“Of course they keep running away from him—don’t they, Mary? Why, we’ve got an Adonis in the house.”
“The Lord forbid I’d say that of him, sir,” remarked Mrs. Galvin, whose acquaintance with Hellenic myths was rather hazy. “Bad as he is, he hasn’t come to that yet.”
“I am glad to hear you say as much,” said the priest, as he poured out a cup of tea, and proceeded to butter the toast. “Never fear, Mary, I’ll have an eye on that fellow.”
The door closed, shutting out the housekeeper, and Father Maher’s face relaxed into a broad smile. He rested the local paper against the toast-rack, and laughed cautiously from time to time, as he ran down its columns of barren contents. Neither Paddy nor Mrs. Galvin had the faintest idea of the amusement their daily quarrels afforded him, or of the gusto with which he used to describe them at the dinner-tables to which he was occasionally invited.
Having burnished the irons and cleansed the leathers until they shone again, Paddy Fret mounted to his bedroom, over the stable, and proceeded to array himself with unusual care. His toilet completed, he surveyed himself in the cracked triangle of looking-glass imbedded in the mortar of the wall, and the result of the scrutiny satisfied him that there was not a gayer or handsomer young fellow in the whole parish of Croagh. So, in love with himself and part of the world, he stole cautiously down the rickety step-ladder, and gliding like a snake between the over-bowering laurels which flanked the chapel-house, emerged on the high road.
“I’m afeerd, Paddy, that my father will never listen to a good word for you,” said pretty Katty Tyrrell, as the priest’s boy took a stool beside her before the blazing peat fire, burning on the stoveless hearth. “He’s a grave man, wanst he takes a notion into his head.”
“All ould min has got notions,” said Paddy, “but they dhrop off with their hairs. Lave him to me, and if I don’t convart him, call me a souper. Sure, if he wants a son-in-law to be a comfort in his ould age he couldn’t meet with a finer boy than meself.”
“Mrs. Galvin says,” continued Katty, “that it would be a morchial sin to throw me and my two hundherd pounds away on the likes o’ you. ‘A good-for-nothin’ bosthoon,’[26] says she, ‘that I wouldn’t graize the wheel of a barrow with.’”
“She wouldn’t graize a great many wheels, at any rate,” replied Paddy. “The truth is, Katty dear, the poor woman is out of her sivin sinses, and all for the want of a gintleman to make a lady of her, as I’m goin’ to make wan o’ you.”
The splendour of the promise bewildered Miss Tyrrell. She could only rest her elbows on her knees, hide her face in her hands, and cry, “Oh, Paddy!”