“I’m goin’ to leave Ireland come Candlemas,” said the beansho, pulling her feet wearily out of the mire.
“And where would ye be goin’ to then, Sheila Carrol?”
“Beyont the water.”
“Mercy be on us, and are ye goin’ surely?”
“True as death, I’m goin’,” said Sheila Carrol with rising voice. “I’m sick of this place—not the place itself but the people that’s in it, them with their bitin’ tongues and cuttin’ talk, them that won’t let those that do them no harm a-be. Nothin’ bad enough that they wouldn’t put past me, the same Frosses people. For me it’s always the hard word that they have; even the priest himself when he meets me on the high road crosses himself as if he met the red-hot devil out of hell. But did he refuse my shillin’ to-day?... Even at the wakes the very people point their thumbs at me when I go down on my own two knees to say a prayer for the dead.... But what am I talkin’ about! Why should I be tellin’ my own sorrows to one that has heavy troubles of her own to bear.... I’m goin’ beyont the water come next Candlemas, anyway, Norah Ryan!”
CHAPTER XI
THE TRAIN FROM GREENANORE
I
WHEN one is leaving home every familiar object seems to take on a different aspect and becomes almost strange and foreign. The streets, houses, and landscape which you have gazed on for years become in some way very remote, like objects seen in a dream, but under this guise every familiar landmark becomes dearer than ever it has been before. So Norah Ryan felt as she was leaving home in the June of 1905 bound for the potato fields of Scotland.
“Is this the road to Greenanore, the road that our feet took when goin’ to the town for the stockin’ yarn?” she asked herself several times. “It is changed somehow; it doesn’t seem to be the same place, but for all that I like it better than ever. Why this is I do not know; I seem to be in a dream of some kind.”
Her thoughts were confused and her mind ran on several things at the same time; her mother’s words at leave-taking, the prayer that the child might do well, the quick words of tearless farewell spoken at the doorstep; and as she thought of these things she wondered why her mother did not weep when her only child was leaving her.