Transcriber's Note:
A Table of Contents has been added.
Obvious typographic errors have been corrected.

THE VALLEY OF THE
SQUINTING WINDOWS

THE VALLEY OF THE
SQUINTING WINDOWS

BY

BRINSLEY MacNAMARA

NEW YORK
BRENTANO'S
1920

Copyright, 1919, by
BRENTANO'S
——
All rights reserved

To
ONE WHO WAITED
FOR THIS STORY

And the Lord spake unto Moses saying:
Speak unto Aaron saying whosoever he be of thy seed in their generations that hath any blemish let him not approach to offer the bread of his God.

Leviticus xxi. 16-17.

CONTENTS

PREFATORY NOTE

In the parlor, as they call it, or best room of every Irish farmhouse, one may come upon a certain number of books that are never read, laid there in lonely repose upon the big square table on the middle of the floor. A novel entitled "Knocknagow" is almost always certain to be amongst them, yet scarcely as the result of selection, although its constant occurrence cannot be considered purely accidental. There must lurk an explanation somewhere about these quiet Irish houses connecting the very atmosphere with "Knocknagow". A stranger, thinking of some of the great books of the world, would almost feel inclined to believe that this story of the quiet homesteads of Ireland must be one of them, a book full of inspiration and truth and beauty, a story sprung from the bleeding realities which were before the present comfort of these homes. Yet for all the expectations which might be raised up in one by this most popular, this typical Irish novel, it is most certainly the book with which the new Irish novelist would endeavor to contrast his own. For he would be writing of life, as the modern novelist's art is essentially a realistic one, and not of the queer, distant, half pleasing, half saddening thing which could make one Irish farmer's daughter say to another at any time within the past forty years:

"And you'd often see things happening nearly in real life like in 'Knocknagow.' Now wouldn't you?"

Nearer by a long way than Charles Joseph Kickham to what the Irish novelist should have been was William Carleton in his great, gloomy, melodramatic stories of the land. He was prevented by the agrarian obsession of his time from having the clear vision and wide pity, in keeping with his vehemence, which might have made him the Irish Balzac.

Even in Ireland Lever and Lover have become unpopular. They are read only by Englishmen who still try to perpetuate their comic convention when they write newspaper articles about Ireland.

As with Kickham, largely in his treatment of the Irish peasant, Gerald Griffin in "The Collegians" did not succeed in giving his Irish middle or "strong farmer" class characters the spiritual energy so necessary to the literary subject.

Here are five writers then, who included in their work such exact opposites as saints and sinners, heroes and omadhanns, earnest passionate men and broths of bhoys. And somehow between them, between those who wrote to degrade us and those who have idealized us, the real Irishman did not come to be set down. From its fiction, reality was absent, as from most other aspects of Irish life.

To a certain extent the realistic method has been employed by the dramatists of the Irish Literary Movement, but necessarily limited by the scope and conventions of the stage and by the narrower appeal of the spoken word in the mouth of an actor. The stage, too, has a way of developing cults and conventions and of its very nature must display a certain amount of artificiality, even in the handling of realistic material. Thus comes a sudden stagnation, a sudden completion always of a literary movement developed mostly upon the dramatic side, as has come upon the work of the Abbey Theater.

It appears rather accidental, but perhaps on the whole to its benefit, that the dramatic form should have been adopted by J. M. Synge and not the epical form of the novel. Synge fell with a lash of surprise upon the Ireland of his time, for the Irish play had been as fully degraded as the Irish novel. Furthermore the shock of his genius created an opportunity which made possible the realistic Irish novelist. At the Abbey Theater they performed plays dealing with subjects which no Irish novelist, thinking of a public, would have dreamt of handling. Somehow their plays have come to be known and accepted throughout Ireland. Thus a reading public for this realistic Irish novel has been slowly created and the urge to write like this has come to many storytellers.

Of necessity, as part of the reaction from the work of the feeble masters we have known, the first examples of the new Irish novel were bound to be a little savage and pitiless. In former pictures of Irish life there was heavy labor always to give us the shade at the expense of the light, in fact at the expense of the truth which is life itself. In Ireland the protest of the realist is not so much against Romanticism as against an attempt made to place before us a pseudo-realism. According as the Irish people resign themselves to the fact that this is not a thing which should not be done, the work of the Irish realist will approximate more nearly to the quality of the Russian novelists, in which there are neither exaggerations of Light nor of Shade, but a picture of life all gray and quiet, and brightened only by the beauty of tragic reality.

It leaves room for interesting speculation, that at a time of political chaos, at a time when in Ireland there is a great coming and going of politicians of all brands, dreamers, sages and mystics, the decline of the Irish Literary Movement on its dramatic side should have given the realistic Irish novelist his opportunity to appear. The urgent necessity of reality in Irish life at the moment fills one with the thought that a school of Irish realists might have brought finer things to the heart of Ireland than the Hy Brazil of the politicians.

The function of the Irish novelist to evoke reality has been proved in the case of "The Valley of the Squinting Windows." Upon its appearance the people of that part of Ireland with whom I deal in my writings became highly incensed. They burned my book after the best medieval fashion and resorted to acts of healthy violence. The romantic period seemed to have been cut out of their lives and they were full of life again. The story of my story became widely exaggerated through gradually increasing venom and my book, which had been well received by the official Irish Press,—whose reviewers generally read the books they write about—was supposed by some of my own people to contain the most frightful things. To the peasant mind, fed so long upon unreal tales of itself, the thing I had done became identified after the most incongruous fashion and very curiously with an aspect of the very literary association from which I had sprung. Language out of Synge's "Playboy of the Western World" came to my ears from every side during the days in which I was made to suffer for having written "The Valley of the Squinting Windows."

"And saving your presence, sir, are you the man that killed your father?"

"I am, God help me!"

"Well then, my thousand blessings to you!"

The country as a whole did not dislike my picture of Irish life or say it was untrue. It was only the particular section of life which was pictured that still asserted its right to the consolation of romantic treatment, but in its very attempt to retain romance in theory it became realistic in practise. It did exactly what it should have done a great many years ago with the kind of books from which it drew a certain poisonous comfort towards its own intellectual and political enslavement. The rest of Ireland was amused by the performance of those who did not think, with Mr. Yeats, that romantic Ireland was dead and gone. The realist had begun to evoke reality and no longer did a great screech sound through the land that this kind of thing should not be done. A change had come, by miraculous coincidence, upon the soul of Ireland. It was not afraid of realism now,—for it had faced the tragic reality of the travail which comes before a healthy national consciousness can be born. No longer would the realist be described in his own country as merely a morbid scoundrel or an enemy of the Irish people. They would not need again the solace of the sentimental novelist for all the offenses of the caricaturists in Irish fiction, because, with the wider and clearer vision of their own souls fully realized, had they already begun to look out upon the world.

Brinsley MacNamara.

Dublin, March 1st, 1919.

THE VALLEY OF THE
SQUINTING WINDOWS

THE VALLEY OF THE SQUINTING
WINDOWS

CHAPTER I

Mrs. Brennan took her seat again at the sewing-machine by the window. She sighed as she turned her tired eyes in search of some inducement to solace down the white road through the valley of Tullahanogue. The day was already bright above the fields and groups of children were beginning to pass through the morning on their way to school. Mrs. Brennan beheld their passage, yet now as always she seemed to miss the small beauty of the little pageant.

"God help them, the poor little things!" she condoled to herself, "and may He enlighten the unfortunate parents who send them to that quare, ould, ignorant pair, Master Donnellan and Mrs. Wyse, the mistress. Musha, sure they're no teachers!"

From this it might seem that Mrs. Brennan, the dressmaker of the valley and one well entitled to be giving out an opinion, did not think very highly of National Education. Yet it was not true that she failed to regard the lofty fact of education with all a peasant's stupid reverence, for was she not the mother of John Brennan, who was now preparing for the priesthood at a grand college in England? A priest, mind you! That was what you might call something for a woman to be!

The pride of her motherhood struck a high and resounding note in the life of the valley. Furthermore, it gave her authority to assert herself as a woman of remarkable standing amongst the people. She devoted her prerogative to the advancement of the Catholic Church. She manifested herself as one intensely interested in its welfare. There was no cheap religious periodical, from The Catholic Times to The Messenger, that she did not regularly purchase. All these she read to her husband, Ned Brennan, in the long quiet evenings after the manner of one discharging a religious duty.

This was a curious side of her. She kept him in comfort and in ease, and yet when his body had been contented she must needs apply herself to the welfare of his soul. For, although he spent many a penny of her money in the village of Garradrimna, was he not the father of John Brennan, who was going to be a priest of God? She forgave him everything on this account, even the coarse and blasphemous expressions he continually let fly from his mouth the while she read for him the most holy stories by Jesuit Fathers.

Just now she had given him two shillings with which to entertain himself. He had threatened to strike her in the event of her refusal.... That was why she had been sighing and why the tears were now creeping into her great tired eyes as she began to set her machine in motion for the tasks of the day. Dear, dear, wasn't he the cruel, hard man?... Yet beyond all this thought of him was her bright dream of the day when, with the few pounds she had saved so secretly from the wide grasp of his thirst, she must fit him out in a rich suit of black and go by his side proudly to attend the ordination of their son John. It was because she so dearly loved her dream that she bore him with immense patience.

Also it was because she had been thinking of that grand day and of the descending splendor of her son that she now commented so strongly upon the passage of the children to school. She had spoken bitterly to her own heart, but in that heart of hers she was a bitter woman.

