Grandmother and the Priests (5 page)

Their alarm increasing, they called their priest and despairingly laid the matter before him. He had a quiet talk with Dolores. The young men returned to their ruined castle. But very soon Henry was writing daily to Dolores, and Michael once a month. “And what are you doing, Father, to help us?” cried the anguished parents. “Patience,” said the priest. As Dolores had spoken to him in confidence he could reveal nothing at all. He only smiled. The parents, giving up the priest as a bad job, rushed to the rescue of their bemused daughter. If she married either of these poverty-stricken lads at all, she must marry Michael, Lord Cunningham. They laid down the law. Dolores listened, her eyes downcast. Then she agreed with her parents. It must be Michael or no one. She was a dutiful daughter. They did not see the mischief in her eyes.

(“Ah, and she crushed the pour heart in her,” said Grandmother in a sentimental tone, she who was as sentimental as a crocodile.)

The Monsignor appeared not to hear this. He said meditatively, “There are those who know nothing about the Irish and who therefore maintain that the Irish are a jolly and effervescent race, and display all their emotions copiously at any provocation. They forget that there is much of the stern Spaniard in the Irish, and his moroseness and his dignity, which prevents him from being vulgar and spilling out his feelings and the secrets of his soul. These he will express only in song and poetry.”

The two brothers, Michael and Henry, loved each other deeply but by nature could not express this love except in the companionship of the hunt or the worry over the bills and taxes. “Even Our Lord,” Michael would say, “found the tax-gatherer, the publican, the man in most need of the mercy of God, for is he not evil by nature and doomed to hell, lest he repent?” (This was too deep for Henry, though he hated the publican also; he could only shake his head and think simply of the mace, a fine iron ball with spikes sprouting from it. The publican, to Henry, meant the Englishman.) The brothers had been closer than most brothers from their childhood, for their lives had been isolated and surrounded by the awesome beauty of nature. They were more attuned to the songs of birds than to the voices of men, more to the slow wood-heart of an oak than to the cities. Their castle was literally their castle, their defense against a world growing more hurried, frenetic and larger each day, more incoherently noisy and meaningless. Orphaned when Michael was only eighteen, and possessing no other relatives, they clung to each other silently but strongly. They had gone to the same school together; they went to Confession and Mass together. They worked, ate and moved together, the quiet-colored brother and the younger shining brother. It was not expected by their villagers that they appear in the local pub. But it was expected that they have their own friends among the county gentry. However, they were rarely seen and more rarely heard. Sometimes the hamlet would hear Henry calling to his sheep, and the bark of his dog, and sometimes they heard the crack of Michael’s gun in the forest beyond the castle. And, they saw the two brothers at Mass, sitting close together as if for protection.

“But they were rigorous in the performance of their spiritual duties,” said Monsignor. “There was not a Saturday that they were not at Confession. I don’t recall them missing one Sunday Mass. Very often they came through the week, and at many times they were the only communicants there, receiving Holy Communion side by side at the rail. Moreover, in spite of their poverty, they were as generous as possible, tithing themselves severely. The Sisters never appealed to them and came away empty-handed, if it were only a leg of lamb or a loaf of bread, all they could spare on many occasions. And, in that giving, I am certain they went hungry, themselves. It is very necessary for you, my friends, to know how good they were, and how they loved each other and the Church. Henry may have been stupid, but he was noble, as was his brother.” Monsignor sighed.

Who knows what Henry, the simple and loving, thought when his brother, Michael, became betrothed to the young and beautiful Dolores? One could be sure, said Monsignor, that he did not cry out or rail against his brother, or curse his fate or run away. He apparently accepted the situation. He was his brother’s attendant when the marriage took place in the church where Dolores had been baptized, and her ancestors before her. It was noticed that Henry was very white and suddenly very thin, and that though he smiled there was a look of agony in his eyes. He never returned to the castle. When the young folk came back from a very brief honeymoon in London, Henry had already taken up residence in a shepherd’s hut. It was understood, among the three of them, that this was best for all, “though I doubt,” said Monsignor, “that there was a word exchanged.” Michael and Dolores believed that Henry was delicately leaving the young couple alone, moved by natural reticence.

“A man of intelligence rationalizes his misery after a time,” said Monsignor. “He accepts what he has to accept. He expects nothing very marvelous from living in this world. But the simpler man is like a child. He trusts life, implicitly. It cannot be cruel to him; it cannot take from him all that he has. It is kind, it is loving. Suffering is only a dream. He will awake, eventually, from a nightmare and find himself in his mother’s arms. Such thoughts are excellent, if they are spiritualized. But they can kill a simple man if he relates them to the objective world.”

Henry, to the Monsignor’s surprise, appeared one day at the rectory. He sat on a chair and wrung his hands and looked at the priest with the simple and baffled anguish of a lamb that is being tortured. When questioned gently he could only move his lips soundlessly. What was it that troubled him? Henry shook his head, dumbly. All the light that had always appeared to move about him like an aura was quenched. He might have been a peasant, sitting there in the rectory parlor with the ashen light of the dying year on his face. He was looking for help, in bewilderment.

