"Mebbe it's what you're ashamed to let him see you giving to me. That's a grand thing now, and I knowing what I know!"
"Can't you be easy now and maybe 'tis a whole shilling I'll be giving you in a few minutes."
This was altogether too generous of his mother. It gave scope to Marse Prendergast to exercise her tyranny. Her threat was part of the begging convention she had framed for herself, and so it did not move him towards speculation or suspicion. His mind drifted on to the enjoyment of other thoughts, the girl he had just walked with down the valley, the remembered freshness of the morning road. He came out to the door. The little kitchen garden stretched away from his feet. An abandoned spade stood up lonely and erect in the middle of the cabbage-plot. Around it were a few square feet of freshly-turned earth. It was the solitary trace of his existence that his father had left behind.... As the mind of John Brennan came to dwell upon the lonely spectacle of the spade the need for physical exertion grew upon him.
He went out into the little garden and lifted the rude implement of cultivation in his hand. He had not driven it many times into the soft clay of the cabbage-bed when a touch of peace seemed to fall upon him. The heavy burden that had occupied his mind was falling into the little trench that was being made by the spade.
He had become so interested in his task that he had not heard his mother go upstairs nor seen Marse Prendergast emerge from the house some moments later.
The old shuiler called out to him in her high, shrill voice:
"That's right, John! That's right! 'Tis glad myself is to see you doing something useful at last. Digging the cabbage-plot, me sweet gosoon, and your father in Garradrimna be this time with his pint in his hand!"
Mrs. Brennan had followed her to the door, and her cruelty was stirred to give the sore cut by reviving the old dread.
"That's the lad! That's the lad! But mind you don't dig too far, for you could never tell what you'd find. And indeed it would be the quare find you might say!"