This was such a sunny, lovely morning. It was the day of the June Races in the town of Mullaghowen, and most of the valley-dwellers had gone there. The winding, dusty road through Tullahanogue was a long lane of silence amid the sunlight. It appeared as an avenue to the Palace of Dreams. So it was not at all strange that Mrs. Brennan was dreaming forward into the future and filling her mind with fancies of the past. She was remembering herself as Nan Byrne, the prettiest girl in the valley. This was no illusion of idle vanity, for was there not an old daguerreotype in an album on the table behind her at this very moment to prove that beauty had been hers? And she had been ruined because of that proud beauty. It was curious to think how her sister and she had both gone the same way.... The period of a generation had passed since the calamity had fallen upon them almost simultaneously. It was the greatest scandal that had ever happened in these parts. The holy priest, whose bones were now moldering beneath the sanctuary of the chapel, had said hard words of her. From the altar of God he had spoken his pity of her father, and said that she was a bad woman.

"May God strengthen him, for this is the bitter burden to bear. Philip Byrne is a decent man for all his daughter Nan is a woman of shame. I pray you avoid her every one who has the trace of God's purity in his heart. Let you go not into that house which she has made an abode of lust, nor allow the fair name of your own house to be blemished by the contamination of her presence within its walls."

Yes, it was true that all this had been said of her by the holy father, and in the very spot beneath which his bones were now at rest. They were the hard words surely to have issued from the lips of God's anointed. Even in the fugitive remembrance of them now they seemed to have left red marks like whip-lash weals across her soul. The burning hurt of them drove her deeper into remembrance. She had already come to the full development of her charms when her ambition had also appeared. It was, in short, to effect the "catch" of one of the strong farmers of the valley. She entered into conspiracy with her sister and, together, they laid their plans. Henry Shannon was the one upon whom she had set her eye and Loughlin Mulvey the one her sister Bridget had begun to desire. They were both men of family and substance, and hard drinkers after the fashion of the fields. They often called at the house to see the sisters. Philip Byrne, whose occupation as head-groom at the stables of the Moores of Garradrimna often took him away from Ireland, would always be absent during those visitations. But their mother would be there, Mrs. Abigail Byrne, ambitious for her daughters, in great style. It was never known to happen that either of the strong farmers called to the house without a bottle of whiskey. Mrs. Byrne always looked favorably upon them for their high decency, and the whiskey was good whiskey.

Here in this very room where she now sat remembering it all there had been such scenes! Her hair had been so thick and brown and there had been a rare bloom upon her skin as she had sat here alone with Henry Shannon, talking with him of queer things and kissing his dark, handsome face. And all through those far, bygone times she used to be thinking of his grand house and of his broad fields and the way she would one day assert herself in the joy of such possessions over her less fortunate sisters of the valley. Yet, ever mixed with her bright pieces of imagination, there had been such torturing doubts.... Her sister Bridget had always been so certain of her prey.

There had been times when Henry Shannon spent the night in the house. In those nights had been laid the foundations of her shame.... Very, very clearly did she remember the sickening, dreadful morning she had come to her mother with the story that she was going to have a child. How angry the elder woman had been, so lit within her all the wild instincts of the female against the betrayer of her sex? Why had she gone so far? Why had she not played her cards like her sister? There was no fear of her yet although she had got a proper hold of Loughlin Mulvey.... What was she to do at all? She who had had great ambitions was to become lower than the lowest in the valley.

Yet the three of them had conferred together, for all the others were so angry with her because of her disastrous condition into which she had allowed herself to slip without having first made certain of Henry Shannon. The only course left now was to "make a show" of him if he could not see his way to marry her.

She could now remember every line of the angry, misspelled letter she had sent to her whilom lover, and how it had brought him to the house in a mood of drunken repentance. He presented her with material for a new dress on the very same night, and, as she laughed and cried over it in turn, she thought how very curious it was that he should wish to see her figure richly adorned when already it had begun to put on those signs of disfigurement which announce the coming of a child. But he was very, very kind, and all suspicion fell away from her. Before he went he whispered an invitation to spend a few days with him in Dublin.... What did it matter now, and it was so kind of him to ask her? It showed what was in his mind, and therefore no talk of marriage passed between them. It did not seem necessary.

Then had followed quickly those lovely days in Dublin, she stopping with him as "Mrs. Henry Shannon" at a grand hotel. He had given her a wedding-ring, but while it remained upon her finger it was ever the little accusing symbol, filling her with an intense conviction of her sin.

This great adventure had marked the beginning of her acquaintance with the world beyond the valley, and, even now, through the gloom of her mood, she could remember it with a certain amount of gladness coming back to her mind. But it was queer that the brightest moment of her life should also have been the moment of darkest disaster.... She re-created the slight incidents of their quarrel. It was so strange of him after all the grand kindness he had just been showing her.... She had returned to the valley alone and with her disgrace already beginning to be heavy upon her.... She never saw Henry Shannon or spoke with him again. When she wrote referring distantly to their approaching marriage and making mention of the wedding-ring, the reply came back from Mr. Robinson, the solicitor in Garradrimna, who was his cousin and sporting companion. She knew how they had already begun to talk of her in the valley for having gone off to Dublin with Henry Shannon, and now, when an ugly word to describe her appeared there black and plain in the solicitor's letter, she felt, in blind shame, that the visit to Dublin had been planned to ruin her. The air of the valley seemed full of whispers to tell her that she had done a monstrous thing. Maybe they could give her jail for having done a thing like that, and she knew well that Henry Shannon's people would stop at nothing to destroy her, for they were a dark, spiteful crew. They were rich and powerful, with lawyers in the family, and what chance would she have in law now that every one was turned against her. So that night she went out when it was very dark and threw away the wedding-ring. The small, sad act appeared as the renunciation of her great ambition.

She remembered with a surpassing clearness the wide desolation of the time that followed. Loughlin Mulvey had been compelled to marry her sister Bridget because he had not been clever enough to effect a loophole of escape like Henry Shannon. Already three months after the marriage (bit by bit was she now living the past again) the child had been born to Bridget, and now she herself was waiting for the birth of her child.... Indeed Bridget need not have been so angry.

She had been delirious and upon the brink of death, and when, at last, she had recovered sufficiently to realize the sharpness of her mother's tongue once more the child had disappeared. She had escaped to England with all that was left of her beauty. There she had met Ned Brennan, and there had her son John Brennan been born. For a short while she had known happiness. Ned was rough, but in his very strength there was a sense of security and protection which made him bearable. And there was little John. He was not a bit like her short, wild impression of the other little child. Her disgrace had been the means of bringing Philip Byrne to his grave; and, after six or seven years, her mother had died, and she had returned to the valley of Tullahanogue. It was queer that, with all her early knowledge of the people of the valley, she had never thought it possible that some of them would one day impart to him the terrible secret she had concealed so well while acting the ingenuous maiden before his eyes.

Yet they were not settled a month at the cottage in the valley when Ned came from Garradrimna one night a changed man. Larry Cully, a loafer of the village, had attacked him with the whole story.... Was this the kind of people among whom she had brought him to live, and was this a fact about her? She confessed her share, but, illtreat her how he would, she could not tell him what had been done with the child.

Henceforth he was so different, settling gradually into his present condition. He could not go about making inquiries as to the past of his wife, and the people of the valley, gloating over his condition, took no pains to ease his mind. It was more interesting to see him torture himself with suspicion. They hardly fancied she had told him all. It was grand to see him drinking in his endeavors to forget the things he must needs be thinking of.

Thus had Mrs. Brennan lived with her husband for eighteen years, and no other child had been born to them. His original occupation of plumber's laborer found no opportunity for its exercise in the valley, but he sometimes lime-washed stables and mended roofs and gutters. For the most part, however, she kept him through her labor at the machine.

Her story was not without its turn of pathos, for it was strange to think of her reading the holy books to him in the long, quiet evenings all the while he despised her for what she had been with a hatred that all the magnanimous examples of religion could not remove.

She was thinking over it all now, and so keenly, for he had just threatened to strike her again. Eighteen years had not removed from his mind the full and bitter realization of her sin.... They were both beginning to grow gray, and her living atonement for what she had been, her son John who was going on for the Church, was in his twentieth year. Would her husband forgive her when he saw John in the garb of a priest? She wondered and wondered.

So deep was she in this thought that she did not notice the entrance of old Marse Prendergast, who lived in a cabin just across the road. Marse was a superannuated shuiler and a terror in the valley. The tears had been summoned to her eyes by the still unchanging quality of Ned's tone. They were at once detected by the old woman.

"Still crying, are ye, Nan Byrne, for Henry Shannon that's dead and gone?"

This was a sore cut, but it was because of its severity that it had been given. Marse Prendergast's method was to attack the person from whom she desired an alms instead of making an approach in fear and trembling.

"Well, what's the use in regretting now that he didn't marry ye after all?... Maybe you could give me a bit of Ned's tobacco for me little pipe, or a few coppers to buy some."

"I will in troth," she said, searching her apron pocket, only to discover that Ned had taken all her spare coppers. She communicated her regrets to the old woman, but her words fell upon ears that doubted.

