“It’s a good child she is gettin’ to be, and a pleasant-tempered one, too,” said Mrs. Dillon to herself; “it’s made over intirely, she is, our Lady be praised!”
She began to sing the burden of an Irish ditty, but the broken-nosed tea-kettle over the fire beginning to sing too, she commenced talking again.
“Heaven send it mayn’t be thrue, but it does look like the heretic’s doings. She were like a brimstone match, or like gunpowder itself, at home, and tender-hearted as a young baby besides. Shure, it’s a mighty power, any way, that has so changed her. I can’t jist feel aisy about it, for it’s Father M‘Clane will find out the harm of her good spaches and doings.”
The words were hardly out of her mouth when the priest entered. The storm on his brow was not unnoted by Biddy, but she respectfully set a chair for him in the cleanest part of the room. She was not quite so easily terrified by priestly wrath and authority as she had been in her own country; for she had the sense to know that the ghostly father’s malediction did not, as in Ireland, entail a long course of temporal misfortunes upon the poor victims of his displeasure. But she had not yet acknowledged to herself the doubts that really existed in her mind in regard to the truth of the Romish faith; she still clung to the errors in which she had been brought up, and feared the effect on her eternal happiness of Father M‘Clane’s displeasure. So it was with a beating heart that she awaited his time to address her.
“Do you know that your daughter is a heretic?” was his first question.
“Indade, no, yer riverence,” replied Biddy.
“An’ what sort o’ a mother are you, Biddy Dillon, to stand still and look on while the wolf stales the best o’ yer flock? You might have known that heretic family would lave not a stone unturned to catch her at last. And so she can read—”
“Read!” interrupted the astonished woman.
“Yes, read! And it’s the heretics’ Bible she has read, too,—and all through your fault. Mighty proud ye have been o’ all the fine housekeeping ways she has learned, and very thankful, no doubt, for the bits o’ could victuals from the big house; but where’s the good now? Ye may thank yourself that she will lose her sowl for ever.”
Mrs. Dillon started and turned pale as the door softly opened, and Annorah herself, unobserved by the priest, came in. He went on: “Do you call her better, the pestilent crather, when, from her first going to the grand place on the hill, never a word about them has been got from her at confession? The obstinate crather!”