Grandmother and the Priests (12 page)

The escorts’ feet rang on the cobbles as if they were shod with iron. Chimneys smoked busily over every slate roof. There was no color at all but for the gardens, which amazingly were filled with scarlet and purple and yellow blooms. But the prevailing color of the hamlet, except for the gardens, was black and gray except for an occasional cream-colored door or one even in sprightly blue. However, the view from every side was magnificent and awe-inspiring, for the ocean was everywhere, lined on distant crests with touches of crimson from the sun in its overpoweringly wide sky, its sky of the palest cold azure. And the west! It was a conflagration, as though the whole world were burning, going up in one vast if silent explosion of red and green and yellow fire, with the eye of doom in the very center, larger than any sun Robert had ever seen before, a red eye which could have held a dozen ordinary suns.

There was not even one other isle in sight. MacDougall’s isle stood alone, a black crag against the sunset, the last outpost of man in a holocaust of celestial destruction.

From awe, Robert’s mood proceeded to depression and a kind of pervading and nameless fear. Apocalyptic, he thought. How did these people manage to endure such revelations of terror and awesomeness every night? They would have the northern lights, too, as well as the midnight sun in June. They were Catholic; was there still some paganism here, too, some memory of Druids and Thor and all the gods of all the thunders?

“A fine view,” he murmured to the captain. But the captain and his men were looking remotely at the sunset, and Robert saw their faces and thought: They may be Catholic and devout, but there are strange shapes in their minds and strange forms casting shadows on their souls, and they are not my own people after all. All at once, and still without cause, his depression lifted, became a kind of exaltation, as he, too, dimly remembered things no longer remembered in this dull and prosy world of modern men, things of vastness and glory and exultant joy which could have been known only by man in the spring of his life, in the morning of his world, things lost but dearly coveted with a passionate nostalgia. The sons of Adam had their memories, but in the elegant cities the memories were overlaid with death, and derided. Here, they lived.

The streets of the hamlet had given way to hedgerows, pungent with the life of May. There was a scent of lilacs and the innocent and carnal earth.

And there was the ‘castle’, with its gravel paths. A black-gray granite house, three stories tall, bulky, forbidding, but lighted at every window, and guarded by two giants in full regalia with their rifles over their shoulders. They saluted smartly as Robert approached with his bodyguard. Four chimneys fumed energetically. The double door of oak, fortified with iron, swung open and there was the granite hall with its iron lanterns and candles, its ancient blowing banners, its enormous fireplace and armor, its thronelike seats of black oak, its bearskin rugs, its coat of arms emblazoned everywhere.

Now the bodyguard left Robert and a tall man in kilts approached him, bowing only a little, and led him into a vast room similar to the hall, with a fire roaring on a hearth that could accommodate six men standing abreast, and hoary portraits on the paneled walls. Here was all the pride of the MacDougalls, pale and painted face, fierce black eyes, long or short curling black hair, plaids, swords, brawny knees, delicate bosoms. Firelight and candlelight: they were part of the past and they were alive. They had never died in the MacDougall, he who resembled those on the walls who were long ago dust.

Now the MacDougall himself entered, blazing with vitality and color, kilted, dirked, bare-headed, his hand extended cordially, palm up to show that he carried no concealed weapon, and he shook hands with heartiness with his guest. “Welcome to this hoose, which has been honored, Faether,” he said, “and I hope ye leave a blessing behind.”

Robert wanted to say something irascible in the manner of Scotsmen, even when they are on good terms with each other, but he found himself only shaking hands with his host and admiring his handsomeness and height and general air of virile power. Then, of course, he came to himself and said, “Had I had a choice, Douglass? About coming this nicht?”

The MacDougall laughed merrily and called for whiskey, and he pulled a great chair to the fire for the priest, then sat opposite him, his mighty knees red and glowing with chaps and health. He shook his head. “Ah, ye should have known the auld Faether! He was here every Saturday nicht, leaving his blessing! Puir old mon!”

“He died, I think, at the age of well over a hundred?”

“Puir auld mon,” repeated the MacDougall, sadly, as if he spoke of a man in his vigorous middle age who had been called, untimely, to his grave.

“Your faether’s age when he died?” asked Robert.

The MacDougall’s large black eyes saddened even more. “Weel, it was an accident, one might say. He was but sixty. But my grand-dada — he died but a year ago, and he was one hundred and eight to the day, covered with scars.”

“I don’t doot that for a moment,” said Robert. But the MacDougall, wishing to leave doleful subjects alone, asked Robert how he had found his parish and the good Sisters and all. Robert admitted it was all far better than he had expected, and he asked when summer arrived, which made the MacDougall merry again. He assured the priest that it was practically high summer this very day. Weather fit for a king; wonderful for the lungs; bracing; brisk. The fire roared, but Robert’s new thick underwear was not a millimeter too heavy. If this was truly summer, he wondered aloud, what was the winter like? “Put the lungs in ye!” said the MacDougall. Not close like this weather. Far and wide and white, like bells in the ears. Robert could imagine, and he shuddered.

