'How is it I've never seen you in church before?'
'Don't you know I'm a Roman?' he replied wonderingly.
Then the demeanor of her neighbors was made plain to her, and she
blushed to think of what she had done.
'No, I didn't know; why didn't you tell me?' she stammered. 'Why did
you come in if you didn't like it?'
'But I did like it,' he replied in a vibrant voice. 'I'd do more
than that to sit along of you. Didn't you save my life last night?'
Maggie blushed and kept silence, but a gentle glow of satisfaction
thrilled through her.
Presently they came to the cross roads, one arm of which led
homeward, the other to the shore.
'I'm going this way,' she said, motioning towards the beach.
'May I come too?'
'Of course you may,' she laughed, with a coquettish glance at him
from under her long eyelashes; 'do you think I'd have mentioned it,
if I hadn't meant you to come?
'Does father know you're a Roman?' she inquired suddenly, after a
pause.
'Of course.'
'Then how is it he keeps you in the shop? I thought he was so bitter
against your folks.'
'So he is; but there's no one else in the town as can hold a candle
to me at the feel of the stuff. And old Paterson--I mean, Mr.
Paterson, Miss--doesn't mix up his business with his religion, or he
wouldn't be the smartest trader in the town, as he is now.'
Every Sunday after that they went to church together, and for their
half-hour's stroll afterwards. She looked forward to the meeting as
the one bright spot in her dull existence. Her starved heart was
ripe for love; and soon her whole life became centred round the glow
in this one young man's eyes. Her father knew nothing of what was
happening. He attended the Wesleyan Chapel, where the service was
half an hour longer, and always found his daughter at home when he
arrived.
Old Paterson was a queer character in his way. His hard-featured
face showed the Scotch blood that is so prevalent among the middle
classes in the North of Ireland. His was a nature that had been
warped by adversity. Somewhat late in life he married a wife whom he
tenderly loved. After one short year of wedded happiness, she died
in giving birth to Maggie. Up to the date of that crowning sorrow of
his life, Paterson had been an ordinary church-goer, somewhat Low
Church like the rest of his class. But from that moment onward his
religion flowed in an ever bitterer and narrower stream. The
emotional side of his nature, thwarted in one direction, expended
itself fiercely in another. He became noted in the parish for his
intolerance and rabid sectarianism. In him all the forces of
Orangism, its opposition in race, class, and religion to the
surrounding Papists, reached their fullest development.
Gradually his bigotry became too intense for the orthodox Church to
hold him. He got himself elected a churchwarden for the mere purpose
of thwarting the vicar at every turn. At last, when the harassed
clergyman was nearly persecuted to death, that lack of humor which
was an inherent element of Paterson's severely practical mind,
delivered him from his enemy. Paterson's eye fell upon the church
notice-board, and perceived that it was held in an Oxford frame,
which was in the form of a cross. This was rank Popery, and not to
be borne in a Protestant establishment. In all haste he summoned a
vestry meeting, and proposed that the Oxford frame should have its
ends sawn off and all resemblance to the accursed symbol removed.
The vestry-meeting, composed chiefly of his friends, and Scotch like
himself, gravely carried his proposal into effect. But the ridicule
of the town descended upon the idea, and the mutilated notice-board
remained for a testimony against him.
Paterson shook the dust of an ungrateful sect from off his feet, and
joined the Wesleyans; he built them a tin church, and raised them
into prominence. His position of patron gratified his lust for
power, and for ten years now he had set the tone to the narrowest
clique of the community.
All this time, however, he kept his business apart from his religion,
and prospered greatly. His shop was the one place where he made no
difference between a Catholic and a Protestant. But all his energies
flowed in these two main streams--his business life and his religious
life--and left no particle of the rich emotion, which was their
source, for the unfortunate daughter, who was growing up with a heart
starved by the lack of nourishment.
Lisnamore is a hotbed of gossip--that vice of small towns and small
minds--and soon everybody in the place was discussing Maggie's affair
with Johnny Daly. Old Paterson himself alone remained in ignorance
of it; he inspired too healthy a respect in the breasts of his
neighbors for any one to approach him on the subject.
The priest, Father O'Flaherty, was one of the first to hear of the
grievous lapse of Johnny Daly into church-going, and immediately
seized an opportunity of speaking to that unruly member of his flock.
'You're quite a stranger, Johnny,' he began, the first time he met
him in the street; 'how is it I haven't seen yous at midday mass
these last three or four Sundays?'
'I go to church,' said Johnny shortly.
'An' what call have yous to go to church, when you shud be at chapel
like your forebears before you, John Daly?' inquired the priest
sternly.
But Daly was at that restive stage of a young man's passion, which
takes no account of authority, human or divine. He glowered at the
priest darkly, and replied,--
'That's my business; an' I'll do as I like. Just you show me the man
as'll cross me.'
Father O'Flaherty, alarmed at such unaccustomed violence, saw that
this was a case for diplomacy, that the bonds could not be strained
too tightly for fear that they might burst, and replied soothingly,--
'Oh, ay, to be sure, I mind now, they did be tellin' me there was a
girl in the case. An' young blood must have its road. But don't be
doin' anything foolish, Johnny, my son. I'll be expectin' yous at
chapel wan of these days.'
The priest hurried off, glad to be well rid of his ticklish mission.
And where he had failed, no one else felt inclined to interfere. The
months rolled on, and Johnny Daly's weekly appearance in church
became too much a part of the established order of things to any
longer attract notice. Scandal appeared likely to die a natural
death of sheer inanition, when suddenly a breath coming, no one knew
whence, fanned it into more than its original brightness, as the
embers of a dying fire often spring into a fresh glow from some
unknown cause.
