Patsy climbed through the low window space, and the others climbed in after him.
XV
Inside the house was an earthen floor, four walls, and plenty of air. There were breezes blowing in the empty house, for from whatever direction a wind might come it found entrance there. There were stones lying everywhere on the floor; some of them had dropped from the walls, but most had been jerked through the window by passing children. There were spider’s webs in that house; the roof was covered with them, and the walls were covered with them too. It was a dusty house, and when it would be wet enough it would be a muddy house, and it was musty with disuse and desolation.
But the company did not care anything about dust or stones or spiders. They kicked the stones aside and sat on the floor in the most sheltered part of the place where there had once been a fireplace, and if a spider walked on any of them it was permitted.
Patsy produced a clay pipe and lit it, and Caeltia took a silver-mounted briar from his pocket and he lit that and smoked it.
Outside the rain suddenly began to fall with a low noise and the room grew dark. Within there was a brooding quietness, for none of the people spoke; they were all waiting for each other to speak.
Indeed, they had all been agitated when they came in, for the wrung face of Patsy and the savage eyes of Eileen Ni Cooley had whipped their blood. Tragedy had sounded her warning note on the air, and they were each waiting to see had they a part in the play.
But the sudden change of atmosphere wrought like a foreign chemical in their blood, the sound of the falling rain dulled their spirits, the must of that sleeping house went to their brains like an opiate, and the silence of the place folded them about, compelling them to a similar quietude.
We are imitative beings; we respond to the tone and colour of our environment almost against ourselves, and still have our links with the chameleon and the moth; the sunset sheds its radiant peace upon us and we are content; the silent mountaintop lays a finger on our lips and we talk in whispers; the clouds lend us of their gaiety and we rejoice. So for a few moments they sat wrestling with the dull ghosts of that broken house, the mournful phantasms that were not dead long enough to be happy, for death is sorrowful at first and for a long time, but afterwards the dead are contented and learn to shape themselves anew.
Patsy, drawing on his pipe, looked around the people.
“Eh!” he exclaimed with heavy joviality, “where has the man got to, the man with the big stick? If he’s shy let him come in, and if he’s angry let him come in too.”
Eileen Ni Cooley was sitting close beside Art. She had let her shawl droop from her head, and her hair was showing through the dusk like a torch.
“The man has gone away, Padraig,” said she; “he got tired of the company, and he’s gone travelling towards his own friends.”
Patsy regarded her with shining eyes. The must of the house was no longer in his nostrils; the silence lifted from him at a bound.
“You are telling me a fine story, Eileen,” said he, “tell me this too, did the man go away of his own will, or did you send him away?”
“It was a bit of both, Padraig.”
“The time to get good news,” said Patsy, “is when it’s raining, and that is good news, and it’s raining now.”
“News need not be good or bad, but only news,” she replied, “and we will leave it at that.”
Caeltia spoke to her:
“Do you have a good life going by yourself about the country and making acquaintances where you please?”
“I have the life I like,” she answered, “and whether it’s good or bad doesn’t matter.”
“Tell me the reason you never let himself make love to you when he wants to make it?”
“He is a domineering man,” said she, “and I am a proud woman, and we would never give in to each other. When one of us would want to do a thing the other one wouldn’t do it, and there would be no living between us. If I said black he would say white, and if he said yes I would say no, and that’s how we are.”
“He has a great love for you.”
“He has a great hate for me. He loves me the way a dog loves bones, and in a little while he’d kill me in a lonely place with his hands to see what I would look like and I dying.”
She turned her face to Mac Cann:
“That’s the kind of man you are to me, Padraig, although you’re different to other people.”
“I am not that sort of man, but it’s yourself is like that. I tell you that if I took a woman with me I’d be staunch to her the way I was with the mother of the girl there, and if you were to come with me you wouldn’t have any complaint from now on.”
“I know everything I’m talking about,” she replied sternly, “and I won’t go with you, but I’ll go with the young man here beside me.”
With the words she put her hand on Art’s arm and kept it there.
Mary Mac Cann straightened up where she was sitting and became deeply interested.
Art turned and burst into a laugh as he looked critically at Eileen.
“I will not go with you,” said he. “I don’t care for you a bit.”
She gave a hard smile and removed her hand from his arm.
“It’s all the worse for me,” said she, “and it’s small harm to
