He looked sharply at the girl, who, feeling uncomfortable in his presence, longed to be away from the man’s side. She wondered why she had not gone off to the other end of the graveyard with Sheila Carrol, whom she could now see kneeling before a black wooden cross that was fast falling into decay. But it would be wrong to go away from the side of her father’s coffin, she thought.
“Any word from Fergus of late?” the priest was asking.
“No; not the smallest word.”
That Mary Ryan owed him two pounds, and that there was very little possibility of ever receiving the money, forcibly occurred to the priest at that moment. “Ye’ll not be in a good way at home now?” he said aloud.
“There’s hardly a white shilling in the house,” answered the girl.
“Is that the way of it?” exclaimed the priest, then seemed on the point of giving expression to something more forcible, but with an effort he restrained himself. “Well, it cannot be helped, I suppose, but there are two pounds owing for the building of my new house.”
IV
“THE grave is ready,” said Micky’s Jim, approaching the priest and saluting. The youth was perspiring profusely; his shirt open at the neck exposed his hairy chest, on which beads of sweat were glistening brightly.
“In with the coffin then,” said the priest, taking a book from his pocket and approaching the open grave. A pile of red earth, out of which several white bones protruded, lay on the brink, and long earthworms crawled across it. The coffin was lowered into the grave with a rope. Norah wept loudly; old Oiney Dinchy remarked that the bones belonged to her grandparents whom she did not remember.
“Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return,” the priest chanted in a loud, droning voice. Norah, kneeling on the wet ground, her head bent down over her bosom, so that her hair hung over her shoulders, saw nothing but the black coffin which was speedily disappearing under the red clay, and heard nothing but the thud of the earth as it struck the coffin.