The stirabout ready, the two sisters ate their meal together. Honor’s was that of a blackbird. In vain Grania coaxed her with the best-mixed corner of the pot; in vain added milk, breaking in little bits of carefully-treasured white bread, brought from the mainland. The sick woman pretended to eat, but in reality barely moistened her lips with the milk and touched a corner of the bread. When she could persuade her to take no more Grania settled down to her own share, and with the aid of her yellow auxiliary speedily cleared the pot. With a man’s power of work she had a man’s healthy appetite, and could often have disposed of more food than fell to her share.{172}

The meal over she got up, went to the door, and stood awhile looking down the gully towards the seashore. It was getting dusk, and the night was strangely cold. The wind sweeping in from the north-east felt rough and harsh. No screen or protection of any sort was to be found upon this side of the island. Worse still, fuel was scarce and dear. As a rule, the poor suffer less in Ireland from cold than from most of the other ills of life. A smoke-saturated cabin is warm if it is nothing else. Turf, too, is generally abundant; often to be had for the trouble of fetching it home. In the Aran isles there are no bogs, consequently there is no turf, and the cost of carriage from the mainland has to be added, therefore, to its price. The traffic, too, being in a few hands, those few make their own profit out of it, and their neighbours are more or less at their mercy.

Upon Inishmaan, the most retrograde of{173} the three islands, turf is scarcer and dearer than on either Aranmore or Inisheer. Sometimes the supply vanishes utterly in the winter, and until fresh turf can be fetched from the mainland the greatest suffering prevails; dried cowdung and every other substitute having to be resorted to to supply its place. Grania was always careful to lay in a good supply of turf in the autumn, and the sisters’ rick was noted as the tallest and solidest on the island. This year, however, it had melted mysteriously away, much earlier than usual. They had burned a good deal, for the winter had been a severe one, and the sick woman suffered greatly from cold. Still Grania had suspicions that someone had been tampering with their rick, though, so far, she had said nothing about the matter to Honor, not wishing her to be troubled about it.

It was nearly time now to go down and see{174} if the kelp fire was burning, and to set it in order for the night—the last task always in the day during the kelp-burning season. Murdough Blake had promised to meet her there, and the consciousness of this made her feel dimly remorseful at the thought of again leaving Honor, although the kelp fire had to be seen to, and she had no intention of lingering a minute longer than she could help. With this idea in her mind she turned to look at her sister, a mere shadow now in her dusky corner, from which the hacking sound of a cough broke, with mournful iteration, upon the silence. A sudden feeling of pity, a sudden intense sense of contrast, swept over the girl’s mind as she did so. She would have been incapable of putting the thought into words, but she felt it, nevertheless. Herself and Honor! What a difference! Yet why? Why should it be so? Honor so good, so patient, she herself so much the contrary!{175} With that strong pictorial faculty which comes of an out-of-door life, she already saw herself racing down the hill towards the shore where the kelp fire was built; already felt the gritty texture of the rocks under her feet, the peculiarly springy sensation that the overhanging lip of one ledge always lent as you sprang from it to the next beyond; saw herself arriving in the narrow stony gorge where the kelp was burnt; saw the glow of its fire, a narrow trough of red ashes half covered and smothered with seaweed; saw Murdough Blake coming through the dusk to meet her. At this point a mixture of sensations, too complicated to be quite comfortable, came over her, and she left her momentary dreams for the reality, which at least was straightforward enough.

‘Is there e’er a thing I can do, sister, before I go?’ she asked.

‘Ne’er a thing at all, child. ’Tis asleep{176} you’ll find me most like when you come back,’ Honor answered cheerfully.

Grania left a cup with water in it within the sick woman’s reach, covered the fire with ashes, so that it might keep alight, laid her own cloak over Honor, and went out.

She was already late, and Murdough, she knew, had the strongest possible objections to being kept waiting; accordingly she hurried down the rocky incline at a pace that only one accustomed from babyhood to its intricacies could have ventured to go.

