Grandmother and the Priests (50 page)

“You have a name to clear?”

“No. No one believed that I had killed my wife. I was acquitted; the jury was out only twenty minutes. And tea was served them during that time. No one ever believed that Florence had killed Agnes, either. The judge expressed himself as approving of the verdict.”

The priest again walked the floor, musing. They watched him, anxiously.

He paused before them. “Should you go to Belfast, after all these years, you would revive the whole case. You could not be tried again, Mr. Gould. Mrs. Gould might, or might not, be tried, on a technicality. Rose would be harassed again, and her name soiled, and under suspicion. And your children? They are old enough now, most of them, to undergo torture and shame. You could not live in this hamlet any longer. Therefore, I should like to ask you just what you would accomplish? And, by the way, after the verdict — I am interested in the comments of the court?”

“Death by misadventure.”

“Will you, then, go to Belfast, considering all these matters?”

“What would you advise, Father?”

“I have given my advice, that you do not lie any longer to your children. In all good conscience you can tell them that you did not murder your wife, nor did your present wife. I should leave it at that. No other person is under suspicion, and therefore you do not have to fly to his help. Of course, if such an eventuality should occur, then you must speak up. I doubt it will occur, however.”

Their faces were full of joy. Youth returned to them in an instant. The priest said, “Your conscience is not urging you to return to Belfast, Mr. Gould, and reopen the case?”

“No! For now all the doubts I had, Father, about my guilt have vanished. That is what haunted me, and that is why I told Father Tom everything.”

The priest shook his head. “You did not tell him everything, because he did not question you as I have. Old Father Tom was right, I am thinking. His instinct was sure. He knew murder had been done, and that is why he was so outraged because you would not confess. You did not tell him because you did not know the truth. You must forgive him. You must think kindly of him. For, he cannot be blamed.”

He smiled at them. “I shall expect you at Confession, tomorrow, Mr. Gould. And at Mass, on Sunday. After all, you have seriously sinned in neglecting your religious duties. You have let your children suffer needlessly, under the false thought that you must protect them. Despite the attitude of Father McGinnis, you should have persisted, and not have believed that you had been driven away. Had you persisted, he may have come to doubt his very reliable instinct at last. You caused him much misery, and he was an old man. I am afraid I shall inflict rather extensive penances, Mr. Gould.”

The squire cried out, “Not penances! Blessed privileges! Father, you have lifted despair from us! What can I say, or do, to thank you?”

Mrs. Gould shyly gave her hand to the priest. She was smiling radiantly, though tears ran down her cheeks. “And Father,” she said, “I should like to take instructions. If you will receive me.”

Father Shayne did not write the Bishop after all. He decided to go to see him and tell him everything. The Bishop would be very happy.

“So,” said Father Shayne tonight, “evil had been done, by an evil woman, who had hated her husband and her children. Her evil had turned the thoughts of her husband to her friend. Her evil had resulted in innocent murder, and her own innocent suicide. Her character had made her children suffer physically and spiritually. Evil, too, had been done by Mr. Gould and his second wife, out of a loving desire to shelter those children, who had wanted only the truth about their mother from them. Their lives had been blighted.

“Not permanently, however. Geoffrey became a priest; he is now a Bishop, in America. Elsa became a joyous wife and mother.” He paused. “But little Eric died. He died in convulsions, a year after that day in my study. Who knows but what he might have been saved had his father called physicians in time? Another evil had been done, out of a fear of scandal, and to protect a woman who should not have been protected. Had her husband exposed her when Geoffrey had suffered his injury from her, Elsa should have been spared her suffering and terror and blight. Eric would not have died. Yet, it was all done with the purest of intentions and with innocence and love.

“So evil, in this case, was inextricably webbed with good and virtue. It is all very strange. Yet, there was no evil intended, so there was no evil.”

The unwelcome summons to return home came the next morning, and Rose watched her luggage being packed and cried a little to herself. Cook was firm and disapproving when she made Rose a last cup of tea and presented the small cake she had just baked.

