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

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.