The MacDougall promised him a coat lined with fur for the winter. “No doot I’ll sleep in it, too,” said Robert. But no, there would be fur rugs for his bed. “Ye’ll not freeze,” said Douglass with a slight disdain for the city man. He refilled Robert’s glass. The whiskey was excellent, and Douglass’ eye sparkled with pleasure when Robert praised it. “The auld Faether had a bottle a day, for his blood,” said Douglass. This statement would have horrified Robert only twenty-four hours ago, but now he complimented the old priest in his mind for his perspicacity and his attention to his health in this climate. “Ye’ll be well supplied from me ain kegs,” the MacDougall promised Robert generously. Robert wished to remark that he did not expect to remain here until past the century mark, but in view of his host’s hospitality and kindness he prudently restrained the words. They would have been ungracious.

“And now we’ll have the sherry for the ladies,” said the MacDougall, and smote the bell at his side so that it sounded like a gong.

“The ladies?” said Robert.

“Me future bride, Mary Joyce, and her cousin and chaperone, Pamela Stone,” said the MacDougall, with a hint of impatience. “Hae no one told ye of their presence in ma hoose?”

The names rang vaguely in Robert’s brain, which was already ringing with the whiskey. He admitted his ignorance.

“Sassenach ladies,” said the MacDougall. “Ma guests. Niver did I think a MacDougall would take a Sassenach bride, but God disposes, is it nae true?”

“True,” said Robert. “No one told me.”

“Ah, weel,” said the MacDougall oddly, and with a little pride that Robert did not immediately understand. “They’re not ones to talk, my ain folk.”

Then Robert remembered the newspaper from Dundee which he had read on the train and he started so violently that the whiskey in his glass splashed on his hand. “The ladies who disappeared in Edinburgh, with Scotland Yard on their trail!” he exclaimed.

“They didna disappear,” said the MacDougall reasonably. “If ‘twere so, why would they be here?”

“But their friends, they were visiting!” cried Robert. “They didna know!”

“Do Edinburgh folk know aught?” asked the MacDougall superbly.

Robert stared at him. A horrid thought flitted into his mind. He refused to believe it for a moment. Then he stuttered, “Did the ladies come on their ain?”

“I escorted them,” said Douglass, and smote the bell again. “I, and my lads.”

“Ye — No, ye did not!” said Robert, appalled.

“I did,” said the MacDougall. “I see we do not have a stupid priest, and thank the guid God for that,” he added piously. “I dislike cracking a mon’s skull to put a thought in it.”

Robert carefully put down his whiskey. He was very pale. “Ye came to the rail to receive Holy Communion,” he said. “And ye in mortal sin!”

The MacDougall stared him down, and now he was formidable. “A MacDougall chooses his bride,” he said. “It isna for the lass to choose.”

“Kidnapping!” said Robert. “A crime. A criminal!”

The MacDougall became even more formidable. “Not sae harsh with the evil words, Faether. I chose my bride, and I brought her here to marry me, and ye’ll witness the wedding. Enough?”

“Not enough,” said the young priest, clenching his fists on his knees. “I’ll nae marry a criminal kidnapper to an unwilling lass.”

“She isna unwilling,” said Douglass. “What lass would reject the MacDougall and all he is? She is but coy. If, Faether, ye are thinking I hae already taken her by force, clear your un-Christian thoughts away. The lass is as virtuous as the day she was born. The day I saw her — ”

Robert’s aghast mind could hardly absorb the enormity of the story. Over a week ago the MacDougall had gone to Edinburgh to see the Bishop about a new pastor, and to bring that pastor to his isle. He was enjoying a fine morning of sun and flowers on Princes Street when a carriage drove by, and in that carriage were two handsome young ladies. He immediately fell in love with one who turned out to be Miss Mary Joyce of London Town. The young ladies alighted from their carriage, opened their parasols, and strolled among the flowers, and the MacDougall had followed them and had contrived to introduce himself to them. Robert had no doubt but that his appearance had intrigued the demure young ladies immediately; they told him the names of their friends, who, it transpired, were very distantly related to the MacDougall himself. In fact, he dined with those distant relatives that very night and captivated the visitors. At the very least, Miss Joyce had seemed much ‘taken’. Then and there Douglass decided to marry her, and as time was short his courtship was a little abrupt.

