick, if she were going to die? She did not believe it for a minute. The youth in her veins cried for life, life! sharp-edged life, life with the blood in it, not for a thin bloodless heaven that no one could touch or prove.
Turning away, she made an excuse, therefore, of having to go and see after the calf, and ran hastily out of the cabin door into the sunlight, leaving it open behind her.
Left alone, Honor’s eyes kept dreamily following the yellow bands of light as they spread in ever-widening streams across the rocks. Over the top of the gully she could see a space of sky, which seemed to her to be not only bluer, but also higher than usual. She tilted her head a little backwards so as to be able to look farther and farther up, higher and higher still, into this dim, mysterious distance, gradually forgetting all troubles, vexations, hindrances, as her eyes lost themselves in that untravelled region.
‘Augh, my God! what will it be like at all, at all, when we get there?’ she whispered, looking up and smiling, yet half abashed at the same time by her own audacity.
CHAPTER VII
At the extreme south-eastern end of the island, upon the same step or level of rock, but about half a mile farther on than the O’Malleys, lived the Duranes. Their cabin was the smallest and worst, next to Shan Daly’s, on Inishmaan, but then they were Duranes, and Durane is one of the best established names on the island. The family consisted of a father, a mother, five children, a grandfather and an orphan niece. There was only one room in the whole house, and that room was about twenty feet long by twelve or perhaps fourteen feet wide. The walls had, seemingly, never been coated with plaster, and even the mortar between the blocks of stone had fallen out, and been replaced from the inside by lumps of turf or mud as necessity occurred.