"Think o' that now," she told herself, "an' if I had come t' th' airly mass I'd niver 'a' known it!"
Hardly would her knees uphold her until she could sink into an obscure pew, far back under the gallery. And there, at the tense moment when the silver-toned bell proclaimed commemoration of the great lifting-up in suffering, Mary raised her faith-full prayer: "A'mighty God, sind me gyurl back t' me! But if it don' be in yer heart t' do thot mooch, maake her a good gyurl wheeriver she be. Fer th' love av Christ, Amin."
Not often in any lifetime, perhaps, does it come to pass that one prays with such sublime assurance of crying straight into the listening ear of Omnipotence that will inevitably keep faith with poor flesh. For nigh on to forty years Mary Casey had listened to reiterations of the old and new Covenants, but they had fallen on sterile ground in her soul. It was the little chance remark about the new priest's first mass, dropping into harrowed and watered soil, that flowered in immediate faith.
The mass ended and the throngs of worshipers passed out, but Mary sat unheeded and unheeding in her dim corner, her simple mind grappling with the stupendous idea of its Covenant with Heaven.
Before she had any realizing sense of time, the church had filled again for high mass. Then the lighting of the great white altar fascinated her, and she felt an intense desire to live again through such a moment of assurance as she had lately experienced—to hear that bell ring again, to smell the incense, and to believe that in some wonderful, wonderful way it was all a part of that prayer of hers that Heaven was bound to answer.
So she stayed on, in her far-away pew, to the remotest corner of which she was crowded as the enormous church filled to its capacity. With the entrance of the preacher into the pulpit, though, she was conscious of a distinct "let-down." She had never liked sermons; they dealt with things so formally. Even when the priests made their greatest efforts to be plain-spoken and understandable, she seldom got any personal help from their discourse. They were prone to denunciations of adultery and drunkenness and other sins of which she was innocent, and to vague exhortations looking toward a hereafter on which her imagination had never taken any but the feeblest hold. But what was this priest saying? Something about a little household that the Lord had loved, and one of its two sisters had gone astray!
The woman sitting next to Mary nudged her other neighbor and glanced in the direction of Mary's face, thrust forward as if so as not to lose a syllable, the tears chasing each other unheeded down its furrows. In her lap Mary's gnarled hands were clasped in painful intensity.
Over and over, since she was a tiny child in Ireland, she had heard this Catholic rendering, of Mary of Bethany's story, but it had never meant anything to her. To-day it meant everything.
