“And whose fault is that, Mother Agnes?” asked Kate, with swift glance and tone. “Will ye be telling me ’t was The O’Mahony’s? Did he l’ave me widout a four-penny bit, depindent on others, or was it that others stole me money and desaved me, and to-day are keeping me out of me own? Tell me that, Mother Agnes.”
The nun’s ivory-tinted face flushed for an instant, then took on a deeper pallor. Her gaze, lifted momentarily toward Kate, strayed beyond her to vacancy. She rose to her full height and made a forward step, then stood, fumbling confusedly at her beads, and with trembling, half-opened lips.
“’T is not in me power,” she stammered, slowly and with difficulty. “There—there was something—I’ve not thought of it for so long—I’m forgetting strangely—”
She broke off abruptly, threw up her withered hands in a gesture of despair, and then, never looking at the girl, turned and with bowed head left the room.
Kate still stood staring in mingled amazement and apprehension at the arched casement through which Mother Agnes had vanished, when the oak door was pushed open again, and Sister Blanaid, a smaller and younger woman, yet bent and half-palsied under the weight of years, showed herself in the aperture. She bore in her arms, shoving the door aside with it as she feebly advanced, a square wooden box, dust-begrimed and covered in part with reddish cow-skin.
“Take it away!” she mumbled. “’T is the mother-supayrior’s desire you should take it from here. ’T is an evil day that’s on us! Go fling this haythen box into the bay and thin pray for yourself and for her, who’s taken that grief for ye she’s at death’s door!”
The door closed again, and Kate found herself mechanically bearing this box in her arms and making her way out through the darkened hallways to the outer air. Only when she stood on the steps of the porch, and set down her burden to adjust her hat, did she recognize it. Then, with a murmuring cry of delight, she stooped and snatched it up again. It was the cathach which The O’Mahony had given her to keep.
On the instant, as she looked out across the open green upon the harbor, the bay, the distant peninsula of Kilcrohane peacefully gathering to itself the shadows of the falling twilight—how it all came back to her! On the day of his departure—that memorable black-letter day in her life—he had turned over this rude little chest to her; he had told her it was his luck, his talisman, and now should be hers. She had carried it, not to her mother’s home, but to the tiny school-room in the old convent, for safekeeping. She recalled now that she had told the nuns, or Mother Agnes, at least, what it was. But then—then there came a blank in her memory. She could not force her mind to remember when she ceased to think about it—when it made its way into the lumber-room where it had apparently lain so long.
But, at all events, she had it now again. She bent her head to touch with her lips one of the rough strips of skin nailed irregularly upon it; then, with a shining face, bearing the box, like some sanctified shrine, against her breast, she moved across the village-common toward the wharf and the water.
The injunction of quavering old Blanaid to cast it into the bay drifted uppermost in her thoughts, and she smiled to herself. She had been bidden, also, to pray; and reflection upon this chased the smile away. Truly, there was need for prayer. Her perplexed mind called up, one by one, in disheartening array, the miseries of her position, and drew new unhappiness from the confusion of right and wrong which they presented. How could she pray to be delivered from what Mother Agnes held up as the duties of piety? And, on the other hand, what sincerity could there be in any other kind of spiritual petition?