Grandmother and the Priests (54 page)

Father Lambert had plenty of pounds, for though he had taken the vow of poverty his loving parents kept him well supplied with money in the form of gifts. A new cheque had just arrived. He saw himself comfortably riding, from the last railway station, in a carriage, and invited the Irish priest, who exchanged a slightly uncharitable and amused glance with the Bishop. “I’m an ould man,” said the Bishop, piously, “and it’s been long since I’ve seen a lonely Irish village, and it’s happy I am that you’ll be there, Father Lambert, and will be returning with your story of this — harp.”

Father Lambert thought the whole journey foolish. A remote Irish lad had found a harp on his doorstep, and all the village was agog with stories of angels in the night. He knew these Irish. They looked for miracles as eagerly as Englishmen looked for sovereigns. Ah, well, poor creatures. What else did they have in their worn and battered lives in that wild country? This fellow priest, Dan O’Connor, another of the dream-struck, another of those who sought miracles in common events. No doubt some shopkeeper in a nearby village had heard of this Doyle’s desire for a harp, and in some secret penance for his sins had sent such an instrument to him. Doyle was blind, was he? Sad. The people of Ireland were famous for their sudden generosities, which had a touch of childishness in them. They were a people who loved mysteries and stories. In a way, thought Father Lambert, it would be a shame to destroy this particular mystery and story with the light of cold fact. Then he remembered that he was a rational Englishman, and prudence and rationality were high virtues in the opinion of the Church. So he set out with his Irish brother in Christ, who appeared to have some secret amusement of his own, and this made Father Lambert coldly irritable. He began to look on the adventure as a sort of joke on himself.

“I know all these things,” said Father O’Connor, at Grandmother’s fireside. “For Father Lambert, who became a Bishop himself later, told me of them. He was shaken, he was, when he and Father Conway arrived in Darcy, and no wonder. They were both brown with mud, and not even the donkeys could carry them the last ten miles, and they had dragged the poor shivering beasts by the halter the rest of the way. Father Conway was enjoying himself, I am afraid, but Father Lambert was not.”

They arrived on All Souls’ Day. Father O’Connor, Father Lambert was surprised to find, was an intelligent man, and not an ignorant one, and he had no explanations, no enthusiasms, no annoying mysticisms. He told his visitors the facts. They were big men and had to crouch in the tiny cottage, and Father Lambert, in great dismalness, knew that he would have to spend his nights sleeping on blankets on the cold floor. Father Conway did not find the situation to be outrageous. He listened gravely to Father O’Connor’s story, while Father Lambert frowned impatiently.

Stephen Doyle, who was steeped in the ballads of his people, was rarely absent from his precious harp. He enchanted the village. He had but to strike the strings to bring everyone running. “How much, Father,” said Father Lambert, “would you say the harp originally cost?”

Father O’Connor considered. Then he said, “If it was bought at all, then I should judge at least five thousand pounds, or even much more.”

Father Lambert was incredulous. “Surely you are jesting!” he expostulated, having had a long view of Darcy. “Who would have given such a treasure to a poor peasant?”

Father O’Connor bridled. “The Irish are not peasants, Father,” he said, with severity, and Father Conway, who was enjoying all this, chuckled that disagreeable chuckle of his again. “Stephen Doyle is no peasant. He is a man of mind and heart and love, and read all my books before he was blind, and the colleen he is to marry after the New Year is a pert girl who reads well and who reads to him at night.”

Father Lambert was vaguely disgusted. He decided to investigate immediately; anything to get out of this dank little hut with its smell of peat and mutton, even if it were raining worse than in London. He and Father Conway, accompanied by Father O’Connor, who was not liking the English priest at all, went to Stephen’s house. And they heard the glorious singing of the harp even over the wind and the rain. Father Lambert stopped in amazement, in the torrents, and said, “Is that it?” “It is that,” said Father O’Connor, a little grimly.

Stephen, who had been warned of this somewhat ominous investigation, let the priests silently into his house. The day was dark, the air brown with wind and rain and wild with dead leaves, and a little peat fire burned on the hearth. And dominating everything, filling the small room with grandeur and majesty, overpowering the big priests themselves, stood the mighty harp in its gold and silver and marble, and topped with its angel face. It glowed and shimmered and shone and sparkled as never a harp has done before, nor since, and seemed, not an instrument of metal, but a living entity in itself.

