happiness. Just when he was wishing for it she had come to him of her own accord.
Perhaps her thoughts had been running with his. Perhaps she had felt the impetuous
desire that was in him, and then the yielding mood had come upon her. Now that she
had fallen to him so easily, he wondered why he had been so diffident.
He stood, holding her head between his hands. Then, slipping one arm swiftly about
her body and drawing her towards him, he said softly:
`Gretta, dear, what are you thinking about?'
She did not answer nor yield wholly to his arm. He said again, softly:
`Tell me what it is, Gretta. I think I know what is the matter. Do I know?'
She did not answer at once. Then she said in an outburst of tears:
`O, I am thinking about that song, "The Lass of Aughrim".'
She broke loose from him and ran to the bed and, throwing her arms across the bed-
rail, hid her face. Gabriel stood stock-still for a moment in astonishment and then
followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself
in full length, his broad, well-filled shirt-front, the face whose expression always
puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eye-glasses.
He halted a few paces from her and said:
`What about the song? Why does that make you cry?'
She raised her head from her arms and dried her eyes with the back of her hand like a
child. A kinder note than he had intended went into his voice.
`Why, Gretta?' he asked.
`I am thinking about a person long ago who used to sing that song.'
`And who was the person long ago?' asked Gabriel, smiling.
`It was a person I used to know in Galway when I was living with my grandmother,'
she said.
The smile passed away from Gabriel's face. A dull anger began to gather again at the
back of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins.
`Someone you were in love with?' he asked ironically.
`It was a young boy I used to know,' she answered, `named Michael Furey. He used to
sing that song, "The Lass of Aughrim". He was very delicate.'
Gabriel was silent. He did not wish her to think that he was interested in this delicate
boy.
`I can see him so plainly,' she said, after a moment. `Such eyes as he had: big, dark
eyes! And such an expression in them - an expression!'
`O, then, you were in love with him?' said Gabriel.
`I used to go out walking with him,' she said, `when I was in Galway.'
A thought flew across Gabriel's mind.
`Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?' he said
coldly.
She looked at him and asked in surprise:
`What for?'
Her eyes made Gabriel feel awkward. He shrugged his shoulders and said:
`How do I know? To see him, perhaps.'
She looked away from him along the shaft of light towards the window in silence.
`He is dead,' she said at length. `He died when he was only seventeen. Isn't it a terrible
thing to die so young as that?'
`What was he?' asked Gabriel, still ironically.
`He was in the gasworks,' she said.
Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure
from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their
secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him
in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him.
He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a penny-boy for his aunts, a nervous,
well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish
lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.
Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that
burned upon his forehead.
He tried to keep up his tone of cold interrogation, but his voice when he spoke was
humble and indifferent.
`I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,' he said.
`I was great with him at that time,' she said.
Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead
her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:
`And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?'
`I think he died for me,' she answered.
A vague terror seized Gabriel at this answer, as if, at that hour when he had hoped to
triumph, some impalpable and vindictive being was coming against him, gathering
forces against him in its vague world. But he shook himself free of it with an effort of
reason and continued to caress her hand. He did not question her again, for he felt that
she would tell him of herself. Her hand was warm and moist: it did not respond to his
touch, but he continued to caress it just as he had caressed her first letter to him that
spring morning.
`It was in the winter,' she said, `about the beginning of the winter when I was going to
leave my grandmother's and come up here to the convent. And he was ill at the time
in his lodgings in Galway and wouldn't be let out, and his people in Oughterard were
written to. He was in decline, they said, or something like that. I never knew rightly.'
She paused for a moment and sighed.
`Poor fellow,' she said. `He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy. We
used to go out together, walking, you know, Gabriel, like the way they do in the
country. He was going to study singing only for his health. He had a very good voice,
poor Michael Furey.'
`Well; and then?' asked Gabriel.
`And then when it came to the time for me to leave Galway and come up to the
convent he was much worse and I wouldn't be let see him, so I wrote him a letter
saying I was going up to Dublin and would be back in the summer, and hoping he
would be better then.'
She paused for a moment to get her voice under control, and then went on:
`Then the night before I left, I was in my grandmother's house in Nuns' Island,
packing up, and I heard gravel thrown up against the window. The window was so
wet I couldn't see, so I ran downstairs as I was and slipped out the back into the
garden and there was the poor fellow at the end of the garden, shivering.'
`And did you not tell him to go back?' asked Gabriel.
`I implored of him to go home at once and told him he would get his death in the rain.
But he said he did not want to live. I can see his eyes as well as well! He was standing
at the end of the wall where there was a tree.'
`And did he go home?' asked Gabriel.
`Yes, he went home. And when I was only a week in the convent he died and he was
buried in Oughterard, where his people came from. O, the day I heard that, that he
was dead!'
She stopped, choking with sobs, and, overcome by emotion, flung herself face
downward on the bed, sobbing in the quilt. Gabriel held her hand for a moment
longer, irresolutely, and then, shy of intruding on her grief, let it fall gently and
walked quietly to the window.
She was fast asleep.
Gabriel, leaning on his elbow, looked for a few moments unresentfully on her tangled
hair and half-open mouth, listening to her deep-drawn breath. So she had had that
romance in her life: a man had died for her sake. It hardly pained him now to think
how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life. He watched her while she
slept, as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife. His curious eyes
rested long upon her face and on her hair: and, as he thought of what she must have
been then, in that time of her first girlish beauty, a strange, friendly pity for her
entered his soul. He did not like to say even to himself that her face was no longer
beautiful, but he knew that it was no longer the face for which Michael Furey had
braved death.
Perhaps she had not told him all the story. His eyes moved to the chair over which she
had thrown some of her clothes. A petticoat string dangled to the floor. One boot
stood upright, its limp upper fallen down: the fellow of it lay upon its side. He
wondered at his riot of emotions of an hour before. From what had it proceeded?
From his aunt's supper, from his own foolish speech, from the wine and dancing, the
merry-making when saying good night in the hall, the pleasure of the walk along the
river in the snow. Poor Aunt Julia! She, too, would soon be a shade with the shade of
Patrick Morkan and his horse. He had caught that haggard look upon her face for a
moment when she was singing `Arrayed for the Bridal'. Soon, perhaps, he would be
sitting in that same drawing-room, dressed in black, his silk hat on his knees. The
blinds would be drawn down and Aunt Kate would be sitting beside him, crying and
blowing her nose and telling him how Julia had died. He would cast about in his mind
for some words that might console her, and would find only lame and useless ones.
Yes, yes: that would happen very soon.
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under
the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades.
Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade
and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked
in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that
he did not wish to live.
Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any
woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly
in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man
standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that
region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not
apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out
into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time
reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow
again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the
lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the
newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part
of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and,
farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling,
too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay
buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of
the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow
falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last
end, upon all the living and the dead.
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