The dusk lingers long in the far north-west, and upon the Aran islands longer apparently than elsewhere, owing to their shining environment of sea and still more to their treeless rain-washed surfaces, which reflect every atom of light as upon a mirror. It was getting really dark now, however, and the sea below her was all one dull purplish grey, barred at long intervals with moving patches of a yet deeper shadow. Splashes of white or pale yellowish lichens flung upon the dark rocks stood out here and there, looking startlingly light and distinct as she neared them. They might have been dim dancing figures, or strange grimacing faces grinning at her out of the obscurity. Over everything hung an intense sense of saltness—in the air, upon the rocks, on the short grass which crisped under foot with the salty particles as with a light hoar-frost. Fragments of dry crumpled-up seaweed, like black rags, lay about everywhere, showing that the kelp fires were not far off.
She hastened her steps. Was Murdough already there? she wondered. He was. As she came round the corner she saw him leaning against a big boulder, a ‘Stranger’ like the one that blocked the mouth of their own gully; ice-dropped granite blocks whose pale rounded forms stud by thousands the darker limestone of the islands.
‘My faith and word, Grania O’Malley, but it is the late woman you are to-night!’ he said, straightening himself from his lounging posture and speaking in a tone of offence.
There was a tone of unusual submissiveness about the girl’s voice as she advanced towards him through the dusk; a look almost of shyness in her eyes as she lifted them to his in the dimness.
‘My faith and word but it is the long time, the very long time, I have been kept waiting. And it is the ugly lonely place for a man to be kept waiting in!’ he continued in the same aggrieved tone. ‘And it was not to please myself I came either. No, it was not, but just to help you with the kelp fire. And it is not one foot of me I would have come—no, nor the half of a foot—if I had thought you would have served me so.’
‘Honor kept me. ’Tis sick she is this evening, worse than common,’ Grania answered simply. ‘Was it wanting me very badly you were, Murdough agra?’ she added, in the same tone as before.
‘Yes, it was wanting you very badly I was, Grania O’Malley, for it was the Fear Darrig I could not help thinking of, and that it was just the place to see him, and it was that made me want you, for they say two people do never see him at the one time, and it is not I that want to see him now, nor at any time—not at all, so I do not!’
‘My grandfather, he saw the Fear Darrig many’s the time,’ Murdough continued, presently, in a more amicable tone; ‘he would, maybe, be setting his lines at night and it would look up at him sudden out of the water. Once, too, he told my grandmother he was up near the big Worm hole and it run at him on a sudden, and danced up and down before him, for all the world like a red Boffin pig gone mad. Round and round it ran as clear as need be in the moonlight, laughing and leaping and clapping its hands, and he praying for the bare life all the while, and shutting his eyes for fear of what he’d see, and not a single saint in the whole sky minding him, no more than if he’d been an old black Protestant bellringer!’
‘You have never seen the Fear Darrig, have you, Murdough?’ Grania asked with a slightly mocking accent, as she began to busy herself with collecting the dry seaweed and heaping it upon the smouldering fire.