“It is not as if,” she said, “you loved your Grandmother.” (Nor she you, added the good woman in her thoughts. Rose, with the prescience of lonely childhood, caught the compassionate glance of Cook and understood.) “It can’t be just the tales you hear from the old men at night around the fire.”

But it was indeed the tales, like a great book opening wide and colored pages in a small drab life. “What is it, then?” asked Cook. “Drink your tea.”

As Cook obviously did not fancy tales, Rose could only shake her head miserably. But Cook was shrewd. “Then it is the tales,” she said. “I could tell you plenty, meself, if I were a gossip like some who run from house to house. What’s it about the tales, Rosie?”

“They make me think of God,” said the child, and blushed.

“Aha,” said Cook, meaningly. “They ‘ave you a Roman in no time if you listen.”

Rose sipped at her tea. If those kind old men, who took such an interest in her and fed her dainties from their own plates slyly — forbidden dainties for children — were Roman, then she would be a Roman, too. No one else but Cook had ever been so kind to her before, or had cared much about her. “I could do worse,” she said to Cook, pertly.

“Mind your tongue,” said Cook. She paused. “I’d not say that to your Ma and Pa if I was you, Rosie. They’d never let you come here again.”

Rose remembered never to tell her parents. The spring came, and the summer, the endless hot and dusty summer in London, and then a visit to Bournemouth with her parents. She waited impatiently for autumn and winter, and listened eagerly to the mounting irritability of her parents’ voices as the gray dull days came and went.

But it was January before the explosion came, and Rose was off to Grandmother’s again. “Again?” said Grandmother. “I niver thought that one of my lads had so much spirit.”

She looked at Rose critically. “If it wasna for the red hair, like mine, I’d say you were unco unpretty, Rose.” Grandmother was indeed an ‘auld child’. She spoke cruel words deliberately; she had malice to spare; her moods were not to be trusted, and there was no mature kindness to which to appeal, no understanding. Yet Rose looked at her with affection, and she was startled, herself. Rose was not a child to be beguiled by magnetism and charm and affectations. She did not consider Grandmother handsome. She only knew that Grandmother was lively, her house beautiful, her dresses full of splendor, her jewels incredible, and that, all in all, she was enchantment.

Grandmother was eying her exactly as the parrot eyed her, her head cocked, her green eyes fixed on Rose’s face, her mouth grinning. “It’s not sorry you are to come here,” she said.

“I like to come,” said Rose.

Grandmother, of course, was deeply flattered. She considered it a personal tribute to herself. She patted Rose’s head, and then in the manner of children she pulled Rose’s hair sharply and unexpectedly, and laughed at the little girl’s cry of pain. Then again, in the manner of children, she was superficially contrite. “I’ve got a present for you,” she said, and took Rose’s hand and raced with her up the stairs to her magnificent bedroom. Proudly, she gave Rose a little cardboard box, and, opening it, Rose saw a string of bright coral. Grandmother preened at Rose’s exclamation of delight, and so almost loved the child.

“And by the way,” she said, “there are two old friends of yours here again tonight, Father Hughes and Monsignor Harrington-Smith. Did ye know what the Monsignor said of you? He said one day ye’d be writing doon the tales ye hear, and they’d be a book.” She laughed merrily.

That night Monsignor Harrington-Smith spoke of a concert he had attended in London, and particularly mentioned the harpist, “Almost as fine as Stephen Doyle, who played as an angel plays. I heard him when I was a very young man. We called him the Minstrel Boy.”

“I knew him well,” said Father O’Connor, and all looked at him in amazement. “He was in my parish. He not only played like an angel but — ”

“Yes,” said Father O’Connor to the amazed faces about Grandmother’s dinner table, “I am the priest of that ‘legend’, and I knew the Minstrel Boy.” He looked at his old veined hands folded placidly on the table. “It is sixty years or more, I am thinking.”

