"Where is my father bound for?"
"He's gone to Garradrimna, John, to order lead for the roof of the school. The valley behind the chimney is leaking again and he has to cobble it. 'Tis the great bother he gets with that roof, whatever sort it is. Isn't it a wonder now that Father O'Keeffe wouldn't put a new one on it, and all the money he gets so handy ...?"
"My father seems to be always at that roof. He used to be at it when I was going to school there."
The words of her son came to Mrs. Brennan's ears with a sound of sad complaint. It caused her to glimpse momentarily all the villainy of Ned Brennan towards her through all the years, and of how she had borne it for the sake of John. And here was John before her now becoming reverently magnified in that part of her mind which was a melting tenderness. It was him she must now save from the valley which had ruined her man. Thus was she fearful again and the heart within her caused to become troubled and to rush to and fro in her breast like rushing water. Then, as if her whole will was sped by some fearful ecstasy, she went on to talk in her accustomed way of every one around her, including the stranger who had not yet come to the valley.
It was on the evening of this day that Rebecca Kerr, the new assistant teacher, came through the village of Garradrimna to the valley of Tullahanogue. Paddy McCann drove McDermott's hackney car down past the old castle of the De Lacys. It carried her as passenger from Mullaghowen, with her battered trunk strapped over the well. The group of spitting idlers crowding around Brannagan's loudly asserted so much as Paddy McCann and his cargo loomed out of the shadows beneath the old castle and swung into the amazing realities of the village. It was just past ten o'clock and the mean place now lay amid the enclosing twilight. The conjunctive thirsts for drink and gossip which come at this hour had attacked the ejected topers, and their tongues began to water about the morsel now placed before them.
A new schoolmistress, well, well! Didn't they change them shocking often in Tullahanogue? And quare-looking things they were too, every one of them. And here was another one, not much to look at either. They said this as she came past. And what was her name? "Kerr is her name!" said some one who had heard it from the very lips of Father O'Keeffe himself.
"Rebecca Kerr is her name," affirmed Farrell McGuinness, who had just left a letter for her at the Presbytery.
"Rebecca what? Kerr—Kerr—Kerr, is it?" sputtered Padna Padna; "what for wouldn't it be Carr now, just common and simple? But of course Kerr has a ring of the quality about it. Kerr, be God!"
These were the oracles of Garradrimna who were now speaking of her thus. But she had no thought of them at all as she glanced hurriedly at the shops and puzzled her brains to guess where the best draper's shop might be. She had a vague, wondering notion as to where she might get all those little things so necessary for a girl. She had a fleeting glimpse of herself standing outside one of those worn counters she was very certain existed somewhere in the village, talking ever so much talk with the faded girl who dispensed the vanities of other days, or else exchanging mild confidences with the vulgar and ample mistress of the shop, who was sure to be always floating about the place immensely. Yes, just there was the very shop with its brave selection from the fashions of yester-year in the fly-blown windows.
And there was the Post Office through which her letters to link her with the outer world would come and go. She quickly figured the old bespectacled postmistress, already blinded partially, and bent from constant, anxious scrutiny, poring exultantly over the first letters that might be sent to "Miss Rebecca Kerr," and examining the postmark. Then the quality and gender of the writing, and being finally troubled exceedingly as to the person it could have come from—sister, mother, brother, father, friend, or "boy." Even although the tall candles of Romance had long since guttered and gone out amid the ashes of her mind the assaulting suspicion that it was from "a boy" would drive her to turn the letter in her hand and take a look at the flap. Then the temptation that was a part of her life would prove too strong for her and a look of longing would come into the dull eyes as she went hobbling into the kitchen to place it over the boiling kettle and so embark it upon its steamy voyage to discovery. In a few minutes she would be reading it, her hands trembling as she chuckled in her obscene glee at all the noble sentiments it might contain. The subsequent return of the letter to the envelope after the addition of some gum from a penny bottle if the old sticking did not suffice. Her interludiary sigh of satisfaction when she remembered that one could re-stick so many opened envelopes with a penny bottle of gum by using it economically. The inevitable result of this examination, a superior look of wisdom upon the withered face when the new schoolmistress, Rebecca Kerr, came for the first time into the office to ask for a letter from her love.... But so far in her life she had formed no deep attachment.