Grania and Murdough had parted meanwhile upon the top of the ridge close to the old Mothar Dun, he going west, she east. When she reached home she found the cabin door still shut, a hen and clutch of chickens sitting upon the step waiting to be let in. It was evident that no one had been either in or out since she left it five or six hours before.
Inside the cabin was very dark, and Honor’s thin white face showed ghost-like against this setting. She was half sitting, half lying, upon her bed, with her eyes closed, though she was not asleep, a board and a pillow covered with a bit of old striped cotton{157} supporting her. Everything around had the peculiarly chocolate hue of peat. The cabin was clean—for an Irish cabin commendably clean—but the whole had the deeply-dyed, almost black, hue of a Rembrandt background. The face of the sick woman herself might have come from the canvas of quite a different master. Early Italian painters have all tried their hands at it. How well we know it!—that peculiar look, a look of toil-worn peace—peace caught as it were out of the inmost heart of pain;—the hollow cheek, the deeply-marked eye-sockets, the eyes looking out as prisoners’ eyes look from their dungeon bars;—we all recognise it when great art shows it to us, though rarely, if ever, otherwise. Upon a canvas Honor O’Malley’s face might have been the face of a saint or a martyr. It was the face of a saint or a martyr, as saints and martyrs find their representation in these days of ours. Three{158} long years the poor woman had lain there dying. Consumption had its hold upon her. It had been very slow and deliberate in its approaches—nay, in its earlier stage might have been arrested altogether had there been any means at hand of attempting anything of the sort, which, of course, there were not. Who can say what hours of pain had worn themselves out in that smoke-dyed corner? Who can say how many supplications had risen out of its recesses, how often the eternal complaint of the sea licking the base of the cliffs had seemed to Honor the voice of her own silent complaining, the unresting cry of the night wind her own dumb cries made audible? She had won peace now. She was dying comparatively quickly. Mercy was fast coming nearer and nearer, and would presently touch her with its wings.
Grania’s step sounded on the rocks{159} without, and she looked up suddenly, a smile of welcome waking in her hollow eyes.
‘Is it yourself, it is, allanah?’ she exclaimed joyfully as the younger sister came quickly in, pushed upon the shoulders of the gust which always lurked in the throat of that gully.
‘’Tis myself, and ’tis wanting me you have been this while back, Honor, I know,’ the girl replied in quick tones of self-reproach.
‘Augh, no, child, ner a bit; ’twas only I—’ here her voice was stopped by an access of coughing, which shook her from head to foot and brought a momentary flush to her poor sunken cheeks.
Grania stood by penitently, helpless till the paroxysm was exhausted and the coughing had ceased.
‘’Twas the potatoes,’ she said apologetically when Honor again lay back, white and dry-lipped. ‘’Tis a bitter while they take{160} this year, whatever the reason is; and then Phelim, the creature, came, and I got listening to him, and then Murdough Blake and—’
‘Wurrah! whist with the tongue of you, and don’t be telling me, child! Is it within the four walls of a house I would be keeping my bird all the long day?’ the sick woman said with tender impatience. ‘’Tis the uselessness of me, I was going to say, kills me. Never a pot cleaned nor a thing done since morning. But there! God knows, and He sent it; so ’tis all for the best, sure and certain.’
Grania without another word picked up the three-legged black pot, and ran to fill it at the well outside, setting it down on the fire when she returned, and beginning to mix in the oatmeal by handfuls for the stirabout which was to serve for their evening meal.
Honor lay watching her, her face still{161} flushed from the last fit of coughing, the perspiration standing out in drops on her forehead and under her hollow eye-sockets, but a great look of content gradually spreading over her face as her eyes followed her sister’s movements.
As long as it had been possible she had gone on working, long, indeed, after she ought to have ceased to do so. Her spinning wheel still stood near her in a corner, though it was nearly a year since she had been able to touch it. Her knitting lay close at hand. That she still occasionally worked at, and even managed to mend her own clothes and Grania’s, and to keep her own immediate surroundings sweet and clean.
Irish cabins are not precisely bowers of refinement, yet this corner, where Honor O’Malley’s life had been for years ebbing slowly away, told a tale in its way of a purity which, if it did not amount to refinement,{162} amounted to something better. Outside the wind howled, sweeping with a vicious whirl over the long naked ledges, loosening here and there a thin flake of stone, which spun round and round for a moment like a forest leaf, then fell with a light pattering noise upon the ridge below. Inside the sods crackled dully, as the fire blown by Grania ran along their ragged brown sides, or shot into a flame whenever a stray fibre helped it on.
Besides the two owners, and not counting an itinerant population of chickens varying in ages and degrees of audacity, the cabin boasted one other inmate. The dog tax being unknown, nearly every Irish cabin has its cur, and on the Aran isles the dogs are only less numerous than the babies. The O’Malleys, however, had no dog, and their house-friend (the r in the last word might appropriately have been omitted) was a small{163} yellow, or, rather, orange-coloured, cat, noted as having the worst temper of any cat upon Inishmaan. Whether in consequence of this temper, or in spite of it, there was no cat who appeared to have also so constant a train of feline adorers. Remote as the O’Malleys’ cabin stood, it was the recognised rendezvous of every appreciative Tom upon the island, so that at night it was sometimes even a little startling to open the door suddenly and catch the steady glitter of a row of watchful eyes, or to see three, four, or five retreating forms creeping feloniously away over the rocks.
‘’Tis the milk she does be tasting already, the little snakin............