"Ah-ha, the lie is on your lip yet, Nan Byrne, just as it was there for your poor husband the day he married you, God save us all from harm—you who were what you were before you went away to England. And now the cheek you have to go refuse me the few coppers. Ye think ye're a great one, don't you, with your son at college, and he going on to be a priest. Well, let me tell you that a priest he'll never be, your grand son, John. Ye have the quare nerve to imagine it indeed if you ever think of what happened to your other little son.... Maybe 'tis what ye don't remember that, Nan Bryne.... The poor little thing screeching in the night-time, and some one carrying a box out into the garden in the moonlight, and them digging the hole.... Ah, 'tis well I know all that, Nan Byrne, although you may think yourself very clever and mysterious. And 'tis maybe I'll see you swing for it yet with your refusals and the great annoyance you put me to for the means of a smoke, and I a real ould woman and all. But listen here to me, Nan Byrne! 'Tis maybe to your grand son, John Brennan, I'll be telling the whole story some day!"

CHAPTER II

Her tongue still clacking in soliloquy, Marse Prendergast hobbled out of the house, and Mrs. Brennan went to the small back window of the sewing-room. She gazed wistfully down the long, sloping fields towards the little lake which nestled in the bosom of the valley. Within the periods of acute consciousness which came between her sobs she began to examine the curious edifice of life which housed her soul. An unaccountable, swift power to do this came to her as she saw the place around which she had played as a child, long ago, when she had a brow snow-white and smooth, with nice hair and laughing eyes. Her soul, too, at that time was clean—clean like the water. And she was wont to have glad thoughts of the coming years when she had sprung to girlhood and could wear pretty frocks and bind up her hair. Across her mind had never fallen the faintest shadow of the thing that was to happen to her.

Yet now, as she ran over everything in her mind, she marveled not a little that, although she could not possibly have returned to the perfect innocence of her childhood state, she had triumphed over the blight of certain circumstances to an extraordinary extent. She was surprised to realize that there must have been some strength of character in her not possessed by the other women of the valley. It had been her mother's mark of distinction, but the dead woman had used it towards the achievement of different ends. Ends, too, which had left their mark upon the lives of both her daughters.

It struck her now, with another lash of surprise, that it had been an amazingly cheeky thing to have returned to the valley; but, as the shining waters of the lake led her mind into the quiet ways of contemplation, she could not help thinking that she had triumphed well.

To be living here at all with such a husband, and her son away in England preparing for the priesthood, seemed the very queerest, queerest thing. It was true that she held herself up well and had a fine conceit of herself, if you please. The mothers of the neighborhood had, for the most part, chosen to forget the contamination that might have arisen from sending their daughters to a woman like her for their dresses, and, in consequence, she had been enabled to build up this little business. She asserted herself in the ways of assertion which were open to the dwellers in the valley. She attended to her religious duties with admirable regularity. It was not alone that she fulfilled the obligation of hearing Mass on Sundays and Holydays, but also on many an ordinary morning when there was really no need to be so very pious. She went just to show them that she was passionately devoted to religion. Yet her neighbors never once regarded her in the light of a second Mary Magdalene. They entered into competition with her, it was true, for they could not let it be said that Nan Byrne was more religious than they, and so, between them, they succeeded in degrading the Mysteries. But it was the only way that was open to them of showing off their souls.

On a Sunday morning the procession they formed was like a flock of human crows. And the noise they made was a continual caw of calumny. The one presently absent was set down as the sinner. They were eternally the Pharisees and she the Publican. Mrs. Brennan was great among these crows of calumny. It was her place of power. She could give out an opinion coming home from Mass upon any person at all that would almost take the hearing out of your ears. She effectively beat down the voice of criticism against herself by her sweeping denunciations of all others. It was an unusual method, and resembled that of Marse Prendergast, the shuiler, from whom it may probably have been copied. It led many to form curious estimates as to the exact type of mind possessed by the woman who made use of it. There were some who described it as "thickness," a rather remarkable designation given to a certain quality of temper by the people of the valley. But there was no denying that it had won for her a cumulative series of results which had built up about her something definite and original and placed her resolutely in the life of the valley.

She would often say a thing like this, and it might be taken as a good example of her talk and as throwing a light as well upon the conversation of those with whom she walked home the road from the House of God. A young couple would have done the best thing by marrying at the right age, and these long-married women with the queer minds would be putting before them the very worst prospects. Mrs. Brennan would distinguish herself by saying a characteristic thing:

"Well, if there's quarreling between them, and musha! the same is sure to be, the names they'll call one another won't be very nice for the pedigree is not too clean on either side of the house."

No word of contradiction or comment would come from the others, for this was a morsel too choice to be disdained, seeing that it so perfectly expressed their own thoughts and the most intimate wishes of their hearts. It was when they got home, however, and, during the remaining portion of the Sunday, their happy carnival of destructive gossip, that they would think of asking themselves the question—"What right had Nan Byrne of all people to be thinking of little slips that had happened in the days gone by?" But the unreasonableness of her words never appeared in this light to her own mind. She was self-righteous to an enormous degree, and it was her particular fancy to consider all women as retaining strongly their primal degradation. And yet it was at such a time she remembered, not penitently however, or in terms of abasement, but with a heavy sadness numbing her every faculty. It was her connection with a great sin and her love for her son John which would not become reconciled.

When she returned to the valley with her husband and her young child she had inaugurated her life's dream. Her son John was to be her final justification before the world and, in a most wondrous way, had her dream begun to come true. She had reared him well, and he was so different from Ned Brennan. He was of a kindly disposition and, in the opinion of Master Donnellan, who was well hated by his mother, gave promise of great things. He had passed through the National School in some way that was known only to Mrs. Brennan, to "a grand College in England." He appeared as an extraordinary exception to the breed of the valley, especially when one considered the characters of both his parents.

Mrs. Brennan dearly loved her son, but even here, as in every phase of her life, the curious twist of her nature revealed itself. Hers was a selfish love, for it had mostly to do with the triumph he represented for her before the people of the valley. But this was her dream, and a dream may often become dearer than a child. It was her one sustaining joy, and she could not bear to think of any shadow falling down to darken its grandeur. The least suspicion of a calamity of this kind always had the effect of reducing to ruins the brazen front of the Mrs. Brennan who presented herself to the valley and of giving her a kind of fainting in her very heart.

Her lovely son! She wiped her tear-stained cheeks now with the corner of her black apron, for Farrell McGuinness, the postman, was at the door. He said, "Good-morra, Mrs. Brennan!" and handed her a letter. It was from John, telling her that his summer holidays were almost at hand. It seemed strange that, just now, when she had been thinking of him, this letter should have come.... Well, well, how quickly the time passed, now that the snow had settled upon her hair.

Farrell McGuinness was loitering by the door waiting to have a word with her when she had read her letter.

"I hear Mary Cooney over in Cruckenerega is home from Belfast again. Aye, and that she's shut herself up in a room and not one can see a sight of her. Isn't that quare now? Isn't it, Mrs. Brennan?"

"It's great, isn't it, Farrell? You may be sure there's something the matter with her."

"God bless us now, but wouldn't that be the hard blow to her father and mother and to her little sisters?"

"Arrah musha, between you and me and the wall, the divil a loss. What could she be, anyhow?"

"That's true for you, Mrs. Brennan!"

"Aye, and to think that it was in Belfast, of all places, that it happened. Now, d'ye know what I'm going to tell ye, Farrell? 'Tis the bad, Orange, immoral hole of a place is the same Belfast!"

CHAPTER III

Farrell McGuinness, grinning to himself, had moved away on his red bicycle, and a motor now came towards her in its envelope of dust down the long road of Tullahanogue. This was the first hire motor that had appeared in the village of Garradrimna and was the property of Charlie Clarke, an excellent, religious man, who had interested himself so successfully in bazaars and the charities that he had been thus enabled to purchase it. Its coming amongst them had been a sensational occurrence. If a neighbor wished to flout a neighbor it was done by hiring Clarke's car; and Mrs. Brennan immediately thought what a grand thing it would be to take it on the coming Thursday and make a brave show with her son John sitting up beside her and he dressed in black. The dignity of her son, now moving so near the priesthood, demanded such a demonstration. She hailed Charlie Clarke, and the car came suddenly to a standstill. The petrol fumes mingling with the rising dust of the summer road, floated to her nostrils like some incense of pride.

"Good morning, Mrs. Brennan!"

"Good morning, Mr. Clarke!"

"You're not at the races of Mullaghowen?"

"Not yet, Mrs. Brennan, but I'm going—and with the Houlihans of Clonabroney."

"The Houlihans of Clonabroney, well, well; that's what you might call a quality drive."

"Oh, indeed, 'tis almost exclusively to the quality and to the priests my drives are confined, Mrs. Brennan. I'm not patronized by the beggars of the valley."

"That's right, Mr. Clarke, that's right. Keep your car clean at all costs.... It's what I just stopped you to see if you could drive me over to Kilaconnaghan to meet my son John on Thursday. He's coming home."

"Is that so? Well you may say that's grand, Mrs. Brennan. Oh, indeed, John is the rare credit to you, so he is. You should be proud of him, for 'tis the fine beautiful thing to be going on for the Church. In fact, do ye know what it is, Mrs. Brennan? Only I'm married, I'd be thinking this very minute of giving up motor, shop, land and everything and going into a monastery. I would so."

"Now aren't you the fine, noble-minded man to be thinking of the like?"

"I am so.... Well, I'll drive you, Mrs. Brennan. On Thursday, you say, to Kilaconnaghan. The round trip will cost you fifteen shillings."

"Fifteen shillings?"