“I was much younger then,” said Monsignor, sadly. “I saw before me only a very simple young man who had been hurt in some fashion. I did not see a man who was dying, six months after his brother’s wedding. How was it possible to ascribe tremendously deep feeling to a young man whose chief pleasures in life were playing with his dog, hunting with his brother, and wrestling with some young ram in the frisky days of the spring? There he sat in his coarse, homespun britches, with his woolen stockings and thick boots which smelled of sheep-dung. His yellow hair fell in a shock over his forehead; his mouth was half open. The numb misery in his eyes was the misery of a hurt animal — I thought. God forgive me, but I did not know he was suffering because of his love for the Lady Dolores! I thought it was something else, and I did not know what it was!”

The Monsignor, puzzled, urgently trying to help, talked vaguely to Henry. All men had their wretchednesses; he would not pry. If Henry wanted to speak, he would be heard. But a man had to have courage — Had he anything to say? Henry shook his head. Finally he stood up gravely, shook hands with the priest, went outside and rode away on his horse. “I had failed him,” said Monsignor, sighing. “I had given him a stone when he was dying for bread. I gave him generalities, when he wanted to be told that someone knew of his pain, and that God knew more than anyone else what it was, and was ready with consolation.”

That night, dazed, tormented, utterly without understanding, without comfort, Henry hanged himself in his hut, attaching the rope to a nail in the rafters.

The Monsignor, after his first incredulous shock, was faced with a problem. Henry was a suicide. If he had killed himself with the full force of his will, in full assent, arrived at coldly and with knowledge, then he could not be given Catholic burial. But Michael, weeping, discussed the situation with the priest. Henry had never been very intelligent; he had never grown mentally beyond the age of twelve, if that. In fact, he had not completed the final forms in school, but had been sent home at the age of thirteen, a hopeless case as his teachers had said. A man had not murdered himself. A boy, without understanding, had left the world, unaware of his great sin. Henry had deeply loved God. He had wanted to return to his Father, Who would give him what men could not.

“And I did not know it was because of my wife, Dolores,” said Michael, huskily. “He came to the castle last night, walking in casually. He smiled at me. Then he bent over me and kissed my cheek, took Dolores’ hand and kissed it also. He left, without a word of greeting or farewell. I’d not know now if one of the shepherds had not told me of Henry groaning in his sleep and calling desperately for my wife, and weeping even as he slept. Ah, if the scoundrel had only told me so earlier and had not waited until my brother had done himself to death! My brother was crazed; he did not know what he was doing.”

So Henry, a man in body but a child in soul, was buried in consecrated ground, near his parents, and all his ancestors, under the mighty oaken trees. Thinking of his bewildered agony, Monsignor could not sorrow over the young man. He could only marvel at the pain of the simple, for which they have no words, and could only pray that Henry now had peace. He said to Michael, as sensibly as possible, “Henry is in God’s hands. The future, and life, is still in yours, my lord. Your young wife will have a child in five months. Be as calm as possible with her, for this has shocked her, too.

“I should have known,” said Monsignor, with some bitterness. “I am an Englishman, and I did not know the long, dark sorrows of the Irish.”

A week after the funeral the young wife visited the priest, arriving in the one shabby carriage her husband could afford. She sat and cried and could not speak for a long time. Then she stammered out that she had never loved Henry at all, that from the first moment Michael had been her love. The marriage had not been forced upon her, as the Father knew. It was only her sense of mischief which had kept her meek when her parents had suggested it. “And do you think, Father,” she cried to the priest, “that if my heart had been with Henry I’d have married Michael? Can a woman do such violence to her heart?” She shook her head over and over, her black curls flying about her pale wet cheeks.

The girl sat in her cloak and bonnet and wept bitterly. “It is Michael, now, who is worrying the heart from me. He will not speak; he walks the floor at night. He sighs. He groans. He goes to the churchyard each day. I cannot reach him.”

“It did not occur to me,” said Monsignor, swishing the brandy in his glass before the fire at Grandmother’s house, “to suggest to the child that she assure her husband that she loved him, alone. I thought it was self-evident to Michael. I did not know that the girl was asking me to do something that I believed she had already done. All I could say to her was that time healed all wounds, the most foolish aphorism of them all. She must give Michael time. She must be patient. Above all things, she must think of her child. I spoke to her as if to an English lady, who is always in control of herself. I forgot I was speaking to an Irish girl, shy, uncertain and frightened. The Irish soul is more remote and alone than the English, living more in itself, a prey to moroseness, preferring silence to speech.”

The girl had listened quietly, and then she had gone away. “She was not concerned with herself,” said Monsignor, “though how was I to know that, being English? She was concerned only about her husband. Henry had killed himself not only because of his own pain but because he believed that Dolores was suffering even more, and that she loved him. By removing his presence, he had thought, he was removing Dolores from misery. Greater love — ”

The terrible part of the whole situation was that Michael was as deceived as his brother.

