“Biddy McQuilkin.”
Chapter Twenty Five.
On the Black Hill road.
This, then, was the mystery which for eighteen years had hung over Kilgorman. My mother’s letter cleared up a part of it, but the rest it plunged into greater mystery still. That Maurice Gorman was a villain and a usurper was evident. But who was the rightful heir my mother, either through negligence or of set purpose, had failed to state. Was it Tim? or I?
I recalled all I could of my mother’s words and acts to us both—how she taught us our letters; how she sang to us; how, when need be, she chid us; how, with a hand for each, she took us as children to church; how she kissed us both at nights, and gave us our porridge when we started for the hills in the morning. In all this she never by a sign betrayed that one of us was her son and the other a stranger. Even to the last, on the day she died, the words she spoke to me, I was convinced, she would equally have spoken to Tim, had he, not I, been there to hear them.
Could it be possible that she did not herself know? Any mother who reads this will, I think, scoff at the notion; and yet I think it was so. Weak and ill as she was when it all happened, bewildered and dazed by the murder of her master and the terrible suspicion thrown on her husband, lying for weeks after in a half swoon, and believing herself at the gate of death, I think, in spite of all the mothers in Ireland, that when at last she came back to life, and looked on the two little fellows nestled in the bed at her side, she knew not the one from the other.
My father, I was sure, if he even knew that one of us was not his own boy, neither knew nor concerned himself which was which, so long as he kept his honour in good-humour.
But as regarded Biddy McQuilkin, it was different. She was not ill or blind or in mortal fear when it all happened. If any one could tell, it was she. And she, unless all reports were false, slept in the pit of the guillotine in Paris, beside her last master and mistress. It was not likely that the Republic One and Indivisible, when it swept away the old couple, would overlook their faithful and inseparable attendant.