“Well, thin,” whispered Kate, bending forward as if the very waves had ears, “it’s just that he didn’t do. I gave him money, and I gave him the O’Mahony’s ring, and sint him to search the world over till he came upon his master, or his master’s grave—and I charged him to say only this: ‘Come back to Muirisc! ’Tis Kate O’Mahony wants you!’ And now no one knows this but me confessor and you.”
The boatman gazed earnestly into her face.
“An’ why for did ye say: ‘Come back?’” he asked.
“Ah thin—well—‘tis O’Daly’s hard d’alin’s wid the tinants, and the failure of the potatoes these two years and worse ahead and the birth of me little step-brother—and—”
“Answer me now, Katie darlint?” the old man adjured her, with glowing eyes and solemn voice. “Is it the convint ye’re afraid of for yoursilf? Is it of your own free will you’re goin’ to take your vows?”
The girl had answered this question more than once before, and readily enough. Now, for some reason which she could not have defined to herself, she looked down upon the gliding water at her side, and meditatively dipped her fingers into it, and let a succession of little waves fling their crests up into her sleeve—and said nothing at all.
CHAPTER XVIII—THE GREAT O’DALY USURPATION.
The stern natural law of mutability—of ceaseless growth, change and decay—which the big, bustling, preoccupied outside world takes so indifferently, as a matter of course, finds itself reduced to a bare minimum of influence in such small, remote and out-of-the-way places as Muirisc. The lapse of twelve years here had made the scantest and most casual of marks upon the village and its inhabitants. Positively no one worth mentioning had died—for even snuffy and palsied old Father Harrington, though long since replaced at the convent by a younger priest, was understood to be still living on in the shelter of some retreat for aged clergymen in Kerry or Clare. The three old nuns were still the sole ladies of the Hostage’s Tears, and, like the rest of Muirisc, seemed only a trifle the more wrinkled and worn under this flight of time.