After a few days, Eva heard Maggie humming this tune over her work. "There," she said to herself, "the good angels are near her! I don't know what to say to her, but they do."
In fact, Eva had that delicacy and self-distrust in regard to any direct and personal appeal to Maggie which is the natural attendant of personal refinement. She was little versed in any ordinary religious phraseology, such as very well-meaning persons often so freely deal in. Her own religious experiences, fervent and sincere though they were, never came out in any accredited set of phrases; nor had she any store of cut-and-dried pious talk laid by, to be used for inferiors whom she was called to admonish. But she had stores of kind artifices to keep Maggie usefully employed, to give her a sense that she was trusted in the family, to encourage hope that there was a better future before her.
Maggie's mother, fond and loving as she was, seconded these tactics of her mistress but indifferently. Mary had the stern pride of chastity which distinguishes the women of the old country, and which keeps most of the Irish girls who are thrown unprotected on our shores superior to temptation.
Mary keenly felt that Maggie had disgraced her, and as health returned and she no longer trembled for her life, she seemed called upon to keep her daughter's sin ever before her. Her past bad conduct and the lenity of her young mistress, her treating her so much better than she had any reason to expect, were topics on which Mary took every occasion to enlarge in private, leading to passionate altercations between herself and her daughter, in which the child broke over all bounds of goodness and showed the very worst aspects of her nature. Nothing can be more miserable, more pitiable, than these stormy passages between wayward children and honest, good-hearted mothers, who love them to the death, and yet do not know how to handle them, sensitive and sore with moral wounds. Many a time poor Mary went to sleep with a wet pillow, while Maggie, sullen and hard-hearted, lay with her great black eyes wide open, obdurate and silent, yet in her secret heart longing to make it right with her mother. Often, after such a passage she would revolve the line of the hymn—
"I stood outside the gate."
It seemed to her that that gate was her mother's heart, and that she stood outside of it; and yet all the while the poor mother would have died for her. Eva could not at first account for the sullen and gloomy moods which came upon Maggie, when she would go about the house with lowering brows, and all her bright, cheerful ways and devices could bring no smile upon her face.
"What is the matter with Maggie?" she would say to Mary.
"Oh, nothing, ma'am, only she's bad; she's got to be brought under, and brought down,—that's what she has."
"Mary, I think you had better not talk to Maggie about her past faults. She knows she has been wrong, and the best way is to let her get quietly into the right way. We mustn't keep throwing up the past to her. When we do wrong, we don't like to have people keep putting us in mind of it."
"You're jest an angel, Miss Eva, and it isn't many ladies that would do as you do. You're too good to her entirely. She ought to be made sensible of it."