Father Rogan moved about the room, and donned a soft black hat. Buttoning his coat to his throat, he laid his hand on the doorknob. “Let us walk,” he said.
The two went out upon the street. The priest turned his face down it, and Lorison walked with him through a squalid district, where the houses loomed, awry and desolate-looking, high above them. Presently they turned into a less dismal side street, where the houses were smaller, and, though hinting of the most meagre comfort, lacked the concentrated wretchedness of the more populous byways.
At a segregated, two-story house Father Rogan halted, and mounted the steps with the confidence of a familiar visitor. He ushered Lorison into a narrow hallway, faintly lighted by a cobwebbed hanging lamp. Almost immediately a door to the right opened and a dingy Irishwoman protruded her head.
“Good evening to ye, Mistress Geehan,” said the priest, unconsciously, it seemed, falling into a delicately flavoured brogue. “And is it yourself can tell me if Norah has gone out again, the night, maybe?”
“Oh, it’s yer blissid riverence! Sure and I can tell ye the same. The purty darlin’ wint out, as usual, but a bit later. And she says: ‘Mother Geehan,’ says she, ‘it’s me last noight out, praise the saints, this noight is!’ And, oh, yer riverence, the swate, beautiful drame of a dress she had this toime! White satin and silk and ribbons, and lace about the neck and arrums—’twas a sin, yer reverence, the gold was spint upon it.”
The priest heard Lorison catch his breath painfully, and a faint smile flickered across his own clean-cut mouth.
“Well, then, Mistress Geehan,” said he, “I’ll just step upstairs and see the bit boy for a minute, and I’ll take this gentleman up with me.”
“He’s awake, thin,” said the woman. “I’ve just come down from sitting wid him the last hour, tilling him fine shtories of ould County Tyrone. ’Tis a greedy gossoon, it is, yer riverence, for me shtories.”
“Small the doubt,” said Father Rogan. “There’s no rocking would put him to slape the quicker, I’m thinking.”
Amid the woman’s shrill protest against the retort, the two men ascended the steep stairway. The priest pushed open the door of a room near its top.