The Necromancers | Page 8

hills--a face, seen
for an instant, smiling and gone again; a whisper in his ear, with that
dear stammer of shyness; a touch on his knee of those rippling fingers
that he had watched in the moonlight playing gently on the sluice-gate
above the moonlit stream.... He would tell no one if God wished it to be
a secret; he would keep it wholly to himself. He did not ask now to
possess her; only to be certain that she lived, and that death was not
what it seemed to be.
* * * * *
"Is Father Mahon at home?" he asked, as he halted a mile from his own
house in the village, where stood the little tin church, not a hundred
yards from its elder alienated sister, to which he and Maggie went on
Sundays.
The housekeeper turned from her vegetable-gathering beyond the fence,
and told him yes. He dismounted, hitched the reins round the gatepost,
and went in.
Ah! what an antipathetic little room this was in which he waited while

the priest was being fetched from upstairs!
Over the mantelpiece hung a large oleograph of Leo XIII, in cope and
tiara, blessing with upraised hand and that eternal, wide-lipped smile; a
couple of jars stood beneath filled with dyed grasses; a briar pipe,
redolent and foul, lay between them. The rest of the room was in the
same key: a bright Brussels carpet, pale and worn by the door, covered
the floor; cheap lace curtains were pinned across the windows; and over
the littered table a painted deal bookshelf held a dozen volumes,
devotional, moral, and dogmatic theology; and by the side of that an
illuminated address framed in gilt, and so on.
Laurie looked at it all in dumb dismay. He had seen it before, again and
again, but had never realized its horror as he realized it now from the
depths of his own misery. Was it really true that his religion could emit
such results?
There was a step on the stairs--a very heavy one--and Father Mahon
came in, a large, crimson-faced man, who seemed to fill the room with
a completely unethereal presence, and held out his hand with a certain
gravity. Laurie took it and dropped it.
"Sit down, my dear boy," said the priest, and he impelled him gently to
a horsehair-covered arm-chair.
Laurie stiffened.
"Thank you, father; but I mustn't stay."
He fumbled in his pocket, and fetched out a little paper-covered packet.
"Will you say Mass for my intention, please?" And he laid the packet
on the mantelshelf.
The priest took up the coins and slipped them into his waistcoat pocket.
"Certainly," he said. "I think I know--"
Laurie turned away with a little jerk.

"I must be going," he said. "I only looked in--"
"Mr. Baxter," said the other, "I hope you will allow me to say how
much--"
Laurie drew his breath swiftly, with a hiss as of pain, and glanced at the
priest.
"You understand, then, what my intention is?"
"Why, surely. It is for her soul, is it not?"
"I suppose so," said the boy, and went out.

Chapter II
I
"I have told him," said Mrs. Baxter, as the two women walked beneath
the yews that morning after breakfast. "He said he didn't mind."
Maggie did not speak. She had come out just as she was, hatless, but
had caught up a spud that stood in the hall, and at that instant had
stopped to destroy a youthful plantain that had established himself with
infinite pains on the slope of the path. She attacked for a few seconds,
extricated what was possible of the root with her strong fingers, tossed
the corpse among the ivy, and then moved on.
"I don't know whether to say anything to Mrs. Stapleton or not,"
pursued the old lady.
"I think I shouldn't, auntie," said the girl slowly.
They spoke of it for a minute or two as they passed up and down, but
Maggie only attended with one superficies of her mind.
She had gone up as usual to Mass that morning, and had been

astonished to find Laurie already in church; they had walked back
together, and, to her surprise, he had told her that the Mass had been for
his own intention.
She had answered as well as she could; but a sentence or two of his as
they came near home had vaguely troubled her.
It was not that he had said anything he ought not, as a Catholic, to have
said; yet her instinct told her that something was wrong. It was his
manner, his air, that troubled her. What strange people these converts
were! There was so much ardor at one time, so much chilliness at
another; there was so little of