“We’re going to draw this place on Friday,” said Willy, pausing in the steady flow of his conversation with Mick to give me the information. “Blackthorn will carry Miss Theo right enough, wouldn’t he, Mick? and I’ll ride the new mare.”
The village of Rathbarry, which we had now entered, consisted of a single street of low, dirty-looking cottages, their squalid uniformity varied at frequent intervals by the more prosperous shuttered face of a public-house. At the end of the street, a gateway led into a graveyard, surrounded by ill-thriven elm trees, in the middle of which stood the church. It was an ugly, oblong building, with a square tower at the west end, from which proceeded a clanging as of a cracked basin battered with a spoon.
“We’re in good time,” said Willy, drawing up with a flourish before the porch. “That’s the hurry-bell only begun now, so we’ve five minutes to spare. Look, Theo! there’s the Clashmore carriage. Did you ever see such brutes as those chestnuts?”
Before, however, I had time to reply, Uncle Dominick hurried me into the church, and we took our places in opposite corners of a singularly uncomfortable square pew. As we sat confronting each other in the half-empty church, we heard in the porch Willy’s voice raised in agreeable converse. Apparently his remarks were of a complimentary sort, for a girl’s voice rejoined, “Oh, nonsense, Willy!” with a laugh.
“Disgraceful!” muttered my uncle, under his breath; and the next moment three ladies swept up the aisle, followed by Willy, on whose face still beamed a slightly fatuous smile.
He immediately sat down beside me, and in a rapid whisper instructed me as to the more prominent members of the congregation.
“Those are the O’Neills”—indicating the ladies he had come in with. “Connie’s the little fair one. And look! those are the Jackson Crolys! You’d better sit up and behave, as they’ll be watching you all the time. I know they all want to see what you’re like!”
“Hush! don’t talk!” I whispered back. “Here’s the clergyman.”
The service was very long. The music, which consisted of the clergyman’s daughter accompanying herself on a harmonium, with casual vocal assistance from a couple of school-children, was of an unexhilarating kind. Willy fidgeted, admired his boots, trimmed his nails, and tried to utilize every possible opening for conversation. Uncle Dominick, on the contrary, devoted his whole attention to the service, and answered all the responses with austere punctiliousness, even going so far as to try and track the clergyman’s daughter in her devious course through the hymns.
From the corner which had been allotted to me in my uncle’s pew I could not see the clergyman, and, though his voice resounded through the church, his very pronounced Cork accent made it difficult for me to understand more than a word here and there in his discourse.