Charlie Clarke had already re-started the car which was again humming dustily down the road. Mrs. Brennan turned wearily into the sewing-room and seated herself once more by the machine. She was crushed a little by the thought of the fifteen shillings. She saw clearly before her the long procession of the hours of torture for her eyes that the amount represented. It appeared well that she had not given the few coppers to old Marse Prendergast, for, even as things stood, she must approach some of her customers towards the settlement of small accounts to enable her to spend fifteen shillings in the display of her pride.... For eighteen years it had been thus with her, this continual scraping and worrying about money. She wondered and wondered now was she ever destined to find release from mean tortures. Maybe when her son had become a priest he would be good to his mother? She had known of priests and the relatives of priests, who had grown amazingly rich.

She was recalled from her long reverie by the return of Ned Brennan from Garradrimna. The signs of drink were upon him.

"Where's me dinner?" he said, in a flat, heavy voice.

"Your dinner, is it? Oh dear, dear, 'tis how I never thought of putting it on yet. I had a letter from John, and sure it set me thinking. God knows I'll have it ready for you as soon as I can."

"Aye, John. A letter from John.... Begad.... Begad.... And I wanting me dinner!"

"So you'll have it, so you'll have it. Now aren't you the wild, impatient man? Can't you wait a minute?"

"I never did see such a woman as you, and I in a complete hurry. Three slates slipped down off the school roof in the bit of wind the other night, and I'm after getting instructions from Father O'Keeffe to put them on."

"Ah, sure, 'tis well I know how good and industrious you are, Ned. That's the sixth time this year you've put on the very same slates. You're a good man, indeed, and a fine tradesman."

For the moment his anger was appeased by this ironical compliment, which she did not intend as irony; but at heart he was deeply vexed because he was going to do this little job. She knew he must be talking of it for months to come. When the few shillings it brought him were spent she must give him others and others as a continuous reward for his vast effort. This she must do as a part of her tragic existence, while beholding at the same time how he despised her in his heart.

But, just now, the bitterness of this realization did not assail her with the full power of the outer darkness, for her mind was lit brilliantly to-day by the thought of John. And during the hours that passed after she had fitted out Ned for his adventurous expedition to the roof she could just barely summon up courage to turn the machine, so consumed was she by a great yearning for her son.

The days, until Thursday, seemed to stretch themselves into an age. But at three o'clock, when Charlie Clarke's white motor drew up at the door, she was still preparing for the journey. In the room which had known another aspect of her life she had been adorning herself for long hours. The very best clothes and all the personal ornaments in her possession must needs be brought into use. For it had suddenly appeared to her that she was about to enter into an unique ceremony comparable only to the ordination of John.

Searching in an unfrequented drawer of the dressing-table for hair-pins, she had come upon an old cameo-brooch, one of Henry Shannon's costly presents to her during the period of their strange "honeymoon." It was a pretty thing, so massive and so respectable-looking. It was of that heavy Victorian period to which her story also belonged. With trembling hands she fastened it upon her bosom. In a deeper recess of the drawer she came upon a powder puff in a small round box, which still held some of the aid to beauty remaining dry and useful through all the years. She had once used it to heighten her graces in the eyes of Henry Shannon. And now, for all the blanching trouble through which she had passed, she could not resist the impulses of the light woman in her and use it to assert her pride in her son. It must be a part of her decking-out as she passed through the valley in a motor for the first time, going forth to meet her son.

She took her seat at last by the side of Charlie Clarke, and passed proudly down the valley road. Things might have gone as agreeably as she had planned but for the peculiar religious warp there was in Charlie. He might have talked about the mechanism of his car or remarked at length upon the beauty of the summer day, but he must inevitably twist the conversation in the direction of religion.

"I suppose," said he, "that it's a fine thing to be the mother of a young fellow going on for the Church. It must make you very contented in yourself when you think of all the Masses he will say for you during your lifetime and all the Masses he will say for the repose of your soul when you are dead and gone."

"Aye, indeed, that's a grand and a true saying for you, Mr. Clarke. But sure what else could one expect from you, and yourself the good man that goes to Mass every day?"

"And, Mrs. Brennan, woman dear, to see him saying the Holy Mass, and he having his face shining with the Light of Heaven!"

"A beautiful sight, Mr. Clarke, as sure as you're there."

The car was speeding along merrily, and now it had just passed, with a slight bump, over the culvert of a stream, which here and there was playing musically about little stones, and here and there was like bits of molten silver spitting in the sun. It was a grand day.

Whether or not the unusual sensation of the throbbing car was too much for Mrs. Brennan, she was speaking little although listening eagerly to the words of Charlie Clarke, asking him once or twice to repeat some sentences she had been kept from hearing by the noise of the engine. Now she was growing more and more silent, for they had not yet passed out of the barony of Tullahanogue. She saw many a head suddenly fill many a squinting window, and men and women they met on the road turn round with a sneer to gaze back at her sitting up there beside Charlie Clarke, the saintly chauffeur who went to Mass every day.

Her ears were burning, and into her mind, in powerful battalions, were coming all the thoughts that had just been born in the minds of the others. The powder she had applied to her cheeks was now like a burning sweat upon her skin. The cameo-brooch felt like a great weight where it lay upon her bosom heavily. It caught her breath and so prevented her maintaining conversation with Charlie Clarke. It reminded her insistently of the dear baby head of John reposing, as in a bower of tenderness, upon the same place.

"It must be the grand and blessed thing for a mother to go to confession to her son. Now wouldn't it be wonderful to think of telling him, as the minister of God's mercy, the little faults she had committed before he was born or before she married his father. Now isn't that the queer thought, Mrs. Brennan?"

She did not reply, and it took all she could marshal of self-possession to protect her from tears as the motor hummed into the village of Kilaconnaghan, where the railway station was. They had arrived well in advance of the train's time. She passed through the little waiting-room and looked into the advertisement for Jameson's Whiskey, which was also a mirror. She remembered that it was in this very room she had waited before going away for that disastrous "honeymoon" with Henry Shannon.... This was a better mirror than the one at home, and she saw that the blaze upon her cheeks had already subdued the power of the powder, making it unnecessary and as the merest dirt upon her face.... The cameo-brooch looked so large and gaudy.... She momentarily considered herself not at all unlike some faded women of the pavement she had seen move, like malignant specters, beneath the lamplight in Dublin city.... She plucked away the brooch from her bosom and thrust it into her pocket. Then she wiped her face clean with her handkerchief.

Far off, and as a glad sound coming tentatively to her ears, she could hear the train that was bearing her beloved son home to the valley and to her. It was nearly a year since she last saw him, and she fancied he must have changed so within that space of time. Who knew how he might change towards her some day? This was her constant dread. And now as the increasing noise of the train told that it was drawing nearer she felt immensely lonely.

The few stray passengers who ever came to Kilaconnaghan by the afternoon train had got out, and John Brennan was amongst them. On the journey from Dublin he had occupied a carriage with Myles Shannon, who was the surviving brother of Henry Shannon and the magnate of the valley. The time had passed pleasantly enough, for Mr. Shannon was a well-read, interesting man. He had spoken in an illuminating way of the Great War. He viewed it in the light of a scourge and a just reckoning of calamity that the nations must pay for bad deeds they had done. "It is strange," said he, "that even a nation, just like an individual, must pay its just toll for its sins. It cannot escape, for the punishment is written down with the sin. There is not one of us who may not be made to feel the wide sweep of God's justice in this Great War, even you, my boy, who may think yourself far removed from such a possibility."

These were memorable words, and John Brennan allowed himself to fall into a spell of silence that he might the better ponder them. Looking up suddenly, he caught the other gazing intently at him with a harsh smile upon his face.

So now that they were to part they turned to shake hands.

"Good-by, Mr. Brennan!" said Myles Shannon to the student. "I wish you an enjoyable holiday-time. Maybe you could call over some evening to see my nephew Ulick, my brother Henry's son. He's here on holidays this year for the first time, and he finds the valley uncommonly dull after the delights of Dublin. He's a gay young spark, I can tell you, but students of physic are generally more inclined to be lively than students of divinity."

This he said with a flicker of his harsh smile as they shook hands, and John Brennan thanked him for his kind invitation. Catching sight of Mrs. Brennan, Mr. Shannon said, "Good-day!" coolly and moved out of the station.

To Mrs. Brennan this short conversation on the platform had seemed protracted to a dreadful length. As she beheld it from a little distance a kind of desolation had leaped up to destroy the lovely day. It compelled her to feel a kind of hurt that her son should have chosen to expend the few first seconds of his home-coming in talking, of all people, to one of the Shannon family. But he was a young gentleman and must, of course, show off his courtesy and nice manners. And he did not know.... But Myles Shannon knew.... His cool "Good-day!" to her as he moved out of the station appeared to her delicate sensitiveness of the moment as an exhibition of his knowledge. Immediately she felt that she must warn John against the Shannons.

He came towards her at last, a thin young man in black, wearing cheap spectacles. He looked tenderly upon the woman who had borne him. She embraced him and entered into a state of rapt admiration. Within the wonder of his presence she was as one translated, her sad thoughts began to fall from her one by one. On the platform of this dusty wayside station in Ireland she became a part of the glory of motherhood as she stood there looking with pride upon her son.

