The mere mention of Rebecca's name in this filthy place annoyed John Brennan, who thought of her continuously as some one far beyond all aspects of Garradrimna.
Yet they would be forever coming here to invite this persecution. Ulick would ever and again retreat into long silences that were painful for his companion. But John found some solace come to him through the port wine. So much was this the case that he began to have a certain hankering after spending the evening in this way. When the night had fallen thick and dark over Garradrimna they would come out of McDermott's and spend long hours walking up and down the valley road. Ulick would occasionally give vent to outbursts of talk upon impersonal subjects—the war and politics, the tragic trend of modern literature. John always listened with interest. He never wished to return early to the house, for he dreaded the afflicted drone of his mother reading the holy books to his father by the kitchen fire.
During those brief spells, when the weather brightened for a day or two, he often took walks down by the school and towards the lake.... Always he felt, through power of an oppressive realization, that the eyes of Master Donnellan were upon him as he slipped past the school.... So he began to go by a lane which did not take him before the disappointed eyes of the old man.
Going this way one day he came upon a battered school-reader of an advanced standard, looking so pathetic in its final desertion by its owner, for there is nothing so lonely as the things a schoolboy leaves behind him.... He began to remember the days when he, too, had gone to the valley school and there instituted the great promise which, so far, had not come to fulfilment. He was turning over the leaves when he came on a selection from Carlyle's French Revolution—"Thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendor." He pondered it as he stood by the water's edge and until it connected itself with his thought of Rebecca. Thy foot to light on softness, thy eye on splendor.
It would be nearing three o'clock now, he thought, and Rebecca must soon be going from school. He might see her passing along between the muddy puddles on The Road of the Dead.
He had fallen down before her again.
CHAPTER XXV
In the high, gusty evening Tommy Williams, the gombeen-man, was standing proudly at his own door surveying the street of Garradrimna. It was his custom to appear thus at the close of the day in contemplation of his great possessions. He owned four houses in the village, four proud buildings which advertised his worth before the beggars of the parish—out of whom he had made the price of them. But he was distrustful of his customers to an enormous degree, and his purpose in standing thus at his own door was not altogether one of aimless speculation upon his own spacious importance in Garradrimna. He was watching to see that some people going down the valley road upon ass-carts did not attempt to take away any of the miscellaneous merchandise exhibited outside the door. As he stood against the background of his shop, from which he might be said to have derived his personality, one could view the man in his true proportions beneath his hard, high hat. His short beard was beginning to show tinges of gray, and the deepening look of preoccupation behind his glasses gave him the appearance of becoming daily more and more like John Dillon.