Now Father Lambert had had the pleasure, before he had been a priest, of visiting the noblest opera houses in England and on the Continent. He had seen harps in Windsor Castle and in Buckingham Palace. He had enjoyed the sight and music of them in the homes of grand friends. But never had he seen a harp like this, not even at the Royal Opera House during a ballet in St. Petersburg.

Stunned into silence and awe, the two visiting priests moved about the harp while Stephen stood restlessly on the hearth, restrained only by Father O’Connor’s gentle hand. The priests appeared afraid to touch the instrument. Then Father Lambert finally brought himself to it and struck the strings. Instantly the air was permeated with the holiest and most glorious of sounds, rippling and singing, and there was a murmur of bells in the background. Father Lambert fell back, white and amazed. And Father Conway involuntarily crossed himself.

“Play for us, Stephen,” said Father O’Connor, and Stephen, with surety in his step, went to the harp and sat down on the stool near it and began to play. The harp sang like a bevy of angels rejoicing in a simple Irish ballad of Tara’s Halls. Father Conway’s eyes filled with tears. Father Lambert stood like a statue, and there was no color in his cheeks at all. Stephen’s hands wandered from the ballads to some grave song that lived only in his soul, and they all knew, instinctively, that it was a salutation to the Queen of Heaven, herself.

“And what is your explanation, Father?” asked Father O’Connor when the three priests were back in the little rectory.

“There is none,” said Father Conway. “You have told us of all the villages about Darcy, and we have seen them ourselves. No one in Dublin, however generous, or even in London, could have sent this here, to Stephen Doyle, for it is a treasure beyond price. And who would give this to such a young man, whom no one has known except those in Darcy, and perhaps a poor comrade or two in the wars? It is a gift — from a Queen, or an Emperor.”

“There is a rational explanation, surely,” said Father Lambert, but there was no certainty in his voice. “We will investigate further.”

The quiet investigation went on for a year, and in the meantime Stephen married his Veronica, and people traveled from the outer villages on foot or in carts or on donkeys to look at the famous harp and to hear Stephen bring life and splendor and joy from its strings. Then, in the summer of the next year, the Bishop himself came, covered with dust from the hot roads.

The Bishop, of course, was stunned. But he questioned Stephen sharply. Had he known any grand gentlemen in the Royal Army? Had he been servant to some great person, who had been touched by his desire for a harp? Stephen had known no great gentlemen; he had told no one but Father O’Connor of his desire. The priest, himself, came in for some sharp questioning. All the answers were simple and sincere, and entirely true. The Bishop departed, shaking his head. He spent more time than usual over his prayers that night.

Father Lambert, that cold and distant Englishman, had not forgotten Stephen and his harp and he told his gentry friends about the whole matter, cautiously refraining, however, from mentioning that there was something mysterious about the appearance of the harp. Stephen Doyle, he said, had been given that glorious harp, and he was a musical genius and the world should know of him. It was sinful to keep such music in the folds of the hills in a part of Ireland unknown to the outside world. The world had a right to it.

When approached on the subject, with definite arrangements in the hands of the now Monsignor Lambert, the Bishop hesitated, prayed on the matter, then heartily agreed. He wrote to Father O’Connor.

By this time Stephen and his Veronica had a fine pair of boy twins and were utterly happy. They were astounded at the Bishop’s letter. Stephen should go out into the wide world with his harp and play for grand persons in grand places? Why? They wanted no money; they had all they needed in the world.

“But the world does not have all it is needing,” said the priest. “It is a sin to hide what is here, for who knows how many multitudes will be touched in the heart by Stephen and his harp? There is another matter: Stephen, why do you think God sent this harp to you? To keep its voice, and your music, from His weary children, to keep their gladness from the souls of other men?

“In short,” said old Father O’Connor, remembering those days so long ago, “Stephen obeyed what he knew he must obey, and he and his harp and Veronica went out into the world, from country to country, and everywhere they went, the generals and the princes and the nobility and the great ladies stood and wept when Stephen’s concerts were over. He had developed an enormous memory; he had only to hear a sonata or a song once to repeat it on his harp. He had no eyes to see the notes of music; he had only his soul to remember. It is not important to mention that gold poured into the hands of Stephen, for he kept very little and sent the rest to the Church for the teaching of priests and the missions. And he built me a fine little church in Darcy, and tore down all the mean little cottages and built tight ones for those who had prayed for him, that he might have a harp. For he knew it was their prayers which had brought the harp to him and had given his soul a voice.

