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What had been her life from that time to the period at which, under Father Marty's auspices, she became the inhabitant of Ardkill Cottage, no one knew but herself. She was then utterly dissevered from all friends and relatives, and appeared on the western coast of County Clare with her daughter, a perfect stranger to every one.
So she started for the old red schoolhouse in quite a cheerful frame of mind, in spite of Marty's prophecy that "she'd soon git sick o' that old maid." It was not Miss Scattergood that Janice had reason to be "sick of!"
He would have pawned his life at that moment for the taste of her lips. She stood at the bottom of the stairs and held out her hand. "Good night, old boy," she said. And he took it and hurt it. "Good night, Joany," he answered. That pet name hurt her more than his eager grasp. It was Marty's own word Marty, who who She threw up her head and stamped her foot, and slammed the door of her thoughts.
He looked critically at her. "You ought not to feel like that, Marty." Her only reply was turning to take up the next tree; and they planted on through a great part of the day, almost without another word. Winterborne's mind ran on his contemplated evening-party, his abstraction being such that he hardly was conscious of Marty's presence beside him.
When a goodly heap had been piled beside her, she found her voice again, saying: "I reckon everything that's ever been lost from Sobrante since it began is down here. Elsa's little leathern bags with their knitted covers; Beppo's plumes; Marty's watch, that he thought he had lost in the gulch; Wun Lung's carved image. Oh, Pedro! how dreadful and yet how splendid!"
I never saw mosses so beautifully arranged; and it was so thoughtful of her to bring them in for you for Christmas Eve. I wish we had something to send in to them, don't you?" "Well, I've been thinking," said his mother, "that we might ask them to come in and take dinner with us to-morrow. Marty's made some capital mince-pies, and is going to roast a turkey.
And, though the old differences of temperament and interest had not lessened, the two had reached a fine contentment over each other's purposes. J.W. was happy in Marty's preacher-plans, and Marty believed implicitly in the wisdom of J.W.'s understood purpose to be a forthright Christian layman.
In Marty's basket was a brown paper packet, and in the packet the chestnut locks, which, by reason of the barber's request for secrecy, she had not ventured to intrust to other hands. Giles asked, with some hesitation, how her father was getting on. He was better, she said; he would be able to work in a day or two; he would be quite well but for his craze about the tree falling on him.
Old Marty's face had never looked other than lovingly into Stephen's since he first lay in her arms, twenty-five years ago, when she came, a smooth-cheeked, rosy country-woman of twenty-five, to nurse his mother at the time of his birth. She had never left the home since.
There is no finer handling of sex-love with due regard to its dual nature, love that grows in earth yet flowers until it looks into heaven than Marty's oft-quoted beautiful speech at her lover's grave; and Hardy's belief rings again in the defense of that good fellowship that camaraderie which can grow into "the only love which is as strong as death beside which the passion usually so-called by the name is evanescent as steam."
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