As if from the excitement of the concert, John Brennan felt weary next
morning. He had been awake since early hours listening to the singing
of the birds in all the trees near the house. The jolly sounds came to
him as a great comfort. Consequently it was with an acute sensation
of annoyance that there crowded in upon his sense of hearing little
distracting noises. Now it was the heavy rumble of a cart, again
the screech of a bicycle ridden by Farrell McGuinness on his way to
Garradrimna for the letters of his rounds; and, continually, the hard
rasp of nailed boots upon the gravel of the road.
His mother was moving about in the sewing-room beneath. He could hear
the noise made by her scissors as, from time to time, she laid it down
and picked it up again, while, mingled with these actions, occasionally
came up to him the little, unmusical song of the machine. His father
was still snoring.
Last night Rebecca Kerr had shone in his eyes.... But how exactly had
she appeared before the eyes of Garradrimna and the valley? After what
manner would she survive the strong blast of talk? The outlook of his
mother would be representative of the feeling which had been created.
Yet he felt that it would be repugnant to him to speak with his mother
of Rebecca Kerr. There would be that faded woman, looking at him with
a kind of loving anxiety which seemed always to have the effect of
crushing him back relentlessly towards the realities of the valley and
his own reality. After his thoughts of last night and this morning he
hated to face his mother.
When at last he went down into the room where she sat sewing he had
such an unusual look in his eyes as seemed to require the solace of an
incident to fill it. If he had expected to find a corresponding look
upon his mother's face he was disappointed. It seemed to wear still the
quizzical expression of last night, and a slight curl at the corners
of her mouth told that her mind was being sped by some humorous or
satirical impulse.
"Whatever was the matter with you last night, John?" she asked.
She did not give him time to frame an answer, but went on:
"And I dying down dead to talk to you about the concert, I could not
get you to speak one word to me and we coming home."
He noticed that she was in good heart, and, although it was customary
with him to be pleased to see his mother in a mood of gladness, he
could not enter into laughter and gossip with her now.
But she could not be silent. This small expedition into the outer world
of passing events was now causing her mind to leap, with surprising
agility, from topic to topic.... Yet what was striking John more than
her talk, and with a more arresting realization, was, that although
the hour of his Mass-going was imminent, she was not reminding him or
urging him to remembrance of the good custom.... At last he was driven
by some scruple to remind her of the time, and it was her answer that
finally amazed him:
"Ah, sure you mightn't go to-day, John. You're tired and all to that, I
know, and I want to tell you.... He! he! he! Now wasn't it the funniest
thing to see the schoolmistress of Ballinamult and the schoolmistress
of Tullahanogue and they up upon the one stage with Harry Holton's
dramatics making sport for a lot of grinning idiots? Like a couple of
circus girls they were, the brazen things! Indeed Miss Kerr is the
bold-looking hussy, with not a bit of shame in her at all. But sure
we may say she fell among her equals, for there wasn't much class
connected with it anyhow."
"I think Ulick Shannon was knocking about the stage."
The words strayed, without much sense of meaning or direction, out of
the current of his musing, but they produced a swift and certain effect
upon Mrs. Brennan. Her eyes seemed to cloud suddenly behind her glasses.
"Aye ... I wonder who was the girl he went off with through the wood as
we came out. Never fear it was the new schoolmistress."
She said this with a curious, dead quietness in her tones, and when she
had spoken she seemed instantly sorry that the words had slipped from
her lips.... It seemed a queer thing to say to her son and he going on
to be a priest.
John thought it very strange that she too should have observed this
incident, which he had imagined must have been hidden from all eyes
save his own. He now wondered how many more must have seen it as he
tried to recall the sensations with which it had filled him.... But
beyond this remarkable endeavor of his mind his mother was again
speaking:
"If you went now, you'd be in time for half-past eight Mass."
He did not fail to notice the immediate change which had taken place in
her, and wondered momentarily what could have been its sudden cause.
He was beginning to notice of late that she had grown more and more
subject to such unaccountable fits.
In his desire to obey her he was still strong, but, this morning, as he
walked along to Garradrimna he was possessed by a certain feeling of
annoyance which seemed to strain the bond that stretched between them.
In the chapel he knelt beside Charlie Clarke, like the voteens around
them, with a lifeless acquiescence in the ceremony. He was here not
because his heart was here, but merely because his mother had wished
it. When his lips moved, in mechanical mimicry of the priest, he felt
that the way of the hypocrite must be hard and lonely.
When he came out, upon the road he was confused to find himself face
to face with Rebecca Kerr. It seemed a trick of coincidence that he
should meet her now, for it had never happened on any other morning.
Then he suddenly remembered how his mother had kept him late from
"eight o'clock" by her talk of the concert, and it was now Miss Kerr's
school-going time.... She smiled and spoke to him.
She looked handsome as she moved there along the road from the house
of Sergeant McGoldrick to the Girls' School of Tullahanogue. She was
in harmony with the beauty of the morning. There had been a dull pain
upon his mind since he had last seen her, but already it was gone.
Although the concert might appear as the immediate subject to which
their minds would turn, this was not so. They began to talk of places
and things away from Garradrimna.
She spun for his amusement many little yarns of the nuns who conducted
the college where she had been trained. He told her stories of the
priests who taught in the English college where he was being educated
for the priesthood. They enlarged upon the peculiarities of monastic
establishments.
"And you're going to be a priest?" she said, looking up into his face
suddenly with dancing eyes.
Such a question had never before been put to him in exactly this way.
"I am.... At least, I think so.... Oh, yes!" he faltered.
She laughed in a ringing, musical way that seemed to hold just the
faintest trace of mockery in its tones, but it seemed, next instant,
to be only by way of preface to another conventual tale which she
proceeded to tell.
Through the period of this story they did not notice that they were
being stared at by those they were meeting upon the road.... As she
chatted and laughed, his eyes would be straying, in spite of him, to
that soft place upon her neck from which her hair sprang upward.
It was with painful abruptness that she said: "Good morning, Mr.
Brennan!" and went into the old, barrack-like school.