“It’s myself,” replied the child, and her teeth chattered as she answered.
“The blush is going from your cheek,” said Maire a Glan. “And your mother; is she better in health? They’re hard times that are in it now,” she went on, without waiting for an answer to her question. “There are only ten creels of potatoes in our townland and these have to be used for seed. God’s mercy be on us, as the old man said, but it was a bad year for the crops!”
“It couldn’t have been worse,” said Judy Farrel, clapping her thin hands to keep them warm. “On our side of the water, old Oiney Dinchy (that’s the man who has the dog that bit Dermod Flynn) had to dig in the pratee field for six hours, and at the end of that time he had only twenty-seven pratees in the basket.”
“If the crows lifted a potato in Glenmornan this minute, all the people of the Glen would follow the crow for a whole week until they got the potato back,” said old Maire a Crick. “It’s as bad now as it was in the year of the famine.”
“Do you mind the famine year?” asked Norah Ryan. The water was streaming from the girl’s clothes into the roadway, and though she broke into a run at times in her endeavour to keep pace with the elder women, the shivering fits did not leave her for an instant. The wind became more violent and the sleet which had ceased for a while was again falling from the clouds in white wavy lines.
“I mind the bad times as well as I mind yesterday,” said Maire a Crick. “My own father, mother, and sister died in one turn of the sun with the wasting sickness and the hunger. I waked them all alone by myself, for most of the neighbours had their own sick and their own dead to look after. But they helped me to carry my people to the grave in the coffin that had the door with hinges on the bottom. When we came to the grave the door was opened and the dead were dropped out; then the coffin was taken back for some other soul.”
“At that time there lived a family named Gorlachs at the foot of Slieve a Dorras,” said Maire a Glan, taking up the tale; “and they lifted their child out of the grave on the night after it was buried and ate it in their own house. Wasn’t that the awful thing, as the old man said?”
“I wouldn’t put it past them, for they were a bad set, the same Gorlachs,” said Maire a Crick. “But for all that, maybe it is that there wasn’t a word of truth in the whole story.”
IV
NORAH RYAN, who was now lagging in the rear, got suddenly caught by a heavy gust of wind that blew up from the sea. Her clothes were lifted over her head; she tried to push them down, and the weasel-skin purse which she held in her hand dropped on the roadway. The penny jingled out, the coin which was to procure her bread in Greenanore, and she clutched at it hurriedly. A sudden dizziness overcame her, her brain reeled and she fell prostrate to the wet earth. In an instant the beansho was at her side.