The motor had surprised him. He would have been better pleased if this expense had been avoided, for he was not without knowledge and appreciation of the condition of his parents' affairs. Besides the little donkey and trap had always appeared so welcome in their simplicity, and it was by means of them that all his former home-comings had been effected. Those easy voyages had afforded opportunity for contemplation upon the splendor of the fields, but now the fields seemed to slip past as if annoyed by their faithlessness. Yet he knew that his mother had done this thing to please him, and how could he find it in his heart to be displeased with her?

She was speaking kind words to him, which were being rudely destroyed, in their tender intonation, by the noise of the engine. She was setting forth the reasons why she had taken the car. It was the right thing now around Garradrimna.—The Houlihans of Clonabroney.—Again the changing of the gears cut short her explanation.

"That man who was down with you in the train, Mr. Shannon, what was he saying to you?"

"Indeed he was kindly inviting me over to see his nephew. I never knew he had a nephew, but it seems he has lived up in Dublin. He said that his brother, Henry Shannon, was the father of this young man."

The feelings which her son's words brought rushing into her mind seemed to cloud out all the brightness which, for her, had again returned to the day. Yes, this young man, this Ulick Shannon, was the son of Henry Shannon and Henry Shannon was the one who had brought the great darkness into her life.... It would be queer, she thought, beyond all the queerness of the world, to see the son of that man and her son walking together through the valley. The things that must be said of them, the terrible sneer by which they would be surrounded—Henry Shannon's son and the son of Nan Byrne.... She grew so silent beneath the sorrow of her vision that, even in the less noisy spaces of the humming car, the amount of time during which she did not speak seemed a great while.

"What is the matter, mother?" said John Brennan.

"It was how I was thinking that maybe it would be better now if you had nothing to do with the Shannons."

"But it was very kind of Mr. Shannon to invite me."

"I know, I know; but I'd rather than the world it was any other family at all only the Shannons. They're a curious clan."

In the painful silence that had come upon them she too was thinking of the reasons from which her words had sprung. Of how Henry Shannon had failed to marry her after he had ruined her; of how the disgrace had done no harm at all to him with his money and his fine farm. Then there was the burning thought of how he had married Grace Gogarty, the proudest and grandest girl in the whole parish, and of how this young man had been born prematurely and, by a curious chance, about the same time as her own little child. The one thing that she always dreaded more than any other, in the pain of its remembrance, was the fact that Henry Shannon had married Grace Gogarty directly after the "honeymoon" with her in Dublin. Yes, it was hardest of all to think of that, and of how Grace Gogarty had so held up her head all through the short period of her wedded life with Henry Shannon. And after his death she had gone about with such conceited sorrowfulness in her widow's weeds.

These thoughts had passed through her mind with swift definition, each one cutting deeper the gap which separated her from the long-dreamt-of joy of John's home-coming. And her lovely son sitting up beside her had grown so silent.

As the car stopped by the house and Ned Brennan came out to meet them, unshaven and walking doggedly, she felt very certain that a shadow had settled down upon this particular return of John. The remembrance of her sin, from which it seemed impossible to escape, made the great thing she had planned so little and desolate.

CHAPTER IV

There arose a continual coming and going of John Brennan to and from the house of his mother through the valley. He was an object of curiosity and conjecture. The windows would squint at him as he went past through power of the leering faces behind; men working in the fields would run to the hedges and gaze after him as he went far down the road.

In the evenings black prophets would foregather and say: "Now isn't he the fine-looking young fellow indeed, with the grand black clothes upon him; but he'll never be a priest, and that's as sure as you're there, for his mother is Nan Byrne, and she was a bad woman, God help us all! 'Tis a pity of him, when you come to think of it, for it isn't his fault, happening as it did before he was born."

John Brennan was innocent of guile, and so he did not become aware of the attitude of those among whom he passed. He did not realize that in his own person he stood as an affront to them, that he was the Levite standing nearer God than they in their crude condition as clods of the earth. It was his mother who had created this position for him, for she had directed his studies towards divinity. If his natural abilities had won him the promise of any other elevation, it might not have annoyed them so deeply. But this was something they could not have been expected to bear, for not one amongst them had a son a priest, although they believed as implicitly as Mrs. Brennan in the virtue of religion, and there was always a feeling of intense righteousness upon them when they remembered her story.

Yet, although this was the way they looked upon him, they were not without a certain cringing respect for the realization he represented. Thus it was that when they spoke to him there was a touch of deference in their voices although there was a sneer in their hearts. It could not be expected that he should see them as they really were. Yet there were odd, great moments when his larger vision enabled him to behold them moving infinitesimally, in affright, beneath the shadow of the Divine Hand. He possessed a certain gift of observation, but it was superficial and of little consequence to his character for it flourished side by side with the large charity of his heart.

One morning he encountered old Marse Prendergast upon the road. She was gathering a few green sticks from the hedge-rows. She seemed to be always looking for the means of a fire, and, to John Brennan, there appeared something that touched him greatly in the spectacle of this whining old woman, from whom the spark of life was so quickly fading, having no comfort, even on a summer day, but just to be sitting over a few smoldering sticks, sucking at an old black pipe and breaking out into occasional converse with herself. She who had given birth to strong sons and lovely daughters sitting here in her little cabin alone. Her clutch was gone from her to America, to the streets, and to the grave.

John Brennan felt the pity of her, although he did not notice that the curtsey she gave him from the ditch was an essential portion of her contempt for the son of Nan Byrne (the cheek of him going on for to be a priest!), or that when she addressed him as Mr. Brennan it was in derision.

"And glory be to God, sure we'll soon have to be calling you Father Brennan!" she repeated, as if silently marveling at the impossibility of the combination of words.

He saw her move to accompany him down the road, her old back bent cruelly beneath the load of the weighty, green branches. He was touched, for he was not blind to the symbolism for which she stood, and offered to carry the branches for her, and she, accepting his offer, called down upon his head the blessing of God.

As they moved slowly along the road she recounted, in snatches between her questions regarding his life at college, all the intimate woes of her life. Her lamentations, as they drew near the cottage of Mrs. Brennan, attracted the attention of his mother, who saw a sight filling her eyes which cut her to the bone. She saw her son John, her hope and pride, conversing with Marse Prendergast, the long-tongued shuiler who tramped the country with her stories and in quest of more stories—Marse Prendergast who knew her secret as no other knew it, and who had so recently reminded her of that knowledge. And he was carrying her sticks along the public road in the full light of day.... So powerful was the hurt of her maternal feelings that she almost fainted sitting there by her machine.

When John came into the room she looked so pale that he fancied she must be ill. He inquired as to the causes of her condition, but she only replied that she would try to tell him when he had taken his breakfast.

As he was eating in silence she wondered what at all she could say to him or how she would attempt to place her view of things before him. This incident of the morning might be taken as a direct foreshadowing of what might happen if his foolish charity extended further down the valley. She did not dare to imagine what things he might be told or what stories might be suggested to his mind by the talk of the neighbors. But it was clearly her duty doubly to protect him from such a possibility. She saw that he had finished his breakfast.

"That was the quare thing you were doing just now, John? It was the quarest thing at all, so it was."

"Queer, mother; what was?"

"Talking to old Marse Prendergast, son, and she only a woman of the roads with a bad tongue on her."

"I only stopped talking with her, mother, so that I might carry her sticks. She was not able."

"And she used the fine opportunity, I'll warrant, to drag information out of you and carry it all through the valley. That's what she was at! That's what she was at!"

There was a kind of mournful wail in Mrs. Brennan's tones as if she saw in John's action of the morning some irretrievable distance placed between herself and him. The people of the valley loomed ever great as an army between her and the desire of her heart, and John had just now, as it were, afforded an opening to the enemy.

He received a certain amount of hurt from her words, for although he knew her only as his mother and a good woman who was well nigh faultless in her practise of the Christian religion, why was it that this simple action of his, with its slight touch of charity, was resented by her? Yet he allowed her to proceed without question, listening always with that high and fine attention which must have been the attitude of Christ as He listened to His Mother in Galilee.

She painted a picture of the valley for his consideration. She proceeded to do this with a great concern moving her, for she was quick to perceive the change in him since his last holidays. He was a man now, and it was to his manhood condition she appealed. She began to tell him, with such a rush of words, the life-histories of those around him. There was not a slight detail she did not go to great pains to enlarge, no skeleton she did not cause to jump from its cupboard and run alive once more through the valley. She painted a new portrait of every inhabitant in a way that amazed John, who had not known of such things.

But over his first feelings of surprise came a great realization of sadness. For this was his mother who was speaking. Hitherto he had looked upon her as one untouched by the clayey villainies of earth, a patient and very noble woman, with tired eyes and busy hands rather fashioned to confer benedictions than waste themselves in labor. Now he was listening to one most subtly different, to a woman who had been suddenly metamorphosed into the likeness of something primeval and startling. And she was oh! so bitter.

Mrs. Brennan had no notion of the change that had come upon her. To herself there still appeared no difference in herself. She was doing all this for love of her son John, as she had done much for love of him.

There fell a thick silence between them when she had finished. The mother and the son were both exhausted, he from listening to her and she from reading the pedigrees of every one to whom her mind could possibly extend, including Marse Prendergast, the shuiler, and the Shannons, who were almost gentlemen like the Houlihans of Clonabroney.

John Brennan sighed as he said out of the innocence of his heart:

"It is good, mother, that we are not as the rest of these."

Mrs. Brennan did not reply.

