And thus it was that Mat saw, for the first time since his return to Ballybay, the gentle, timid, lovely girl who had once willingly stood between him and death.
A few minutes afterwards, Betty's mother appeared. Her features bore the traces of the deepest grief that had yet assailed her. All pride had gone from that once imperious face; she was a stooped, shame-faced, old woman. As Mat looked at her there rushed before his memory the many momentous hours of his life with which that face was bound up, his days of childhood in her prosperous home, his association with her daughter, and the glad hours during the first election of Crowe, when life was still full of glorious hope, and she had dashed the glad vision with the first breath of suspicion and anticipated evil.
They looked at each other silently for a moment, and then she shook her head, and with a look of infinite grief in her eyes, said to him—
"Ah, Master Mat, it was the hunger did it; it was the hunger did it."
By a trick of memory Mat recollected that these were the words he had heard on that day, long ago, when Betty had rescued Mary and himself from the enraged bull.
One thing Mat had noticed as Betty Cunningham had passed; it was that amid the wreck of her beauty one feature still remained as strangely witching as ever. The soft eyes had not lost their delicacy of hue, nor had the evil passions of her soul deprived them of their gentle look. Those who mentioned her, and she was not an uncommon topic among the men of the town, still spoke of Betty's beautiful eyes.
At last there came a temporary change in her fate. A branch of the Mary Magdalene Asylum was established in Ballybay for the rescue of fallen women, and she was one of the first to enter. But her temper, spoiled by excesses and disappointment, fretted under the restraint. She quarrelled with the nuns, and one night she fled. Then the revival in all its fierce vigilance of the old spectre of eternal punishment made her more infuriate than ever. She drank more deeply, cursed more fiercely, was oftener in the police-cell, and Ballybay loathed her more than ever.
One morning—it was a Christmas morning—Mat was walking with his father in the "Big Meadows." Snow had fallen heavily the night before; and as they passed a bush, they saw the impress of a woman's form; it was evident that an unhappy being had there spent her Christmas Eve.
"My God!" said Mat, "a woman has slept there."
Mat's father was the kindest and most humane being in all the world, but "Serve the wretch right!" was his comment.