"I might not have gone so far. Don't you see how I might have waited in patience and allowed the hand of Fate to adjust things? See how grandly they are coming around.... And now maybe I have gone too far. Maybe I have helped to spoil Ulick's life into the bargain. And then there's the third party, this girl, Rebecca Kerr?"
He looked straight out before him now, and away over the remains of the breakfast.... He crossed to the window and gazed for a while over the wet fields. He moved into the cold, empty parlor and gazed from its window also over the fields.... Then he turned and for a space remained looking steadfastly at the bureau which held so much of Her. Quite suddenly he crossed over and unlocked it.... Yes, there, with the other dead things, were the photograph of Helena Cooper and the letters she had written, and the letter John Brennan's mother had written about him. He raised his eyes from the few, poor relics and they gathered into their depths the loneliness of the parlor.... Here was the picture of this girl, who was young and lovely, while around him, surging emptily forever, was the loneliness of his house. It was Nan Byrne who had driven him to this, and it was Nan Byrne who had ruined his brother Henry.... And yet he was weakly questioning his just feelings of revenge against this woman, but for whom he might now be a happy man. He might have laughter in this house and the sound of children at play. But now he had none of these things, and he was lonely.... He looked into the over-mantel, and there he was, an empty figure, full of a strong family pride that really stood for nothing, a polite survival from the mild romance of the early nineties of the last century, a useless thing amid his flocks and herds. A man who had none of the contentment which comes from the company of a woman or her children, a mean creature, who, during visits to the cattle-market, occasionally wasted his manhood in dingy adventure about low streets in Dublin. One who remained apart from the national thought of his own country reading queer articles in the Irish Times about "resolute" government of Ireland.
His head lay low upon his chest because he was a man mightily oppressed by a great feeling of abasement.
"In the desolation of her heart through the destruction of her son," he muttered to himself, not without a certain weariness, as he moved away from the mirror.
CHAPTER XXIV
Whenever a person from the valley went abroad now to fair or market the question was always asked:
"Is it a fact that Ulick Shannon was expelled from the University in Dublin and is at home? And is it a fact that John Brennan is at home from the college he was at too, the grand college in England whose story his mother spread far and wide?"
"That's quite so, ma'am. It's a double fact!"