“In Martin Eveleen’s house, the house of a decent man,” said the beansho. “Eat yer bit of bread, child, for ye’re dyin’ of hunger.”
For a moment the child looked earnestly at the bread, then, as if stifling the impulse to return it, she began to eat almost savagely. Maire a Crick placed the purse and penny which she had lifted from the road by the bedside and withdrew to the door, already sorry perhaps for having wasted so much time on the journey. The beansho found her baby, kissed a crumb into its mouth, tied it up again in her shawl and, when Norah had eaten the bread, both went to the door together.
“God be with ye, decent people,” said the child. “Some day I hope to be able to do a good turn for you.”
“We’re only glad to be of help to a nice girsha,” said the man, taking down a bottle of holy water from the roof-beam. He made the sign of the cross, dipped his fingers in the bottle, and shook the holy water over the visitors.
“God be with yer journey,” he said.
“And God keep guard over your home and everything in it,” Norah and the beansho made answer in one voice.
CHAPTER II
AN UNSUCCESSFUL JOURNEY
I
THE hour was half-past ten in the forenoon. In the village (“town” the peasantry called it) of Greenanore two rows of houses ran parallel along a miry street which measured east to west some two hundred yards. At one end of the street were the police barracks and at the other end the workhouse. Behind the latter rose the Catholic chapel, and further back the brown moors stretched to the hills which looked down upon the bay where the women crossed in the early morning.
The houses in the village were dull, dirty and dilapidated. There were eight public-houses, a few grocers’ shops, a smithy where the blacksmith, who mended scythes or shod donkeys, got paid in kind for his services. The policemen, one to every fifty souls in the village, paraded idly up and down the street, their heavy batons clanking against their trousers, and their boots, spotlessly clean, rasping eternally on the pavement. Their sole occupation seemed to be the kicking of unoffending dogs that spent their days and nights in a vain search for some eatable garbage in the gutter. The dogs were skeletons; and when kicked they would slink quietly out of the way, lacking courage either to snap or snarl. Even a kick brought no yelp from them, they were almost insensible to every feeling but that of the heavy hunger which dulled their natural activity. At night they were silent ghosts prowling about looking for a morsel to eat. Now and again they howled mournfully, sitting on their haunches in a circle; and when the people heard the lonely sound they would say: “There, the dogs are crying because they have got no souls.”