He went on; a blind force impelled him. At length he reached the old Ballamona. His own especial room in the house was the little book-encased closet, looking over the Curraghs toward the sea—the same that had been the study of Gilcrist Mylrea, before he went away and came back as bishop.
But Ewan turned mechanically toward another part of the house and entered a room hung about with muskets and the horns of deer, fishing rods and baskets, a watchman's truncheon lettered in red, loose pieces of net, and even some horse harness. A dog, a brown collie, lay asleep before the fire, and over the rannel-tree shelf a huge watch was ticking.
But Dan was not in his room. Then Ewan remembered in a dazed way—how had the memory escaped him so long?—that when Dan passed him on the road he was not going homeward, but toward the village. No doubt the man was on his way to the low pot-house he frequented.
Ewan left Ballamona and went on toward the "Three Legs of Man." He crossed the fields which the Bishop had cut off from the episcopal demesne for his son's occupation as a farm. As he walked, his wandering, aimless thoughts were arrested by the neglected state of the land and the stock upon it. In one croft the withered stalks of the last crop of cabbage lay rotten on the ground; in a meadow a sheep was lying dead of the rot, and six or seven of the rest of the flock were dragging their falling wool along the thin grass.
Ewan came out of the fields to the turnpike by the footpath that goes by Bishop's Court, and as he passed through the stile he heard the Bishop in conversation with some one on the road within.
"What is the balance that I owe you, Mr. Looney, for building those barns on my son's farm?" the Bishop was saying.
"Seven pounds five shillings, my lord," the man answered, "and rael bad I'm wanting the money, too, my lord, and three months I'm afther waiting for it."
"So you are, Mr. Looney. You would have been paid before this if I'd had wherewith to pay you."
Then there was silence between the two, and Ewan was going on, when the Bishop added:
"Here—here—take this;" there was a sound as of the rattle of keys, and seals, and a watch chain—"it was my old father's last gift to me, all he had to give to me—God bless his memory!—and I little thought to part with it—but there, take it and sell it, and pay yourself, Mr. Looney."