"But in Army medical work, however, there is always the compensating chance of the gentleman with the license to kill getting killed himself," continued Ulick.
His lips closed now, for he had at last come to the end of his joke. The conversation lapsed, and Mr. Shannon went on with his reading. Ulick had been to Garradrimna on the previous evening, and he was acutely conscious of many defects in his own condition and in the condition of the world about him this morning. His thoughts were now extending with all the power of which they were capable to his uncle, that silent, intent man, whose bald head stretched expansively before him.
Myles Shannon was a singularly fine man, and in thinking of him as such his mind began to fill with imaginations of the man his father must have been. He had never known his father nor, for the matter of that, could he boast of any deep acquaintance with his uncle, yet what an excellent, restrained type of man he was to be sure! Another in the same position as his guardian would have flogged himself into a fury over the mess he had made of his studies. But it had not been so with his uncle. He had behaved with a calm forbearance. He had supplied him with time and money, and had gone even so far as to look kindly upon the affair with Rebecca Kerr. He had been here since the beginning of the year, and all his uncle had so far said to him by way of asserting his authority was spoken very quietly:
"Now, I'll give you a fair time to think over things. I'll give you till the end of the summer holidays, till after young Brennan comes and goes." These had been his uncle's exact words, and he had not attempted to question them or to qualify them at the time. But just now they were running through his brain with the most curious throbbing insistence. "Till after young Brennan comes and goes." He knew that his uncle had taken an unusual fancy to John Brennan and evidently wished that his summer holidays should be spent enjoyably. But it was a long time until summer, and he was not a person one might conscientiously commend to the friendship of a clerical student. He very often went to Garradrimna.
Ulick had already formed some impressions of his fellow man. He held it as his opinion that at the root of an action, which may appear extraordinary because of its goodness, is always an amount of selfishness. Yet, somehow, as he carefully considered his uncle in the meditative spaces of the breakfast he could not fit him in with this idea.
As he went on with his thought he felt that it was the very excess of his uncle's qualities which had had such a curious effect upon his relations with Rebecca Kerr. It was the very easiness of the path he had afforded to love-making which now made it so difficult. If they had been forbidden and if they had been persecuted, their early affection must have endured more strongly. The opposition of the valley and the village still continued, but Ulick considered their bearing upon him now as he had always considered it—with contempt.
There had been a good deal of wild affection transported into their snatched meetings during the past summer in Donegal. After Christmas, too, he had gone there to see her, and then had happened the climax of their love-making in a quiet cottage within sound of the sea.... Both had moved away from that glowing moment forever changed. Neither could tell of the greatness of the shadow that had fallen between them.
He remembered all her tears on the first evening he had met her after coming back to the valley. There had been nothing in her letters, only the faintest suggestion of some strained feeling. Then had come this unhappy meeting.... She had tortured herself into the belief that it was she who was responsible for his failure.
"With all the time you have wasted coming to see me I have destroyed you. When you should have been at your studies I was taking you up to Donegal."