Mary had laughed merrily. Matters were not solved so easily; she was not to be wooed and won, if at all, like a barbarian. Douglass must visit her parents in London, preferably next Christmas, on her twentieth birthday. The very idea of visiting London stupefied the MacDougall, and the very thought of waiting over half a year for his bride enraged him. He could not understand this skittishness, this coyness, this ‘play-acting’. But he would go at once to London, with the girls, and inform Mary’s parents that he was marrying her and taking her ‘hame’. Doubtless they would be overwhelmed by this condescension of the MacDougall.

Everyone, the two girls and their host and hostess, thought this all too amusing for words. They did not take Douglass seriously. So Douglass brooded. He returned to the little inn where he was staying and he brooded all night. He called early at the house where the girls were visiting; and the hostess — “nae of my blood; it was her husband, and he but a distant one, tenth removed” — had received him with a coldness even he could not overlook. Her husband had informed the girls of the isle, and Mary had been ‘shocked to the very heart of her’, and so she had asked her hosts to explain to the MacDougall that she was no longer at home to him, and never would be from that day forward.

Douglass had not believed it in the slightest. He haunted Princes Street for the carriage. In the meantime he had visited the Bishop, who had promised him his own nephew. (What perfidy! I didna even know, mesel’, then, thought Robert with a bitter thought directed at his uncle.) The ladies did not come to Princes Street, so he haunted adjacent streets.

Then, as he was with some of his men, he came upon an interesting sight.

The girls were in a carriage with their hostess, leaving for the railway station, for they had become bored with Edinburgh. A cart, following them, carried the maid, Agnes, and all the girls’ considerable luggage. Later, girls, hostess, maid and luggage formed an island in the center of the hurrying station on this day of dark rain and wind. A Highlander in city clothes came to the hostess with a ‘message’ from her husband in the City, and as it was confidential he drew her to a little distance. The station was very crowded, with trains hooting and spilling steam and soot and passengers scurrying with umbrellas and the lanterns bobbing about. No one heard the maid scream, but the hostess, who had been given a very trivial message indeed, and totally nonexistent, she discovered later, arrived back to the spot where she had left her guests and their luggage, found the guests and luggage had disappeared completely. The maid was screaming of ‘masked men’ who had seized the young ladies and had whisked up all the bags and cases, and had borne them off ‘as easy as babes’. (The masked men lived only in Aggie’s heated imagination; she had seen only large men in plain clothes who had thrown the girls over their shoulders and had disappeared into the streams of preoccupied people.)

“I took Pamela Stone with us, also,” said the MacDougall to the priest, virtuously. “It wouldna have done for her to travel alone with men, she unchaperoned.” The men, moving like the wind, had deposited the young ladies, their encumbrances, and one gentleman to assist them, into a carriage the MacDougall had bought all within the past few minutes for so large a sum, apparently, that the cabbie had disappeared from Edinburgh discreetly. At any rate, he was not seen for months — and this the priest did not discover until much later. His cab, he had said, had been stolen from him while he was occupied with a cup of tea in an inn.

The MacDougall’s men and himself had come from the North on their horses. They rode back all the way, with the carriage and the weeping young female prisoners. Pamela had stopped weeping on the third day and had begun to sing, to the MacDougall’s pleasure, and he would join her. But Mary had only cried, wrung her hands, “and behaved like daft,” said the MacDougall, with indulgence.

“Ye call it daft to object to being kidnapped?” cried Robert in despair.

“A mon chooses his bride,” said the MacDougall with amazement that anyone could be so obtuse as not to understand this simple fact.

“And that’s a’, save for the wedding,” said the MacDougall. “Had the auld Faether been here there’d be no talk here of kidnappings and crimes and daftness. We’d be married the day.”

Vexed, he smote the bell again and the manservant came in and said the ladies asked to be excused this night from dining with their involuntary host. “They’ll nae insult the Faether!” shouted the MacDougall, rising to his immense height. “Bring ‘em doon at once, or I’ll go mesel’ and carry them doon!”

The manservant coughed. The ladies, he explained, enjoying every moment, were Church of England. They did not care for the company of Romans, especially priests.

Robert did not know whether to be angry or relieved. But the MacDougall told the man to deliver his message to the ladies or they’d rue the day. Robert had a vision of him storming the ladies’ apartments and bringing them down, one under each arm, like kittens, and as easily. Apparently the ladies thought him quite capable of it — and he was — and in a few moments they arrived, haughtily and silently.

The first to enter was doubtless Miss Pamela Stone, thought the priest, tall and slender and lissome in a bustled dress of blue silk, and with blue silk slippers on her narrow feet. She was all English, from her slim, tearose face, stern pink lips, large, pale blue eyes and smooth golden hair swept to the top of her head, whence it then descended in a cascade of glistening curls to her shoulders. She looked not once at the MacDougall, but gave Robert a glacial glance from under white lids like marble and then half turned away in the very center of the room. Robert disliked her immediately.