It will be remembered that the priest left Feemy after his stormy interview in a somewhat irritable¹ mood; she was still chewing the cud of the bitter thoughts to which the events of the last few hours had given rise, and was trying to make herself believe that her brother and Father John and Pat Brady, and all the rest of them, were wrong in their detestable surmises², and that her own Myles was true to her, when another stranger called at Ballycloran; and a perfect stranger he must have been, for he absolutely raised the lion-headed, rusty³ knocker, and knocked at the door — a ceremony to which the customary visitors of the house never dreamed of having recourse. So unusual was this proceeding⁴, that it frightened the sole remaining domestic, Katty, out of all her decorum. It will be remembered that Mary Brady had absconded⁵ with Biddy. Poor Katty did not well know how to act under the trying emergencies of the case; she could not get to the door of Miss Feemy’s parlour, as a strange gentleman was standing⁶ in the hall, so she ran round the house, and ascertaining⁷ that the intruder was well in the hall, and could not see her, she clambered up to her mistress’s window, and exclaimed,

“Hist! Miss Feemy, there’s a sthranger gintleman a rapping at the big knocker, and I think it’s the fat lawyer from Carrick; what’ll I do thin, Miss?”

“Why, you fool!” whispered Feemy through one of the broken panes⁸ of glass, “go and ask him who he wants, and tell him Thady an’t at home.”

So Katty dropped from the window-sill again, and went to receive the gentleman into the house by following him in at the hall door. By the time, however, that she had entered herself, old Larry Macdermot had been aroused out of his lethargy by a third knocking of the stranger; and on opening his own parlour door, was startled to see Mr. Hyacinth Keegan, the attorney from Carrick on Shannon, standing before him.

分享到：