“I need not, I am fully ensured,” he said in his suave manner, “ask any questions touching your daughters.”
“Of that, Father,” answered Mr Roberts quickly, “you must be a better judge than I. But I do most unfeignedly trust that neither of my maids hath given you any trouble by neglect of her religious duties? Gertrude, indeed, is so—”
“Mistress Gertrude hath not given me trouble,” replied the priest. “Her worst failing is one common to maidens—a certain lack of soberness. But I cannot conceal from you, my son, that I am under some uneasiness of mind as touching her sister.”
Mr Bastian’s uneasiness was nothing to that of the man he was engaged in tormenting. The terrified mouse does not struggle more eagerly to escape the claws of the cat, than the suffering father of Pandora to avoid implicating her in the eyes of his insinuating confessor.
“Forsooth, Father, you do indeed distress me,” said he. “If Pandora have heard any foolish talk on matters of religion, I would gladly break her from communication with any such of her acquaintance as can have been thus ill-beseen. Truly, I know not of any, and methought my sister Grena kept the maids full diligently, that they should not fall into unseemly ways. I will speak, under your good leave, with both of them, and will warn Pandora that she company not with such as seem like to have any power over her for evil.”
“Well said, my son!” responded the priest, with a slight twinkle in his eye. “Therein shall you do well; and in especial if you report to me the names of any that you shall suspect to have ill-affected the maiden. And now, methinks, I must be on my way home.”
Mr Roberts devoutly thanked all the saints when he heard it. The priest took up his hat, brushed a stray thread from its edge, and said, as he laid his hand upon his silver-headed stick—said it as though the idea had just occurred to him—
“You spake of Mistress Holland. She, of course, is true to holy Church beyond all doubts?”
Mr Roberts went back to his previous condition of a frightened mouse.
“In good sooth, Father, I make no question thereof, nor never so did. She conformeth in all respects, no doth she?”