Rebecca was again alone, but now she was within sight of the house of Sergeant McGoldrick. It seemed to be dozing there in the sunlight. She began to question herself did those within already know ...? Now that the full publicity of her condition seemed imminent an extraordinary feeling of vanity was beginning to take possession of her. She took off her dust-coat and hung it upon her arm. Thus uncloaked she would face the eyes of Mrs. McGoldrick and her daughters, Euphemia and Clementina, and the eyes, very probably, of John Ross McGoldrick and Neville Chamberlain McGoldrick....
But when she entered the house she experienced the painful stillness of a tomb-like place. There was no one to be seen. She went upstairs with a kind of faltering in her limbs, but her head was erect and her fine eyes were flashing.... Even still was she soaring beyond and beyond them. Her eye was caught by a note pinned upon her door. It seemed very funny and, despite her present condition of confusion and worry, she smiled, for this was surely a melodramatic trick that Mrs. McGoldrick had acquired from the character of her reading.... Still smiling, she tore it open. It read like a proclamation, and was couched in the very best handwriting of Sergeant McGoldrick.
"Miss Kerr,
Rev. Louis O'Keeffe, P.P., Garradrimna, has given notice that, on account of certain deplorable circumstances, we are to refuse you permission to lodge with us any longer. This we hasten to do without any regret, considering that, to oblige you at the instigation of Father O'Keeffe, we broke the Regulation of the Force, which forbids the keeping of lodgers by any member of that body. We hereby give you notice to be out of this house by 6 p.m. on this evening, May —, 19—, having, it is understood, by that time packed up your belongings and discharged your liabilities to Mrs. McGoldrick. Father O'Keeffe has, very magnanimously, arranged that Mr. Charles Clarke is to call for you with his motor and take you with all possible speed to the station at Kilaconnaghan.
Sylvester McGoldrick (Sergeant, R.I.C.)."
The official look of the pronouncement seemed only to increase its gloomy finality, but the word "magnanimously," fresh from the dictionary at the Barrack, made her laugh outright. The offense she had committed was unnamed, too terrible for words. She was being sentenced like a doomed Easter rebel.... Yet, even still, she was not without some thought of the practical aspect of her case. She owed thirty shillings to Mrs. McGoldrick. This would leave her very little, out of the few pounds she had saved from her last instalment of salary, with which to face the world. This, of course, if Ulick did not come.... And here was her dinner, set untidily in the stuffy room where the window had not been opened since the time she had left it this morning in confusion. And the whole house was quiet as the grave. She never remembered to have heard it so quiet at any other time. It seemed as if all this silence had been designed with a studied calculation of the pain it would cause. There was no kindness in this woman either, although she too was a mother and had young daughters. It appeared so greatly uncharitable that in these last terrible moments she could not cast from her the small and pitiful enmity she had begun upon the evening of Rebecca's arrival in the valley. She would not come even now and help her pack up her things, and she so weary?... But it was easily done. The few articles that had augmented her wardrobe since her coming to the valley would go into the basket she had used to carry those which were barely necessary for her comfort when she went to that lonely cottage in Donegal.... The mean room was still bare as when she had first come to it. She had not attempted to decorate it. In a pile in one corner stood the full series of Irish School Weeklies and Weldon's Ladies' Journals she had purchased since her coming here. She had little use for either of these publications now, little use for the one that related to education or the other that related to adornment.
There came a feverish haste upon her to get done with her preparations for departure, and soon they were completed. She had her trunk corded and all ready. She had no doubt that Ulick would meet her upon The Road of the Dead at 5.30, the hour she had named in the letter of this morning. It was lucky she had so accurately guessed her possible time of departure, although somehow she had had no notion this morning of leaving so soon. But already it was more than 4.30 by her little wristlet watch. She put on her best dress, which had been left out on the bed, and redid her hair. It was still the certain salvage from the wreck she was becoming. Ulick or any other man, for all he had ruined her, must still love her for that hair of gold. It needed no crown at all, but a woman's vanity was still hers, and she put on a pretty hat which Ulick had fancied in Dublin. She had worn it for the first time last summer in Donegal, and it became her better than any hat she had ever worn.... What would they say if they saw her moving about in this guise, so brazenly as it seemed, when she might be spoken of from the altar on Sunday?
Now fell upon her a melancholy desire to see the chapel. There was yet time to go there and pray just as she had thought of praying on her first evening on coming to Garradrimna. She took a final glance at the little, mean room. It had not been a room of mirth for her, and she was not sorry to leave it—there was the corded trunk to tell the tale of its inhospitality. She took the money for Mrs. McGoldrick from her purse and put it into an envelope.... Going downstairs she left it upon the kitchen table. There was no one to be seen, but she could hear the scurrying of small feet from her as if she were some monstrous and forbidden thing.
As she went up the bright road there was a flickering consciousness in her breast that she was an offense against the sunlight, but this feeling fled away from her when she went into the chapel and knelt down to pray. Her mind was full of her purpose, and she did not experience the distraction of one single, selfish thought. But when she put her hands up to her face in an attitude of piety she felt that her face was burning.
It was a day for confessions, but there were few people in the chapel, and those not approaching the confessionals. The two young curates, Father Forde and Father Fagan, were moving about the quiet aisles, each deeply intent upon the reading of his office. They were nearer the altar than to her, but for all the air of piety in which they seemed to be enveloped, they detected her presence immediately and simultaneously. Soon they began to extend their back and forward pacing to include her within the range of their sidelong vision.... By the time she had got half way around her little mother-of-pearl rosary they were moving past her and towards one another at her back. She was saying her poor prayers as well as she could, but there they were with their heads working up and down as they looked alternately at her and at their holy books.... Just as she got to the end of the last decade she was conscious that they had come together and were whispering behind her.... It was not until then that she saw the chapel for what it stood in regard to her. It was the place where, on Sunday next, mean people would smirk in satisfaction as they sat listening in all their lack of charity and fulness of pride.... The realization brought the pulsing surge of anger to her blood and she rose to come away. But when she turned around abruptly there were the two curates with their eyes still fixed upon her.... She did not meet their looks full straight, for they turned away as if to avoid the contamination of her as she ran from the House of God.
When John Brennan reached a point in his disgust where further endurance was impossible he broke away from the house and from his mother. He went out wildly through the green fields.