He came on a group of children playing by the roadside. It seemed as if they had been driven across his path to thwart him with their innocence. He instantly remembered that other evening when he had been pained to hear them express the ugly, uncharitable notions of their parents regarding a child of another religion. Now they were playing merrily as God had intended them to play, and religion, with its tyranny of compulsion towards thoughts of death and sin, seemed distant from them, and distant was it from him too. His mind was empty of any thought. Would no kindly piece of imagination come down to cool his spirit with its grace or lift from his heart the oppression of the leaden weights he had bound about the body of Ulick Shannon?... At last he had remembrance of his mother. It had been borne in upon him during some of his lonely cycle-rides to and from Ballinamult that things should not be, somehow, as they were. He was moving along exalted ways while his mother labored in lonely silence at her machine.... Where was the money coming from? Such an unproductive state as his required money for its upkeep. His father was no toiler, but she was always working there alone in the lonely room. Her hands were grown gnarled and hard through her years of labor.... Just presently she was probably discussing a dismal matter of ways and means with some woman of the valley, saying as she had said through the long years:
"Thank God and His Blessed Mother this night, I still have me hands. Aye, that's what I was just saying to Mrs. So and So this morning—Thank God I still have me hands!"
Thus she was going on now, he imagined, as he had always heard her, a pathetic figure sitting there and looking painfully through the heavy, permanent mist that was falling down upon her eyes. And yet it was not thus she really was at this moment. For although it was a woman who held her company, there was no mood of peace between them. It was Marse Prendergast who was with her, and she was proceeding busily with her eternal whine. Mrs. Brennan was now disturbed in her mind and fearful of the great calamity that might happen. While she had bravely maintained the money in the little chest upstairs there had lingered, in spite of every affliction, a sense of quietness and independence. But now she was without help and as one distraught. Of late this gibbering old woman had obtained a certain power over her, and a considerable portion of the once proud Mrs. Brennan had fallen finally away. Although, at unaccountable moments, her strong pride would spring up to dazzle the people of the valley, she did not now possess that remarkable imperviousness which had so distinguished her attitude towards life. Now she was in a condition of disintegration, unable to maintain an antagonism or hide a purpose. The old ruined woman, the broken shuiler of the roads, was beginning to behold the ruins of another woman, the ruins of Mrs. Brennan, who had once been so "thick" and proud.
"So you won't hearken to me request?"
"I can't, Marse dear. I have no money to give you!"
This was a true word, for the little store upstairs had gone this way and that. Tommy Williams had had to be given his interest, and although people might think that John was getting his education for charity, no one knew better than she the heavy fees of the college in Ballinamult. Besides, he must keep up a good appearance in the valley.
But when Marse Prendergast made a demand she knew no reason and could make no allowance.
"Well, Nan, me dear, I must do me duty. I must speak out when you can't bribe me to be silent. I must do a horrid piece of business this night. I must turn a son against his mother. Yes, that must be the way of it now, a son turned for good against his mother. For surely there could be no pardon in his grand, holy eyes for what you were once upon a time. But let me tell you this, that I'd have acquainted him anyhow, for I'd not have gone to me grave with that sin on me no matter what. They say it isn't right to offer a son to God where there's after being any big blemish in the family, and that if you do a woful misfortune or a black curse comes of it. And sure that was the quare, big blemish in your family, Nan Byrne, the quarest blemish ever was."
Mrs. Brennan began to cry. She seemed to have come at last to the end of all her long attempt to brazen things out.... Marse Prendergast was not slow to observe this acceptance of defeat, and saw that now surely was her time to be hard and bitter. She was growing so old, a withered stump upon the brink of years, and there was upon her an enormous craving for a little money. People were even driven, by her constant whine for this thing and that, to say how she had a little store of her own laid by which she gloated over with a wicked and senile delight. And for what, in God's name, was she hoarding and she an old, lone woman with the life just cross-wise in her?... And it was always Mrs. Brennan whom she had visited with her singular and special persecution.
"I suppose now you think you're the quare, clever one to be going on with your refusals from day to day. I suppose you think I don't know that you have a chesht full of money that you robbed from poor Henry Shannon, God be good to him, when he used to be coming running to see you, the foolish fellow!"