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                                GRANIA

                                VOL. I.




                         _By the same Author_


                           HURRISH: a Study
                 IRELAND (Story of the Nations Series)
                        MAJOR LAWRENCE, F.L.S.
                      PLAIN FRANCES MOWBRAY, &c.
                         WITH ESSEX IN IRELAND

                    [Illustration: ISLANDS OF ARAN

                             GALWAY BAY.]




                                GRANIA

                        THE STORY OF AN ISLAND

                                BY THE
                          HON. EMILY LAWLESS

                     AUTHOR OF ‘HURRISH, A STUDY’
                                 ETC.

                            IN TWO VOLUMES

                                VOL. I.

                                LONDON
                SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
                                 1892

                        [_All rights reserved_]




                              DEDICATION

                               To M. C.


This story was always intended to be dedicated to you. It could hardly,
in fact, have been dedicated to anyone else, seeing that it was with you
it was originally planned; you who helped out its meagre scraps of
Gaelic; you with whom was first discussed the possibility of an Irish
story without any Irish brogue in it--that brogue which is a tiresome
necessity always, and might surely be dispensed with, as we both agreed,
in a case where no single actor on the tiny stage is supposed to utter a
word of English. For the rest, they are but melancholy places, these
Aran Isles of ours, as you and I know well, and the following pages have
caught their full share--something, perhaps, more than their full
share--of that gloom. That this is an artistic fault no one can doubt,
yet there are times--are there not?--when it does not seem so very easy
to exaggerate the amount of gloom which life is any day and every day
quite willing to bestow.

Several causes have delayed the little book’s appearance until now, but
here it is, ready at last, and dedicated still to you.

E. L.

LYONS, HAZLEHATCH:
_January, 1892_.




PART I

SEPTEMBER




PART I

_SEPTEMBER_




CHAPTER I


A mild September afternoon, thirty years ago, in the middle of Galway
Bay.

Clouds over the whole expanse of sky, nowhere showing any immediate
disposition to fall as rain, yet nowhere allowing the sky to appear
decidedly, nowhere even becoming themselves decided, keeping everywhere
a broad indefinable wash of greyness, a grey so dim, uniform, and
all-pervasive, that it defied observation, floating and melting away
into a dimly blotted horizon, an horizon which, whether at any given
point to call sea or sky, land or water, it was all but impossible to
decide.

Here and there in that wide cloud-covered sweep of sky a sort of break
or window occurred, and through this break or window long shafts of
sunlight fell in a cold and chastened drizzle, now upon the bluish
levels of crestless waves, now upon the bleak untrodden corner of some
portion of the coast of Clare, tilted perpendicularly upwards; now
perhaps again upon that low line of islands which breaks the outermost
curve of the bay of Galway, and beyond which is nothing, nothing, that
is to say, but the Atlantic, a region which, despite the ploughing of
innumerable keels, is still given up by the dwellers of those islands to
a mystic condition of things unknown to geographers, but too deeply
rooted in their consciousness to yield to any mere reports from
without.

One of these momentary shafts of light had just caught in its passage
upon the sails of a fishing smack or hooker, Con O’Malley’s hooker, from
the middle isle of Aran. It was an old, battered, much-enduring sail of
indeterminate hue, inclining to coffee colour, and patched towards the
top with a large patch of a different shade and much newer material. The
hooker itself was old, too, and patched, but still seaworthy, and, as
the only hooker at that time belonging to the islands, a source, as all
Inishmaan knew, of unspeakable pride and satisfaction to its owner.

At