It was better weather to go with the wind than against it, for the snow drove in gritty particles, and the sidewalks made themselves disagreeable and apt to slip out from under a person. Little spurts of snow danced up St. Catherine's roofs and went off the ridgepoles in puffs. It ought to snow on Christmas Eve; but it rightly should snow with better manners and not be so cold. The groceries closed early. Freiburger, the saloon man, looked over the curtains of his window.
“I don't know vat for Fater Harra tack up dings dis time by his kirch door, 'Come—come in here.' Himmel! der Irishman!”
Father Harra turned in to his supper, and thought how he would trouble Father Conner's reputation for enterprise and what a fine bit of constructive ability himself was possessed of.
The great central door of St. Catherine's stood open, so that the drift blew in and piled in windrows on the cold floor of the vestibule. The tall front of the church went up into the darkness, pointing to no visible stars; but over the doors two gas jets flickered across the big sign they use for fairs at the parochial school. “Come in here.” The vestibule was dark, barring another gas jet over a side door, with another sign, “Come in here,” and within the great church was dark as well, except for a cluster over the Christ figure. That was all; but Father Harra thought it a neat symbol, looking toward those who go from meagre light to light through the darkness.
Little noises were in the church all night far up in the pitch darkness of rafter and buttress, as if people were whispering and crying softly to one another. Now and again, too, the swing door would open and remain so for a moment, suspicious, hesitating. But what they did, or who they were that opened it, could hardly be told in the dusk and distance. Dennis went to sleep in a chair by the chancel rail, and did not care what they did or who they were, granted they kept away from the chancel.
How the wind blew!—and the snow tapped impatiently at stained windows with a multitude of little fingers. But if the noises among the rafters were not merely echoes of the crying and calling wind without, if any presences moved and whispered there, and looked down on flat floor and straight lines of pews, they must have seen the Christ figure, with welcoming hands, dominant by reason of the light about it; and, just on the edge of the circle of light, shapeless things stretched on cushions of pews, and motionless or stirring uneasily. Something now came dimly up the aisle from the swing door, stopped at a pew, and hesitated.
“Git out!” growled a hoarse voice. “Dis my bunk.”
The intruder gave a nervous giggle. “Begawd!” muttered the hoarse voice. “It's a lady!”
Another voice said something angrily. “Well,” said the first, “it ain't behavin' nice to come into me boodwer.”
The owner of the giggle had slipped away and disappeared in a distant pew. In another pew to the right of the aisle a smaller shadow whispered to another: