There goes the old Church bell.”
Harrigan.
IT was Sunday morning. The iron heart of the bell that hung in the tower of St. Michael’s beat against its brazen ribs, and the clangour went rioting over the housetops. Streams of people, dressed in their Sunday best, picked their way across the railroad toward the sound; heavy faces peered through bedroom windows and sleep-dry lips murmured curses at the noise; a shifting engine panted heavily as it dragged a milk train over the rails, and spat cinders into the face of day.
In the kitchen of a squat, shabby building fronting on the railroad, a lean, yellow-faced old woman sat beside the range, nursing her knees and drawing at a black clay pipe. Another, almost her counterpart, was sweeping the floor with the worn stump of a broom.
“God be good till uz, Ellen!” suddenly exclaimed the first. “What are yez about?”
“What talk have ye, Bridget?”
“Sure ye wur as near as a hair till swapin’ the bit av dust out av the dure!”
“Divil a fear av me. Is it swape the luck from the house I’d be doin’?”
Ellen scraped up the sweepings. “There do be bad luck enough about the place,” she continued, as she slid the dust into the fire and watched it burn, the flame lighting up her old, faded face, her dirty white cap, her bony, large-veined hands. “Malachi tells me that the biz’ness do be poorly.”
“Little wonder,” declared Bridget, knocking the ashes from her pipe and laying it carefully on the top of a tin at the back of the stove. “I know’d what ’ud come av havin’ the son av a Know-nothin’ glosterin’ about the place! Sure the curse av God is on the loike!”