FOR two days and nights the neighbours came in, prayed by the bedside, drank bowls of tea, smoked long white clay pipes and departed, only to return later and renew the same performance. A coffin and coffin-bearer, the latter shaped like a ladder, the sides of which were cushioned to ease the shoulders of the men who carried it, were procured. On the rungs of the coffin-bearer a number of notches, three hundred and fifty-two in all, told of the bodies carried on it to the grave. The bearer had been in service for many years and had been used by most of the families in Frosses. The man who made it was long dead; number seventy-seven represented his notch on the rungs.

On the morning of the third day Oiney Dinchy and Micky’s Jim lifted the dead man from the bed and placed him in the coffin. Before the lid was screwed down, Mary Ryan knelt over the coffin, gripping the side near her with thin, long fingers, which showed white at the joints, and kissing her husband she burst into a loud outcry of grief. Norah, more reserved in her sorrow, knelt on the floor, said a short prayer and then kissed the face of the corpse as her mother had done.

The lid was fastened, but here an interruption occurred. The wife wanted to look at her husband for “just one other minute.” With a gesture of impatience old Oiney Dinchy, who was discussing the best means of catching flukes and tying the coffin, lifted the lid again and stood silently by, his hat drawn down well over his eyes. Mary Ryan gave vent to another outburst of grief; the coffin was again closed and lifted on the wooden bearer. An idle child was busily engaged in counting the notches.

“Seventy-seven; that’s for the man who made it,” someone was saying.

“Listen, Micky’s Jim,” whispered Mary Ryan as the youth passed her, going towards the door with a basket of pipes and tobacco.

“Well, Mary, what is it?” Jim asked.

“Was this a good year beyond the water?”

Jim went yearly to the potato-digging in Scotland, taking with him a squad of men and women from his own country, and over these he was master while they were at work.

“It was not so very bad,” said Jim cautiously. He was afraid that the old woman might ask the loan of money from him.

“Next year I have a mind to send Norah.”

“And not to make a nun of her, after all?”

Norah was piling peat on the fire, lifting them from the floor and dropping them into the flames. As she bent down Jim noticed every movement of her body and paid very little attention to the words of the old woman. Norah, having finished her task, stood upright; Jim waited eagerly for a repetition of her former movement, but seeing that she was weeping he turned his attention to the task of getting the coffin through the doorway.

Norah would be a light girl for heavy work on the Scottish farms, Jim thought, as he stooped down and lifted a rung of the bearer. Could he take her with him? That was a ticklish question. She was clever with the needles, he knew, but she had not done any heavy manual work for the last two years. Learning lessons was to Jim an idle task. But the movement of her body, and especially of her legs when bending over the fire, appealed to Jim. The grace of her carriage, the poise of her head, the soft hair that fell over her shoulders, all these found favour in the eyes of the healthy young man.

“My cripes, I’ll take her with me next year!” he said under his breath. He spoke in English and had learned many strange oaths abroad.

II

OUTSIDE a large crowd of people were waiting; the women dressed in red flannel petticoats and woollen shawls, the men in white wrappers and corduroy trousers. The coffin bearer was raised on high; four men placed their shoulders under it; a bottle of holy water was sprinkled over bearers and burden indiscriminately; the men and women crossed themselves many times, and the mournful procession started.

Mary Ryan stood at the door and watched it wending its way across the dreary, uneven fields, past the Three Rocks, now getting lost in some hollow, again rising to the shoulders of a hillock, the coffin swaying unevenly on the shoulders of the bearers, the red petticoats of the women in the rear shaking in the breeze. The widow, almost too weak to move, was with difficulty restrained from going to the churchyard. Norah, having arranged the hassock in the corner for her mother, had followed the procession, and now the old woman thought that she could detect her child a quarter of a mile away, following in the rear of the party. Micky’s Jim, who had not gone away yet, was engaged in sorting a rope on the thatch which had been blown askew by the wind of the previous nights.

“I’ll overtake the funeral, Mary,” he said when he completed the work. “I was just making the thatch strong against the breeze and I have tied a broken rope.”

“Mother of God be good to you, Jim, but it is yourself that has the kindly heart!” said Mary in a tremulous whisper. “Could you take Norah with you beyond the water next year?”

Jim called to mind the movements of the girl’s body when she stooped to lift peat for the fire, and the remembrance filled him with pleasure. “When next summer comes round, I’ll see, Mary Ryan,” he answered. “If there is a place to spare in the squad I’ll let you know and your Norah will have the very first chance of it.”

“Mother of God bless you, Jim, for the kindness is in you!” said the old woman. “It is me that is the lone body this very minute, with never a penny in my house and not even the old curragh left to me to make a penny by.”

“Well, I’m off, Mary,” said Jim. “The coffin is going out of sight and they’ll be needing new blood under it.” He hurried across the fields, his long legs covering an enormous spread of earth at every stride. Over the brae he hurried, and at the turn of the road halted for a moment and looked back at Mary Ryan’s cabin. The woman still stood at the door, one hand shading her eyes, looking towards the Frosses churchyard, which lay more than three miles away. “Thinkin’ that she could get anything for an old curragh!” he muttered contemptuously, as he resumed his stride. “She’s an old fool; but Norah! Ah! she’s a soncy lass, and she was good to look at when making that fire!”

