The house of Bridget Davanagh was now desolate indeed. Her son lost for ever in the unknown waters. Her daughter sleeping in the village churchyard, bearing the burden of her cross no more. There was no cheer for her in the well-meant gossip of her neighbors. There was no comfort for her in the promise of a land, beyond this mortal, of perpetual rest. If her religious instincts and principles were still alive, they remained dumb and dormant. She could not read. She loved not company. Her few personal necessities rendered much bodily toil superfluous, and, when her work was done, she had no other occupation than to sit down and brood over her sorrows. The range of her thought was narrow. She had no future to look forward to. Her eyes were only on the past, and the past held for her but two figures—her murdered Mary and her Mary's murderer. It was in vain that the good parish priest sought to divert her mind and lead her to better things; for, though she said but little and that quietly, he could see, like all who now came intimately near her, that her faculties were clouded and her control over her will and imagination almost totally destroyed.
How long she might have lived thus without becoming fully crazed was, fortunately, never tested. A letter came to her one evening, bearing a foreign post-mark, and dotted over with the many colored stamps which tell of journeys upon sea and land. It was the first letter she had ever received. No relative or friend, no acquaintance except Michael Herican, has she out of Easky, and she was sorely puzzled, as she broke the seal and turned the pages up and down and sideways, in the useless attempt to tell from whence it came. She called in a passing school-child to decipher it, and, as he blundered through its weary lines, she sat with her face buried in her hands, rocking her body ceaselessly to and fro. He reached the end and read the signature of "Bernard Davanagh." The widow's boy still lived. She lifted her worn face out of her hands and the tears chased each other down her cheeks. They eased her throbbing brain, and she bade the child go over it again, for of its first reading she had scarcely heard a word except the name. And now she learned that he was in America. He had been left sick on shore, at the last voyage of his ill-fated vessel, and escaped alive. Since then he had been tossed on every sea which bears a name, till, tired of the toil and danger, he had settled in the far-off mining regions of the western continent. He now sent for her and Mary to come out to him, enclosing money and passage certificates for each, and saying that in two month's time he hoped to have them both with him in his new home. It was a long time before the old woman could comprehend the message; but, when she once really understood that Bernard was alive, she would have started on the instant to reach her boy. Her idea of the distance was, that America lay somewhere out beyond Dromore, as far, perhaps, as that was from Easky, and it was with difficulty that the neighbors, who came flocking in when the news went flitting up and down the street, could control her. Those who stayed with her through the night, and those who went back homeward, had settled it, however, before morning dawned, that, though the journey might be fearful and the chances few, it was better she should go and perish by the way, than stay at home to grieve, and craze, and die.
There was not much preparation. Her cottage sold, her furniture distributed among her friends, the other passage-paper given to a woman in Dromore, who eagerly grasped the chance of going out to seek her husband, and Bridget Davanagh left Easky and its graves for ever. The emigrant best knows the weariness and hardship of a steerage passage in a crowded ship, and this old and worn-out woman endured them as a thousand others, old and feeble, have done since then and before. But the long voyage had an end some time, and, in a day after the ship was moored at New York wharves, the mother had found her son. He had a cabin built and furnished, deep in the wild gorge of a mountain, out of whose sides the glittering anthracite was torn by hundreds of tons a day; and here he took her to live and care for him. Not a face around her that she ever saw before; the dialect of their language so differing from her own that she could only here and there make out a word; Bernard himself grown up into a tall, stout, burly man, black with dust and reeking with soot and oil, she longed almost fiercely for her home by the green sea, and wished herself back again a score of times a day. When her homesickness wore off, as it slowly did, and she formed new acquaintances, and grew familiar with the scenes around her; above all, when she began to realize the comforts which the new world gave beyond the old—she became reconciled to her strange life, and seemed almost herself again. Only when, now and then, her spite and hatred to the name of Herican broke out again did her mind reel with its fury; otherwise, she was more like Bridget Davanagh in her early days of second widowhood than she had been for years.
