Grandmother and the Priests

by Taylor Caldwell

  Yes. Who? Who had given this gift? Who had found this place unknown even to the Sassenagh and the mapmakers and the builders of roads? Who, outside Darcy, had known that Stephen Doyle, the lost and the sightless and the most humble, had wanted a harp? Who, in an access of the most stupendous generosity, had delivered this treasure in the night and had left no name, this treasure which could have bought all of Darcy and a handful of neighboring villages? Even the Queen, herself, would have looked on it with reverence and awe, this mighty glory of a harp, and the Holy Father, himself, would have delighted in its music. A treasure beyond the knowing of most men. The priest looked at the angelic face surmounting the frame and it seemed to smile at him. Then it was that the priest blessed himself and did not quite know why he did so.

  The sun shifted through the window and struck the harp and it glittered and shone and sparkled in all its incredible magnificence, its priceless beauty. Then the old sexton rang the one bell in the church and the priest started. Mass! There were footsteps outside, still heavy with sleep, moving towards the church, and sleepy voices. “Oh, God forgive me!” said the priest, in haste. “Stephen, come with me to the church. We will speak of this later.”

  They walked the little way to the church together, and Stephen moved in a dream, murmuring again, over and over, “Who? Who? Who? Is it dreaming I am, Father?”

  “If so, then I am too,” said the priest, and skipped fast into his house, the villagers staring at his back. They questioned Stephen. What was wrong with the ould Father, with his white face and the queer look in his eyes? But Stephen could not speak. He could only smile, as radiant as the morning.

  Father O’Connor had always known joy when he said the Mass, and his heart had always shaken in him when he consecrated the Bread, for he was forever awed and was forever wondering why God had chosen him, a starveling young man born in Darcy, to elevate the sacred Host, and to offer It to the Most High in sacrifice. But on this morning his joy and his wonder and his awe almost blinded him with tears and his hands trembled and his heart was one fire of rapture. He kissed the altar and said, “Sanctus. Sanctus. Sanctus,” and all his soul was in his words and all his worship.

  He must have communicated what he felt to his little flock, the few men and women in the pews, for their hearts rose humbly with his and not a thought wandered, and those who came to the Communion rail moved like youths and maidens through flowery fields. It was remarked, later, that the ould Father had had a light on his face like an angel’s. A man guided Stephen Doyle to the rail, and Stephen received, then bent his head upon the rail and knelt there, not moving for a time, until all had received. Even when gently touched he did not stir. A stronger and more urgent touch finally aroused him, and he stood up, his expression far and dazed and shining.

  Within a few minutes all Darcy knew of the harp, and all the men, before going to their work, and all the women, before making the breakfast, gathered at Stephen’s house, and one by one, like those entering a small shrine, they went within to see the harp and stare at it with open-mouthed disbelief, and in silence. But when they were on the street again, they looked at each other dumbly, these poor men and women of Darcy who knew no beauty in their lives except their love for each other and their love for God, and who had never seen a cultivated rose or a fine stained window in a cathedral or a jewel or a length of silk or velvet or a golden chain, or any of the daily beauties which surround more fortunate people. They had now been in the presence of beauty and they were overwhelmed.

  Then it was that some women who had heard old Granny Guilfoyle’s talk of hearing angels in the night remembered her words, and they were repeated eagerly and mysteriously and joyfully. Every soul was asked if he had heard the sound of wheels or strangers’ voices in the night, and each shook his head, freshly overcome. No one had been in Darcy that night, nor the night before, nor any night that anyone could remember, except those who had been born there and lived there. Who would come to Darcy? Who knew of Darcy? Only the Bishop knew, in Dublin, and it was not likely that he often thought of it except when it needed a pastor, or a new Sister. And the Bishop would not know of Stephen Doyle. Who, then, had brought this harp? “The angels,” said some old women very simply, remembering what old Granny had said. “She heard them fetching it.” They blessed themselves. “And they took her back with them, God rest her soul.”

  The younger men and women scoffed, but remembered that Granny had been no storyteller and had roundly declared on more than one occasion that she had no belief whatsoever in the ‘little people’ and thought those who believed in them to be ‘queer in the head’. Granny’s life had been as outright as bread and butter; she had not even been particularly pious and took all sorts of advantages because of her great age. She was devoted to no saint, not even St. Patrick, and would remind shocked others that the saint had not even been an Irishman but had come from some heathen country or other. She would cackle highly at tales of demonic possession, and would jest in a most irreverent fashion even with the Father, and would often ask the Sisters what in God’s Name had made them ‘give up the world’. She often depressed the poor and humble ladies with her questions and her jokes, but more often she had made them laugh and blush like girls. So, if Granny said she had heard angels in the night, then it stood to reason that she had heard angels in the night, and anyone who doubted the tale of a fine old lady like Granny, who had never lied in her life, was practically committing a mortal sin.

  Eventually even the most skeptical, such as the brewer, was convinced.

  Father O’Connor, in his little cottage, was remembering Granny’s words also. Once an old priest had said to him, “If, under certain circumstances, the reasonable does not appear, and nothing can be explained in a rational manner, then the incredible remains and must be accepted.” He went back to Stephen’s house, but even when he was some distance from it he heard the music, striking on the heart like angelic voices, powerful and exalted, and sweeter than any of the voices of earth.

  “Who?” said Stephen to the priest again.

  “I do not know,” said Father O’Connor.

  Stephen smiled. “God,” he said.

  Father O’Connor wrote to his Bishop in Dublin and the Bishop promptly inserted a notice in the newspapers there asking if anyone had ‘mislaid a harp’. He thought it a silly notice, and he wondered if Dan O’Connor had lost his mind or was having hallucinations. Nevertheless, he had to make sure. So he caused a notice to be published ‘concerning a lost harp’ in the Belfast papers also, and then in Limerick. He waited four weeks and there was no answer. Then he sent two priests who were notable for their common sense and lack of superstition and who teemed with erudition to Darcy. One was an Englishman, and one could always count on a Sassenagh to believe practically nothing. The English priest had spent several years in Rome and was about to be elevated to the Monsignori, and his family was a wealthy one and he had been educated at Eton. Moreover, he was a convert. There would always remain some slight skepticism in a convert, the Bishop thought, then remembered that his blessed dear old mother had been one, herself, and he withdrew the thought. But he was glad that Father Lambert was to visit Darcy.

  “Where is Darcy?” the two priests asked. The Bishop got out his map and could not find it. “But I know it is there!” he said, baffled. “The nearest big village is some thirty miles from it, and you can ask the way. Darcy.” The autumn winds and rains had come, and the Bishop remembered lost Irish hamlets and the roads that ran with mud and water and were hardly passable by the strongest beast, and he looked at the immaculate Father Lambert and felt a human and deplorable pleasure. “You will be able to get the hire of horses in the big village,” he said, “but you’ll be doing most of the way on foot, I am fearing.” The English priest looked a little taken aback, but the Irish priest, who knew all about the hidden villages of Ireland and had come from one himself, chuckled under his breath. “Big high boots,” he said, “and a callused bottom. That’s what you need in t
hose poor, Godforsaken places, and it’s a donkey you will be riding, Father, and thankful for it.”

  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 D
oyle, 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.