"Still crying, are ye, Nan Byrne, for Henry Shannon that's dead and gone?"
This was a sore cut, but it was because of its severity that it had been given. Marse Prendergast's method was to attack the person from whom she desired an alms instead of making an approach in fear and trembling.
"Well, what's the use in regretting now that he didn't marry ye after all?... Maybe you could give me a bit of Ned's tobacco for me little pipe, or a few coppers to buy some."
"I will in troth," she said, searching her apron pocket, only to discover that Ned had taken all her spare coppers. She communicated her regrets to the old woman, but her words fell upon ears that doubted.
"Ah-ha, the lie is on your lip yet, Nan Byrne, just as it was there for your poor husband the day he married you, God save us all from harm—you who were what you were before you went away to England. And now the cheek you have to go refuse me the few coppers. Ye think ye're a great one, don't you, with your son at college, and he going on to be a priest. Well, let me tell you that a priest he'll never be, your grand son, John. Ye have the quare nerve to imagine it indeed if you ever think of what happened to your other little son.... Maybe 'tis what ye don't remember that, Nan Bryne.... The poor little thing screeching in the night-time, and some one carrying a box out into the garden in the moonlight, and them digging the hole.... Ah, 'tis well I know all that, Nan Byrne, although you may think yourself very clever and mysterious. And 'tis maybe I'll see you swing for it yet with your refusals and the great annoyance you put me to for the means of a smoke, and I a real ould woman and all. But listen here to me, Nan Byrne! 'Tis maybe to your grand son, John Brennan, I'll be telling the whole story some day!"
CHAPTER II
Her tongue still clacking in soliloquy, Marse Prendergast hobbled out of the house, and Mrs. Brennan went to the small back window of the sewing-room. She gazed wistfully down the long, sloping fields towards the little lake which nestled in the bosom of the valley. Within the periods of acute consciousness which came between her sobs she began to examine the curious edifice of life which housed her soul. An unaccountable, swift power to do this came to her as she saw the place around which she had played as a child, long ago, when she had a brow snow-white and smooth, with nice hair and laughing eyes. Her soul, too, at that time was clean—clean like the water. And she was wont to have glad thoughts of the coming years when she had sprung to girlhood and could wear pretty frocks and bind up her hair. Across her mind had never fallen the faintest shadow of the thing that was to happen to her.
Yet now, as she ran over everything in her mind, she marveled not a little that, although she could not possibly have returned to the perfect innocence of her childhood state, she had triumphed over the blight of certain circumstances to an extraordinary extent. She was surprised to realize that there must have been some strength of character in her not possessed by the other women of the valley. It had been her mother's mark of distinction, but the dead woman had used it towards the achievement of different ends. Ends, too, which had left their mark upon the lives of both her daughters.