III

THE graveyard, surrounded by a stone wall, broken down in several places, served as a grazing plot for bullocks, donkeys, and sheep, as well as for the burial place of the dead. A long walk, lined with stunted hazel bushes, ran half-way through the yard, and at the end a low stone vault, hardly higher than a man’s head, stood under the shadow of an overhanging sycamore.

The funeral procession was delayed on the journey, and Father Devaney, round-faced and red-cheeked, stamped up and down while waiting its arrival. He had come all the way from Greenanore and was in a hurry to get back again. The morning was cold and caused him to shiver a little, and when he shivered he clapped his hands vigorously, the palm of one against the back of the other.

His large mansion, complete now and habitable, had not been fully paid for yet, and most of his parishioners were a pound or two in arrears; when this money came to hand matters would be much better. Old Devaney had developed a particularly fine taste in wine and cigars and found these very expensive; and at present he called to mind how James Ryan was two pounds in arrears with the mansion tax. The old priest knew that this money would never come to hand; the widow was ill, no word had been heard of Fergus for years, and Norah Ryan was a light slip of a girl who would probably never earn a penny. Devaney knew all the affairs of his flock, and he stamped up and down the graveyard, a little angry with the dead man who, being so long in coming to his last home, had kept him waiting for thirty minutes.

The funeral came in sight, creeping up over the brow of the hill that rose near at hand, the bearers straining under their burden as they hurried across the uneven ground, with the coffin rising and falling on their shoulders like a bark in a storm at sea. The gate of the graveyard was already open; the procession filed through, Father Devaney stepping out in front, his surplice streaming in the wind. The good man thought of the warm dinner waiting for him at home, and being in a hurry to get done with the burial service he walked so quickly that the bearers could hardly keep up with him. On the floor of the little vault in the centre of the graveyard the coffin was set down and the basket of snuff, pipes, and tobacco was handed round. All the men took pipes, filled them with rank plug and lit them; the older women lit pipes also, and everybody, with the exception of the priest and Norah Ryan, took snuff.

“Hurry up!” said Father Devaney. “Ye can smoke after ye do yer duty. It would be well if ye were puttin’ yer hands in yer pockets now and gettin’ yer offerin’s ready.”

Immediately a stream of silver descended on the coffin. All the mourners paid rapidly, but in turn, and the priest called out their names as they paid. A sum of ten pounds seventeen shillings was collected, and this the priest carefully wrapped up in a woollen muffler and put into his pocket.

“Now hurry up, boys, and get a move on ye; and open the grave!” he shouted, making no effort to hide his impatience now that the money was safely in his keeping. He felt full of the importance of a man who knows that everybody around him trembles under his eyes. Three or four young fellows were digging the grave and joking loudly as they worked; a crowd of men stood round them, puffing white clouds of smoke up into the air. Many of the women were kneeling beside graves that held all that remained of one or another near and dear to them. Norah Ryan stood alone with the priest, her dark shawl drawn over her white forehead, and a few stray tresses, that had fallen over her face, shaking in the breeze.

“It is a black day this for you, Norah, a black day,” said the priest, speaking in Gaelic. Two tears coursed down the girl’s cheeks, and she fixed a pair of sorrowful grey eyes on the man when he spoke.

“Don’t cry, girsha beag (little girl),” said the priest. “It is all for the best, all for the best, because it is the will of God.”

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.

The priest took his departure; the grave was filled up and the crowd began to disperse.

“Come away home now,” said Sheila Carrol to Norah, who was still kneeling on the wet ground. The girl rose without a word, brushed her dress with a woollen handkerchief and accompanied the beansho from the churchyard.

“Don’t cry, Norah,” said Sheila, observing that tears were still falling down the cheeks of her companion. “Everyone must die and go away just the same as if they had never been at all, for that is the will of God. How is yer mother this morning?”

“Much the same as she was always,” said Norah. “She cannot get rid of her cough, and she has shiverin’ fits of late.... Hasn’t the sea the black heart?”

“Black enough, indeed, my child,” said the beansho. “Your mother will feel it a big lot?”

“Not so much,” said the girl. “She’ll soon be with him, she’s thinkin’.”

“At the wake I heard her say that she would be the last of the family to die. What put that into her head?”

“I don’t know what put it into her head, but if I were to die on the wet road this very minute I wouldn’t care one haet.” On Norah’s face there was a look of infinite sadness, and the pathos of her words cut Sheila to the heart.

“Don’t speak like that, Norah Ryan,” she exclaimed. “Death is black and bitter, but there are things much worse than death, things far, far worse.”

They had now reached a stile, and far in front the soft caishin (path) wound on by rock and rath across the broad expanse of moor. Several people, walking one after another, were in front; the soft ooze was squirting under their feet and splashing against their ankles. In the midst of the heather a young bullock lay chewing the cud, and looked upon the passers-by with that stupid, involved look peculiar to the ox; a moor-cock, agitated and voluble, rose into the air and chattered as it swept across the brown of the moor.

“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!”