A council of matrons was held, and it was decided that when Maggie's
good name came to be 'spoke about,' it was time her father, 'poor
innocent,' was told.
This delicate duty was finally undertaken by Mrs. M'Connell, a
butcher's wife, and the 'mother of eleven,' one of those women who
delight in arranging other people's affairs, and do it by discussing
those affairs with everybody that they can get to listen. But even
she stood rather in awe of old Paterson.
The next evening at teatime she attired herself in her Sunday finery,
and walked across the road and knocked at Paterson's door. Maggie
was not in the room when she arrived, and Mrs. M'Connell opened fire
at once before her courage had time to evaporate.
'I've come to spake to yous about yer dahter, poor innocent lamb, an'
I ought to know, as is the mother of eleven, an' has brought up an'
married foor dahters already, an' thim not so much as sayin' "Thank
ye" wanst they are safely settled, an' me afther toilin' an' moilin'
an' wearin' me fingers to the bone for their sakes. Ah, it's an
ongrateful wurrld, Misther Paterson, an ongrateful wurrld, that's
just what it is.'
Paterson perceived beneath this flood of words that there was some
unpleasant news about his daughter; and with the instinct of a highly
secretive nature, he set his face as a mask and stood upon his guard.
'But maybe ye've heerd tell of what they're sayin' about Maggie?'
pursued the matron, as he made no reply.
'Maybe,' he answered vaguely. It was not his cue to give unnecessary
information or encouragement.
'They do be sayin' that she's enthirely too thick with that young
Daly.'
'Ay, do they?'
'He goes to church wid her every Sunday these six months, an' him a
Roman. I wonder the praste doesn't hinder him. Did ye know that?'
'Ye've told it me now.'
'An' I did hear they've been walkin' about the lanes together in the
dusk, so we thought it was time some wan tould ye the road that
things was goin'!'
'That 'ud be no harm, if they was goin' to be married,' said Paterson
suddenly, prompted by an utterly unexpected instinct--an instinct of
protection on behalf of his daughter and of antagonism against the
vulgar gossip of the town.
'Ay,' ejaculated the visitor, entirely dumfounded at this unexpected
attitude in a man of his proverbial intolerance.
'I'm thinking,' continued the old man reflectively, 'that I'm getting
past my work over and above a bit, and Daly's a likely young chap to
take into partnership.'
'But he's a Roman.'
'A Roman may make a good business man and a good husband.'
'Ay, sure enough,' gasped the lady, too astounded to say all she
thought.
'And now, Mrs. M'Connell, is there anything else you have to say?'
'No.'
'It's a pity, then, that you took the trouble to dress yourself up to
come over here and try to make trouble between a father and his
daughter. If I might make bold to give you a bit of advice, it would
be to mind your own business more. If you looked after other folks'
affairs less and your own better, your husband mightn't be owin' me
that twenty-five pound this minute.'
At this personal turn in the conversation Mrs. M'Connell hastily left.
But though the enemy was thus put to flight in confusion, she left no
less consternation behind her. Now that his visitor was gone, the
old man was quite at a loss to explain to himself the impulse which
had led him to make a suggestion at which yesterday he would have
held up his hands in horror. It had sprung suddenly full-armed from
nowhere. Even now the idea did not possess that impossibility for
him that he expected. He examined it--Daly was one of the inferior
race, a Celt, a peasant by blood, and a Roman Catholic by religion,
but now all those things were as nothing in his eyes. He could only
remember him as the faithful servant and as the possible lover of his
daughter.
That last was the idea that swallowed up all others. He thought of
his own religious strictness, and it had suddenly retired very far
away. The thought of his wife, and through her of her daughter, was
nearer him to-night than it had been any time these twenty years.
What was it that had roused these old memories, this sudden
tenderness? He asked himself this question, and found the solution
in the mysterious manner of his visitor; he had not permitted her to
say all that she had come prepared to say. What was this evil that
threatened him?
In the ordinary course of affairs the old man would have spoken to
his daughter at once; but this uneasiness determined him to see for
himself, first of all, how matters lay.
That night was Saturday, and he avoided Maggie all the evening. In
the morning he followed her when she went to church, and found
himself, for the first time for many years, sitting behind the pew
where the two lovers were sitting together, where he and his wife had
once sat in the days that now came back so freshly to his memory.
Maggie's profile, with the sun shining on it, was the very image of
his wife; and his heart grew yet softer as he noticed the confident
droop of her little head towards her lover. Nor did the devotion
with which Daly watched her every motion escape him. He stole softly
from the church, feeling as though he had suddenly grown very old,
and that he had lost something out of his life which he had never
troubled to make his own, but which he had nevertheless expected to
be always there when he stretched out his hand to gather it. Now
that the first place in his daughter's affections was lost to him
forever, he suddenly discovered its value. But he was a strictly
just man, and recognized that he was himself entirely to blame for
the loss that he had sustained.
He felt very tired, and sat idly in his chair, his hands resting upon
the arms, waiting for his daughter's return. When she came in and
found him there, she started; it was the first time for the last six
months that he had been home before her, and she knew that the
Wesleyan service could not be over yet. What brought him there?
For some time the old man sat in silence, and his eyes followed her
eagerly about the room; sharpened by anxiety, they noted what she was
only just beginning to become conscious of herself. Suddenly he
spoke,--
'Where have you been since church?'
'For a walk with Johnny Daly.'
He nodded. The directness of the answer pleased him.
'And what is there between you and Johnny Daly?' This time there was
a sharper note of anxiety in his voice.
'We were afeard to tell you before, father, but I married him--three
months ago--before the registrar.'
'Thank God!' said the old man solemnly. In his relief that it was no
worse, and in his freshly awakened love for his daughter, he found it
in his heart even to forgive his son-in-law for being a Catholic.