“Had the harp come to him sooner it would have been too soon. For he had had to purge his spirit of its old bitterness and despair, had had to know the heart of his brother first, and had had to love that brother. But then, the harp could not have been sent earlier, for it should not have been received as it was, and Stephen was not ready.”

“It is a fine legend,” said Grandmother.

Old Father O’Connor sighed and smiled. “It is no legend. It is the truth, and it happened over sixty years ago, and I was there.”

He thought for a while, and all waited for him to speak again. “Stephen Doyle died thirty years ago, with his wife and five wonderful children about him, and their children. The old wound had never truly healed, in his head. He developed a tumor in his brain and he died in agony, but also in peace. For there was nothing but faith and joy in his soul.”

“And the harp?” asked Grandmother. “Where is it now?”

Father O’Connor hesitated. “It is very strange, but it is true. When Stephen was buried in the largest graveyard in Dublin the mourners, many of them in the most splendid carriages, returned to the house he had there. And the harp was gone. It had disappeared, Father Hughes, as completely as your famous C’est Egal disappeared from the greenhouse of your friend, and from the house of your aunt. No one ever saw it again.”

“But, there must be some explanation!” said Monsignor Harrington-Smith, who had had his dread encounter.

“Is there?” said Father O’Connor. “If there is, then none of us will ever know. For myself, I am thinking of the old prayer, ‘The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away’, in His own mysterious time.”

A priest who had been quiet looked at Monsignor Harrington-Smith and said, gently, “And God permits things to happen which are very strange, as you have told us, yourself, Monsignor. And things of humor, for who can deny the Almighty a sense of humor, also, which makes life sweet? I am thinking of Mustard. No, not an edible, a spice. A name, and one most dear to me. I must tell you of him.”

“I knew of the ould Bishop, his dear lordship, by secondhand,” said Father Morley, “that is, his youth, for he was well on to ninety when I was ordained. And never was there a lovelier man, less than five feet in his boots with the heel on them to make him taller, and towering like a giant in his soul. You’d have thought him a saint from the cradle except for the gleam in his bright black eye and the big roaring laugh he had. He was as round as a pot, at ninety. It was himself that told me that when he had been but a spalpeen, a fighting broth of a lad, he was called Mustard, and Mustard he was called by his ould sister who lived to be over a hundred and lively as a cricket to the day God took her to be one of His own. Ye had to be gnarly and full of muscles,” said Father Morley, “to live to be ould in those days, what with the Famine, the Irish winters and the Sassenaghs. There’s not much hanging of the men and women for the wearing of the green these days, but when his lordship was a lad it was common. But never will the man live who will make the Irish knuckle under him, and the Bishop was no exception. And in his youth he was not holy at all, but a rowdy sinner.

“It was said that in pitched fights — before he was a priest, of course — the Bishop gave a good accounting of himself with the Sassenaghs, and many was the skull he broke with pleasure and with a shout of patriotism. And they armed with rifles, too, and he only with his stout blackthorn. His sister told me, and herself had the black gleam in the eye, too, that Mustard was everywhere at once, heartening the lads to battle and whirling his stick at the same time, and shouting to heaven in a voice like the trumpet. He was willing to die for ould Erin at the drop of the hat, and while fighting for the occasion he did his very best, and many was the Sassenagh who rued crossing him. ‘Ah, there was niver a man like Mustard,’ said his sister, Eileen, to me, and it was sure she was that he’d have driven the Sassenagh out of Ireland single-handed if he had not suddenly decided to be a priest. And it was regretting it a little she was, as she told me.

“The Bishop did not tell me of his young days, but only of his later ones. His house in Dublin, when he was a Bishop, too, was little and cold and almost as bare as your hand, but he was a man of fire and iron and piety and laughter, with a wise way of looking into the heart of you. I did not know him when he was eighty-four, but had heard of him. With an eye to his youth, he had kindness for sinners, and if they were patriotic ones, too, and a lad of seven and a man in his great age felt comfort in his presence, and understanding. Penances he gave, and repentance he demanded, as God’s only due, but never was there a harsh word from him or a turning away. He had been a mighty drinker in his day, before the priesthood, and any layman or desperate priest who could not manage the drink had but to come to him for help and he would receive it, and from that day on he was master of his weakness. A man did not want to disappoint the good Bishop, who knew the hard road and had walked it, and who had been a sinner like themselves and who sinned no more. If a man hardly higher than a tall boyo’s shoulder could conquer, then a hulking big man could do it, too, they were thinking.

“He was a Bishop when he was eighty-four, and he had been a Bishop since he was fifty, and hardly in all that time had he more than a few pounds to rub together, and his larder was always spare. He always asked for prayers for his intentions, and the intentions of the Holy Father, and he asked for prayers for the whole miserable world of men, and even for the Sassenagh, though he admitted that no true Irishman should be asked to love the Sassenagh. That was asking too much of human nature.

“Those were the days when the Irish farmer was little more than a Russian serf in the eyes of the English landlords, and each year food was taken from the farms to be sent to England, though the Irish were starving and the Famine was not yet over, and the potatoes were still rotting in the fields. If those who took the food were sometimes not seen again, and if the soldiers or the lawyers or the agents came alooking, no one had ever seen the missing men, and the lads and the women swore to it. Will ye call that a mortal sin? But there were babies in the cradles whimpering for food, or a young mother with her milk drying for lack of bread, or a father dropping dead of hunger in the very fields he was tilling, or ould people chewing on their knuckles in the chimney corners.

“The Irish do not forgive freely, and it is hard to forgive when ye must strike a spade through the frozen ground of winter in the graveyard to bury your wife or your child or your mother, who starved to death, and the food going to England. The Irish will forgive England in time, but never will they forget the Famine, and they will never forget the colleens and the lads who had fled to America so they’d not eat the little left and could make some money to send home.

“It was during one of the worst times, one of the blackest winters, when the starving people rioted in Dublin and killed and were killed, many of them, and may all their souls be remembered in our prayers. For it is the English poet, Kipling, who wrote: ‘Lest we forget, lest we forget!’ And over two hundred young lads and colleens were arrested and driven into the prisons waiting for trial, and the Bishop knew that scores would be hung for the desperate killing, though it was in defense of their very lives.

“The judges were Sassenaghs, and the judge who was to try those wretched young men and women had lost his favorite nephew, who was an English officer, in the riots. He was a hot man by nature, that judge, but now he was in a frenzy, for he was a childless widower and he had loved his nephew. It was sad, and it was terrible, and that I am knowing. And the Bishop, in his little wintryhouse, in the coldest of winters, knew it, too. The Bishop was eighty-four, but strong as a lion, and if he had one bare meal a day he counted that day as lucky. His sister, Eileen, kept his house, and she was over ninety, and many was the time he said he had no appetite so that she could have the potato, or the herring, or the wing of the fowl which they had been eating for over a week, and the fowl was not a big one in the beginning.

“The Bishop offered his hunger, and he was always hungry, in behalf of the poor souls in Purgatory. He would take nothing if it meant that some mother or child or ould folk was deprived, and so it was that he did not have a full meal often. He could have home that, but his heart broke when he learned of the two hundred lads and girls in the prison, and the judge who would sentence them to death in revenge. The desperate young folk, who had fought and even killed to save their lives, and it had come to nothing but the scaffold and the public hangings as a lesson to them that had too many lessons.”

The Bishop was eighty-four, and he was gaunt then from lack of food, and moved like a little shadow about his house, and fainted quietly at the high altar for a few moments in the mornings, but so quietly that he knew when it was coming and rested his head on the altar until his wits returned again. He wanted no one to grieve over him, they filled with grief, themselves, and weeping for their children in the prisons until the church was filled with their mourning. He could only bless them, and pray that they would turn their thoughts to a just God, and he knew that they would find no justice on earth, an earth which was becoming harsher and more appalling every day. He told Father Morley, and some other young priests, that perhaps it was his giddiness at Mass one day, and his faintness, that gave him a vision of days to come, and the vision was so frightful that he cowered and went to his house, speechless. “Ah,” he said to the young men, “it will not come in my day, and that I am knowing, nor in your day, nor in the day of the priests who will follow you, but it will come, and unless men repent in those days, and do penance for their sins, then they shall surely die and their world with them. Do not ask me about that vision, for I cannot tell of it, for I have no words, and I am one who never lacked words in all my life.”

