Grandmother and the Priests

by Taylor Caldwell

  “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.”

  Bishop Quinn and Lucifer

  “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 alway
s 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.

  The Bishop’s heart was loud in his ears, and thudding and trembling, and all his pulses throbbed in his hunger-stricken body. He knew the greatest terror of his life.

  “Don’t be afraid, my lord,” said Lucifer, and his voice was like rolling music. “I see you know me. You are a very astute man. Do I seem very formidable to you, in all truth?”

  The Bishop’s mouth and lips and throat were as dry as dust. It was some moments before he could reply. “But this is just an apparition of you,” he whispered. “You do not truly look like this.” His mind and his wits swirled; he tried to remember prayers and exorcisms, but they were like dropping water in his thoughts.

  L
ucifer cocked an indulgent eyebrow, and his face glowed. “And how do you know I do not look like this, my lord? After all, I am an archangel, and I was considered the most beautiful of all — by Him. I was also the most beloved. Or, have you forgotten?”

  Now, like all devout churchmen, the Bishop had often thought of Lucifer and sometimes his thoughts had fascinated him. Ancient church-fathers had speculated on him and his dreadful empire of the pit, this tremendous angel who had fallen from heaven and who was still an archangel.

  “But,” said the Bishop, “you are a spirit; you are purely spirit. How can I see with my eyes of flesh?” He clenched his tiny hands together, and trembled even more.