When John regained the house he saw that his father's boots had disappeared from their accustomed place beside the fire. No doubt he had gone away in them to Garradrimna. He had not met him on the road, but there was a short way across the fields and through the woods, a backward approach to three of the seven publichouses along which Ned Brennan, some rusty plumber's tool in his hand and his head downcast, might be seen passing on any day.  
He did not go straight into the sewing-room, for the door was closed and he could hear the low murmur of talk within. It must be some customer come to his mother, he thought, or else some one who had called in off the road to talk about the concert. Immediately he realized that he was wrong in both surmises, for it was the voice of Marse Prendergast raised in one of its renowned outbursts of supplication.
 
"Now I suppose it's what you think that you're the quare, clever woman, Nan Byrne, with your refusing me continually of me little needs; but you'd never know what I'd be telling on you some day, and mebbe to your grand son John."
 
"Sssh—sssh—sure I'll get it for you when he goes from the kitchen."
 
This last was in a low tone and spoken by his mother.
 
"Mebbe it's what you're ashamed to let him see you[Pg 118] giving to me. That's a grand thing now, and I knowing what I know!"
 
"Can't you be easy now and maybe 'tis a whole shilling I'll be giving you in a few minutes."
 
This was altogether too generous of his mother. It gave scope to Marse Prendergast to exercise her tyranny. Her threat was part of the begging convention she had framed for herself, and so it did not move him towards speculation or suspicion. His mind drifted on to the enjoyment of other thoughts, the girl he had just walked with down the valley, the remembered freshness of the morning road. He came out to the door. The little kitchen garden stretched away from his feet. An abandoned spade stood up lonely and erect in the middle of the cabbage-plot. Around it were a few square feet of freshly-turned earth. It was the solitary trace of his existence that his father had left behind.... As the mind of John Brennan came to dwell upon the lonely spectacle of the spade the need for physical exertion grew upon him.
 
He went out into the little garden and lifted the rude implement of cultivation in his hand. He had not driven it many times into the soft clay of the cabbage-bed when a touch of peace seemed to fall upon him. The heavy burden that had occupied his mind was falling into the little trench that was being made by the spade.
 
He had become so interested in his task that he had not heard his mother go upstairs nor seen Marse Prendergast emerge from the house some moments later.
 
The old shuiler called out to him in her high, shrill voice:
 
[Pg 119]
 
"That's right, John! That's right! 'Tis glad myself is to see you doing something useful at last. Digging the cabbage-plot, me sweet gosoon, and your father in Garradrimna be this time with his pint in his hand!"
 
Mrs. Brennan had followed her to the door, and her cruelty was stirred to give the sore cut by reviving the old dread.
 
"That's the lad! That's the lad! But mind you don't dig too far, for you could never tell what you'd find. And indeed it would be the quare find you might say!"
 
He laughed as she said this, for he remembered that, as a child she had entertained him with the strangest stories of leprecauns and their crocks of gold, which were hidden in every field. The old woman passed out on the road, and his mother came over to him with a pitiful look of sadness in her eyes.
 
"Now, John, I'm surprised at you to have a spade in your hand before Marse Prendergast and all. That's your father's work and not yours, and you with your grand education."
 
The speech struck him as being rather painful to hear, and he felt as if he should like to say: "Well, what is good enough for my father ought to be good enough for me!" But this, to his mother, might have looked like a back-answer, a piece of impertinence, so he merely stammered in confusion: "Oh, sure I was only exercising and amusing myself. When this little bit is finished I'm going down to have a read by the lake."
 
"That's right, John!" she said in a flat, sad voice, and turned back to her endless labor.
 
He stopped, his hands folded on the handle-end of the[Pg 120] spade, and fell into a condition of dulness which even the slightest labor of the body brings to those unaccustomed to it. All things grew so still of a sudden. There seemed to come a perfect lull in the throbbing, nervous realization of his brain from moment to moment.... He felt himself listening for the hum of his mother's machine, but it was another sound that came to him—the desolating sound of her lonely sobbing. She was crying to herself there now in the sewing-room and mourning forever as if for some lost thing.... There were her regular sobs, heavy with an eternal sadness as he listened to them. Into such acute self-consciousness had his mood now moved that he could not imagine her crying as being connected with anything beyond himself. He was the perpetual cause of all her pain.... If only she would allow him, for short spaces, to go out of her mind they might both come into the enjoyment of a certain freedom, but sometimes the most trivial incident seemed to put her out so. This morning she had been in such heart and humor, and last night so interested in the concert, and here now she was in tears. It could not have been the visit of Marse Prendergast or her talk, for there was nobody so foolish, he thought, as to take any notice of either. It must have been the digging and the fact that people passing the road might see him. Now was not that foolish of her, for did not Father O'Keeffe himself dig in his own garden with his own two blessed hands ...? But he must bend in obedience to her desire, and go walking like a leisured gentleman through the valley. He was looking forward to this with dread, for, inevitably, it must throw him back upon his own thoughts.
 
[Pg 121]
 
As he came down past the school he could hear a dull drone from among the trees. The school had not yet settled down to the business of the day, and the scholars were busy with the preparation of their lessons. John stopped by the low wall, which separated its poor playground from the road, to gaze across at the hive of intellect. Curious that his mother should now possess a high contempt for this rude academy where he had been introduced to learning. But he had not yet parted company with his boyhood. He was remembering the companions of his schooldays and how this morning preparation had been such a torture. Still moving about the............