BLESSED ARE THE POOR
“Blessed are the poor,” announced the young curate with his rolling Irish emphasis.
Here was a statement quite to Judy’s taste. Loud were her groans of approval. She turned up her eyes with great piety, and the gusto with which she beat her breast indicated that she took the benediction entirely to herself. “But don’t think, me brethren,” went on the ecclesiastic warningly, “that this means that because you’re poor in purse you’re pleasing to God. It’s the poor in spirit that I do be meaning. There’s many a poor body with a proud heart.”
Now poor old Judy must have been conscious of the possession of this spiritual drawback; for even as she had taken the text as a direct compliment, so she now took the corollary to it as a personal insult. She drew herself up with a jerk and threw a glance of furious reproach at the speaker. No more groans should His Riverence have out of her! No—nor tongue clacking, nor chest thumpings either!
For the rest of his sermon she remained rigid, fixing her gaze upon him with an unwavering glare of disapproval.
As the priest had to come from a considerable distance, he was generally late; and as the congregation itself straggled in from over the hills, sometimes much before the hour, it was the pious custom at Rathenisha for the two model damsels of the congregation each to read aloud out of a different book of sermons for the edification of the assembly in the delay before Mass. They had fine loud voices and read simultaneously; the effect can be better imagined than described. One ear would be struck by genteel accents proclaiming, “Admoire the obedience of Joseph, me brethren. Did he repoine, did he hesitate?”—the while the other ear was assailed by a rich brogue announcing, “The sentence is already past. Thou must doi. How many have gone to bed at noight in apparent good health—”
It was some such threat as this, intermittently caught from the side of the deepest brogue, which would terrify my small mind. The whole churchyard, with its horror of green graves, would seem to close about me. And how much worse it was should there chance to be a new, raw mound without!
One of the Mahon girls did indeed illustrate the gloomy treatise in a manner appalling to my secret state of apprehension. She died quite suddenly while dancing at some rural festivity. Rumour had it it was tight-lacing which had produced the tragedy.