She was asleep when Dermod Flynn came, and wakened to find him standing by her bed, looking down at her with eyes full of love and pity. There was no surprise written on her face when she saw him; to Norah for days he had been as near in dreams as he was now in real flesh and blood.
“I was dreamin’ of ye, Dermod,” she said in a low voice, sitting up with one elbow buried in the pillow and her bare shoulders showing white and delicate under her locks of brown hair.
“Ye took the good time in comin’,” she went on, but there was longing, not protest, in her voice. “Ellen told me that ye were lookin’ for meself.”
Dermod was down on his knees by the bedside. “ ‘Tis good to see you again, darling,” he said. “I have been looking for you for such a long time.”
“Have ye?” she asked, her voice, tinged with a thousand regrets, rising a little as if in mute protest, against the shadows dancing on the roof. Sobbing like a child, she sank back in the bed. “It’s the kindly way that ye have with ye, Dermod,” she said in a quieter voice. “Ye don’t know what I am, and the kind of life I’ve been leadin’ for a good lot of years, to come and speak to me again. It’s not for a decent man like yerself to speak to the likes of my kind. It’s meself that has suffered a big lot too, Dermod, and I deserve pity more than hate. Me sufferin’s would have broke the heart of a cold mountainy stone.”
“Poor Norah!” Dermod said, half in whispers; “well do I know what ye have suffered. I have been looking for you for a long while, and now, having found you, I want to make you very happy.”
“Make me happy!” she exclaimed, withdrawing her hands from Dermod’s grasp as if they had been stung. “What would ye be doin’, wantin’ to make me happy? I’m dead to ev’rybody, to the people at home and to me own very mother. What would she want with me now, her daughter and the mother of a child that never had the priest’s blessin’ on its head. A child without a lawful father! Think of it, Dermod! What would the Frosses and Glenmornan people say if they met me now on the streets? It was a dear child to me, it was. And ye are wantin’ to make me happy! Every time ye come ye say the same.... D’ye mind seem’ me on the streets, Dermod?”
“I remember it, Norah.”
He looked at her closely, puzzled no doubt by her utterances. She was now rambling a little again. Dreams intermingled with reality and her fingers were making folds in the sheets. Dermod remembered how in Glenmornan this was considered a sign of death. She began to talk to herself, her head on the pillow, one erring tress of hair lying across her cheek.
“It was the child, Dermod,” she said, a smile playing over her features; “it was the little boy and he was dyin’, both of a cough that was stickin’ in his throat and of starvation. As for meself, I hadn’t seen bread or that what buys it for many’s a long hour, even for days itself. I couldn’t get work to do. I would beg, aye, Dermod, I would, and me a Frosses woman, but I was afeared that the peelis would put me in prison. In the end there was nothin’ left to me but to take to the streets.... There were long white boats goin’ out and we were watchin’ them from the strand of Trienna Bay. The boats of our own people. Ah! my own townland, Dermod!... I called the little child Dermod, but he never got the christenin’ words said over him, nor a drop of holy water.... Where is Ellen?... Ellen, ye’re a good friend to me, ye are! The people that’s sib to myself don’t care what happens to me, one of their own kind; but it’s ye yerself that has the good heart, Ellen. And ye say that Dermod Flynn is comin’ to see me? I would like to see Dermod again.”