Read Ebook: The Valley of Squinting Windows by MacNamara Brinsley

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1142 lines and 77979 words, and 23 pages

He came towards her at last, a thin young man in black, wearing cheap spectacles. He looked tenderly upon the woman who had borne him. She embraced him and entered into a state of rapt admiration. Within the wonder of his presence she was as one translated, her sad thoughts began to fall from her one by one. On the platform of this dusty wayside station in Ireland she became a part of the glory of motherhood as she stood there looking with pride upon her son.

The motor had surprised him. He would have been better pleased if this expense had been avoided, for he was not without knowledge and appreciation of the condition of his parents' affairs. Besides the little donkey and trap had always appeared so welcome in their simplicity, and it was by means of them that all his former home-comings had been effected. Those easy voyages had afforded opportunity for contemplation upon the splendor of the fields, but now the fields seemed to slip past as if annoyed by their faithlessness. Yet he knew that his mother had done this thing to please him, and how could he find it in his heart to be displeased with her?

She was speaking kind words to him, which were being rudely destroyed, in their tender intonation, by the noise of the engine. She was setting forth the reasons why she had taken the car. It was the right thing now around Garradrimna.--The Houlihans of Clonabroney.--Again the changing of the gears cut short her explanation.

"That man who was down with you in the train, Mr. Shannon, what was he saying to you?"

"Indeed he was kindly inviting me over to see his nephew. I never knew he had a nephew, but it seems he has lived up in Dublin. He said that his brother, Henry Shannon, was the father of this young man."

The feelings which her son's words brought rushing into her mind seemed to cloud out all the brightness which, for her, had again returned to the day. Yes, this young man, this Ulick Shannon, was the son of Henry Shannon and Henry Shannon was the one who had brought the great darkness into her life.... It would be queer, she thought, beyond all the queerness of the world, to see the son of that man and her son walking together through the valley. The things that must be said of them, the terrible sneer by which they would be surrounded--Henry Shannon's son and the son of Nan Byrne.... She grew so silent beneath the sorrow of her vision that, even in the less noisy spaces of the humming car, the amount of time during which she did not speak seemed a great while.

"What is the matter, mother?" said John Brennan.

"It was how I was thinking that maybe it would be better now if you had nothing to do with the Shannons."

"But it was very kind of Mr. Shannon to invite me."

"I know, I know; but I'd rather than the world it was any other family at all only the Shannons. They're a curious clan."

In the painful silence that had come upon them she too was thinking of the reasons from which her words had sprung. Of how Henry Shannon had failed to marry her after he had ruined her; of how the disgrace had done no harm at all to him with his money and his fine farm. Then there was the burning thought of how he had married Grace Gogarty, the proudest and grandest girl in the whole parish, and of how this young man had been born prematurely and, by a curious chance, about the same time as her own little child. The one thing that she always dreaded more than any other, in the pain of its remembrance, was the fact that Henry Shannon had married Grace Gogarty directly after the "honeymoon" with her in Dublin. Yes, it was hardest of all to think of that, and of how Grace Gogarty had so held up her head all through the short period of her wedded life with Henry Shannon. And after his death she had gone about with such conceited sorrowfulness in her widow's weeds.

These thoughts had passed through her mind with swift definition, each one cutting deeper the gap which separated her from the long-dreamt-of joy of John's home-coming. And her lovely son sitting up beside her had grown so silent.

As the car stopped by the house and Ned Brennan came out to meet them, unshaven and walking doggedly, she felt very certain that a shadow had settled down upon this particular return of John. The remembrance of her sin, from which it seemed impossible to escape, made the great thing she had planned so little and desolate.

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 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.

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 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, 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 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.

The mind of John Brennan was more or less foreign to this aspect of life amongst the fields. He would be the very last to realize that such were essential happenings in the life of his native village of Garradrimna. On his first Sunday at home he went walking, after second Mass, through the green woods which were the western boundary of the village. His thoughts were dwelling upon Father O'Keeffe's material interpretation of the Gospel story. At last they eddied into rest as he moved there along the bright path between the tall trees, so quiet as with adoration.

When he came by that portion of the demesne wall, which lay at the back of Brannagan's public-house, he heard a scurrying of rabbits among the undergrowth. In the sudden hush which followed he heard a familiar voice raised in a tense whisper.

"Hurry, quick! quick! There's some one in black coming up the path. It must be Sergeant McGoldrick. The can! the can!"