“People,” said Monsignor, “talk to each other constantly about the most unimportant things. The world usually sounds like a babbling jungle with the voices of men. But seldom do they speak to each other of what is the most important. If they did so there would he much less sorrow in life and less sin and cruelty and misunderstanding.”

Michael had noticed that Dolores had flirted outrageously with Henry, in her innocent and light-hearted way; but then, she had flirted with him, too, and other young men. If Henry had seemed bemused during the time of the festivities at Dolores’ home, Michael had been, himself, too bemused to notice it. The brothers had returned to their castle and neither of them had mentioned Dolores to the other, out of their shyness and their pressing debts, which troubled them all their waking hours. Henry looked to his brother as a boy to his father, with admiration and respect for his superior intelligence and ingenuity; he relied implicitly on Michael; to him, Michael could do no wrong, and Henry never questioned him. So when Michael quietly said he must make a journey Henry had not even asked him his destination. Michael, of course, had gone to Dolores’ parents and asked for her in marriage, which was the proper thing to do in those days. One did not approach a girl directly. He was accepted, though there was some sad discussion about finances. Michael came home to announce, as briefly as possible, that Dolores would soon be his wife. He was so full of joy that he did not notice any grief in Henry. As for Henry, he doubtless believed that it was only just that his wonderful brother should marry his own love, even if he was convinced, in his simplicity, that Dolores loved him. Had she not written him gay letters in answer to his own boyish ones?

When Dolores became pregnant she also became pale and listless. Michael did not feel it necessary to inform his brother that he was expecting an heir. After all, there was a crisis about the sheep. Too many lambs had died in the hard winter; many of the sheep were sick with a baffling illness. The tax-rates had been raised by the Sassenagh. The harvest would be small that year. These were the important things to the brothers. Countrymen did not discuss their wives, even to their blood kin, and especially not in those reticent days. Henry saw Dolores seldom; when he saw her the last day, she was in tears, and very white. She had had the smallest of quarrels with Michael that early morning, and when she saw Henry she had cried out in temper, “Oh, and it’s wishing I am that I had not married him!” It did not occur to the womanless Henry, who had never loved before and knew nothing about women, that it was the very young Dolores’ physical condition which made her hysterical; she was also lonely for her mother, and was frightened, and everything was exaggerated to her. He came to the one conclusion possible for him: that she loved him and had been forced into an unwelcome marriage. If he no longer existed he would not be an impediment to a future happiness between Michael and Dolores. And so he hanged himself that night out of love for the only two people in the world he loved.

“It was simple to understand,” said Monsignor. “The fault was with me. I was a man of the cities, of Oxford, of books and sophistication and many complex things. I had not yet learned that people like these live uncomplicated and forthright lives, and that their emotions are direct and turbulent. I was still trying to make Englishmen of these Irish, who are much more honest in their hearts. I would still try to talk with the old peasants in their two-wheeled carts as I had talked with their brothers, knowing and cynical, in the English countryside. No wonder they would look puzzled, or sour, as if I were deliberately mocking them.”

After his brother’s death Michael, himself, believed that Henry and Dolores had loved each other, that Dolores’ parents had forced the marriage upon her because he, Michael, was the older brother with the title, and that he had destroyed two young and loving lives. Had he spoken to Dolores then, or she to him, what happened would never have happened, in terror and anguish. She knew something was fearfully wrong with her husband and she had gone to Monsignor Harrington-Smith, dumbly asking for help, a help he could not give her because he did not understand the situation. She had wanted the priest to go to Michael and tell him, in words she, herself, could not use, that her husband was breaking her heart with his grief, and frightening her, and that she loved him dearly even if she did not know, in her extreme youth, how to comfort him.

So it was that one midnight the youthful priest was awakened by a wild pounding on his door. He hurried downstairs in his nightshirt, for by now he knew that such summons were not trivial and that lives were threatened. He found one of Michael’s hairy shepherds, a young lad, on his doorstep, panting. “It’s himself, his lordship, who would be hanging himself, too!” cried the shepherd, crumpling his cap in his hands. “Her ladyship — it’s herself that wants ye, Faether. Come at once!”

There was a jaunty-cart outside, with a half-tamed horse. The priest hastily pulled on his clothing with trembling hands, and he prayed while he did so. Buttons flew in his haste. The night was cold and overcast; a high pale moon flitted among fleeing clouds, and ground fog concealed the earth in shifting mists. The priest pulled a gray shawl over his shoulders and stumbled out to the jaunty-cart, which smelled of hay and dung and rotten apples, and which possessed two large and uncertain wheels. He sat on the side seat and had to cling for dear life as the shepherd whipped up the cart and it lurched and dipped and soared over the broken road. He was grateful, for the first time, for the shawl an old village woman had knitted for him. The piercing cold of the dank dark night chilled him except for his shoulders and neck and chest, which the shawl protected. The horse snorted and shied; the cart slipped, almost upset. The black trees hung over the priest’s head. Then a wheel fell off, the horse broke away, and the priest was thrown to the ground.