Everybody expressed admiration, and a forlorn glimmer of complacency at the arrangement passed over even the sorrowful countenance of Mrs. Skeffington Yelverton herself, as she sat in her ragged old wisp of a shawl. She was holding under it her grand new delft teapot, whose beauties she should never see; though by this time much fingering had made her familiar with the outlines of its raised pink-rose wreath. Then Theresa Joyce said, "We ought to be steppin' on wid ourselves, if we're to get to Duffclane before dark. The evenin's took up a bit. I see the sky there turnin' like goulden glass agin the windy-pane." But the neighbours protested against their setting forward again; and it was agreed that they should sleep the night at the Kilfoyles'.
When this point had been decided, Mrs. Morrough said, "Would that be the say—the rustlin' I hear outside there?"
Upon this people looked ruefully at her and at each other, as if the question had given them a glimpse into the darkness in which she was sitting.
"Ah, no, ma'am," said Mrs. Doyne, "that's on'y the sedge-laves in the win' round the big pool just back of the house. Few days of the year there is, summer or winter, but they'll be shoosh-sooin' that way. A dhrary sort of noise it is to my mind. I do be tired listenin' to it in the night sometimes."
"Sure there's ne'er a dhrop of say-wather nearer us, ma'am, than the place you're after quittin' out of," said Judy Ryan, "it's the quare whillaloo it 'ud have to be risin' before we'd hear it that far."
"Well, well," said the blind woman, "yous are the very lucky people, I'm thinkin', all of yous, that see the shinin' of the sun, and live beyond the sound of the say."
Her remark was followed by a short silence, during which her hearers were, perhaps, questing for consolatory rejoinders rather than congratulating themselves upon their own luckiness. It was Big Anne who broke the pause, saying, with the best intentions, "Ah, sure, ma'am dear, plase God, you won't be so, and we won't be so;" a sentiment which apparently did not meet with the approval of Ody Rafferty, as he frowned bushily at her and said in a testy undertone, "Musha, good gracious, woman, what talk have you out of you at all?"
Just at this moment sounds, the nature of which could not easily be mistaken, rose up close by—shouts and laughter and thumps and trampling of feet. People who ran quickly to the door were in time to see a knot of youths fall confusedly out of the house over the way—the Quigleys'—obviously, to judge by their subsequent proceedings, for the purpose of continuing a scuffle with ampler elbow room. But it was only for a very brief space that their wrestling and skirmishing among the puddles held anybody's attention. That was speedily diverted to the far more extraordinary and astonishing behaviour of their visitor, Mrs. Morrough. For she suddenly sprang up off her chair, exclaiming, "Saints above—it's Paddy—that's Paddy's voice—him that I haven't set eyes on for nine year next Easter—and there's Felix yellin' too! The both of them's come back, glory be to God!" And so saying out of the house she ran, and across the road as straight as a dart, she who not an hour before had been led gropingly in, and would have put her foot among the glowing hearth-sods, if her guides had not pulled her away.
The neighbours could at first look on in only mute amazement, but in any case the two boys and she were for some time so intricately entangled that any attempt to elicit any explanation would have been futile. When at last questions and answers were possible, no very lucid account of the matter was forthcoming. To the many voices that demanded: "Is it seein' you are, woman alive? Is it seein' you are?" all Mrs. Morrough could answer was: "Ay, bedad am I, and as well as iver I done in me life—praise be to goodness. Sure I dunno what way it was, but me sight came back to me all of a flash, the same as it went, just the very minyit I was hearin' the lads shoutin'. Och, Paddy, avic, but you're the grand man grown; and Felix, och now, to be seein' you agin, and everythin' else as clear as clear. It's meself's the lucky woman this day—glory be to God and Mary."
In short, the marvellous restoration of her sight is to this day a miracle, very freshly in remembrance at Lisconnel and Laraghmena, where the inhabitants know little about paralysed optic nerves, and might perhaps continue to wonder none the less even if they knew more. Beside it the unexpected reappearance of the two young Morroughs seemed almost a commonplace incident, though Paddy's fine new suit and gold watch-chain were, indeed, very exceptional things at Lisconnel. His story ran that he had prospered highly of late out in California, having made enough to set him up grandly on a good bit of land in the old country, and give Felix a fair start, and keep the old mother in comfort all the rest of her life. With which objects in view they had landed at Queenstown, he and his wife, a girl belonging to very respectable, decent people in the county Wicklow. "So next mornin', walkin' along the Quay, who should I see but me gintleman there, and another chap along with him, and both of them lookin' as wild as if they'd been caught. And says I to Sally, 'You bet, that's Felix from our place at home;' and right I was, and just slick in time to stop him goin' on board." Paddy had then left his wife with her family in Wicklow, where he had seen a promising farm; and he and Felix were now on their way to fetch their mother thither.