He laughed as she said this, for he remembered that, as a child she had entertained him with the strangest stories of leprecauns and their crocks of gold, which were hidden in every field. The old woman passed out on the road, and his mother came over to him with a pitiful look of sadness in her eyes.
"Now, John, I'm surprised at you to have a spade in your hand before Marse Prendergast and all. That's your father's work and not yours, and you with your grand education."
The speech struck him as being rather painful to hear, and he felt as if he should like to say: "Well, what is good enough for my father ought to be good enough for me!" But this, to his mother, might have looked like a back-answer, a piece of impertinence, so he merely stammered in confusion: "Oh, sure I was only exercising and amusing myself. When this little bit is finished I'm going down to have a read by the lake."
"That's right, John!" she said in a flat, sad voice, and turned back to her endless labor.
He stopped, his hands folded on the handle-end of the spade, and fell into a condition of dulness which even the slightest labor of the body brings to those unaccustomed to it. All things grew so still of a sudden. There seemed to come a perfect lull in the throbbing, nervous realization of his brain from moment to moment.... He felt himself listening for the hum of his mother's machine, but it was another sound that came to him—the desolating sound of her lonely sobbing. She was crying to herself there now in the sewing-room and mourning forever as if for some lost thing.... There were her regular sobs, heavy with an eternal sadness as he listened to them. Into such acute self-consciousness had his mood now moved that he could not imagine her crying as being connected with anything beyond himself. He was the perpetual cause of all her pain.... If only she would allow him, for short spaces, to go out of her mind they might both come into the enjoyment of a certain freedom, but sometimes the most trivial incident seemed to put her out so. This morning she had been in such heart and humor, and last night so interested in the concert, and here now she was in tears. It could not have been the visit of Marse Prendergast or her talk, for there was nobody so foolish, he thought, as to take any notice of either. It must have been the digging and the fact that people passing the road might see him. Now was not that foolish of her, for did not Father O'Keeffe himself dig in his own garden with his own two blessed hands ...? But he must bend in obedience to her desire, and go walking like a leisured gentleman through the valley. He was looking forward to this with dread, for, inevitably, it must throw him back upon his own thoughts.
As he came down past the school he could hear a dull drone from among the trees. The school had not yet settled down to the business of the day, and the scholars were busy with the preparation of their lessons. John stopped by the low wall, which separated its poor playground from the road, to gaze across at the hive of intellect. Curious that his mother should now possess a high contempt for this rude academy where he had been introduced to learning. But he had not yet parted company with his boyhood. He was remembering the companions of his schooldays and how this morning preparation had been such a torture. Still moving about the yard before his formal entrance to the school, was Master Donnellan. As John Brennan saw him now he appeared as one misunderstood by the people of the valley, and yet as one in whom the lamp of the intellect was set bright and high. But beyond this immediate thought of him he appeared as a man with overthrown ambitions and shattered dreams, whose occasional outbursts of temper for these reasons had often the effect of putting him at enmity with the parents of the children.
Master Donnellan was a very slave of the ferrule. He had spent his brains in vain attempts to impart some knowledge to successive generations of dunces of the fields. It had been his ambition to be the means of producing some great man whose achievements in the world might be his monument of pride. But no pupil of his in the valley school had ever arisen as a great man. Many a time, in the long summer evenings, when the day would find it hard to disappear from Ireland, he would come quietly to the old school with a step of reverence, and going into the moldy closet, where all the old roll-books and register-books were kept, take them down one by one and go searching through the lists of names. His mind would be filled with the ringing achievements of men who had become notable in the world.... Not a trace of any of those famous names could he find here, however far he might search in all the musty books until the day had faded.... Then he would rely upon his memory in a further aspect of his search. He had not even produced a local great man. In his time no priests had come out of the valley. There was a strange thing now—no priests, and it was a thing that was always said by angry mothers and fathers when they called at the valley school to attack him for his conduct towards their children—"And you never to have made a priest or a ha'porth!" It was not the unreasonableness of their words that annoyed him, but rather the sense of impotence with which they filled him.... If only it would happen that he could say he had produced one famous man. A priest would be sufficiently fine to justify him in the eyes of the valley. It was so strange that, although he had seen many young men move towards high attainment, some fatality had always happened to avert his poor triumph. He thought of young Brennan as his present hope and pride.
John went on towards the lake. When he came to the water's edge he was filled with a sense of peace. He sat down beneath one of the fir trees and, in the idleness of his mood, began to pick up some of the old dried fir-cones which were fallen beneath. They appeared to him as things peculiarly bereft of any sap or life. He gathered until he had a handful and then cast them from him one by one on the surface of the water. It seemed a surprising thing that the small eddies which the light splashes of them made rolled distantly to the shores of the little lake. He began to wonder would his life come to be like that—a small thing to be flung by the Hand of Fate and creating its little ripple to eddy to the far shores of Time.
"Me sound man, John!"