“You must not hurt me, my dear,” said Finaun, smiling gravely at him.
Mary had leaped to Art, whose arm she took, and they backed to the end of the room.
Eileen stood up; she arranged her dress and wrapped the shawl about her head again; she gazed fearlessly at Mac Cann.
“The house is full of your friends, Padraig, and there’s nobody here with me at all; there’s no man could want better than that for himself.”
Patsy’s voice was hoarse.
“You’re looking for fight?”
“I’m looking for whatever is coming,” she replied steadily.
“I’m coming, then,” he roared, and he strode to her. He lifted his hands above his head, and brought them down so heavily on her shoulders that she staggered.
“Here I am,” said he, staring into her face.
She closed her eyes.
“I knew it wasn’t love you wanted, Padraig; it was murder you wanted, and you have your wish.”
She was swaying under his weight as she spoke; her knees were giving beneath her.
“Eileen,” said Patsy, in a small voice, “I’m going to tumble; I can’t hold myself up, Eileen; my knees are giving way under me, and I’ve only got my arms round your neck.”
She opened her eyes and saw him sagging against her, with his eyes half closed and his face gone white.
“Sure, Padraig!” said she.
She flung her arms about his body and lifted him, but the weight was too much, and he went down.
She crouched by him on the floor, hugging his head against her breast.
“Sure, listen to me, Padraig; I never did like anyone in the world but yourself; there wasn’t a man of them all was more to me than a blast of wind; you were the one I liked always. Listen to me now, Padraig. Don’t I be wanting you day and night, and saying prayers to you in the darkness and crying out in the dawn; my heart is sore for you, so it is: there’s a twist in us, O my dear. Don’t you be minding the men; whatever they did it was nothing, it was nothing more than beasts playing in a field and not caring anything. We are beside one another for a minute now. When I would put my hand on my breast in the middle of a laugh it was you I was touching, and I do never stop thinking of you in any place under the sky.”
They were kissing each other like lost souls; they babbled and clung to each other; they thrust one another’s head back to stare at it, and pursued the head with their violent lips.
It was a time before they all got to sleep that night, but they did sleep at the end of it.
They stretched in the darkness with their eyes closed, and the night folded them around, separating each one from his fellow, and putting on each the enchantment of silence and blindness. They were no longer together although they were lying but a few inches apart; there was only the darkness that had no inches to it; the darkness that has no beginning and no end; that appears and disappears, calling hush as it comes and goes, and holding peace and terror in either invisible hand; there was no silver moon in the sky and no sparkle of white stars; there was only darkness and silence and the steady hushing of the rain.
When he awoke in the morning Mac Cann rolled urgently on his elbow and stared to where Eileen Ni Cooley had stretched herself for sleep—but she was not there, she was not anywhere.
He shouted, and the company sprang to their feet.
“She got out through the window,” he roared.
“The devil damn the soul of her,” said he.
Book III
Brien O’Brien
XX
They continued their travels.
It would be more correct to say they continued their search for food, for that in reality was the objective of each day’s journeying.
Moving thus, day by day, taking practically any road that presented itself, they had wandered easily through rugged, beautiful Donegal down into Connaught. They had camped on the slopes of rough mountains, slept peacefully in deep valleys that wound round and round like a corkscrew, traversed for weeks in Connemara by the clamorous sea where they lived sumptuously on fish, and then they struck to the inland plains again, and away by curving paths to the County Kerry.
At times Mac Cann got work to do—to mend a kettle that had a little hole in it, to stick a handle on a pot, to stiffen the last days of a bucket that was already long past its labour, and he did these jobs sitting in the sunlight on dusty roads, and if he did not do them Mary did them for him while he observed her critically and explained both to her and to his company the mystery of the tinker’s craft.
“There’s a great deal,” he would say, “in the twist of the hand.”
And again, but this usually to Art when that cherub tried his skill on a rusty pot:
“You’ll never make a good tinker unless you’ve got a hand on you. Keep your feet in your boots and get to work with your fingers.”
And sometimes he would nod contentedly at Mary and say:
“There’s a girl with real hands on her that aren’t feet.”
Hands represented to him whatever of praiseworthy might be spoken of by a man, but feet were in his opinion rightly covered, and ought not to be discovered except in minatory conversation. One ran on them! Well, it was a dog’s trade, or a donkey’s; but hands! he expanded to that subject, and could loose thereon a gale of praise that would blow all other conversation across the border.
They set their camp among roaring fairs where every kind of wild man and woman yelled salutation at Patsy and his daughter, and howled remembrance of ten and twenty-year old follies, and
