“The poor old lady has troubles enough, God knows. Her man's not much good—he's troubled with the drink; and she's got eleven childer, and that's too many for one woman. Don't ye think so?”
She asked this with a naïveté which made Hal laugh. “Yes,” he said, “I do.”
“Well, I think people'd help her more if she'd not complain so! And half of it in the Slavish language, that a body can't understand!” So Mary began to tell funny things about Mrs. Zamboni and her other polyglot neighbours, imitating their murdering of the Irish dialect. Hal thought her humour was naïve and delightful, and he led her on to more cheerful gossip during the remainder of their walk.
SECTION 13.
But then, as they were on their way home, tragedy fell upon them. Hearing a step behind them, Mary turned and looked; then catching Hal by the arm, she drew him into the shadows at the side, whispering to him to be silent. The bent figure of a man went past them, lurching from side to side.
When he had turned and gone into the house, Mary said, “It's my father. He's ugly when he's like that.” And Hal could hear her quick breathing in the darkness.
So that was Mary's trouble—the difficulty in her home life to which she had referred at their first meeting! Hal understood many things in a flash—why her home was bare of ornament, and why she did not invite her company to sit down. He stood silent, not knowing what to say. Before he could find the word, Mary burst out, “Oh, how I hate O'Callahan, that sells the stuff to my father! His home with plenty to eat in it, and his wife dressin' in silk and goin' down to mass every Sunday, and thinkin' herself too good for a common miner's daughter! Sometimes I think I'd like to kill them both.”
“That wouldn't help much,” Hal ventured.
“No, I know—there'd only be some other one in his place. Ye got to do more than that, to change things here. Ye got to get after them that make money out of O'Callahan.”
So Mary's mind was groping for causes! Hal had thought her excitement was due to humiliation, or to fear of a scene of violence when she reached home; but she was thinking of the deeper aspects of this terrible drink problem. There was still enough unconscious snobbery in Hal Warner for him to be surprised at this phenomenon in a common miner's daughter; and so, as at their first meeting, his pity was turned to intellectual interest.