Grandmother and the Priests (22 page)

“That we have!” said Mr. James, emphatically. “Does your Reverence take us for idiots?” He blessed himself. “And never a word will he say but to ask us to daily Mass, and penance and good works, and charity.”

“Saints always talk that way,” said the neighbor. “It’s the language they have.”

Mr. James ignored him as an inferior who had not deserved a saint, no doubt because of a mass of mortal and venial sins, and therefore not fit to be addressed as a Christian. Another man spoke up, sneeringly. “I be a Methodist, and I gets what you Romans get, too, and if it is a saint you have he’s not bothering what church ye belong to.”

“Saints,” said Father Ifor, again hastily, “come to all men, as Our Lord did. They have no favorites, in the main. And how is my cousin, Father Andrew?”

“A new man!” exclaimed Mr. James. “There’s old Granny Burke as does for him, and in he took her orphan grandchild too.” His eyes sparkled like hot blue fire. “And tell me this,” he said, glaring at both the Methodist and the surly neighbor, “ ‘ow was that kid cured? Bent she was, like an old woman, with twisted legs and shoulders, from her birth when her mother died, and may God rest her soul. Crawled about the street she did, or sat on the high kerb, like a knot, with her little twisted face with the pain in it. And then one morning,” and Mr. James’ voice dropped reverently, and the others crossed themselves, “she was playing on the street with roses in her face, and nary a twist to her legs and arms, and sings like an angel! And she tells the tale, and we believe it, that one night she saw a man all dressed in light, and he touched her and blessed her, and when she woke up — ” Emotion choked him, and a girl sobbed.

“Er,” said Father Ifor, stammering, “it was my cousin she saw in the dream?”

Mr. James cleared his throat. “How can a wee one mark the face of a saint in a dream? It was a man in light, and the little lass tells the tale that each day Father Andrew especially blessed her and prayed for her, for it is the good mind she has, and it was not twisted like her body, and she is in school now.” He sighed, deeply. “We has gone, the lot of us, to Father Andrew, and kneeled for his blessing, which he gives, but he will not admit he is a saint. In fact, he says he is not, and asks only for prayers and the rest.”

“There was a gouging last summer, by one of the men of Gwenwynnlynn,” said the surly stranger, “and it was foul, so your saint has not done you much good, seems.”

“Saints,” said Father Ifor, loudly, “do not keep themselves to the worthy. It was Our Lord, Himself, who said He came to save sinners, and not the good, who are already saved.” He could not restrain a grin, in spite of his confusion. “Could it be that the men of Gwenwynnlynn were a pack of sinners, more than in any other hamlet?”

The surly stranger guffawed and slapped his patched knee. “That they are. Minds me — ”

“I cannot speak for the Romans,” said the Methodist, stiffly, “but we observe our duties faithfully, and you’ll not find us on the street or in the field, of a Sunday, tossing the ball and fighting and wrestling, and breaking the Sabbath. And drinking,” he added, deeply.

“The Sabbath,” said Father Ifor, who was, after all, a combative Welshman, “was created for man, and not the reverse. I hope,” he said to Mr. James, “that there has been an increase of piety among the communicants, and that daily Mass is not attended solely by the sacristan and the altar boys?”

“It is full to the doors, the church!” shouted Mr. James. “Crowded against the walls! And many’s the Baptist and the Methodist there, too, trying to hide his face!” He suddenly smiled. “Ah, you should see the church, Father! The wonderful new statues. The Blessed Mother’s plaster was faded and breaking, and now there’s a new statue of her, and others, and it’s the pride of the village. And the altar cloths! Irish linen and finest lace. And the vessels! Silver, gold-plated. And the Monstrance! And the candlesticks, the finest, of solid silver, and the windows, stained glass, not white glass. Like the Methodists and Baptists,” he added, crushingly.

“We’re not for statues and other worldly things,” said the Methodist, who appeared a little dejected. Father Ifor said to him, gently, “One can have beauty in the heart, too, my son.” The Methodist smiled at him with a timidity rare for a Welshman, and a profound gratitude. “Our Lord,” went on Father Ifor, “spoke on the bare hills and in the fields and in the dusty market place. It is what is in a man’s heart.”

Mr. James frowned, and Father Ifor noted this and said, severely, “It seems that if you — er — have a saint among you, Harlock James, it has not done you much good in the way of Christian charity. And tolerance for one’s fellow-man, and his ways.”

Mr. James’ face swelled with the quick fury of the Welshman and his fists knotted. Father Ifor stared him down, and the others watched keenly. Mr. James subsided. “I’d not looked for the cousin of a saint to say that,” he said, with heaviness.

“I think,” said Father Ifor, “that my cousin has not indicated that he is a saint, to you or to me. In fact, his letter to me was troubled.”

“All saints are troubled when their sainthood is seen,” said Mr. James, in a voice of knowing superiority.

“Then, they should be imitated, and there should be no bragging of bank accounts,” said Father Ifor. “And it should be observed that what Catholics now have in Gwenwynnlynn the Protestants have been given, too.”

“Only to bring them to the light,” said Mr. James, stubbornly.

Father Ifor reflected for some moments. “There can be a reasonable explanation. The owners of the mines are becoming kinder.”

“Not in other cots,” said Mr. James, proudly. “The same owners, too.”

“My cousin could have been very persuasive.”

“That is because he is a saint, Father.”

Father Ifor remained silent. Mr. James had begun to annoy him. Of course, it could be explained, all of it, by Father Andrew, and like all Welshmen he was eloquent. But, there was that child — How had she been restored in an instant?

As if Mr. James had read his thoughts, he said, “There have been other miracles. Mistress Brandiffs cows, and she a widow, were dying, and we knew not why. And then they were healthy, and dropped calves. And there was old Benjamin, blind from a lad. He opened his eyelids one morning.” Mr. James paused. “And he saw. And the lapsed ones, they came to Father Andrew and confessed, all of a sudden, and are saints, themselves.”

A young woman spoke quickly. “I had nary a child, and I married for ten years, and always losing them in the third month.” She blushed and peeped at Father Ifor, for, after all, he was a man and females did not speak of such things to men, not even priests. “And now,” she continued, with new resolution, “I have one prettiest.”

“And I,” said a youngish, middle-aged woman, “I had the cancer.” She touched her bosom with a shy, brief touch. “There was no hope, the doctor said. But one morning I awakened, and it was gone!” She paused. “It was the biggest, nastiest lump.”

“The Church,” said Father Ifor, “does not rely upon miracles to declare a man or woman a saint. It is in the practice of heroic virtues. Many’s the miracle which was not a miracle at all. It occurred during nature’s own healing processes.”

An elderly man suddenly stood up in the swaying carriage and came to Father Ifor. He ceremoniously took off his boot, and then his wool stocking, and the others watched, nodding their heads. He extended a broad pink foot with perfect toes towards Father Ifor. “Look ye on yonder, Father,” he said. “I have witnesses. A fire burned more than half my foot away, in the mines. For twenty years I hobbled, and if it had not been for my neighbors, poor as me, my goodwife and I’d have starved, though little they had. And then, one morning, after Mass, I felt a new fire in my foot, and I sat on the kerb and took off my boot and stockings,” and he looked about at the others, who nodded again, “there was my foot, as it was as a lad! As it is, now. That will be your nature’s ‘own healing processes’, between one moment and the other, Father? The giving back to me of half my foot, and three toes?”

“Is it true?” pleaded Father Ifor of the others, and they shouted, “Aye, it is true!”

“And my husband, who was dying,” said a woman, courageously, “with the priest at his side, with the Last Rites, he opened his eyes, and sat up and got from his bed. And he with the consumption, and it is all gone. He is in our fields now, with the barley.”

“It is not unknown,” said Father Ifor, with some lameness, “that with the administering of the Last Rites, a person regains — ”

The woman shook her head vigorously. “I do not deny, Father,” she said. “But my husband had been dying for a year, coughing the blood and heart out of him, and as a skeleton, and then without his senses, and from one moment to another he was cured.”

“Perhaps,” said the Methodist, laughing a little, “a curse was removed from the village when Sir Oswold Morgan died.”

“Aye, that was a bad man!” said Mr. James. “A man of Satan, himself. A wicked, blasphemous, cruel man. I can believe in a curse, myself, for the man was a curse.”

“A wicked man,” chorused the others. “A man without heart or goodness.”

“A baronet lived in your hamlet?” asked Father Ifor, incredulously.

“Aye, that he did. He was born there, and went away, as a bad-faced, ugly lad, with a curse on his lips for all that his father and mother were, and a curse on the cotswold. Never was a lad, or man, hated so much.” Mr. James’ own face became ugly. “I remember him well. Full of mischief and the meanness. He came back to gloat on us, he with his new fine house, and his sneers for Father Andrew, and his laughing at Father Andrew, and he a baptized Catholic, himself, though never in the church at Mass.”

“How did he become a baronet, with a lot of money?” asked Father Ifor.

“Only God knows,” said Mr. James. “It may be he was a thief, or worse. But a man is drawn back to his home when he is dying, or he wants to spit on them as is better than he in their souls, and so he came.”

“He — disliked — Father Andrew?” said Father Ifor.

“Hated him. Laughed at him on the streets. Shamed him. And where he walked evil came.”

“Such as?” said Father Ifor.

But the train had chugged to a stop and they were in Gwenwynnlynn. Absently, Father Ifor glanced through the window, then was immediately astonished. The black wooden platform was gone, had been replaced by handsomely colored flags in a random pattern. The bleak and sooty banks he had remembered were now a tumble of blowsy summer roses and beds of hardy pansies and clumps of sea-pines. “Aye, and it’s handsome now, is it not?” said Mr. James, bursting with pride. “It was the owners!”

“Strange that they did nothing for the other hamlets,” said Father Ifor. He looked for his small luggage, but Mr. James had lifted it and was shouldering towards the door. “No cousin of our saint carries his own,” he said, marching sturdily. “Aye, but wait, Father, until you see Gwenwynnlynn, itself!”

A small neat carriage with a small neat horse and a small neat coachman was waiting. The coachman took Father Ifor’s bag, and removed his hat and smiled radiantly. “The Father could not come, Father Ifor,” he said. “He’s been a little unwell. He’s well on to eighty, you know.”

“Father Andrew drives about in this?” asked Father Ifor when the horse trotted off and they were rolling over the polished dark stones of the street.

“Aye, but not always. He prefers his bicycle, he says,” replied the coachman in the rich voice one uses in speaking of another dearly loved. “His exercise, as he says.”

Father Ifor ruminated as they rolled through one clean and winding little street after another, with the small cottages snug under sound slate roofs, crowding together, and the prosperous little shops. But more than all else, the sturdily dressed women and the children with the good boots! An immense fortune had changed Gwenwynnlynn from dreadful poverty and misery to all this. It was not possible that ‘the owners’ had done this! No, never. Father Ifor knew the owners well. He had been a pit boy, himself.

Then he was vaguely resentful. The people here accepted all that had been done for them so mysteriously with a sort of pride, as if they had been worthier than others. It was their pride that he resented, for he knew they were no different from the inhabitants of the wretched hamlets through which the train had snorted and growled. Their pompous pride! They had their ‘saint’ and their prosperity — they felt they deserved it! That was the intolerable thing.

“How is Father?” he asked the coachman.

“Not so well, Father, and I am sad that it’s me to give you the news. I had an old Dada of my own, and when he was old like this, and tired, it was the same look he had, as if thinking thoughts not of this world. Far off, if your Reverence knows what I mean.”

There was a great mystery here. Father Ifor had not seen his cousin for twelve years, and they had only intermittently corresponded, though the love between them had always been deep. If Father Andrew was troubled, and he usually the most serene of men, then he was not responding as saints respond, nor would he have so urgently asked his much younger cousin to visit him for ‘advice’. Of course, there had been St. Vincent de Paul, and his working with the poor, and his prying the gentlemen of his own class and nobility loose of their cash in the name of Christian mercy and charity, and for the love of God. However, Father Ifor had always been poor; he was not gentry, not to speak of nobility. And there had never been any rich man in Gwenwynnlynn except for that one — and what was his name? The owners? “Pah,” said Father Ifor.

It was known, of course, that saints in the past had frequently performed the miracle of increasing food in times of famine, and had done other equally miraculous things, but Father Ifor doubted that any modern saint could produce the cash to change the hamlet like this. After all, the Bank of England notes could not be counterfeited. Not even by a saint, thought Father Ifor, smiling faintly. He considered his cousin. Father Andrew had several of the heroic virtues, as did all clergymen of all the religions; they had to have them and practice them diligently if they were to endure their own people and work to save their souls. No man became a clergyman as a way of making a living, such as working in the coal mines or in the factories. Father Ifor knew Protestant clergymen and one or two rabbis. They often commiserated together, in an oblique way, knowing that God had bestowed His peculiar Grace upon them, but wondering what obtuseness lived eternally in the deceitful hearts of men, and what hardness of heart. In spite of the prophets; in spite of the Sacrifice on Calvary.

So Father Andrew had a number of the heroic virtues. Was it possible that those virtues had expanded to the dimensions of true saintliness? It was possible. But still — Father Ifor looked at the wall of lavender mountain, its changing face touched by the red, setting sun. The carriage passed a tiny blue lake, which reflected part of the mountain in a shade of purple and turned the edge of the sun to scarlet fire. Then they were trotting to the street on which Father Andrew’s church stood, and the rectory.

The church had been wonderfully restored. Tall and narrow, its slates seemingly washed with crimson water under the dying sun, its cross flaming, it had a look of modest stateliness it had never possessed before. The rectory, too, had been restored. The front garden was filled with flowers. Then Father Ifor saw a knot of respectful men and women loitering near the garden gate. But the shutters facing the street were firmly closed.

The coachman brought up the carriage with a flourish, leapt down lithely, ignoring his fellow villagers, and with a large gesture of importance assisted Father Ifor from the carriage, which irritated the priest a little, for he was in the prime of his life and not decrepit. The men on the street removed their wool caps; the women and girls curtseyed humbly. They gazed at him with marvelous, but annoying, solemnness of face. He tried to smile at them, but it was a little difficult under the circumstances, so he opened the gate and stepped onto the path. Immediately the small throng surged after him. “Wait, there, now!” exclaimed the coachman. “You are not to vex Father. Begone with you all.”