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"What does it matter whether you're happy and contented or not, so long as things are happening to you?" he exclaimed. Mrs. MacDermott burst into bitter laughter. "You have little wit," she said, "to be talking that daft way. Eh, William?" she added, turning to her other brother-in-law. "What do you think about it?"
"Oh, quite easily," he said nonchalantly, and as he spoke he realised that he had come to be a Londoner. "When I got out at the station," Mrs. MacDermott continued, "I called a porter and said to him, 'Just put that bag on your shoulder and carry it for me! 'Where to, ma'am? says he, and then I gave him your address. I thought the man 'ud drop down dead. 'Is it far? says I. 'Far! says he.
Anyhow, at eight o'clock, there he was in the Place Cornavin, arriving at the outskirts of the crowd which was watching the white-robed crucifer and acolytes leading the procession out of the open church doors and down the steps. Macdermott, blocked by the crowd, could hardly see. He felt in an inferior position towards this procession, barred from it by a kindly and reverent crowd of onlookers.
He was to lie low in London so that his father wouldn't find him." "You neither of you thought about me, apparently," said Mrs. MacDermott. "Oh, yes we did. We thought as you hadn't seen him since he was a child that you wouldn't know him. And of course we thought you'd be frightfully old. There didn't seem to be much harm in it." "And you you came here and called me Aunt Nell."
Why didn't your people finish the job they began on myself if it was your people, and not, as I suspect, some Sinn Fein scoundrels?" The ex-cardinal gave his kindly smile. "It was certainly my people, Mr. Macdermott. But, in attacking you, they made a mistake. When they perceived who you were, they desisted.
A girl gets better-paid work in London than in the provinces. That's the only reason!" "Would you rather live in the country, then?" "Yes!" Eleanor said. "I wonder would you like Ballyards!" Mrs. MacDermott said almost as if she were speaking to herself. Then she began to talk of something else.
When John MacDermott was seventeen years of age and entering into his fourth year of monitorship, his Uncle William said to him, "John, boy, you're getting on to be a man now, and it's high time you began to think of what you're going to do with yourself when you are one!" "You're mebbe right," said John. "The next year'll be your last one at the monitoring, won't it?" Uncle William continued.
"What'll you do?" Mrs. MacDermott asked. "Something," said John. "I can easily do something!" "And what about the bookshop?" said Uncle Matthew. "Och, that was only a notion that came into my head," John answered. "I won't bother myself selling books: I'll write them instead!" He glanced about the kitchen. "I've a good mind to start writing something now!" he said. His mother sprang to her feet.
"There's no hurry for a day or two, is there?" she said at last, and then, pleading fatigue, she went to bed. "I can't see what you want to go back to London for," Mrs. MacDermott said when Eleanor had gone. "The neither of you don't look well on that life, and you could write your books here just as well as you can there. Better, mebbe! Eleanor likes Ballyards. She doesn't care much for London."
MacDermott's pride would be outraged by this knowledge, and that she would make bitter complaint to John of his failure to maintain his wife in a way worthy of his family; and so she urged John to say nothing at all of the matter either to Mrs. MacDermott or to Uncle William. He had made no comment on the matter, but she knew that he had been relieved by her request.
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