An Isle in the Water by Katharine Tynan

Against Con Daly's little girl there was never a word spoken in the Island. Con had been well liked, God rest his soul! -- but the man was drowned nigh upon twenty years ago. There was some old tragic tale about it, how he had volunteered to swim with a rope round his waist to a ship breaking up a few yards from the rocks in a sea that a gannet could scarcely live upon. He had pushed aside the men who remonstrated with him, turning on them a face ghastly in the moonlight. 'Stand aside, men,' he cried, 'and if I fail, see to the girsha! ' He was the strongest man in all the Island, and as much at home in the water as a porpoise. They saw his sleek head now and again flung out of the trough of the waves, and his huge shoulders labouring against the weight of the storm. Then suddenly the rope they were holding fell slack in their hands, -- they said afterwards it had snapped on a jagged razor of rock, -- and the man disappeared. A day or two later his battered and bruised body was flung up on the bathing strand, where in summer the city ladies take their dip in the sea. He was buried with some of the drowned sailors he had tried to rescue, and an iron cross put at his head by the fishermen. But for a long time there was a talk that the man had gone to meet his death gladly, had for some reason or another preferred death to life; but people were never quite sure if there was anything in it.

The Islanders had looked askance at Ellen Daly, Con's wife, before that, though to her husband she was the apple of his eye. She had been a domestic servant on the mainland when Con Daly met and married her, and she had never seemed to have any friends. She had been handsome in her day, at least so some people thought, but there were women on the Island who said they never could abide her, with her pale face and sneering smile, and her eyes that turned green as a cat's when she was angry. However, she never tried to ingratiate herself with the women: if the men admired her it was as much as she asked. When she liked she could be fascinating enough. She bewitched Mrs. Wilkinson, the housekeeper at the Hall, into taking her on whenever his Lordship filled the house with gentlemen and an extra hand was needed. She was deft and clever, and could be insinuating when it served her purpose. But the friendship of the Island women she had never desired, and when her husband was drowned there was not a fisher-wife to go and sit with her in the desolate house. As the years went by her good looks went with them. She yellowed, and her malevolent eyes took on red rims round their greenness; while her dry lips, parted over her snarling teeth, were more ill than they had been when they were ripe and ruddy.