by George Moore
The priest heaved a big sigh, for he knew well there was to be no rest for him on this earth, and hardly was the boy four years of age before he could read his native Irish tongue, and when he was seven or eight he could con the Latin and Greek; and between ten and eleven he was running down to his father’s house taking out the books into the garden, reading and learning and refusing to be a shepherd or a carpenter or a blacksmith. Not one of the decent trades that Moling offered him could he be got to take up. It was only books that he had a thought for, and it was great delight to the nuns when he began to read the scriptures to them, and he only fourteen years of age. After this proof of his learning there was no holding the good sisters, and nothing the priest could say could stop their blabbing tongues. One and all of them went about telling how the boy had given out the scriptures to them in the Greek and the Latin, asking if that wasn’t sign enough that a great prophet he would be in time to come: one who would hunt the heretics out of Ireland? Prophet! said the priest, who was now at his wits’ end to quiet them. And what would there be wonderful in that? said the Mother Abbess. Only this, said the priest, if Ligach conceived miraculously it would not be a prophet that she’d bring into the world but a Messiah; and no sooner were the words out of him than he saw he had made a mistake, for, as Mother Abbess put it to him and to the nuns, by means of the Holy Ghost God begot a son that was neither greater nor lesser than himself, and full equal to the Ghost. But we’re not asked, said she, to give in that the Son, with or without the help of the Ghost, can beget himself a son? Sure, being God, the priest answered, he could do anything. That is so, said the nun, but this is the vexation: have we got to believe that our little Martin is God’s grandson? If we believe him to be a grandson aren’t we upsetting the Trinity, a thing that no person here would have hand or part in. Bothered and badgered we are, thinking out the same question, and I’d like to know if the doctrine, as I’m giving it to you, will hold good at the Court of Rome.
Well, now, said the priest, I’ll think that over, for it’s a tough point indeed, and one that won’t be untied in a month of days with the parishioners dropping in to say nothing of yourselves banging away at my door on one business or another. A knotty point which a man must give the whole of his head to. And where, would you tell me, can a man give his mind to a deep matter like the Trinity, unless it’s in the wilderness that I came out of years ago, and where I am going back to think the whole thing out? If I make any head on it I’ll come back with the news. But the nuns were very fond of Father Moling, and at that they started in to weep and wail and cry aloud, a fair keening it was; all ochôn ee ö gô deo, and woeful is the day, very distressful to the priest, who, to quiet them, reminded them of the forty days Jesus spent in the desert. We’ll pray that God will not keep you waiting, cried the nuns. And I’ll make a prayer too, he said, that will be the dead image of the one you’re making, and now my blessing be upon you all, and on our little Martin, whom I give into your charge, and if you don’t see my face again — We will, we will, they all cried, for be the word, and the Mother Abbess took a grip and a swing out of his cassock, but he hauled it off her with a rip in it maybe, and their eyes rested on him for the last time as he stood for a moment at the edge of the wood with his bundle on his shoulder, and he waving a farewell sign to them.
May God speed him, cried the Mother Abbess, on his way, and help him to untie the knot, for it’s a knot of the knots, and I’m dead sure that he is too old to stand the hardships of the wilderness, with them joints and them bones. May God send him back safe to us, said another nun. I’m thinking now, said the Mother Abbess — and the nuns cried out to know what she was thinking. What will we be doing ourselves without a priest and he gone? Without confessions, without Mass we will be lost entirely. True for you, said a nun, and the others added: we never thought of that, Mother. We’ll have to write to the Bishop, and tell him of the loss of our pastor, who has gone into the wilderness to think out a hard bit of doctrine, one so knotty, said the Mother Abbess in her letter, that he may be away for long enough. So we should be glad of a temporary priest if it would be convenient to your lordship to send us one.
CHAPTER 30.
THE MAN THAT goes into the wilderness in his youth returns to it in his old age, and I doubt if they’ll ever see him again, the Bishop remarked, as he passed the letter on to his clerk. A man of seventy-five hasn’t got it in him to spend his nights on the hill-side in draughty huts. But no more than that did he think about it, except, of course, to send them a priest, and when the priest came, Manchin was his name, the first talk was about the disappearance of Moling into the wilderness, and the great and holy man that he was. The last words his lordship spake to me, said he to the nuns, were: the wilderness is no place for a man of his age, and all the nuns cried out that they thought the same. But there was no holding Moling with them for the knot he had to untie — What knot? said Manchin. And bit by bit the story came out, the priest’s face getting more and more troubled and queer-looking, till at last the Mother Abbess cried out: I can see by your Reverence’s eye that you’ll have none of the miracle, and that you think our little Martin is somebody’s leavings. I wouldn’t be saying that, said the priest, and he had a long talk with Ligach, who gave him the story as well as she could for the water in her eyes, and she guessing that the priest didn’t swallow much of her story; and afterwards he wrote to the Bishop saying that a great heresy might arise out of this story that was going the round, and a great many souls be lost in it. The Bishop was fairly put out by the news, and wrote to his brother bishops, and seven or eight of them came, and they went at it.
The news had travelled far and wide; pilgrims were coming all the time, the whole country was talking of the miracle, and nothing else. As the Bishops didn’t want to disappoint the people there is no knowing what mightn’t have happened if, just as the Bishops were leaving, their mitres on their heads and their crosiers in their hands, three long-bearded old men hadn’t come down out of the wilderness and began talking. The story they had come to tell was that Father Moling was doing penance for the great sin he had fallen into in the years back with a nun of the name of Ligach, whom he had deceived and had a child by. Enough, enough, cried the bishops; it was God sent you, lest a great heresy should eat the Church the way a wolf eats a lamb. And the nuns and the bishops and all the country went after the Archbishop into the church, which was fuller that day than it ever was before or since.
Well this is the way it was: the Archbishop began to tell them out of the pulpit that it must have been God sent the three hermits with the news of Moling’s sin, and that they didn’t come a bit too soon either, for they, the bishops, were about to give it up as a bad job without coming to any judgment, none of them liking to say a word for or a thing against the story of such an out-of-the-way miracle as a miraculous conception, though there wasn’t a man jack of them but agreed that such a thing was less likely than one of the little miracles the Church is always willing to accept, such as the curing of palsy with a touch, the giving back of sight and hearing with a spit, the setting of one that has not been able to go about without crutches for years on his feet again; for not like any of these little miracles are the greater miracles, such as the lifting of a dead man alive out of his tomb, or a woman that has never known a man bearing a child; these great miracles were done once in the Eastern world for the saving of the world. So it isn’t likely that God would let his greater miracles happen again: for if a woman bore a child all by herself, or if a corpse lifted himself out of the tomb alive, the great truth of the Church would not be the plain pikestaff that it is to everyone that cares to open one of his two eyes. You may be sure and certain, my brethren, you may give in to it once for all, that no woman will get a child that way again, and whosoever says she has done it is just trying to disturb people in their faith. It is with sorrow that I give it out, but Father Moling was guilty of the crime; but let it be remembered always that he was punished for his sin year in year out,
day after day, minute by minute, expecting all the time, and sure and certain of it, that something would happen to drag the secret out of him, till at last he could bear the torment no longer and took himself off to the wilderness to pray for forgiveness.
The people were reminded by the Bishop that God had forgiven Moling, and that they were bound to believe this, for Moling had confessed his sin and sent three holy men with tidings of his confession to them, the only thing he could do to make up for his sin. The three holy men will tell you of Moling’s repentance as they heard it from the lips of Father Moling himself. They will stand up. Upstand the hermits, said he, but not a hermit of the hermits moved, and as nobody stirred the people began looking here and there for the men, but they were not in the chapel, and so the Bishop sent out to see if they were in the yard. But they were not in the yard either, and all the news that they could get about them was from a shepherd who had seen them sloping away with themselves into the wood; thinking, the Bishop said, their mission was finished. Which it was indeed. All that was wanted, he went on, was proof that no miraculous conception had fallen out in this parish, and they had that. I would have liked you all to hear the story again from their lips, but it isn’t the will of God that you should: for these holy men have gone back to the wilderness they came out of.
The Bishop was a great hand at a sermon and he said much more than I’m telling your honour, and would have said more than he did if a commotion had not begun in the chapel, Ligach suddenly falling faint or dead, it wasn’t certain at first; so white and still was she, that many began saying that the news that her son was a by-blow had finished her. Water was sprinkled onto her face, and she was well rubbed; they got a drop of whisky between her teeth, and as soon as she opened her eyes the Bishop began to take pity on her, and he told the people that she wasn’t a bit to blame nor a scrap in the wrong. She had been, he said, a victim, and next door to a martyr, but a victim she was, one of Satan’s many victims, for the devil never flinched from doing a big wrong if he could only get his own way, which, in this case, was the soul of a man who, until he gave in to temptation, had been a good man and a very good man; one who had left the wilderness because the health failed on him, who had sinned, but we must not judge a man by a single case, but by his whole life; Moling had sinned, not a doubt of that, but he had gone back to the wilderness to repent, he had not hummed nor hawed about it, old man though he was, and the Bishop churned on till Ligach had another faint.
This time her son carried her to the door of the Church, putting back all the people who would help him, saying to them: let none lay a finger on my mother, I am here to care for her and to stick by her. At the chapel door he kissed her and at that she opened her eyes, and they put words in his mouth, and leading her back till they were on the threshold, he stood up to the Bishop in the pulpit, asking his lordship was a story told by three hermits to be believed rather than the story that the nuns of Cuthmore had known to be true for the last fourteen years. If the hermits had the rights of it why have they disappeared like evil spirits? he asked, and the people thought well of that, and the priests were frightened. Let the Bishop call the hermits back. At that the Bishop interrupted Martin, and said that he didn’t know a thing about these hermits. Then why, asked Martin, do you believe them before the words of every sister in this convent? Women my mother lived with from her young youth, always known to them to be as pious as any nun of the nuns, often going stricter than the rule of the convent in her wish to please God, putting her life in the danger too. My mother’s life is well known, so it is, and you said yourself, my lord, that a man’s life ought not to be judged by a single deed. Why then should the whole of my mother’s life be struck out as nothing? No one accused your mother of sin: we hold her to be blameless, cried the Bishop from the pulpit. And by that you hold her to be a silly woman who believed a living man got up on the cross and let on to be God himself. My mother has never been known as an omadhaun, and if it was true would not the hermits have stood their ground here and had it out with me? If they went off with themselves it is because they were afraid of my questions! Let them be called back here if they are hermits itself, coming here and dropping their bad egg and skedaddling off with themselves. All the people gave in to the rights of that, saying: true for you, my boy, more power to the gossoon, and who hid the hermits?
The mistake Martin made was speaking of the hermits as if maybe they weren’t hermits at all; for that gave the Bishops the handle they wanted and they called on the people not to hear another word from the man who accused the clergy of calling the devil to give a hand, which was the way the clergy got the people over to their side, and seeing that he and his mother hadn’t a defender in the world, Martin said: I’ll go on the track of the hermits and I’ll bring Father Moling back with me too, and he’ll tell you that the three hermits told a lie. So off he went with himself into the wilderness, and if I were to begin to tell your honour of the adventures he met and the queer things that happened to him we’d be here until the day after to-morrow morning; for Ireland was a wild place in the days gone by, and it was through the wildest parts he had to be trotting his boots in search of the hermits and Moling, looking for them in the forests and glens, along the naked seashores and from lake island to lake island, but sorra sight or light he could get of one of them, for Ireland is too big a place for one man to go visiting the whole of it; and it was with a belly full of disappointment and a grown man that he came again to Loch Conn, the only place in the wide world he had a memory of. His heart was sick and sore, I’m telling you, as he stood in the place you stood in to-day, your honour, and he looking on a few ruined walls. Is it, says he to the goatherd that was passing by at the time, is it that these walls are all that are left of the convent of Cuthmore? There was a convent here one time, I’ve heard tell of it, the goatherd answered; but the nuns left it years ago because a nun of them thought she had been put in the straw by the Lord himself, but it turned out to be by a robber that came through the chapel while she was praying before the cross.
The woman that is buried here was my mother, said Martin to the goatherd, and I have gone Ireland up and down and back and forth for the last seven years of my life, through forests and mountains, trying to come up with the hermits that brought the news that killed her. Bad and real bad the same news must have been, said the goatherd; what kind of news was it at all, and it that deadly? It was the news that Moling, who was the priest in the convent while my mother was carrying, went to the hermits in the wilderness to repent his sin, and confessed to them that he was my father, and they came along afterwards and told the Bishops. It’s not likely at all, said the goatherd, for who ever heard in the world of a confession being told; if Moling had told that to the hermits they couldn’t have told it to the Bishops, and you can take it from me that if the nun buried under this stone was your mother indeed, then your father was a robber that done a climb in through a window on a dark night and played his trick! Not a bit of it, said Martin, and a great argument and a great row began between the pair of them, and how it would have turned out I don’t know, only that the goatherd had to make off after his goats.
As soon as he got the one hobbled that was setting the others astray, he came back to ask Martin who the this and the that was his father, if it was neither the priest nor the robber, and they must have talked a bit before they separated; but the man my grandfather had the story from, and who got it from his father before him, told my grandfather that Martin believed his soul had come down from a star and went into Ligach’s body while she was at her prayers — it’s the queer thoughts do be in the heads of them heretics. Heretics, Alec? Heretic he was, sir, surely, though I wouldn’t be saying anything about the soul coming down from a star, for can’t the power of the devil work up above as well as down below? But he told the goatherd that his mother’s name was under his own special care, and that everybody would believe in her virginity, for it was part of the new religion he was going to set up, with himself at
the head of it.
And the new religion? I asked. It is said that Martin went off to Germany, Alec answered, and that he got married there to an escaped nun, for you couldn’t set up a new religion or do any of them tricks in Ireland. Are you telling me, Alec, that he married Catherine Bora? That might be her name indeed, for the religion itself was no better than a whore. You don’t mean that Ligach’s son was Martin Luther? Faith, I wouldn’t be saying anything or too much, and we standing at the edge of her grave, still and all the German Martin might easy have been one of the sons of our Martin, but here’s the grave beside us, and you have the story as well as I can give it to you.
CHAPTER 31.
AN EXCELLENT TEA awaited me in the parlour, cakes of different kinds and many various jams, and Alec was speaking in praise of the tea he had been served with in the kitchen, when Mr. Ruttledge’s car came to fetch us. Its arrival was opportune, for another ten miles’ walk, and five of it through a gusty bog, was more than I should care to undertake in the days of my youth, and now I looked forward to leaning back among comfortable cushions, and following in imagination the young man as he strove through the uttermost of night, hearing the stars, as he ascended the hill-sides, telling him that his mother’s womb was quickened by a celestial visitant — an explanation of the mystery of his birth which he received eagerly, for he was one whose mother’s virginity was dearer to him than his own life; one who would forgo his life rather than possess it at the price of his mother’s maidenhood: a sentiment commoner than we think for, for who amongst us is there that has not looked at his father with hatred, or a grudge, in his heart?
