“It is at the bottom,” said a neighbour, Eamon Doherty by name. “It was rotten anyhow, and it hadn’t been in wet water for close on two years.... Now, I wonder what made Shemus go out on it?”

“Nothing atall, atall left,” said the old woman in a feeble voice. “If I only had the curragh even.... And himself dead after all the times that the sea has bent under him! Never to see him again, never! Isn’t it hard to think that a thing like that could be?”

Whereupon, saying this she began to cry, at first quietly, but afterwards, as if getting warmed to the task, more loudly, until her sobs could be heard a hundred yards away from the house.

“If I only had the curragh left!” she repeated time and again.

Norah approached the bed timidly. She had been weeping silently by the door ever since the corpse had been carried in. Death was here in the house; it had already taken possession of her father. And it was with her also. Not to-night nor to-morrow, but at the end of forty years or of fifty, and was it not all the same? And what was this death? She did not know; she only thought it cruel and strange. Her own helplessness in face of such a crisis almost overpowered her. For death there was no help, from it there was no escape. It was all powerful and terrible. To-morrow and to-morrow might come and go, but her father would lie still and unheeding. He would not return, he could not return. This fact hammered at her mind, and the cruelty of her own thoughts tortured her. She tried to think of something apart from the tragedy, but ever her mind reverted to the one and same dreadful subject. Of a great fact she was certain; one that would never be contradicted. Her father was dead; thousands of years might pass and one truth would still remain unquestioned. Her father was dead. “To think of it!” she said in a low voice. “Dead for ever!”

She went down on her knees by the bedside but could not pray. God was cruel; He had no mercy. She sobbed no longer, but with wide, tearless eyes she gazed at the face of her father. It had now become yellow, the lips blue, the nose was pinched and the eyes sunken. The water from his clothes was dripping underneath the bed, and she could hear the drip-drip of it falling on the floor.

Everything in the house had suddenly taken on a different aspect. The bed appeared strange to her; so did the fire, the low droning voices of the neighbours, and the play of light and shadow on the walls. The old cat sitting on top of the dresser, gazing down at her, had a curious look in its wide-open eyes; the animal seemed to have changed in some queer way. Outside the wind was beating against the house and wailing over the chimney. Never in her life before had she heard such a melancholy sob in the wind.

CHAPTER IX
THE WAKE

I

SEVERAL more neighbours, men, women, and children, were now coming in. With eyes fixed straight ahead they approached the corpse, went down on their knees on the wet floor by the bedside and said their prayers, crossing themselves many times. Those who carried the dead body up from the sea drew near to the fire and dried their sodden garments in the midst of a cloud of vapour that almost hid them from view. Eamon Doherty remarked that Ireland would have Home Rule presently, and a loud discussion mingled with many jokes was soon in progress.