“But I heard that from my grandmother, and she has been dead twenty years,” said Grandmother, “and it was very ould to her then, and she spoke of it as long in the past, before she had been born.”

Father O’Connor said musingly, “Legends do have a grand way of receding into the past, and becoming tradition, and it is more authentic for a man to say, ‘My old Dada heard it from his Dada,’ than to say, ‘I saw it myself, and I swear it by the saints.’ No one believes a man, entirely, but the world has a curious way of believing legends, and the oulder the better, as if time gave them verity. It was harder for the Apostles to bear personal witness to the life of Our Lord, they who had had the blessed grace to see Him alive among them — and they died for the witnessing — than it is today for a priest to bear the witness through the Church, the Holy Bible and tradition. For the priest teaches what he has been taught, but the Apostles taught what they had known and had seen for themselves and so the people, many of them, did not believe the Apostles, and killed them. Do men fear that all men are liars, then? I do not know. It is very puzzling that men will believe legends, which were first told by dead men, if those legends are old enough. Yet, it was but sixty years ago when I knew Stephen Doyle and when I witnessed what happened to him.”

“It could be,” said Father O’Flynn, “that men believe that a story which does not die must be true.”

“But there are the many,” said Father O’Connor, “who do not believe in a personal devil, who does exist, in spite of the truth which has survived the millennia. But then indeed, it could be that Satan, himself, has been very busy through the centuries persuading men he does not exist. Always will evil do that, the better to deceive and destroy. What man will take up arms against an enemy he does not, with all his heart, believe is on his step?”

“And it was you, then, Father, who knew Stephen Doyle,” said Grandmother, marveling, “you who would be less in years than my Grandma who told me the story!”

“Yes,” said Father O’Connor, “I was not only Stephen Doyle’s friend, but I was his witness.

“We all know how sad and poor the little remote parishes of Ireland were and are, and I have heard the stories of my brothers in Christ in this very house who starved and labored and suffered in those parishes among their people. But Darcy was, I am thinking, the saddest and poorest of them all, tucked away in green hills, with the earth poorly yielding and famine surely at hand next Tuesday. Never did I meet a man there who had more than two pounds to his name, and it was thought he was a nabob if he had those two pounds all at one time. The young men left to work in Dublin or Waterford, or emigrated to America with their young wives, for there was nothing for them in Darcy, where it seemed only the hopeless or the very hopeful, and the young and the ould, lived in a state of hunger and anxiety.

“Darcy made nothing to sell in the markets, though there had been talk of a Belleek manufactory setting up shop. Some men had come to examine the soil, and had gone away shaking their heads. But the people of Darcy, the hopeful ones, talked of the day when the manufactory would be built and the grand wages coming in. They talked of it all the years I knew them, and I had known them since I was a lad, for I had been born there in a sod hut with a thatched roof. And Darcy was my first parish.

“Each family in Darcy owned its little land outside the village, and everyone who could walk or crawl or see worked the bitter earth. As there was no money, there was barter. A man exchanged a basket of oats for a basket of wheat, and the miller ground the grain for a part of the flour, and he gave part of the flour to the shoemaker for winter boots for his children. The women wove their own linen and wool, and their husbands exchanged them for barley and oats and the ground flour, and for milk and cheese and a little beef. It was primitive and wretched and no one had enough to eat or enough clothing or enough peat to burn in the fireplaces. It was an occasion for rejoicing and celebration when a ewe bore two lambkins instead of one, though the second lamb had to be kept alive in the kitchen before the fire, for its mother would not have it. And if a cow freshened and bore two little bulls there was more rejoicing, for when the bulls were old enough they could be slaughtered and eaten. No cow was ever slaughtered until she could bear no more or give milk, and so it was with the ewes and the sows. The ladies among the animals were cherished to the very day when even a fool could know they had nothing to give the village any longer.”

