Then had followed quickly those lovely days in Dublin, she stopping with him as "Mrs. Henry Shannon" at a grand hotel. He had given her a wedding-ring, but while it remained upon her finger it was ever the little accusing symbol, filling her with an intense conviction of her sin.
This great adventure had marked the beginning of her acquaintance with the world beyond the valley, and, even now, through the gloom of her mood, she could remember it with a certain amount of gladness coming back to her mind. But it was queer that the brightest moment of her life should also have been the moment of darkest disaster.... She re-created the slight incidents of their quarrel. It was so strange of him after all the grand kindness he had just been showing her.... She had returned to the valley alone and with her disgrace already beginning to be heavy upon her.... She never saw Henry Shannon or spoke with him again. When she wrote referring distantly to their approaching marriage and making mention of the wedding-ring, the reply came back from Mr. Robinson, the solicitor in Garradrimna, who was his cousin and sporting companion. She knew how they had already begun to talk of her in the valley for having gone off to Dublin with Henry Shannon, and now, when an ugly word to describe her appeared there black and plain in the solicitor's letter, she felt, in blind shame, that the visit to Dublin had been planned to ruin her. The air of the valley seemed full of whispers to tell her that she had done a monstrous thing. Maybe they could give her jail for having done a thing like that, and she knew well that Henry Shannon's people would stop at nothing to destroy her, for they were a dark, spiteful crew. They were rich and powerful, with lawyers in the family, and what chance would she have in law now that every one was turned against her. So that night she went out when it was very dark and threw away the wedding-ring. The small, sad act appeared as the renunciation of her great ambition.
She remembered with a surpassing clearness the wide desolation of the time that followed. Loughlin Mulvey had been compelled to marry her sister Bridget because he had not been clever enough to effect a loophole of escape like Henry Shannon. Already three months after the marriage (bit by bit was she now living the past again) the child had been born to Bridget, and now she herself was waiting for the birth of her child.... Indeed Bridget need not have been so angry.
She had been delirious and upon the brink of death, and when, at last, she had recovered sufficiently to realize the sharpness of her mother's tongue once more the child had disappeared. She had escaped to England with all that was left of her beauty. There she had met Ned Brennan, and there had her son John Brennan been born. For a short while she had known happiness. Ned was rough, but in his very strength there was a sense of security and protection which made him bearable. And there was little John. He was not a bit like her short, wild impression of the other little child. Her disgrace had been the means of bringing Philip Byrne to his grave; and, after six or seven years, her mother had died, and she had returned to the valley of Tullahanogue. It was queer that, with all her early knowledge of the people of the valley, she had never thought it possible that some of them would one day impart to him the terrible secret she had concealed so well while acting the ingenuous maiden before his eyes.
Yet they were not settled a month at the cottage in the valley when Ned came from Garradrimna one night a changed man. Larry Cully, a loafer of the village, had attacked him with the whole story.... Was this the kind of people among whom she had brought him to live, and was this a fact about her? She confessed her share, but, illtreat her how he would, she could not tell him what had been done with the child.
Henceforth he was so different, settling gradually into his present condition. He could not go about making inquiries as to the past of his wife, and the people of the valley, gloating over his condition, took no pains to ease his mind. It was more interesting to see him torture himself with suspicion. They hardly fancied she had told him all. It was grand to see him drinking in his endeavors to forget the things he must needs be thinking of.
Thus had Mrs. Brennan lived with her husband for eighteen years, and no other child had been born to them. His original occupation of plumber's laborer found no opportunity for its exercise in the valley, but he sometimes lime-washed stables and mended roofs and gutters. For the most part, however, she kept him through her labor at the machine.
Her story was not without its turn of pathos, for it was strange to think of her reading the holy books to him in the long, quiet evenings all the while he despised her for what she had been with a hatred that all the magnanimous examples of religion could not remove.
She was thinking over it all now, and so keenly, for he had just threatened to strike her again. Eighteen years had not removed from his mind the full and bitter realization of her sin.... They were both beginning to grow gray, and her living atonement for what she had been, her son John who was going on for the Church, was in his twentieth year. Would her husband forgive her when he saw John in the garb of a priest? She wondered and wondered.
So deep was she in this thought that she did not notice the entrance of old Marse Prendergast, who lived in a cabin just across the road. Marse was a superannuated shuiler and a terror in the valley. The tears had been summoned to her eyes by the still unchanging quality of Ned's tone. They were at once detected by the old woman.