CHAPTER V

In rural Ireland the "bona-fide," or rather mala-fide, traveler constitutes a certain blasphemous aspect in the celebration of the Sabbath. There are different types of "bona-fide," whose characteristics may be said to vary in direct proportion to their love and enthusiasm for porter. The worship of porter, when it has attained the proportions of a perfect passion, is best described as "the pursuit of porter in a can." It is the cause of many drunken skirmishes with the law, and it is interesting to observe such mistaken heroes in the execution of their plans.

At a given signal a sudden descent is made upon a pub. A series of whistles from sentries in various parts of the village has announced the arrival of the propitious moment. A big tin'can is the only visible evidence of their dark intention. One almost forgets its betraying presence in the whirling moment of the brave deed. Then the deed is done. By some extraordinary process the can that was empty is found to be filled. It is the miracle of the porter.... When the sergeant and his colleagues come on the scene some hours later, an empty can with slight traces of froth upon the sides, "like beaded bubbles winking at the brim," constitutes the remaining flimsy evidence of the great thing that has happened.

The mind of John Brennan was more or less foreign to this aspect of life amongst the fields. He would be the very last to realize that such were essential happenings in the life of his native village of Garradrimna. On his first Sunday at home he went walking, after second Mass, through the green woods which were the western boundary of the village. His thoughts were dwelling upon Father O'Keeffe's material interpretation of the Gospel story. At last they eddied into rest as he moved there along the bright path between the tall trees, so quiet as with adoration.

When he came by that portion of the demesne wall, which lay at the back of Brannagan's public-house, he heard a scurrying of rabbits among the undergrowth. In the sudden hush which followed he heard a familiar voice raised in a tense whisper.

"Hurry, quick! quick! There's some one in black coming up the path. It must be Sergeant McGoldrick. The can! the can!"

His cheeks were suddenly flushed by a feeling of shame, for it was his father who had spoken. He stood behind a wide beech tree in mere confusion and not that he desired to see what was going forward.

His father, Ned Brennan, bent down like an acrobat across the demesne wall and took the can from some one beneath. Then he ran down through the undergrowth, the brown froth of the porter dashing out upon his trousers, his quick eyes darting hither and thither like those of a frightened animal. But he did not catch sight of John, who saw him raise the can to his lips.

It was a new experience for John Brennan to see his father thus spending the Sabbath in this dark place in the woods, while out in the young summer day spilled and surged all the wonder of the world.... A sort of pity claimed possession of him as he took a different way among the cathedral trees.... His father was the queer man, queer surely, and moving lonely in his life. He was not the intimate of his son nor of the woman who was his son's mother. He had never seemed greatly concerned to do things towards the respect and honor of that woman. And yet John Brennan could not forget that he was his father.

Just now another incident came to divert his mood. He encountered an ancient dryad flitting through the woods. This was Padna Padna, a famous character in Garradrimna. For all his name was that of the great apostle of his country, his affinities were pagan. Although he was eighty, he got drunk every day and never went to Mass. In his early days he had been the proprietor of a little place and the owner of a hackney car. When the posting business fell into decline, he had had to sell the little place and the horse and car, and the purchase money had been left for his support with a distant relative in the village. He was a striking figure as he moved abroad in the disguise of a cleric not altogether devoted to the service of God. He always dressed in solemn black, and his coat was longer than that of a civilian. His great hat gave him a downcast look, as of one who has peered into the Mysteries. His face was wasted and small, and this, with his partially blinded eyes behind the sixpenny spectacles, gave him a certain asceticism of look. Yet it was the way he carried himself rather than his general aspect which created this impression of him. He was very small, and shrinking daily. His eyes were always dwelling upon his little boots in meditation. Were you unaware of his real, character, you might foolishly imagine that he was thinking of high, immortal things, but he was in reality thinking of drink.

This was his daily program. He got up early and, on most mornings, crossed the street to Bartle Donohoe, the village barber, for a shave. Bartle would be waiting for him, his dark eye hanging critically as he tested the razor edge against the skin of his thumb. The little blade would be glinting in the sunlight.... Sometimes Bartle would become possessed of the thought that the morning might come when, after an unusually hard carouse on the previous night, he would not be responsible for all his razor might do, that it might suddenly leap out of his shivering hand and make a shocking end of Padna Padna and all his tyranny.... But his reputation as the drunkard with the steadiest hand in Garradrimna had to be maintained. If he did not shave Padna Padna the fact would be published in every house.

"Bartle Donohoe was too shaky to shave me this morning; too shaky, I say. Ah, he's going wrong, going wrong! And will ye tell me this now? How is it that if ye buy a clock, a little ordinary clock for a couple of shillings, and give it an odd wind, it'll go right; but a man, a great, clever man'll go wrong no matter what way ye strive for to manage him?"

If Bartle shaved him, Padna Padna would take his barber over to Tommy Williams's to give him a drink, which was the only payment he ever expected. After this, his first one, Padna Padna would say, "Not going to drink any more to-day," to which Bartle Donohoe would reply sententiously: "D'ye tell me so? Well, well! Is that a fact?"

Then, directly, he would proceed to take a little walk before his breakfast, calling at every house of entertainment and referring distantly to the fact that Bartle Donohoe had a shake in his hand this morning. "A shame for him, and he an only son and all!"

And thus did he spend the days of his latter end, pacing the sidewalks of Garradrimna, entering blindly into pubs and discussing the habits of every one save himself.

He was great in the field of reminiscence.

"Be the Holy Farmer!" he would say, "but there's no drinking nowadays tost what used to be longo. There's no decent fellows, and that's a fact. Ah, they were the decent fellows longo. You couldn't go driving them a place but they'd all come home mad. And sure I often didn't know where I'd be driving them, I'd be that bloody drunk. Aye, decent fellows! Sure they're all dead now through the power and the passion of drink."

So this was the one whom John Brennan now encountered amid the green beauty of the woodland places. To him Padna Padna was one of the immortals. Succeeding holiday after succeeding holiday had he met the ancient man, fading surely but never wholly declining or disappearing. The impulse which had prompted him to speak to Marse Prendergast a few days previously now made him say: "How are you, old man?" to Padna Padna.

The venerable drunkard, by way of immediate reply, tapped upon his lips with his fingers and then blew upon his fingers and whistled in cogitation. It was with his ears that he saw, and he possessed an amazing faculty for distinguishing between the different voices of different people.

"John Brennan!" he at length exclaimed, in his high, thin voice. "Is that John Brennan?"

"It is, the very one."

"And how are ye, John?"

"Very well, indeed, Padna. How are you?"

"Poorly only. Ah, John, this is the hard day on me always, the Sunday. I declare to me God I detest Sunday. Here am I marching through the woods since seven and I having no drink whatever. That cursed Sergeant McGoldrick! May he have a tongue upon him some day the color of an ould brick and he in the seventh cavern of Hell! Did ye see Ned?"

The sudden and tense question was not immediately intelligible to John Brennan. There were so many of the name about Garradrimna. Padna Padna pranced impatiently as he waited for an answer.

"Ah, is it letting on you are that you don't know who I mean, and you with your grand ecclesiastical learning and all to that. 'Tis your own father, Ned Brennan, that I mean. I was in a 'join' with him to get a can out of Brannigan's. Mebbe you didn't see him anywhere down through the wood, for I have an idea that he's going to swindle me. Did ye see him, I'm asking you?"

Even still John did not reply, for something seemed to have caught him by the throat and was robbing him of the power of speech. The valley, with its vast malevolence of which his mother had so recently warned him, was now driving him to say something which was not true.

"No, Padna, I did not see him!" he at last managed to jerk out.

"Mebbe he didn't manage to get me drink for me yet, and mebbe he did get it and is after drinking it somewhere in the shadows of the trees where he couldn't be seen. But what am I saying at all? Sure if he was drinking it there before me, where you're standing, I couldn't see him, me eyes is that bad. Isn't it the poor and the hard case to be blinded to such an extent?"

John Brennan felt no pity, so horrible was the expression that now struggled into those dimming eyes. He thought of a puzzling fact of his parentage. Why was it that his mother had never been able to save his father from the ways of degradation into which he had fallen, the low companions, the destruction of the valley; from all of which to even the smallest extent she was now so anxious to save her son?

Padna Padna was still blowing upon his fingers and regretting:

"Now isn't it the poor and the hard case that there's no decent fellows left in the world at all. To think that I can meet never a one now, me that spent so much of me life driving decent fellows, driving, driving. John, do ye know what it is now? You're after putting me in mind of Henry Shannon. He was the decentest fellow! Many's the time I drove him down to your grandmother's place when he wouldn't have a foot under him to leave Garradrimna. That was when your mother was a young girl, John. Hee, hee, hee!"

John could not divine the reasons for the old man's glee, nor did he perceive that the mind of Padna Padna, even in the darkening stages of its end, was being lit by a horrible sneer at him and the very fact of his existence. Instead he grew to feel rather a stir of compassion for this old man, with his shattered conception of happiness such as it was, burning his mind with memories while he rode down so queerly to the grave.

As he moved away through the long, peaceful aisles of the trees, his soul was filled with gray questioning because of what he had just seen of his father and because of the distant connection of his mother with the incident. Why was it at all that his mother had never been able to save his father?

As he emerged from the last circle of the woods there seemed to be a shadow falling low over the fields. He went with no eagerness towards the house of his mother. This was Sunday, and it was her custom to spend a large portion of the Sabbath in speaking of her neighbors. But she would never say anything about his father, even though Ned Brennan would not be in the house.