As she hurried along her own movements brought the blood tingling through her veins, and her spirits rose insensibly. She felt glad and light, she hardly herself knew why. Leaping from one rocky level to another, her feet beat out a ringing response to the clink of the grooved and chiselled rocks against which they struck. Once she stopped a moment to clutch at a tuft of wood sorrel,{177} springing out of a fissure, and crammed it all, trefoiled leaves and half-expanded pale grey flowers, into her mouth, enjoying the sweet sub-acid flavour as she crunched them up between her strong white teeth.

Better fed than most of her class, her own mistress, without grinding poverty, the mere joy of life, the sheer animal zest and intoxication of living was keener in her than it often is in those of her own rank and sex in Ireland. Of this she was herself dimly aware. Did others find the same pleasure merely in breathing—merely in moving and working—as she did, she sometimes wondered. Even her love for Honor—the strongest feeling but one she possessed—the despair which now and then swept over her at the thought of losing her, could not check this. Nay, it is even possible that the enforced companionship for so many hours of the day and night of that pitiful sick-bed, the{178} pain and weakness which she shared, so far as they could be shared, lent a sort of reactionary zest to the freedom of these wild rushes over the rocks and through the cold sea air. She did not guess it herself, but so no doubt it was.

The dusk lingers long in the far north-west, and upon the Aran islands longer apparently than elsewhere, owing to their shining environment of sea and still more to their treeless rain-washed surfaces, which reflect every atom of light as upon a mirror. It was getting really dark now, however, and the sea below her was all one dull purplish grey, barred at long intervals with moving patches of a yet deeper shadow. Splashes of white or pale yellowish lichens flung upon the dark rocks stood out here and there, looking startlingly light and distinct as she neared them. They might have been dim dancing figures, or strange grimacing{179} faces grinning at her out of the obscurity. Over everything hung an intense sense of saltness—in the air, upon the rocks, on the short grass which crisped under foot with the salty particles as with a light hoar-frost. Fragments of dry crumpled-up seaweed, like black rags, lay about everywhere, showing that the kelp fires were not far off.

She hastened her steps. Was Murdough already there? she wondered. He was. As she came round the corner she saw him leaning against a big boulder, a ‘Stranger’ like the one that blocked the mouth of their own gully; ice-dropped granite blocks whose pale rounded forms stud by thousands the darker limestone of the islands.

‘My faith and word, Grania O’Malley, but it is the late woman you are to-night!’ he said, straightening himself from his lounging posture and speaking in a tone of offence.

‘I know I am, Murdough agra!{180}’

There was a tone of unusual submissiveness about the girl’s voice as she advanced towards him through the dusk; a look almost of shyness in her eyes as she lifted them to his in the dimness.

‘My faith and word but it is the long time, the very long time, I have been kept waiting. And it is the ugly lonely place for a man to be kept waiting in!’ he continued in the same aggrieved tone. ‘And it was not to please myself I came either. No, it was not, but just to help you with the kelp fire. And it is not one foot of me I would have come—no, nor the half of a foot—if I had thought you would have served me so.’

‘Honor kept me. ’Tis sick she is this evening, worse than common,’ Grania answered simply. ‘Was it wanting me very badly you were, Murdough agra?’ she added, in the same tone as before.{181}

‘Yes, it was wanting you very badly I was, Grania O’Malley, for it was the Fear Darrig I could not help thinking of, and that it was just the place to see him, and it was that made me want you, for they say two people do never see him at the one time, and it is not I that want to see him now, nor at any time—not at all, so I do not!’

‘My grandfather, he saw the Fear Darrig many’s the time,’ Murdough continued, presently, in a more amicable tone; ‘he would, maybe, be setting his lines at night and it would look up at him sudden out of the water. Once, too, he told my grandmother he was up near the big Worm hole and it run at him on a sudden, and danced up and down before him, for all the world like a red Boffin pi............