Just as she had hobbled across to the doorway it was again filled by a figure, and the elder Durane, Pete’s father, came in.
He was a curious contrast to his insignificant-looking little son. A tall, stately old man, with that peculiarly well-bred air not unfrequently still to be seen amongst the elder Irish peasants. His white hair was very thick, and hung over his forehead and around his hat in a dense silky thatch. His eyes were drooping and tired-looking, and his whole air that of a man who has done his work in the world, and asks for nothing now but to be left in peace. By an arrangement common enough in the west of Ireland, when the parent is old, and the son or sons married, he had surrendered all ownership in the house and all rights of possession, with a few trifling exceptions. The single stuffed chair, for instance, was his, so was the one drinking-glass, and an old two-handled black oak mether bound with brass, a relic this of unknown antiquity. These and a few similar articles of personal use were his own private property, and to these he clung punctiliously, and in case of a dispute would doubtless have defended them to the death.
On the whole his daughter-in-law and he got on better than might have been expected. Rosha, to tell truth, was rather in awe of her father-in-law. His old world politeness, combined with a certain power he occasionally showed of being uncomfortably caustic if provoked, were not without effect upon the rough-tongued, coarse-natured woman. In the endless domestic storms between her and her husband—storms, it must be said, which raged almost exclusively on one side—old Durane never took his son’s part, though often appealed to by that much-bullied person to do so. On the other hand he had a way of dreamily watching Rosha as she raged about the cabin which had more effect upon the virago than might have been expected from so very negative a form of attack. He now stood perfectly silent upon the threshold, and having politely removed his hat, bent his white head first to one and then to the other of the visitors, leaning as he did so upon the big black stick which he held in his hand. He was still in the same attitude when his son Pete returned hastily, without the girl he had been sent for, but dragging two of the children after him by the hand.
‘Augh, then, Pete Durane, will you never get the sense?’ his wife exclaimed furiously. ‘Who bade you bring back the children, and they sent out on purpose? Pulling them up the rocks, too, like that, and Patsy smoking red with the heat this minute, the creature’—passing her hand over her offspring’s forehead, and turning the palm round to the company to prove her assertion. ‘Auch, Mr. Durane, sir, but it is the fool you have for a son, God love you! yes, indeed, the very biggest fool on all Inishmaan, and it was myself was the next biggest ever to go and marry him, so I was, God knows.’
The elder Durane looked at his son, and then at his daughter-in-law, an air of vague disturbance beginning to cloud his face, but he said nothing. Then, equally silently, his eyes began to wander slowly round the cabin, as if he were calculating the probabilities of any food being forthcoming. Not seeing signs of anything of the sort at present, he again lifted his hat with the same air of dreamy civility, and backing cautiously out of the doorway, beyond which he had not yet ventured, retraced his steps a little way down the pathway, until he had reached a spot where the planes of rock had got accidentally worn away into the likeness of a sort of roughly-hewn arm-chair. Here he seated himself, his legs stretched out in front of him, his eyes beginning, evidently from long habit, to seek out one particular spot in the far-reaching, dull-tinted horizon. Gradually as he did so the serenity, disturbed by Rosha’s appeal and by the general sense of disturbance which was apt to surround that vigorous woman, returned to his face, a look of reminiscence, undefined but on the whole pleasurable, settling down upon his handsome weather-beaten old features.
The aunt from the other side of the island had nearly reached her own home again, and even Peggy Dowd had long disappeared, wheezing and grunting up the craggy pathway, before he ventured to leave his arm-chair and contemplative gaze at the horizon, and once more seek out the cabin and that atmosphere of storm which seemed to hang about it as closely and almost as persistently as its veil of peat smoke.
END OF THE FIRST VOLUME
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