Young Father James Morley was the youngest of the young priests he had ordained when he was ninety, and he was an orphan, and matters were a little better in Ireland than they had been and so his lordship often invited Father Morley to dinner. It did his heart good to watch ‘the boyo’ tuck away the mutton stew and the suet pudding, the young priest who was small in frame, himself, and whose mother had borne him in the height of the misery. In consequence, James Morley was delicate of bone, like a young fowl, and the Bishop thought that he could feed the lad up and make him stronger. And one night, after supper, the Bishop told him a strange story to lift his spirits. James was struggling in the rectory of an old priest who not only had rheumatism and cataracts but was almost doting and had to be helped through every Mass. The church was in the poorest section of poor Dublin, so there was little to eat in the rectory. The people in the parish were rough and led dubious lives and were not given to much piety, and all this weighed on James Morley’s innocent young soul.

“Man needs little in this world except just enough food, and a tight shelter, and some warm clothing, and above all, love,” said the Bishop to his youthful and almost nightly visitor. “He needs to work so that he may be proud of himself and hold up his head, but he should not be expected to work all the hours that the good Lord sends so that he is too weary to live. He should have time to be a man and remember his God and his religious duties, for man is not only a creature. He is a soul, and the saving of his soul is the most important work of his life. But in the days when I was much younger, in my eighties, men worked from sun to sun, like beasts, and still there was little for them to eat, and there was only grief in their lives. They will tell of these things to their children and their children’s children, and it will be with bitterness, and that will be a great danger to the world. But still many of these men will tell their children and their children’s children that above all a man must be free, for God has made him so, and without freedom even more than enough food and clothing and shelter will be worse than the starving. A fat serf without the freedom God gave him is not a true man at all.”

Father Morley knew that the Bishop was thinking of the vision he had had one day at Mass, and he hoped that now the Bishop would tell him of it. But the Bishop began to speak of the Famine, and the riots, and the wandering men and women who staggered through the countryside with their children, looking for an unblighted potato or a piece of bread. And he told of the two hundred young men and women waiting for death in the Dublin prisons and he told of the hanging judge and the scaffolds prepared.

It was almost more than the Bishop could bear. He prayed constantly. He wept his painful old tears, he struggled with rebellion, he was contrite, and he would be comforted. But at the very instant of the coming of comfort he would see the stern and desperate young faces in the prisons, and hear the weeping and the prayers. He had tried to enter those prisons, but he had been turned away. He spoke of last Confessions and Extreme Unction and the right of men to the final consolations of their religion, and the gaolers laughed in his face and drove him off. He thought of mortal sins weighing down many of those young souls, and he hoped that literal martyrdom would wash away those sins in blood. For the young people had been fighting for their lives and food, but more than all else they had been fighting for their right to blessed freedom and the right to worship their God in peace and without fear, and to have their country, which God had given them for their own.

The winter was extremely severe, as winters have a habit of being when men are in despair or at war. So there were just a few pieces of peat on the Bishop’s hearth, and they gave but little warmth to his old and shivering bones. He had no money to buy quantities of fuel, and he was intolerably hungry, for he had not eaten for twenty-four hours. The hour was ten at night and the snow and wind were blowing, and Eileen, his sister, had fallen into her bed in exhaustion and tears and weakness.

The Bishop, this night, was in more agony than usual, and he was sobbing uncontrollably and praying in catches of breath. The light of his one lamp, in his small parlor, was very low, and so was the oil. He put his hands over his face and rocked in his sorrow. Then, all at once, he felt that he was not alone, and he dropped his withered hands and looked up with a bounding of his heart.

A young and very handsome man was sitting near him across the faint red light of the hearth. He was the most beautiful young man the Bishop had ever seen. He was also beautifully clad, in check pantaloons of rakish cut, and his waistcoat was of lovely brocaded silk in a red and green embroidery, and his black broadcloth coat was of the finest, his cravat of black silk pinned with a stone that glowed like fire. His figure was patrician and elegant and tall, his shoulders excellent, his white hands gleaming with gems. But his face held the startled Bishop’s full attention. It was dark, as dark as a Spaniard’s or even darker, and it had a classic splendor, with a full brow, a chiseled nose, and a red-lipped mouth and sharp cheekbones and dimpled chin. His eyes were extraordinary, like jewels themselves, and of the deepest and most shining blue, like the sky just at sunset. His hair was curling and dark and luxuriant.

The young man was smiling charmingly, and there was an expression of sympathy on his grand face, and though he was young his eyes held the shadows of centuries of grief and rage and hate, for all their innocent color and shape, and he appeared very wise. He had the air of a mighty prince, mightier than any emperor or king, and the look of power and invulnerable pride and certitude. So the Bishop, staring, knew exactly who he was, and he knew that this was no lesser demon, but Lucifer, himself, full of grandeur and terrible strength.