Grandmother and the Priests (16 page)

Little rose was so entranced by the romantic story of the Doughty Chieftain and his proper bride that she dreamt that night of skirling bagpipes and noble kilted Highlanders and the gray ocean.

She wondered if the MacDougall had a son or a grandson she could someday marry, and she huddled under her eiderdowns in the early morning to dream again.

She kept out of Grandmother’s way that day so she would not be forbidden to join the enchanting company at night. There were two new priests arriving, she understood from Cook. Father MacBurne had left ‘with a fistful of pounds’ for one of his pet charities, and a message for Rose. She was to be a very good girl, indeed, and God would love her always.

A Father Hughes had listened intently the night before to the story of the MacDougall, so when all the company was about the fire after dinner he said, “I, too, know a story of love, but it is a very strange one, and not to be understood, though since my experience I have heard similar. Who knows if heaven lies about us, not to be seen by our blind eyes, not to be heard with our deaf ears? Would we be frightened like little children? Then God is merciful to conceal almost all from us, lest we die of fear or lose our interest in the life we should live.”

Father Hughes was an Englishman, polished and elegant, with fine white hands and an abstracted air. Like all the other priests, he was also old, but he was so vital, and his blue eyes were so young, that one forgot that he was not a young man.

“Yes,” he said, “a very strange story of love, indeed, and sometimes I wonder if it was all a dream, for it happened so long ago and it has never been explained to me, nor any explanation advanced.”

“I was my old, widowed Aunt Amanda’s only nephew,” said Father Hughes, with a deeply tender expression on his face. “She had a number of nieces, my cousins, but she disliked them heartily, though they were apparently devoted to her.” Father Hughes coughed. “Aunt Amanda was very rich. I was the only one who bore her own family name — Hughes. My cousins were the daughters of Aunt Amanda’s sisters, but I was the son of Aunt Amanda’s only and beloved brother. She had been like a mother to my father, for she was fifteen years his senior; she had brought him up after their parents had died, and when she was twenty-one, in accordance with their father’s will, she was named his full guardian. So, in many ways, there was a filial and maternal relationship between them. My father’s two younger sisters — well, Aunt Amanda did not appear to care a great deal for them. She did her best for them, but only out of duty. My father was her pet.

“Aunt Amanda and my father came from an old Covenanter family, and Aunt Amanda was very shocked when my father married an orphaned Catholic girl. She immediately wrote him that she was ‘cutting him off’. Not with the proverbial shilling, for the estate had been divided equally among the four, such as it was. She never spoke to my father again, and neither did either of his other two sisters, who servilely did whatever Aunt Amanda did, thus earning her vast contempt. For, you see, Aunt Amanda had married an enormously rich merchant in the City, and she had no children of her own, and my other aunts had married very modestly, and had a number of girls.

“Aunt Amanda had written her brother, James Hughes: ‘Certainly, though you have married whom you married, your children will not embrace the Roman Church!’ I was the only child, and, of course, I was christened in the Church. Aunt Amanda, I heard, had a small stroke over the matter, but dutifully, as always, she sent the christening robe — which my father, grandfather and all my aunts had worn on that occasion — for me. She did not come to my christening. The robe was returned after I had worn it at that brief time, and Aunt Amanda never answered any of my father’s loving letters.”

James Hughes was a gentle, dreaming man, who wrote poetry when he should have been studying briefs and such matters in the office where he was a junior barrister. He was a plodding and meticulous worker, and was assigned those dreary research and summing-up affairs which bored his elders madly. He did not mind. He was fond of detail, and it did not occupy all his thoughts. And he continued to write poetry, which was always adamantly rejected by the editors of poetry magazines and other publishers. Apparently it was very bad poetry, indeed, and his son, reading it years later, found it almost embarrassingly naïve and simple. But the man’s sweet and innocent heart glimmered on every line.

His wife, Dorothy, was just like him. She was content with their tiny attached house in London, in one of the isolated mews. She was a happy little thing, and thought nothing of money and only of her God, her Church, her husband and her son. If she had one unhappiness it was because she had borne but one child, whom she had named Benedict for her favorite saint. She and her husband clung together like young trees, embracing both body and spirit intimately.

James thought he should do better for his family, so invested his very small fortune in one of the speculative Bubbles which periodically assailed the Islands during those years. He lost it all. So now he had but his salary. He and Dorothy were not too concerned. They lived a dreaming and devoted life apart from the world, after the initial dismay. In many ways, their life together was an idyl. They read poetry to each other around the fire after tea. James became a Catholic. It appeared unthinkable to him that the slightest thing should divide him and Dorothy; he took instructions, and with his usual single-hearted devotion he entered the Church. If one such as Dorothy, he reasoned, could be a Catholic, then why should he remain outside the portal?

He had one distress: his estrangement from his sister, Amanda. He wrote to her weekly, though receiving no reply, until the day of his death, when his son, Benedict, was ten years old. He had been killed by a tram, ten minutes after he had left a neighborhood church and after receiving Holy Communion. A man of utmost virtue, he had made his Confession only the evening before. The priest assured both wife and son that James had truly died in a state of Grace. It was possible, the kindly priest hinted, that James had entered heaven at once. His life had always been as pure as milk and as harmless as spring water.

Dorothy, the good Catholic, was joyous to receive such consolation. But the zest for life had immediately died in the poor woman, and she was only twenty-eight then. Even when Aunt Amanda came to the small funeral — James knew so few people well — Dorothy did not appear to be too aware of her presence, and kept turning her large dazed eyes on the big, formidable woman as if vaguely, and only occasionally, conscious of her presence. When Amanda, who was usually so grimly controlled, suddenly burst into wild sobbing and tears, Dorothy was dimly alarmed and tried to comfort her, glancing at others as if questioning why this stranger was weeping. When someone would say gently, again and again, “Your husband’s sister, dear,” Dorothy would nod and murmur, “Of course.” But it was only a polite murmur. It is very possible that to the last Dorothy did not consciously know Amanda as her sister-in-law, and James’ sister.

A month after the funeral Aunt Amanda wrote to Dorothy: “As I now understand your financial position I will send you a comfortable check the first of each month, and will be responsible for the education of my brother’s son, Benedict.” Dorothy read the letter uncertainly then called upstairs: “James, darling, I have received the most curious letter! Please come down and read it.” Silence answered her, and she shook her head and said to her grief-struck little boy, “Did you hear your father go out, love? He is not upstairs.”

Benedict was only ten, and he understood that his mother’s mind had suddenly gone, through sorrow and loneliness. Painfully, he composed a stiff letter to his Aunt Amanda, and the paper was blistered with his tears. Aunt Amanda arrived in her glistening victoria four days later — she lived in Grosvenor Square — to find that Dorothy had died in her sleep a few hours before. The birdlike and fragile heart had broken. God, in His mercy, understood that, without James, Dorothy was not truly alive, but only a torn and shattered remnant.

“There are lambs who can withstand the white storms and furies of winter,” said Father Hughes, “and come out the sturdier for them, brisk and up-and-doing, as the poet has urged, full of ginger and love for living. But there are the smaller lambs, soft and gentle and bewildered, who die in the first real storm that assaults them. Our Lord, it is said, was particularly tender with them, and sought them out to bring them in from the storm. My mother was one of those lambs, and Our Lord had taken her home. I like to think of my young parents in heaven,” added Father Hughes, the firelight shining on his white hair, the web of years thickening over his lean face. “I am so much older than they were. Will they know me?”

Aunt Amanda, apparently, suddenly realized what lambs her brother and his wife had been, and she was full of remorse and grief. After Dorothy’s funeral she took small white-faced Benedict home to her mansion, which he had never seen. That night she had placed her hands on his shoulders and had said, “I am a bad, nasty old woman, really detestable. I hope your father can find it in his heart to forgive me.” Then she had scowled. “But remember, my young master, not to take advantage of what you may consider a weakness of mine at this moment! You will go, next week, to such-and-such a preparatory school, and a prince of the Blood Royal is there, himself!”

Benedict had said with his father’s own softness but firmness, “No, Auntie Amanda. I want to be a priest.”

Aunt Amanda threw up her hands in horror, and her large fat face turned purple. She threatened; she vowed. As her husband had been a full-blooded man, she had acquired some rowdy oaths from him, and she roared them out thunderously. But little Benedict was not frightened — at least not too much — and repeated, “I want to be a priest. Papa and Mama knew, and they were happy.”

Aunt Amanda slapped his face roundly, burst into sobs, and clutched him to her enormous breast. She had then ordered brandy for herself and a little sweet wine for the boy. They had drunk together in the gigantic and crowded drawing-room of her house, weeping in the firelight.

She was not a lady to give up easily, and Benedict was not a big boy. She cajoled in the days that followed; she described her lonely state with moving self-pity; she embraced, slapped, thrust away, clutched him to her. The boy would obey her or she’d break his spirit! Benedict’s spirit remained singularly unbroken. Amanda shouted, “You are as obstinate as your poor father, who had not a brain in his head! Ungrateful young dog!”

On the eighth day she suddenly announced that Benedict would go to a good Jesuit school in London, and that was the end of the matter. For some years. He went up to Oxford, and the row began again. The two now loved each other intensely, as only lonely people can love, and they quarreled almost all the time over Benedict’s unswerving decision. Priests came to talk with Amanda; she insulted them, gave them brandy and whiskey, ordered them to have dinner with her, and handed them large quantities of pounds. This was not in the way of a bribe. She merely thought them sensible men who would understand her position, and Benedict’s, as her heir. They understood. They also understood that Benedict had a real vocation.

