“Oh, no! my home is in Staffordshire, but my address is at the headquarters of the Army in London.”
“Very well, Sister, I think we can manage that your name may not appear. I’ll speak to the reporter; he’ll work the oracle for a drink,” he mentally added.
“And now Miss——I beg your pardon, Sister Gertrude—would you mind telling me what you know about this wretched business. You belong to the Salvation Army, I perceive.”
“Yes; I am a soldier in the Army, not an officer, and last night, after our meeting at the Market Cross, a poor frightened woman spoke to me. She was in great trouble, but almost afraid to address me. You see, she is a Catholic and the Catholics never care to do anything their priest might not like. She said she was living an awful life. Her husband, the man they are to try to-day, she said, is a good, true man, and a loving husband, but for the drink, and then he is like one possessed. She said he earned good wages, under the Corporation, I fancy, as a navvy; but he spent so much in drink they were always in sore straits, and now had broken up their home and were living in vile lodgings. I was moved by Nellie’s story, and asked how I could help her. She begged me to go speak with her husband, plead and pray with him to give up the drink. Of course I went….
“Oh! yes. Why should I fear? No one would injure me, and if they did, what matter? So she took me to the lodging-house in which they live. Her husband, Pat, was in a long room, where there were several men and women and some children. At first the man was very surly, would not speak to me. But he is Irish, from the county Cork; and I happen to have spent some time with friends in the neighbourhood of Cork, between the city and Queenstown, on the Lea. But perhaps you don’t know the Lea?”
“Only the lines:
‘…those bells of Shandon,
That sound so grand on,
The pleasant waters of the river Lea,’”
confessed Edward.