His cheeks were suddenly flushed by a feeling of shame, for it was his father who had spoken. He stood behind a wide beech tree in mere confusion and not that he desired to see what was going forward.

His father, Ned Brennan, bent down like an acrobat across the demesne wall and took the can from some one beneath. Then he ran down through the undergrowth, the brown froth of the porter dashing out upon his trousers, his quick eyes darting hither and thither like those of a frightened animal. But he did not catch sight of John, who saw him raise the can to his lips.

It was a new experience for John Brennan to see his father thus spending the Sabbath in this dark place in the woods, while out in the young summer day spilled and surged all the wonder of the world.... A sort of pity claimed possession of him as he took a different way among the cathedral trees.... His father was the queer man, queer surely, and moving lonely in his life. He was not the intimate of his son nor of the woman who was his son's mother. He had never seemed greatly concerned to do things towards the respect and honor of that woman. And yet John Brennan could not forget that he was his father.

Just now another incident came to divert his mood. He encountered an ancient dryad flitting through the woods. This was Padna Padna, a famous character in Garradrimna. For all his name was that of the great apostle of his country, his affinities were pagan. Although he was eighty, he got drunk every day and never went to Mass. In his early days he had been the proprietor of a little place and the owner of a hackney car. When the posting business fell into decline, he had had to sell the little place and the horse and car, and the purchase money had been left for his support with a distant relative in the village. He was a striking figure as he moved abroad in the disguise of a cleric not altogether devoted to the service of God. He always dressed in solemn black, and his coat was longer than that of a civilian. His great hat gave him a downcast look, as of one who has peered into the Mysteries. His face was wasted and small, and this, with his partially blinded eyes behind the sixpenny spectacles, gave him a certain asceticism of look. Yet it was the way he carried himself rather than his general aspect which created this impression of him. He was very small, and shrinking daily. His eyes were always dwelling upon his little boots in meditation. Were you unaware of his real, character, you might foolishly imagine that he was thinking of high, immortal things, but he was in reality thinking of drink.

This was his daily program. He got up early and, on most mornings, crossed the street to Bartle Donohoe, the village barber, for a shave. Bartle would be waiting for him, his dark eye hanging critically as he tested the razor edge against the skin of his thumb. The little blade would be glinting in the sunlight.... Sometimes Bartle would become possessed of the thought that the morning might come when, after an unusually hard carouse on the previous night, he would not be responsible for all his razor might do, that it might suddenly leap out of his shivering hand and make a shocking end of Padna Padna and all his tyranny.... But his reputation as the drunkard with the steadiest hand in Garradrimna had to be maintained. If he did not shave Padna Padna the fact would be published in every house.

"Bartle Donohoe was too shaky to shave me this morning; too shaky, I say. Ah, he's going wrong, going wrong! And will ye tell me this now? How is it that if ye buy a clock, a little ordinary clock for a couple of shillings, and give it an odd wind, it'll go right; but a man, a great, clever man'll go wrong no matter what way ye strive for to manage him?"

If Bartle shaved him, Padna Padna would take his barber over to Tommy Williams's to give him a drink, which was the only payment he ever expected. After this, his first one, Padna Padna would say, "Not going to drink any more to-day," to which Bartle Donohoe would reply sententiously: "D'ye tell me so? Well, well! Is that a fact?"

Then, directly, he would proceed to take a little walk before his breakfast, calling at every house of entertainment and referring distantly to the fact that Bartle Donohoe had a shake in his hand this morning. "A shame for him, and he an only son and all!"

And thus did he spend the days of his latter end, pacing the sidewalks of Garradrimna, entering blindly into pubs and discussing the habits of every one save himself.

He was great in the field of reminiscence.

"Be the Holy Farmer!" he would say, "but there's no drinking nowadays tost what used to be longo. There's no decent fellows, and that's a fact. Ah, they were the decent fellows longo. You couldn't go driving them a place but they'd all come home mad. And sure I often didn't know where I'd be driving them, I'd be that bloody drunk. Aye, decent fellows! Sure they're all dead now through the power and the passion of drink."

So this was the one whom John Brennan now encountered amid the green beauty of the woodland places. To him Padna Padna was one of the immortals. Succeeding holiday after succeeding holiday had he met the ancient man, fading surely but never wholly declining or disappearing. The impulse which had prompted him to speak to Marse Prendergast a few days previously now made him say: "How are you, old man?" to Padna Padna.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet