Grandmother and the Priests

by Taylor Caldwell

  The priest smiled even wider. “She did not see you prepare her medicine; she did not know you had done so. She thought she had driven you off before you had the opportunity. You awoke her. She had no way of knowing that while she was still asleep you had measured out the drops. Rose had not told her that she had prepared the mixture; the lady was half asleep when Rose left. Rose told you, or she did not tell you, that the mixture was ready. She probably doesn’t know for sure, herself, but she has possibly put it out of her mind.

  “Mrs. Gould, I have heard that you were questioned. Did you tell the authorities — you were not asked to testify in court? — that you had put those drops into Mrs. Gould’s waiting glass of water?”

  “No. I was terribly upset, as you can imagine, Father. I didn’t even think of it! It left my mind completely until today, when you questioned us. They never asked me if I had prepared any medicine, myself.” The young woman spoke with quiet vehemence and even passion.

  “And you never testified in court?”

  “No. The Inspector from Scotland Yard talked to me in the house. Then, I heard later I had been under some suspicion, but if so I was never informed directly by the Inspector. He knew my aunt very well; he had known my uncle. In fact, I had seen him often when I was a child, when I was living in my aunt and uncle’s house after my parents died.”

  The priest could understand. The Inspector had known the girl from childhood; he had known her character well. He could not believe that she had deliberately destroyed another woman’s life.

  Father Shayne said, “Before I pass my opinion, which I believe explains everything, I should like to ask you, Mr. Gould, if you were in love with your present wife before your wife died?”

  The dark and elegant face flushed. “Yes. I was. I admit it.”

  “Geoffrey!” exclaimed Florence, and now her face flared into beautiful light. “You never told me! I thought you had learned to love me after Agnes died!”

  He put his hand over hers. She was trembling. “My dear, I was a Catholic husband and father, and I loved my God and tried to obey His law. You were a young woman in my house, loving my children, and having affection for my wife. I could not tell you. I fought it. I struggled with it, and prayed over it. I knew it was wrong, but I could not help myself. I knew that the only thing I could do was never to tell you. I wanted not to love you; I used all my will to prevent you from knowing. I willed not to love you, all through those years, and I never let you know.”

  “You never let me know,” said Florence, delighted and marveling. “Well, my dear, I loved you, too. But I didn’t tell you, either. I knew what you were, honorable and good. If I had told you, before Agnes had died, you would have asked me never to come again. Would you not have?”

  “I should have asked you never to come again, for both our sakes.”

  The squire turned to the priest. “I told Father Tom that I had loved Florence for years, for at least from the time I had stopped caring about Agnes. I told him I had never told Florence. He did not believe me. He did not believe anything. He was certain that either Florence or I had killed my wife, for adulterous reasons and because we wished to be married. Before God, Father, that is not true.”

  The priest laughed a little. “You are wrong. You and your lady, Mr. Gould, did kill your wife. So did Rose Hennessey, probably. Technically, therefore, the three of you are guilty of murder.”

  Florence made a small dim sound and put her gloved hands over her mouth. Her lovely gray eyes stared wretchedly at the priest. The squire started.

  “And, technically, my friends, the late Mrs. Gould committed suicide. After you had left, sir, she prepared her own drops, and drank all four doses.

  “But, the murder and the suicide were done unknown to any of you. You did not will the murder; you did not know you were committing murder; your consciences are clean of any desire to murder. The late Mrs. Gould committed suicide, without her will and without her knowledge, just as you had killed her without your will and your knowledge.

  “You, Mr. Gould, could not help loving your present wife. But you fought it, prayed against it, willed against it. Therefore, you are not guilty of adultery even in your heart. God takes note of intention.

  “Now, I should like to know what you intend to do about all this.”

  Man and wife consulted eloquently with each other with their eyes. Then the squire said, “I think I should return to Belfast and lay the whole matter before the authorities.”

  “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 secon
d 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.”

  Chapter Eleven

  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 — ”

  Father Daniel O’Connor and the Minstrel Boy

  “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 po
unds 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.”