The men in Darcy also cherished their donkeys and their few horses, for these carried the stuffs of barter and pulled the plows. The death of a horse was a major calamity. How would a man replace it? Darcy was days’ journey away from the nearest city, and inland where there were only blue lakes and not the sea where the ships came in. Horses were too tired, and too precious, for a man to use to ride even to the nearest village for a gossip with his kinsmen, so Darcy remained remote and isolated. But it was blessed in one thing: the climate was quite temperate and even, sheltered by hills from what the worst winter could do, and so the grass in the fields and on the hills remained green and edible for long months. Moreover, though it was stingy with its yield of oats and grains it grew fine potatoes, and there had been years when Darcy had been almost entirely kept alive by those vegetables. It was one of the few spots when, during the Famine, the potatoes did not rot. It also yielded peat for the fires. It also yielded some gray stone, and the miller had a small stone house, and the tiny church and rectory were of gray stone.

“That sounds very grand, to say that my house and the church were of stone,” said Father O’Connor. “But the church held seats for about thirty people only, and they crowded, and the late-comers had to stand at the back and the sides and in the one little aisle. Many was the time the weary young mothers leaned against the cold stone, weak with hunger, and holding their squalling infants, and many was the time when I consecrated the Bread that my words were drowned out by the infant wailing. Yet, I am thinking now, the sound must have been sweeter to Our Lord than what I prayed, and the whimpering of the choir, which was composed of two ancient Sisters and one little boy with perpetual bronchitis. For, you will see, we all had bronchitis and we coughed the whole year through. The climate was not too harsh, but the hunger was. We had no doctor; we had a very ould midwife, and many was the young mother who died with the child to whom she had just given birth. Sometimes the child lived, and this meant that the father must try to persuade a pressed farmer for milk, if he had no cow of his own, and sometimes a mother with a nursing infant would help. Yet, I have never seen a village with so many sinewy ould people. The hundredth birthday would bring the children, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren, and the great-great-grandchildren, with a cake for the sake of respect, but it was considered no tremendous age. I have buried many a man or woman who had lived long beyond the mark of the century, and to the last they had done their share of work in Darcy. It would have been a shame on them if they had shirked for one moment. Ah, they were grand people, my own, in Darcy! And never did the Sassenagh know of them to collect any taxes, which was a blessing from God.

“There was no pub in Darcy. Each man contributed his share of malt and grains to the brewer, who made the beer, and he sold the beer for a length of wool or linen or a pair of boots. The beer was drunk by hearthsides, among friends. I never saw a drunken man in Darcy, or a slatternly woman. We had very little, but we had pride in ourselves and we had Faith, and we had love for one another. In all the things a man can be truly rich in, those we had. There are many who would say we had no ambition, except for the young lads and colleens who emigrated — but we had our God, and what more can a man have? Even if he suffers?

“I was a young priest, but even the men and women beyond one hundred spoke of me with affection as the ‘ould Father’. They loved me and I loved them. They gave me what they could in fresh beef and bread and vegetables and though it was very little it was all they could do. The women scrubbed my tiny rectory, which had but two rooms, each only as large as a stall, and never was a rectory cleaner. The men planted flowers about it, and potatoes in the little garden, and radishes and even some lettuce. Those were the happiest days of my life.”

Children were cherished in Darcy, though few survived birth or the year that followed, for they meant more hands in the fields, more hands at the looms. Children were riches in Darcy. And so it was that everyone pitied Peter Doyle and his wife that they had no children. Though they lived just a little better than their neighbors, with no helpless mouths to feed the first years, they were pitied. Peter became forty, then fifty, and Mary, his wife, looked towards her middle age, too. Both were strong and handsome people, with strong backs — but they had no children. Then when Mary Doyle was forty-five she finally conceived.