CHAPTER VI

Just now there happened something of such unusual importance in the valley that Mrs. Brennan became excited about it. The assistant teacher of Tullahanogue Girls' School, Miss Mary Jane O'Donovan, had left, and a new assistant was coming in her stead. Miss O'Donovan had always given the making of her things to Mrs. Brennan, so she spoke of her, now that she was gone, as having been "a very nice girl." Just yet, of course, she was not in a position to say as much about the girl who was coming. But the entry of a new person into the life of the valley was a great event! Such new things could be said!

On Monday morning Mrs. Brennan called her son into the sewing-room to describe the imminent nature of the event. The sense of depression that had come upon him during the previous day did not become averted as he listened.

What an extraordinary mixture this woman who was his mother now appeared before his eyes! And yet he could not question her in any action or in any speech; she was his mother, and so everything that fell from her must be taken in a mood of noble and respectful acceptance. But she was without charity, and as he saw her in this guise he was compelled to think of his father and the incident of yesterday, and he could not help wondering. He suddenly realized that what was happening presently in this room was happening in every house down the valley. Even before her coming she was being condemned. It was beneath the shadow of this already created cloud she would have to live and move and earn her little living in the schoolhouse of Tullahanogue. John Brennan began to have some pity for the girl.

Ned Brennan now appeared at the door leading to the kitchen and beckoned to his wife. She went at his calling, and John noticed that at her return some part of her had fallen away. His father went from the house whistling at a pitch that was touched with delight.

"Where is my father bound for?"

"He's gone to Garradrimna, John, to order lead for the roof of the school. The valley behind the chimney is leaking again and he has to cobble it. 'Tis the great bother he gets with that roof, whatever sort it is. Isn't it a wonder now that Father O'Keeffe wouldn't put a new one on it, and all the money he gets so handy ...?"

"My father seems to be always at that roof. He used to be at it when I was going to school there."

The words of her son came to Mrs. Brennan's ears with a sound of sad complaint. It caused her to glimpse momentarily all the villainy of Ned Brennan towards her through all the years, and of how she had borne it for the sake of John. And here was John before her now becoming reverently magnified in that part of her mind which was a melting tenderness. It was him she must now save from the valley which had ruined her man. Thus was she fearful again and the heart within her caused to become troubled and to rush to and fro in her breast like rushing water. Then, as if her whole will was sped by some fearful ecstasy, she went on to talk in her accustomed way of every one around her, including the stranger who had not yet come to the valley.

It was on the evening of this day that Rebecca Kerr, the new assistant teacher, came through the village of Garradrimna to the valley of Tullahanogue. Paddy McCann drove McDermott's hackney car down past the old castle of the De Lacys. It carried her as passenger from Mullaghowen, with her battered trunk strapped over the well. The group of spitting idlers crowding around Brannagan's loudly asserted so much as Paddy McCann and his cargo loomed out of the shadows beneath the old castle and swung into the amazing realities of the village. It was just past ten o'clock and the mean place now lay amid the enclosing twilight. The conjunctive thirsts for drink and gossip which come at this hour had attacked the ejected topers, and their tongues began to water about the morsel now placed before them.

A new schoolmistress, well, well! Didn't they change them shocking often in Tullahanogue? And quare-looking things they were too, every one of them. And here was another one, not much to look at either. They said this as she came past. And what was her name? "Kerr is her name!" said some one who had heard it from the very lips of Father O'Keeffe himself.

"Rebecca Kerr is her name," affirmed Farrell McGuinness, who had just left a letter for her at the Presbytery.

"Rebecca what? Kerr—Kerr—Kerr, is it?" sputtered Padna Padna; "what for wouldn't it be Carr now, just common and simple? But of course Kerr has a ring of the quality about it. Kerr, be God!"

These were the oracles of Garradrimna who were now speaking of her thus. But she had no thought of them at all as she glanced hurriedly at the shops and puzzled her brains to guess where the best draper's shop might be. She had a vague, wondering notion as to where she might get all those little things so necessary for a girl. She had a fleeting glimpse of herself standing outside one of those worn counters she was very certain existed somewhere in the village, talking ever so much talk with the faded girl who dispensed the vanities of other days, or else exchanging mild confidences with the vulgar and ample mistress of the shop, who was sure to be always floating about the place immensely. Yes, just there was the very shop with its brave selection from the fashions of yester-year in the fly-blown windows.

And there was the Post Office through which her letters to link her with the outer world would come and go. She quickly figured the old bespectacled postmistress, already blinded partially, and bent from constant, anxious scrutiny, poring exultantly over the first letters that might be sent to "Miss Rebecca Kerr," and examining the postmark. Then the quality and gender of the writing, and being finally troubled exceedingly as to the person it could have come from—sister, mother, brother, father, friend, or "boy." Even although the tall candles of Romance had long since guttered and gone out amid the ashes of her mind the assaulting suspicion that it was from "a boy" would drive her to turn the letter in her hand and take a look at the flap. Then the temptation that was a part of her life would prove too strong for her and a look of longing would come into the dull eyes as she went hobbling into the kitchen to place it over the boiling kettle and so embark it upon its steamy voyage to discovery. In a few minutes she would be reading it, her hands trembling as she chuckled in her obscene glee at all the noble sentiments it might contain. The subsequent return of the letter to the envelope after the addition of some gum from a penny bottle if the old sticking did not suffice. Her interludiary sigh of satisfaction when she remembered that one could re-stick so many opened envelopes with a penny bottle of gum by using it economically. The inevitable result of this examination, a superior look of wisdom upon the withered face when the new schoolmistress, Rebecca Kerr, came for the first time into the office to ask for a letter from her love.... But so far in her life she had formed no deep attachment.

It was thus and thus that Rebecca Kerr ran through her mind a few immediate sketchy realizations of this village in Ireland. She had lived in others, and this one could not be so very different.... There now was the butcher's stall, kept filthily, where she might buy her bit of beef or mutton occasionally. She caught a glimpse of the victualler standing with his dirty wife amid the strong-smelling meat. The name above the door was that of the publichouse immediately beside it. A little further on, upon the same side, was the newsagent's and stationer's, where they sold sweets and everything. It was here she might buy her notepaper to write to her own people in Donegal, or else to some of her college friends with whom she still kept up a correspondence. And here also she might treat herself, on rare occasions, to a box of cheap chocolates, or to some of the injurious, colored sweets which always gave her the toothache, presenting the most of them, perhaps, to some child to whom she had taken a fancy.

By little bits like these, which formed a series of flashes, she saw some aspects of the life she might lead here. Each separate flash left something of an impression before it went out of her mind.

The jingling car swung on past the various groups upon the street, each group twisting its head as one man to observe the spectacle of her passing. "That's the new schoolmistress!" "There she is, begad!" "I heard Paddy McCann saying she was coming this evening!" She was now in line with the famous house of Tommy Williams, the gombeen-man. She knew from the look of it that it was here she must buy her few groceries, for this was the principal house in Garradrimna and, even so far as she, the octopus of Gombeenism was sure to extend itself. To be sure, the gombeen-man would be the father of a family, for it is the clear duty of such pillars of the community to rear up a long string of patriots. If those children happened to be of school-going age, it was certain they would not be sent to even the most convenient school unless the teachers dealt in the shop. This is how gombeenism is made to exercise control over National Education. Anyhow Rebecca Kerr was very certain that she must enter the various-smelling shop to discuss the children with the gombeen-man's wife.

It was indeed a dreary kind of life that she would be compelled to lead in this place, and, as she passed the pretty chapel, which seemed to stand up in the sight of Heaven as excuse for the affront that was Garradrimna, she had a strange notion how she must go there sometimes to find respite from the relentless crush of it all. On bitter evenings, when her mind should ring with the mean tumults of the life around her, it was there only she might go and, slipping in through the dim vestibule where there were many mortuary cards to remind her of all the dead, she would walk quickly to the last pew and, bending her throbbing head, pour out her soul in prayer with the aid of her little mother-of-pearl rosary.... They had gone a short distance past the chapel and along the white road towards the valley.

"This is the place," said Paddy McCann.

She got down from the car wearily, and McCann carried her battered trunk into the house of Sergeant McGoldrick which had been assigned as her lodging by Father O'Keeffe. He emerged with a leer of expectation upon his countenance, and she gave him a shilling from her little possessions. At the door she was compelled to introduce herself.

"So you are the new teacher. Well, begad! The missus is up in the village. Come in. Begad!"

He stood there, a big, ungainly man, at his own door as he gave the invitation, a squalling baby in his arms, and in went Rebecca Kerr, into the sitting-room where Mrs. McGoldrick made clothes for the children. The sergeant proceeded to do his best to be entertaining. She knew the tribe. He remained smoking his great black pipe and punctuated the squalls of the baby by spitting huge volumes of saliva which hit the fender with dull thuds.

"It's a grand evening in the country," said Sergeant McGoldrick.

"Yes, a nice evening surely," said Rebecca Kerr.

"Oh, it was a grand, lovely day in the country, the day. I was out in the country all through the day. I was collecting the census of the crops, so I was; a difficult and a critical job, I can tell you!"

With an air of pride he took down the books of lists and showed her the columns of names and particulars.... It was stupidly simple. Yet here was this hulk of a man expanding his chest because of his childish achievement. He had even stopped smoking and spitting to give space to his own amazement, and the baby had ceased mewling to marvel in infantile wonder at the spacious cleverness of her da.

