“An hour ago!” exclaimed the woman. “And why didn’t ye waken me?... I’m a bad yin, Norah Ryan, a gey bad yin!” Saying these words the woman approached the bed and for a moment stared fixedly at the child. Then she paced backwards across the room, sobbing loudly and muttering meaningless words under her breath. Through the dirty window she could see the beer-shop opposite; the doors were open and a young man in shirt-sleeves was taking off the shutters.
“My heart is wae for ye, Norah,” said the old woman. “Death is a hard thing to bear. But I suppose it’ll come to all of us yin day. Oh! oh! and all of us maun gang some day.... I’m goin’ oot the noo,” she suddenly exclaimed, stopping in her walk and looking very serious, as if she had remembered something very important. “I’ll be back again in a meenit or twa.”
Meg tied her shawl over her head and without washing her face went out and became speedily drunk. The young man with the white shirt, who took down the shutters, made some sarcastic remarks about Meg’s dirty face, and Meg, being short-tempered, lifted an empty bottle and flung it in the man’s face, wounding him terribly. A policeman was called in and the woman was hurried off to the police-station.
Noon saw Norah Ryan still sitting on the bedside, her brother’s gold jingling in her pocket whenever she moved, and her dead child lying cold and silent beside her.
II
A month of black sorrow passed by. There was a great void in Norah’s heart, a void which could never be filled up. Every morning she rose from bed, knowing that the day would have no joy, no consolation for her. Life was almost unendurable; never was despair so overpowering, so terrible. Nothing but the all-encompassing loneliness of the future existed for her now—that terrible future from which she recoiled as a timid animal recoils from the brink of a precipice.
She had suffered so much, was healed a little; now the healing salve of motherhood was wrenched from her by the hand of death. Nothing now remained to the girl but regrets, terrible, torturing, lingering regrets that tore at her mind like birds of prey.
“No matter what I do now, nobody will think me no worse than I am,” she cried, but the thought left her unmoved; even life did not interest her enough to have any desire to end it. Shame had once covered her, enveloped her as in a garment, but now shame was gone; she had thrust it away and even the blind trust in some unshapen chance which had once been hers was now hers no longer.
She worked no more; only once was she roused to action, and that was when she looked at the gold coins in her pocket. This was Fergus’ money, and she had often wondered where he had gone to on that night of nights. She went to a neighbouring post-office and sent ten pounds home to her mother. Not a line, not a word went with the money order.
“I’m dead, dead to everyone,” she said. “To me own mother, to Fergus, to all the good people in the wide world.”