“No matter what I do now, no one will think me worse than I am,” said the poor girl. “I’ll have no joy no more in my life, for there’s no happiness that I can look forward to.”
She pulled the fairy thimbles from her breast and crushed them in her hand. Out near the bar she could see the little black boat heaving on the waves. Norah rose to her feet.
How dark the water looked under her. The sand sloped sharply from her feet to the bottom of the pool, which was bedded with sharp rocks covered with trailing, slimy seaweed. She peered in, catching her breath sharply as she did so. Then one little brown foot went further into the water, afterwards the other. She bent down, cut the water apart with her hands; a slight ripple spread out on both sides and was lost almost as soon as it was formed.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, pray for me a sinner now and at the hour of my death, Amen,” she said, repeating a prayer which had flowed countless times since childhood from her lips.
A sudden thought struck her and a look of perplexity overspread her face. “This is pilin’ one sin on top of the other,” she said in a low voice and looked round, fearing that somebody had overheard her. Everything about was silent as if in fear; in that moment she thought that the sea had ceased to move, the swallow to circle, herself even to live; the world seemed to be waiting for something—an event of great and terrible purport, hidden and unknown.
Suddenly the child that was in her leapt under her heart and a keen but not unpleasant pain swept through her body. She drew back from the pool, horror-stricken at the thing which she intended to do.
“I’ll go home,” she said meekly, as if obeying some command. “Maybe he’ll have pity on me when I go over again beyond the water. This day week Micky’s Jim, he goes again. And I can go to Sheila Carrol. She knows and she has the good heart. God in His heaven have pity on me and all that’s like me! for it’s the ignorant girl that I was.... If anyone had told me.... But I knew nothin’, nothin’, and I’m black now in the eyes of God as I’ll soon be black in the eyes of the world, of Dermod Flynn, of me mother and everybody that knows me. Nobody will speak to me then atall, atall!”
CHAPTER XXII
ON THE ROAD
I
A dead weight lay on Norah’s heart; the child beneath her heart was a burden. But even yet (it was now the month of August) those in Micky’s Jim’s squad did not suspect her condition. She knew, however, that she could not conceal her plight much longer, and she wanted to run away and hide. How could she endure the glance of her country people, of Micky’s Jim and Maire a Glan, when the truth became known?