After nearly half an hour of this performance Mrs. McGoldrick bustled into the room. She was a coarse-looking woman, whose manner had evidently been made even more harsh by the severe segregation to which the wives of policemen are subjected. Her voice was loud and unmusical, and it appeared to Rebecca from the very first that not even the appalling cleverness of her husband was a barrier to her strong government of her own house. The sergeant disappeared immediately, taking the baby with him, and left the women to their own company. Mrs. McGoldrick had seen the battered, many-corded trunk in the hall-way, and she now made a remark which was, perhaps, natural enough for a woman:

"You haven't much luggage anyway!" was what she said.

"No!" replied Rebecca dully.

Then she allowed her head to droop for what seemed a long while, during all of which she was acutely conscious that the woman by her side was staring at her, forming impressions of her, summing her up.

"I don't think you're as tall as Miss O'Donovan was, and you haven't as nice hair!"

Rebecca made no comment of any kind upon this candor, but now that the way had been opened Mrs. McGoldrick poured out a flood of information regarding the late assistant of the valley school. She was reduced to little pieces and, as it were, cremated in the furnace of this woman's mind until tiny specks of the ashes of her floated about and danced and scintillated before the tired eyes of Rebecca Kerr.

As the heavier dusk of the short, warm night began to creep into the little room her soul sank slowly lower. She was hungry now and lonely. In the mildest way she distantly suggested a cup of tea, but Mrs. McGoldrick at once resented this uncalled-for disturbance of her harangue by bringing out what was probably meant to be taken as the one admirable point in the other girl's character.

"Miss O'Donovan used always get her own tea."

But the desolating silence of Rebecca at length drove her towards the kitchen, and she returned, after what seemed an endless period, with some greasy-looking bread, a cup without a handle, and a teapot from which the tea dribbled in agony on to the tablecloth through a wound in its side.

The sickening taste of the stuff that came out of the teapot only added to Rebecca's sinking feeling. Her thoughts crept ever downward.... At last there came a blessed desire for sleep-sleep and forgetfulness of this day and the morrow. Her head was already beginning to spin as she inquired for her room.

"Your room?" exclaimed Mrs. McGoldrick in harsh surprise. "Why, 'tis upstairs. There's only two rooms there, myself and the sergeant's and the lodger's room—that's yours. I hadn't time this week back to make the bed since Miss O'Donovan left, but of course you'll do that for yourself. The sergeant is gone up to the barracks, so I'll have to help you carry up your box, as I suppose you'll be wanting to get out some of your things."

It was a cruelly hard job getting the trunk up the steep staircase, but between them they managed it. Rebecca was not disappointed by the bare, ugly room. Mrs. McGoldrick closed the door behind them and stood in an attitude of expectation. Even in the present dull state of her mind Rebecca saw that her landlady was, with tense curiosity, awaiting the opening of the box which held her poor belongings.... Then something of the combative, selfish attitude of the woman to her kind stirred within her, and she bravely resolved to fight, for a short space, this prying woman who was trying to torment her soul.

She looked at the untidied bed with the well-used sheets.... What matter? It was only the place whereon the body of another poor tortured creature like herself had lain. She would bear with this outrage against her natural delicacy.

In perfect silence she took off her skirt and blouse and corset. She let fall her long, heavy hair and, before the broken looking-glass, began to dally wearily with its luxuriance. This hair was very fair and priceless, and it was hers who had not great possessions. Her shining neck and blossomy breasts showed as a pattern in ivory against the background that it made.... Some man, she thought, would like to see her now and love her maybe. Beyond this vision of herself she could see the ugly, anxious face of the woman behind her. She could feel the discord of that woman's thoughts with the wandering strands of withering hair.

No word had passed between them since they came together into the room, and Mrs. McGoldrick, retreating from the situation which had been created, left with abruptness, closing the door loudly behind her.

With as much haste as she could summon, Rebecca took off her shoes and got her night-gown out of the trunk. Then she threw herself into the bed. She put out the light and fumbled in her faded vanity bag for her little mother-of-pearl rosary. There was a strange excitement upon her, even in the final moments of her escape, and soon a portion of her pillow was wet with tears. Between loud sobs arose the sound of her prayers ascending:

"Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.... Hail, Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou.... Hail, Mary, full of grace...."

CHAPTER VII

At tea-time Mrs. Brennan was still talking to John of the girl who was coming to the valley. Outside the day was still full of the calm glory of summer. He went to the window and looked down upon the clean, blue stretch of the little lake.... He had grown weary of his mother's talk. What possible interest could he have in this unknown girl? He took a book from a parcel on the table. With this volume in his hand and reading it, as he might his breviary at some future time, he went out and down towards the lake. On his way, he met a few men moving to and from their tasks in the fields. He bade them the time of day and spoke about the beauty of the afternoon. As they replied, a curious kind of smile played around their lips, and there was not one who failed to notice his enviable condition of idleness.

"Indeed 'tis you that has the fine times!" "Indeed you might say 'tis you that has the fine times!" "Now isn't the learning the grand thing, to say that when you have it in your head you need never do a turn with your hands?"

Their petty comments had the effect of filling him with a distracting sense of irritation, and it was some time before he could pick up any continued interest in the book. It was the story of a young priest, such as he might expect to be in a few years. Suddenly it appeared remarkable that he should be reading this foreshadowing of his future. That he should be seeing himself with all his ideas translated into reality and his training changed into the work for which he had been trained. Strange that this thought should have come into his mind with smashing force here now and at this very time. Hitherto his future had appeared as a thing apart from him, but now it seemed intimately bound up with everything he could possibly do.

He began to see very clearly for the first time the reason for his mother's anxiety to keep him apart from the life of the valley. Did it spring directly from her love for him, or was it merely selfish and contributory to her pride? The whole burden of her talk showed clearly that she was a proud woman. He could never come to have her way of looking at things, and so he now felt that if he became a priest it was she and not himself who would have triumphed.... He was still reading the book, but it was in a confused way and with little attention. The threads of the story had become entangled somehow with the threads of his own story.... Occasionally his own personality would cease to dominate it, and the lonely woman in the cottage, his mother sitting in silence at her machine, would become the principal character.... The hours went past him as he pondered.

The evening shadows had begun to steal down from the hills. The western sky was like the color of a golden chalice. Men were coming home weary from the labor of the fields; cows were moving towards field gates with wise looks in their eyes to await the milking; the young calves were lowing for their evening meal. The quiet fir trees, which had slept all through the day, now seemed to think of some forgotten trust and were like vigilant sentries all down through the valley of Tullahanogue.

Suddenly the eyes of John Brennan were held by a splendid picture. The sweep of the Hill of Annus lay outlined in all the wonder of its curve, and, on the ridge of it, moving with humped body, was Shamesy Golliher, the most famous drunkard of the valley. He passed like a figure of destruction above the valley against the sunset. John smiled, for he remembered him and his habits, as both were known far and wide. He was now going towards a certain wood where the rabbits were plentiful. His snares were set there. The thin, pitiful cry of the entrapped creature now split the stillness, and the man upon the sweep of the world began to move with a more determined stride.... John Brennan, his mind quickening towards remembrance of incidents of his boyhood, knew that the cunning of Shamesy Golliher had triumphed over the cunning of the rabbits. Their hot little eager bodies must soon be sold for eightpence apiece and the money spent on porter in Garradrimna. It was strange to think of this being the ultimate fate of the rabbits that had once frisked so innocently over the green spaces of the woods.... He listened, with a slight turn of regret stirring him, until the last squeal had been absorbed by the stillness. Then he arose and prepared to move away from the lake. He was being filled by a deadly feeling of sadness. Hitherto the continuous adventure of adolescence had sustained him, but now he was a man and thinking of his future.

On his way across the sweep of the hill he encountered Shamesy Golliher. The famous drunkard was laden with the rabbits he had just taken from the snares. The strength of his thirst had also begun to attack him, so that by reason of both defects his legs now bent under him weakly as he walked. Yet his attitude did not suggest defeat, for he had never failed to maintain his reputation in the valley. He was the local bard, the satiric poet of the neighborhood. He was the only inhabitant of the valley who continually did what he pleased, for he throve within the traditional Gaelic dread of satire. No matter how he debased himself no man or woman dared talk of it for fear they might be made the subject of a song to be ranted in the taprooms of Garradrimna. And he was not one to respect the feelings of those whom he put into his rimes, for all of them were conceived in a mood of ribald and malignant glee.

"Me sound man John, how are ye?" he said, extending a white, nervous hand.

"I'm very well, thanks; and how are you, Shamesy?"

"Ah, just only middling. I don't look the very best. You'll excuse me not being shaved. But that's on account of the neuralgia. God blast it! it has me near killed. It has the nerves destroyed on me. Look at me hand." ... It was the idiosyncrasy of Shamesy Golliher to assert that drink was no part of his life.

Immediately he dropped into his accustomed vein. He gazed down the Hill of Annus and found material for his tongue. There were the daughters of Hughie Murtagh. They had no brother, and were helping their father in the fields.

"Them's the men, them's the men!" said Shamesy, "though glory be to God! 'twill be the hard case with them when they come to be married, for sure you wouldn't like to marry a man, now would you? And for pity's sake will you look at Oweneen Kiernan, the glutton! I hear he ate five loaves at the ball in Ballinamult; and as sure as you're there that powerful repast'll have to be made the material for a song."

A loud laugh sprang from the lips of Shamesy Golliher and floated far across the lake, and John Brennan was immediately surprised to find himself laughing in the same way.

The rimer was still pursuing Oweneen down the field of his mind.