Meanwhile, of Michael Herican. He had married Kitty Moran, as the Easky story said. It was, on his part, an act of sheer despair. Not that he did not love her. His passion had grown stronger and more absorbing every hour, and she well returned it. But it was no calm conclusion of his judgment that led him to unite his life with hers. It was more like the suicide of a felon who sees his fate before him, but would rather die by his own free act, to-day, than anticipate inevitable death to-morrow. When the Widow Moran "went to her own place," her fortune fell to them. He opened a little store, and, for a while, life, cheered by business, seemed more bearable; but misfortune followed him and, by one loss and another, both his credit and his stock were sacrificed. Honest to the last farthing, he stripped himself of everything to pay his debts, and turned himself and his young wife, to whom privation had ever been a stranger, into the streets—to work, or beg, or starve. Then, for a time, he went to sea; but the lone hours of watchful idleness upon the deep gave him too many opportunities for recollection, and he could not endure it. As a common hireling he worked about the docks, and earned by this chance toil a meagre pittance for the bare necessities of life. But he could not settle permanently to anything. Of good abilities, with strong arms and a willing heart, it was this mental burden only which unmanned him, and this pursued him everywhere and always, like an avenging ghost. Then he began to wander. From Sligo they went to Ballina, and thence to Galway, and thence to Dublin, living awhile in each, but evermore a restless, wavering, aimless man. His poor wife suffered fearfully. Deprived of all the comforts she had ever known, and cut down sometimes to a mere apology for food and clothing, she rued the day when she was born; but she never blamed her husband. Through all, she clung to him faithfully; and when she found herself, at last, in the lowest portion of the capital, and living among those whose touch in other days would have been infection, however else she murmured, it was never against him. They stayed in Dublin for a year and more. A child was born there, but it soon died from exposure and insufficient food, and this made the mother's heart uneasy, and she longed to move. A berth fell in his way on board a homeward-bound Canadian timber-ship, and he agreed to go. He also paid the passage of his wife with labor, and, in due time, their weary feet were standing on the shores of a new world, ready for other journeys and, perhaps, better paths.
But it did not so eventuate. He was the same man still, though under other skies. There was a doom upon him. His family grew on his hands and opened in his heart new chambers of affection, but they could give no ballast to his brain. He could not anchor anywhere. The weird ship that sails up and down antarctic seas in an eternal voyage is no more harborless than was he. He fought the forests, axe in hand, and smote down many pillars of the olden fane. He toiled on board the river-craft that drift to and fro upon the broad St. Lawrence. He was a stevedore in Quebec, a laborer in Montreal. So he worked on from one town to another, fretting away his own existence, wearing out the health and strength of his devoted wife, until he reached the "States," and, by some mysterious fatality, came into the very village where Bernard Davanagh and his mother lived. Here he found work congenial to his tastes. The dark gloom of the long tunnels underground, the ghastly lamps, and, more than all, the exciting danger of the labor, kept his mind on the stretch and drowned his memory more effectually than it had ever been before. He did not know the nearness of Mary Carrol's mother. He would as soon have dreamed of meeting his dead children in the street as her, and his work late and early kept him out of sight, so that they did not hear of him.
But it happened on one Sunday morning, as he went to Mass in the great town, two miles away, that he heard the name of "Bernard" called by some one in the throng. He looked anxiously around him, and had no difficulty in recognizing, in the features of the man addressed, the son of the detested Bernard Davanagh of his youth. Had he not known the contrary, he might have thought it that very father stepped out of his grave. The recognition was not mutual, but the unquiet heart of Michael Herican reeked little of the sacrifice that day, for thinking where this new phase of his life would end. He feared no bodily injury. He had not lost his animal courage by his sufferings. But he felt like Orestes at the banquet, when he dispels with wine the knowledge of the ever-present furies, and then suddenly beholds the gorgon face pressed closely up to his. He saw in this an omen that, go where he would, the wrongs of Mary Carrol must live on outside him, as they did within.
How Bridget Davanagh and her son became aware that Michael Herican and his family were near them, it is of little consequence to know. When they did find it out, however, it was an evil greater in its results to them than to their enemy. Bernard had warmly espoused his mother's hatred, and added to it the natural fierceness of his own disposition. The discovery of her child's betrayer, and an occasional glimpse of him as he went by, revived all the old woman's vengefulness, and aggravated it beyond control. If Kathleen Herican had known all this, sick of her wandering life as she might be, she would not have stayed near them for a single hour. But she did not know it. Bernard and Bridget she had never seen in Easky, and Michael never told her they were here. Thus she, at least, lived on unconsciously, while vengeance sharpened its relentless sword for retribution, and hung it by an ever-weakening hair over the head of him she loved most of all.
Up to the morning of the fatal day no word or sign had passed between Michael Herican and either of the Davanaghs. But, as he went by to his work that morning, they both stood in their cabin door. The old woman could not resist the impulse to curse him as he passed her, and Bernard was as ready with his malison as she. Michael turned up the path that led toward them, and tried to speak in friendliness, but they would not hear him. At last, exasperated by their violence and abuse, he told the mother she was mad—mad as her daughter had been before her. It was a cruel word for him to speak, cruel for them to hear; but he did not mean it. It smote upon him as he hurried off to his work, and the image of the dead Mary came back and upbraided him many times that day. He left his work early, and went home. There was a strange look in his eye which made the timid heart of Kathleen beat faster when she saw it, and he was more than usually kind and tender to her and his child. His half-eaten supper over, he took his woodman's basket, and went out to gather fagots for the morning's fire. On his way home with others who had been on the like errand, as he came opposite the Davanagh cottage, the mother and the son came out and rushed upon him. One struck him with a stone, and felled him to the earth. The other smote him with an axe, and cleft his skull. It was all over in an instant. Not a word was said. The horror-stricken neighbors stood aghast a moment. When they came to their senses, Bernard Davanagh was climbing up the mountain on the further side of the ravine, and Bridget Davanagh, with bolted doors, kept ward in her devoted house alone.