So Benedict went to his chosen Seminary, and Aunt Amanda did not write to him for two months. Then she presented the Seminary, which was very poor, with such an astounding sum that the Bishop, himself, came to see her to express his gratitude and to assure himself, probably, that he was not dreaming and that the cheque was genuine. “It’s the money his father should have had, sir,” said Aunt Amanda, wiping her eyes and scowling at the same time. “Had I given it to him — the foolish lamb — he’d not have been tramping the street that day, in the fog, but would have been alive now. For he’d have had his own carriage.”

Benedict broke it very, very gently to his old aunt that he wanted to be a mission priest. Amanda had another stroke at this, a rather serious one, which served to bring Benedict to her side frequently, a condition that soothed her and made her hope. But when she was walking again, though with a cane, Benedict told her that his decision still stood. She hit him with the cane, and never used it in walking thereafter. “I don’t know where God is, to permit this!” she said. “My only living boy, with my father’s name!”

Benedict was ordained, and Aunt Amanda was there, and she was in the church when he celebrated his first Mass. She sat upright, extremely fat and tall, and critically watched his every gesture. And tears of mingled joy and sorrow ran down her ruddy cheeks. “Now I can die in peace,” she told him, at the rich and bounteous reception she gave in his honor after the Mass, and she knelt for his blessing and her eyes rolled up touchingly. She lived to be ninety-four, and Benedict’s Order prospered mightily through her gifts. She left him a magnificent fortune, and she left each of her nieces one thousand pounds apiece. They took him to court, of course, claiming undue influence, but they lost the case.

During the long years that she lived alone, except for servants, in her mansion on Grosvenor Square, Benedict visited her as often as he could, and he wrote several times a week to her. He had long ago, when he was only eleven years old, given up calling her Auntie. He called her Mother. “And no lad ever had a better and more loving and more cosseting,” said Father Hughes. “She spoiled me outrageously all her life, and bullied me half to death.”

When she was seventy-six and Benedict almost forty, he had just returned from two years in Africa, and he went to Amanda’s house at once for the stay which had been granted him. Amanda was not perceptibly older. She was to give a tremendous dinner in his honor the next night. “I do want you to meet a darling old fool,” she told Benedict. “Why do they make you wear such an uncomfortable collar? Thank God for no gaiters, though; I really do not know why the poor High Church clergy wear them; silly-looking, I always thought. Never mind. Now, my darling old fool. Oh, he’s several years younger than I am. He’s never married. He reminds me of your father. I might remark, here and now, and no offense should be taken, that you have outgrown your father’s dreaminess and vapors, and that is all to the good. But Sir Joshua Fielding remains almost exactly like your father. I mentioned he is a bachelor? Yes. And no kin. But nothing concerns him; he drifts through life like that damned woman who fell in love with Sir Lancelot — ?”

“The Lady of Shalott,” said Benedict, refilling his aunt’s brandy glass.

“What a ninny,” said Amanda. “She could see the damned man in the mirror, couldn’t she? Was it necessary for her to go plunging after him, then dying? By the way, what was the curse on her?”

“I never knew,” said Benedict, sitting across from his indomitable aunt and smiling at her fondly. “But I think there is a moral there, that those who dare not look at life should just glimpse it through their mirrors. Reality has a shocking effect on some people, you know. Very unfortunate. I often wonder how they can be so weak.”

“Um,” said Amanda, with some sourness. “I was never one to stare at mirrors. How was the joint tonight?”

“Excellent. Do we really have to have that stuffy dinner tomorrow, Mother?”

“Yes, indeed. I have invited a number of rich Romans, for your benefit. It won’t hurt them to give you a few sovereigns for your Order. Rich people cling to sovereigns like flies to honey. One can understand that. Joshua is a Roman, too, and very good and sweet and generous. He’s the Lady of Shalott all over again.”

“He refuses to look at life?”

Amanda considered. Then shook her head, baffled. “I don’t know, dear Benedict. But how he can look at life, if he does, with such serenity and peacefulness is quite beyond me. He never speaks of religion to anyone. He quotes Shakespeare a great deal, especially Hamlet. What is it he is always saying? Perhaps I am not quoting it exactly: ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio — ’ There, I can’t remember the rest.”

Benedict sat up, deeply interested. “Oh? Of course, I remember. It was not one of my favorite quotations.” He paused. “Is Sir Joshua superstitious?”

“Dear me, my child,” said Amanda, irritably. “I cannot say about that. How you do go on in irrelevances! What has superstition to do with Sir Joshua, who lives in a world of dreams? I want you to meet him and for you to see what your father would have been like had the sweet lamb lived. It might,” added Amanda with a tinge of malice, “give you a start.”

Some doddering old man who is possibly senile and has picked up an exotic thought or two in his travels, thought Benedict. He asked, “Has Sir Joshua ever been to India?”

“He’s been all over the world, though why I really do not know,” said Amanda. “The rest of the world is so not-English, isn’t it? Must be very wearing and boring, and one can’t trust the water, I’ve heard, and such sinfulness going on.”