There arose a continual coming and going of John Brennan to and from the house of his mother through the valley. He was an object of curiosity and conjecture. The windows would squint at him as he went past through power of the leering faces behind; men working in the fields would run to the hedges and gaze after him as he went far down the road.
In the evenings black prophets would foregather and say: "Now isn't he the fine-looking young fellow indeed, with the grand black clothes upon him; but he'll never be a priest, and that's as sure as you're there, for his mother is Nan Byrne, and she was a bad woman, God help us all! 'Tis a pity of him, when you come to think of it, for it isn't his fault, happening as it did before he was born."
John Brennan was innocent of guile, and so he did not become aware of the attitude of those among whom he passed. He did not realize that in his own person he stood as an affront to them, that he was the Levite standing nearer God than they in their crude condition as clods of the earth. It was his mother who had created this position for him, for she had directed his studies towards divinity. If his natural abilities had won him the promise of any other elevation, it might not have annoyed them so deeply. But this was something they could not have been expected to bear, for not one[Pg 31] amongst them had a son a priest, although they believed as implicitly as Mrs. Brennan in the virtue of religion, and there was always a feeling of intense righteousness upon them when they remembered her story.
Yet, although this was the way they looked upon him, they were not without a certain cringing respect for the realization he represented. Thus it was that when they spoke to him there was a touch of deference in their voices although there was a sneer in their hearts. It could not be expected that he should see them as they really were. Yet there were odd, great moments when his larger vision enabled him to behold them moving infinitesimally, in affright, beneath the shadow of the Divine Hand. He possessed a certain gift of observation, but it was superficial and of little consequence to his character for it flourished side by side with the large charity of his heart.
One morning he encountered old Marse Prendergast upon the road. She was gathering a few green sticks from the hedge-rows. She seemed to be always looking for the means of a fire, and, to John Brennan, there appeared something that touched him greatly in the spectacle of this whining old woman, from whom the spark of life was so quickly fading, having no comfort, even on a summer day, but just to be sitting over a few smoldering sticks, sucking at an old black pipe and breaking out into occasional converse with herself. She who had given birth to strong sons and lovely daughters sitting here in her little cabin alone. Her clutch was gone from her to America, to the streets, and to the grave.
John Brennan felt the pity of her, although he did not[Pg 32] notice that the curtsey she gave him from the ditch was an essential portion of her contempt for the son of Nan Byrne (the cheek of him going on for to be a priest!), or that when she addressed him as Mr. Brennan it was in derision.
"And glory be to God, sure we'll soon have to be calling you Father Brennan!" she repeated, as if silently marveling at the impossibility of the combination of words.
He saw her move to accompany him down the road, her old back bent cruelly beneath the load of the weighty, green branches. He was touched, for he was not blind to the symbolism for which she stood, and offered to carry the branches for her, and she, accepting his offer, called down upon his head the blessing of God.
As they moved slowly along the road she recounted, in snatches between her questions regarding his life at college, all the intimate woes of her life. Her lamentations, as they drew near the cottage of Mrs. Brennan, attracted the attention of his mother, who saw a sight filling her eyes which cut her to the bone. She saw her son John, her hope and pride, conversing with Marse Prendergast, the long-tongued shuiler who tramped the country with her stories and in quest of more stories—Marse Prendergast who knew her secret as no other knew it, and who had so recently reminded her of that knowledge. And he was carrying her sticks along the public road in the full light of day.... So powerful was the hurt of her maternal feelings that she almost fainted sitting there by her machine.
When John came into the room she looked so pale that[Pg 33] he fancied she must be ill. He inquired as to the causes of her condition, but she only replied that she would try to tell him when he had taken his breakfast.
As he was eating in silence she wondered what at all she could say to him or how she would attempt to place her view of things before him. This incident of the morning might be taken as a direct foreshadowing of what might happen if his foolish charity extended further down the valley. She did not dare to imagine what things he might be told or what stories might be suggested to his mind by the talk of the neighbors. But it was clearly her duty doubly to protect him from such a possibility. She saw that he had finished his breakfast.
"That was the quare thing you were doing just now, John? It was the quarest thing at all, so it was."
"Queer, mother; what was?"
"Talking to old Marse Prendergast, son, and she only a woman of the roads with a bad tongue on her."
"I only stopped talking with her, mother, so that I might carry her sticks. She was not able."
"And she used the fine opportunity, I'll warrant, to drag information out of you and carry it all through the valley. That's what she was at! That's what she was at!"
There was a kind of mournful wail in Mrs. Brennan's tones as if she saw in John's action of the morning some irretrievable distance placed between herself and him. The people of the valley loomed ever great as an army between her and the desire of her heart, and John had just now, as it were, afforded an opening to the enemy.
He received a certain amount of hurt from her words,[Pg 34] for although he knew her only as his mother and a good woman who was well nigh faultless in her practise of the Christian religion, why was it that this simple action of his, with its slight touch of charity, was resented by her? Yet he allowed her to proceed without question, listening always with that high and fine attention which must have been the attitude of Christ as He listened to His Mother in Galilee.
She painted a picture of the valley for his consideration. She proceeded to do this with a great concern moving her, for she was quick to perceive the change in him since his last holidays. He was a man now, and it was to his manhood condition she appealed. She began to tell him, with such a rush of words, the life-histories of those around him. There was not a slight detail she did not go to great pains to enlarge, no skeleton she did not cause to jump from its cupboard and run alive once more through the valley. She painted a new portrait of every inhabitant in a way that amazed John, who had not known of such things.
But over his first feelings of surprise came a great realization of sadness. For this was his mother who was speaking. Hitherto he had looked upon her as one untouched by the clayey villainies of earth, a patient and very noble woman, with tired eyes and busy hands rather fashioned to confer benedictions than waste themselves in labor. Now he was listening to one most subtly different, to a woman who had been suddenly metamorphosed into the likeness of something primeval and startling. And she was oh! so bitter.
Mrs. Brennan had no notion of the change that had come upon her. To herself there still appeared no [Pg 35]difference in herself. She was doing all this for love of her son John, as she had done much for love of him.
There fell a thick silence between them when she had finished. The mother and the son were both exhausted, he from listening to her and she from reading the pedigrees of every one to whom her mind could possibly extend, including Marse Prendergast, the shuiler, and the Shannons, who were almost gentlemen like the Houlihans of Clonabroney.
John Brennan sighed as he said out of the innocence of his heart:
"It is good, mother, that we are not as the rest of these."
Mrs. Brennan did not reply.