“Dead?” he echoed.
“Yes, dead, and laid out, and got a clergyman sitting with her body. What clergyman? Roman Catholic, I should say. It quite worried Mr. Cleghorne. He said it gave him the rats to have a priest hanging around so close at hand. You see, being asthmatic, he’s read a lot about these Roman Catholics, and he doesn’t hold with them. They’re that underhand, he says, it makes him nervous.”
“Can I see this priest?” Michael asked.
“Well, it’s hardly the room you’re accustomed to. I’ve really looked at her more as a charity than an actual lodger. In fact, my poor old mother has gone on at me something cruel for being so good to her.”
“I think I should like to see this priest,” Michael persisted.
Mrs. Cleghorne was with difficulty persuaded to show him the way, and she was evidently a little suspicious of the motive of his visit. They descended into the gloom of the basement, and the landlady pointed out to him the room that was down three steps and up another. She excused herself from coming too. The priest, a monkey-faced Irishman, was sitting on the pale blue chest, and as Michael entered, he did not look up from his Office.
“Is that you, Sister?” he asked. Then he perceived Michael and waited for him to explain his business.
“I wanted to ask about this poor woman.”
Mrs. Smith lay under a sheet with candles winking at her head. Nothing was visible except her face still faintly rouged in the daylight.
“I was interested in her,” Michael exclaimed.