Doonhaven, which had stood empty now since his death some years before. It was only five minutes' walk from the Rectory. The Rector and his wife started them off with furniture and linen, and Jinny was a splendid little manager, she had the doctor's house snug and habitable within a fortnight.
They spent their brief honeymoon by the lakes, bringing back with diem a photograph taken of them both the last day in Slane before returning to Doonhaven. They stood side by side, rather stiff, rather self-conscious, Hal with his hat in his hand and a suspicious, proud look on his face, as though he faced an accuser instead of a photographer. Jinny eager, hopeful, her sailor hat on the back of her brown, curly head, her hands clasping a small muff. The photograph was placed with great pride on the mantelpiece of their new home.
It was strange, thought Hal, to be living down in Doonhaven instead of at Clonmere. It gave him a funny sense of inferiority, which he could not quite get over. He hoped Jinny did not realise it. She was so dear to him, so loving and so kind, and took such a pride in their home, which was nothing but a rather bare, ugly house in the middle of the village. Hal would not for the world have her suspect that it worried him to look out of the sitting-room window at the Post Office, and have Doolan the shoemaker as his next-door neighbour. It was not snobbery that made him resent it, but an unspoken longing for the space and solitude of Clonmere. It was there that he belonged, not in the village of Doonhaven.
When these thoughts passed through his mind he would hate himself for his ingratitude., taking special care to compliment Jinny on her new curtains, or her arrangement of the flowers, or a cake she had baked for Sunday.
'Sometimes I'm a bear and a brute, sweetheart,' he told her, drawing her on his knee, 'and I beg of you to be patient with me at those times, and take no notice. I've brought black moods home with me from Canada, as well as rotten health.'
'That's what I'm here for, Hal,' she answered, running her hand through his hair, 'to chase away the black moods and hold your hand.'
'You're a darling,' he said, 'and I am the luckiest man in the world. . Now give me the hammer and some nails, and I'll see if I can fit up that shelf you want in the pantry. Canada has done one thing for me if nothing else, it's made me a handy man about the house.'
Before they decided to live in the house in the village, the Rector had asked Hal what he felt about returning to Clonmere. Hal had shaken his head at once, an obstinate expression on his face.
'The place is not mine,' he said, 'it's my father's. He has not written to me since I left London nine years ago. How could I possibly go and live at Clonmere after that?'
'Have you ever written to him, boy, and asked his forgiveness?'
'Yes-when I first got out to Winnipeg. I had no answer. That was enough for me. I shall never write to him again as long as I live.'
Tom Callaghan said no more. God alone could heal the breach between father and son, and if he tried to meddle it would only make matters worse. He wrote and told his old friend that Hal had returned to Doonhaven, of his ill-health and failure out in Canada, and the engagement to his daughter. Henry made little comment in his reply.
'I never expected anything else,' he said, 'but that Hal would make a mess of his life. I am afraid your daughter is throwing herself away on him.'
So Clonmere remained shuttered and Hal Brodrick lived in Doonhaven instead, with Jinny doing his cooking and a girl coming in every morning to scrub floors, with himself cleaning the boots and shoes and bringing in the coal.
'I did it all in Canada,' he said, 'and I can do it here too,' and then he would look across the way and see Mike Doolan staring at him with a grin on his face as though he despised him, and if he spoke to him the fellow would be off-hand and indifferent.
'It's funny,' said Hal to Jinny, 'they don't like it. When we lived at Clonmere and were 'the gentry,' and rode past in the carriage, they hated us, no doubt, but they respected us, or at least they respected my father. And now I've come to live amongst them there's resentment, we make an intrusion. Oh, not you: they're used to you. You're the Rector's daughter. But I'm different. I'm a Brodrick, and they expect me to kick them in the pants, even if they hate me while I do it.'
'You're too sensitive,' said Jinny, 'too much on the defensive, and wondering what they are going to say to you. Just be natural, just be yourself. They'll be friendly in time; they are like children.'
'Which is myself?' said Hal. 'I'm damned if I know. I thought I was a rancher, and I was not. I believed myself a painter, and I could not sell a picture. I can't even call myself Hal Brodrick of Clonmere. I'm a useless rotter with a wife who's too good for me, living on the good-will of my father-in-law. And the people know it, that's the trouble.
They've every right to despise me.'
'They don't despise you, and you are none of those horrid things. You are my own Hal,' said Jinny.
She was just a little worried, all the same.
Hal's first rapture at being back and seeing her again had worn rather thin. He was often silent and depressed, and then would be in despair for fear he had wounded her and was making her miserable.
'I'm a burden to you,' he said; 'you'll be sick of me before you've been married six months. I'd no right to Come home and ask you.'
Jinny told some of this to her father, and he nodded his head in understanding.
'The trouble is,' he said, 'that Hal feels he is dependent on us, and yet he hasn't the strength of mind to try to stand on his own. I'll have a talk with him and see what I can do.'
And then, sitting round the fire in the Rectory study, it would be difficult to imagine that Hal was ever anything but charming, light' hearted and gay. He would chaff Aunt Harriet on skimming the cream with a scallop shell, and tease Uncle Tom on the length of the Sunday sermon, and standing on the hearth with his arm round Jinny's waist it might have been Henry himself, some thirty years before, thought the Rector, with the same amusing chatter about people and places, telling them of wild-cat schemes and pranks he had played in Canada with his partner, the dissolute Frank.'
'Are you too proud, Hal,' he said, when Jinny and her mother had left the room, 'to try to earn your living?'
'Not too proud,' said Hal, smiling, 'but too lazy. That's why I failed in Canada.'
'No,' said Tom, 'you failed in Canada because you were friendless and alone, and spent all your money in the Winnipeg saloons. That won't happen here.'
'What do you suggest, then, Uncle Tom? No one will buy my pictures. I hawked three canvases round Slane last week, and didn't sell one of them. It made me ashamed before Jinny, who still believes I'm a good painter. But after I'd had a couple of drinks I felt better about it.'
'Yes, lad, and if you go on like that you'll be ill again, as you were in Canada. No, keep your painting as a hobby, and a very good hobby it is. I want to know if you have the courage to do something else.'
'What should I do?'
The Rector looked at him with a twinkle in his eye. 'You know old Griffiths, the manager up at the mine?' he said.
'Yes.'
'His head clerk has gone to America. He wants someone to do the books and keep accounts, and the hundred and one odd jobs that he can't see to himself.
Office hours, of course, nine till six.
Small salary, but not to be despised. What about it?'
Hal thrust his hands in his pockets and made a face at his father-in-law.
'A Brodrick go and earn a few pounds a week in the mine that will one day bring him thousands?' he said. 'It's a funny sort of suggestion.'
'Never mind about that,' answered the Rector.
'It's the present you have to think about, not the future.
And there would be no question of taking money from your father. The salary is paid to the head clerk, whoever takes the place. The question is, can you pull yourself together and do it?
I know someone who would be very proud of you if you did, and that's Jinny.'
Hal did not answer for a moment. He stood staring at the fire.