Like Zachary and Elizabeth, they could not, at first, believe that such a miracle had been granted to them. The midwife was consulted, and was at first dubious. Mary was practically beyond child-bearing age; she had reached the ‘change’. But month succeeded month and Mary’s body increased. Each morning found the ecstatic couple at Mass, and each morning they received Holy Communion. If their neighbors were skeptical, they were not. Mary would have a child at last. They did not hope for a lad; a girl would be equally welcome. They looked about them with faces of gladness, and at last the whole village was praying for them both. Father O’Connor visited them often, just to look at Mary’s rapturous eyes of faith and joy. He wished, for the first time, that his church possessed an organ. It did have the ruins of one, far beyond repair; of course, there could never be any replacement, for lack of money. The two very ancient Sisters, and the little boy, did their best with their Gregorian chanting. But still, an organ would have been welcome on triumphant Sundays, to remember the miracle of Mary’s conception. However, there were times when the Sisters and the boy outdid themselves, and the tiny church rang like a holy gong.

The whole village declared an unofficial holiday when Mary came to bed in her labor. The brewer recklessly broached a keg of beer for those who stood about the Doyles’ little house. The Sisters knelt at Mary’s straw bed, and Peter Doyle was almost beside himself with joy and fear and had to be upheld by Father O’Connor. It was a warm spring day, full of the fragrance of grass and soft wind, and there was the brightest sun. All appeared auspicious, in spite of Mary’s agonized and prolonged labor. Everyone knew she was in extreme pain, she who had never borne a child before. But no one heard her groan or scream. She bore her anguish with smiles of rapture and gratitude. She was about to deliver her child. Each time her middle-aged body was convulsed her eyes would light up like candle flames, and she would clasp her sweating hands towards heaven.

The hours went by. The midwife’s face was lined with anxiety. She walked restlessly back and forth near Mary’s bed, praying and muttering. Then she called Father O’Connor. “She is dying,” she said, with the abruptness of all village folk. So Father O’Connor gave Mary the Last Rites, to the muted distress of those who waited. Mary rallied at once. “My baby will live, Father,” she said. A little later she gave birth to a boy child, and at the very moment he squalled his first breath she gave her last, humbly and prayerfully. Peter Doyle sat dumbly with his son in his arms and was so far away, as he looked at his dead wife’s calm and smiling face, that even the priest could not reach him.

“ ‘Tis strange, and then again perhaps it is not so strange,” said old Father O’Connor, “that Peter began to hate his little son. He had had his dear wife for twenty-eight years, his dearest and closest companion in misfortune, hope, love, misery and joy. They had lived alone in the oneness of being for the greater part of their lives, and they had known each other as children. Mary was as much a part of Peter’s life as his body. In the deepest sense of marriage they had been as one, almost from their own births. Peter had never loved another girl, nor had Mary loved another boy. Their faces were as familiar to them as their own. They had exchanged their first childhood kiss, and their last. Peter had always been ‘Mary’s boyo’ and Mary had always been ‘Peter’s colleen’. They had sat next to each other at school and had looked at each other’s slates. They, too, had been only children. They were at once brother and sister and husband and wife. No one ever saw Mary, from her babyhood, without seeing Peter beside her. So, when Mary died Peter died also, though he lived thirteen years longer.”

Father O’Connor sighed. “I knew it almost at once. I deplored it, but I understood. Without Mary, Peter was not truly alive. He worked his little field, and came home to his cottage, where his dead father’s elderly aunt now lived to take care of the child. Ould Eileen must have been close to ninety then, but a strong and vigorous woman. She lived to be nearly one hundred and three, and then she died, and Stephen was twelve years old. Never, in those years, did his father speak to him, not in love, not in anger. Sometimes I talked to Peter but he would stare at me with his pale blue eyes and I knew that he did not hear me. On Sundays, he spent his hours near his wife’s grave, mumbling to her and smiling and nodding. It’s very possible he did not even know that he had a son, though later Stephen told me that his father had always hated him. Who knows the recesses of the human heart? Stephen worked in the field with his father, and if they had need to communicate it was only through gestures. It was a terrible life for a young lad, and Stephen came to manhood with bitterness in his heart and anger, for he was all alone. He believed his father held him guilty for Mary’s death, and that his life was a curse. As his father had rejected him and would not know him, he was sure that he was detestable and not worthy of human love and tenderness.

