“Don’t cry,” said the young man awkwardly. “Is there—what’s wrong with ye, Norah?”
She did not answer, but low sobs shook her bosom. How much she wished to be away, and yet—how she liked to be beside him! Surely Dermod would think her a very funny girl to weep like that! A momentary remembrance of a morning long ago when she met him on the Glenmornan road flashed across her mind, and she held out her hand.
“Slan agiv, Dermod,” she said in a choking voice, “I must be goin’. It was good of ye to speak to me in that nice way of yers, Dermod.”
His hand closed on hers but he did not speak. The sound of far-off footsteps reached her ears.... A window was lifted somewhere near at hand ... a cab rattled on the streets. Norah withdrew her hand and went on her journey, leaving Dermod alone on the pavement.
CHAPTER XXX
GROWN UP
I
TO all souls who are sensitive to moods of any kind, whether joyful or sorrowful, there comes now and again a delicious hour when it is not night and no longer day; the timid twilight gleams softly on every object and favours a dreamy humour that weds itself, as if in a dream, to the dim play of light and shade. In that delightful passage of time the mind wanders through interminable spaces and dwells lovingly on vanished hopes, broken dreams, and shattered illusions. In that moment a soul feels the wordless pleasure of a memory that drifts lightly by; a memory to which only the accents of the heart can give life. Old scenes are brought up again and are seen in the delightful haze of transient remembrance; there are waters running to a sea; waves sobbing on a shore; voices speaking softly and low, and trees waving like phantoms to a wind that is merely the ghost of a wind. In these dreams there is a joyful melancholy, a placid acceptance of sorrow and happiness that might have only been realities of an earlier existence of long past years.
An hour like this came to Norah Ryan one evening as she sat in her room waiting for a fight to come to an end on the landing outside. The one-armed soldier, who had just returned from prison and found another man in company with one of his loves, was now blackening the man’s eyes. Norah knew that she would be molested when passing outside; she chose to wait until the storm was over. She was dressed ready to go out; old Meg had taken charge of the child; the fight was still in full swing. A fire burned dimly in the grate at which Norah sat; a frail blue fleeting flame flared nervously for a moment amongst the red tongues of fire, then faded away. The blind was drawn across the window, but the lamp had not been lighted yet. Norah sat on the floor, looking into the glowing embers, her chin, delicately rounded, resting in the palm of her hand, her long, tapering fingers touching a little pink ear that was almost hidden under her soft, wavy tresses. The faintest flush mantled her cheeks, her brow seen in the half-light of the room looked doubly white, and her long lashes sank languidly from time to time over her dream-laden eyes.
Norah’s thoughts were far away; they had crossed the bridge of many years and roved without effort of will over the shores of her own country. Again she lived the life of a child, the life she had known in her earlier years. The air was full of the scent of the peat, the sound of the sea, the homesick song of the streams babbling out their plaints as they hurried to the bosom of their restless mother, the ocean.
It was evening. The sun, barely a hand’s breadth over the horizon, coloured the waters of the bar and the sea beyond, amber, crimson, and dun. The curraghs of Frosses were putting out from the shore; the bare-footed men hurried along the strand, waving their arms and moving their lips, but making no sound. Fergus was there, light-limbed and dark-haired; her father, wrinkled and bearded; the neighbours and the women and children who came down to the beach to see the people off to the fishing.