No qualms of any kind came to the breast of John Brennan. He had hardened his heart between the leaping flames of Love and Hate, and there was upon him now the feeling of one who has done a fine thing. He was in the moment of his triumph, yet he was beginning to be amazed by his sudden power and the result of his decision.... That he, John Brennan, should have had it in him to murder his friend.... But no, it was his enemy he had murdered, the man who had desecrated the beauty of the world.... And there was a rare grandeur in what he had done. It was a thing of beauty snatched from the red hands of Death.
Yet as he went about his preparations for submerging the body he felt something akin to disgust for this the mean business of the murder.... Here was where the beauty that had been his deed snapped finally from existence in his consciousness and disappeared from him.
Henceforth gray thought after gray thought came tumbling into his mind. Ulick had not been a bad fellow. He had tried to be kind to him—all the motor-drives and the walks and talks they had had. Even the bits of days and nights spent together in Garradrimna.... And how was Ulick to know of his affection for Rebecca Kerr? There had never been the faintest statement of the fact between them; his whole manner and conversation and the end for which he was intended forbade any suspicion of the kind. In fact to have had such a doubt would have been a sin in the eyes of many a Catholic.... The legs and arms were well weighted now.... This might not have happened if his mother had been attended in the right spirit of filial obedience.... But with the arrogance of youth, which he now realized for the first time, he had placed himself above her opinion and done what he had desired at the moment. And why had he done so?... She would seem to have had foreboding of all this in the way she had looked upon him so tenderly with her tired eyes many a time since his memorable home-coming last summer. She had always been so fearfully anxious.... Here must have been the melancholy end she had seen at the back of all dreaming.... He could feel that sad look clearly, all dimmed by dark presentiments.
The body was a great weight. He strove to lift it in his arms in such a way that his clothes might not be soiled by the blood.... His face was very near the pale, dead face with the red blood now clotting amongst the hair.... He was almost overpowered by his burden as he dragged it to the water's edge.... It was a very fearful thing to look at just as the water closed over it with a low, gurgling sound, as if of mourning, like the cry of the bird in the moment the murder had been done.
As he staggered back from the sighing reeds he noticed that the ground was blood-drenched beneath the tree.... But he was doing the thing most thoroughly. In a frenzy of precautionary industry he began to hack away the earth with the slating implement very much as Shamesy Golliher might hack it in search of a rabbit.
Later he seemed to put on the very appearance of Shamesy himself as, with bent body, he slouched away across the ridge of the world. He too had just effected a piece of slaughter and Garradrimna seemed to call him.
CHAPTER XXXII
When he came out upon the valley road he was no longer the admirable young man he had been less than a year since. He was a broken thing, and he was stained by another's blood. He was marked eternally by what he had done, and there was upon him a degradation unspeakable. He was an offense against existence and against the gathering, blessed gloom of the quiet evening.... He had murdered one who had been his friend, and it was a thing he might never be able to forget. The body, with all the lovely life so recently gone from it, he had weighted and sunk beneath the surface of the lake.... It was down there now, a poor, dead thing among the ooze of dead things from which the water had taken its color and quality. The wild spirit that had been Ulick Shannon, so contradictory in its many aspects, was now soaring lightly aloft upon the wings of clean winds and he, John Brennan, who had effected this grand release, felt the weights still heavy about his heart.