Chapter VIII: Part II: The Brothers (3)

All through the service she noticed that he watched her closely, and copied her every movement. The rest of the congregation stared at the pew in a manner that made her feel very uncomfortable, and seemed greatly in excess of the occasion.

As they were going out together, she said to him,--

'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.

THE END.