"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.