“Stephen was a tall strong lad, like his father, but with his mother’s dark eyes. There was always a storm in them, from his babyhood. Those we reject, reject us; it is a truth we do not recognize. Stephen came to school for what the ould Sisters could teach him, but he was a restless lad, always looking beyond the hills. I was sure he would emigrate to America or at least to Liverpool. But he stayed on, laboring in the field, earning a penny here and there helping the shoemaker or the blacksmith or the brewer. He worked well, but he hardly spoke. His father became older and more tired, and Stephen did not speak of him. He was Confirmed, and Peter was not there. Stephen sang in the choir on Sunday, but Peter did not hear. The Sisters loved Stephen, but they were frightened for him. He was such a quiet and somber boy and he never smiled. He also did not sin in the full meaning of the word. When he was in the Confessional he would mutter that he sometimes wondered if God cared for him any longer, but that was all. The colleens of the village looked at him, for he was a handsome black-haired lad, tall in his boots, and with fierce and shadowy eyes. By that time he was all alone, for Peter had died when the boy was thirteen.

“I remember me that it was past midnight when Stephen knocked on my door and told me his father was dying and had asked for the priest. That request was almost the only thing Peter had ever asked of his son. Peter made his last confession; I administered Extreme Unction. Then Peter asked for his son, and there were tears on his face. But Stephen was not in the cottage. It was a wild night of rain and wind. I returned to Peter, and remained with him for the little time he lived. When I had closed his eyes I had felt the wetness of his tears, and I looked for Stephen again. Then I went to the neighbors and asked them to stay with the dead man, for it was almost time for Mass. Stephen did not return for three days, and no one knew where he ran, and his father went to his grave with none of his blood to stand beside him.

“It was not that Stephen was a sullen boy then, or resentful or rebellious, for had he been so he’d not have inspired the good ould Sisters with such anxious love for him. One of them told me that Stephen was lonely and desperate, but very conscientious. He worked the bit of land his father left, and he worked at anything else he could find to do. God knows I had little money of my own, but I found him odd jobs in my garden. He would talk seldom with anyone. He had a habit of walking in the woods all alone, and once I saw him so when the wind was high and it was sounding like a thousand harps in the trees. I stood at my distance and watched him and never have I seen a face so suddenly glorious and joyful and listening. He was listening to the great and crashing music of the wind, and its wailing among the boughs and its rustling and shouting in the leaves. He was then but fifteen, and he had the look about him of a wild black colt.

“And once, in the spring, I saw him lying face-down beside a brook, his ear turned to the brown and hurrying water, and he was listening again, and smiling to himself and humming a faint song as to a thin trembling of music. I saw him often like this, in the woods and forest, beside the water, in the fields. What music he heard I did not know. I, myself, was shy and I knew shyness when I saw it and I was not at ease with Stephen, nor was he at ease with me. I did not even know the condition of his soul, for when he was seventeen he no longer came to Confession and only on Sundays to Mass. He was not in the choir now since his voice had changed. He sat in his silence at the end of the worn pew, and he left in silence, and alone. There were those who said he had gone queer in his head, but I did not think so. I prayed for the lad, and I tried to speak to him. He would listen respectfully, and make no answer. Except once.” The old priest smiled gently. “He said to me, ‘Father, it is not the grand voice you have at Mass, but there is one note like an angel’s trumpet.’ And then he hurried away. I had the most foolish thoughts after that about Stephen. I questioned the Sisters, but they told me that Stephen no longer had a voice and that they had known that since it had changed. But, one very ould nun told me, he would listen with painful attention to the choir, and wince if a note was bad.”