Dubliners
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.