“Oh, my dear Miss Annaly,” cried Mrs. M’Crule, “I do wonder to hear you treat this matter so lightly—you, from whom I confess I did expect better principles: ‘sit on the same bench!’ easily said; but, my dear young lady, you do not consider that some errors of popery,—since there is no catholic in the room, I suppose I may say it,—the errors of popery are wonderfully infectious.”
“I remember,” said Lady Annaly, “when I was a child, being present once, when an honest man, that is, a protestant (for in those days no man but a protestant could be called an honest man), came to my uncle in a great passion to complain of the priest: ‘My lord,’ said he, ‘what do you think the priest is going to do? he is going to bury a catholic corpse, not only in the churchyard, but, my lord, near to the grave of my father, who died a stanch dissenter.’ ‘My dear sir,’ said my uncle, to the angry honest man, ‘the clergyman of the parish is using me worse still, for he is going to bury a man, who died last Wednesday of the small-pox, near to my grandmother, who never had the small-pox in her life.’”
Mrs. M’Crule pursed up her mouth very close at this story. She thought Lady Annaly and her uncle were equally wicked, but she did not choose exactly to say so, as her ladyship’s uncle was a person of rank, and of character too solidly established for Mrs. M’Crule to shake. She therefore only gave one of her sighs for the sins of the whole generation, and after a recording look at Mrs. M’Greggor, she returned to the charge about the schools and the children.
“It can do no possible good,” she said, “to admit catholic children to our schools, because, do what you will, you can never make them good protestants.”
“Well,” said Lady Annaly, “as my friend, the excellent Bishop of —— said in parliament, ‘if you cannot make them good protestants, make them good catholics, make them good any-things.’”
Giving up Lady Annaly all together, Mrs. M’Crule now desired to have Mr. Ormond’s ultimatum—she wished to know whether he had made up his mind as to the affair in question; but she begged leave to observe, “that since the child had, to use the gentlest expression, the misfortune to be born and bred a catholic, it would be most prudent and gentlemanlike in Mr. Ormond not to make him a bone of contention, but to withdraw the poor child from the contest altogether, and strike his name out of the list of candidates, till the general question of admittance to those of his persuasion should have been decided by the lady patronesses.”
Ormond declared, with or without submission to Mrs. M’Crule, that he could not think it becoming or gentlemanlike to desert a child whom he had undertaken to befriend—that, whatever the child had the misfortune to be born, he would abide by him; and would not add to his misfortunes by depriving him of the reward of his own industry and application, and of the only chance he had of continuing his good education, and of getting forward in life.
Mrs. M’Crule sighed and groaned.
But Ormond persisted: “The child,” he said, “should have fair play—the lady patronesses would decide as they thought proper.”
It had been said that the boy had Dr. Cambray’s certificate, which Ormond was certain would not have been given undeservedly; he had also the certificate of his own priest.