Grandmother and the Priests Page 6

  The breath was knocked out of him. Cursing, the young shepherd helped him to his feet and found a stone for him to sit on. “Don’t bother about me!” the priest said, angrily. “Go back at once to the Lady Dolores and tell her I am on my way, and if you love your master talk to him. Talk, talk, to him!”

  “He’s locked in his room,” whimpered the shepherd.

  “He won’t kill himself so long as you talk to him,” said the priest. “Don’t you understand, you fool, that his soul is in mortal danger? Go on, at once!”

  He almost struck the blathering lad in his desperate anxiety. “Go! Tell the Lady Dolores to talk to her husband also! You’ve got faster legs than I. Run — run as if the devil were after you!”

  The priest was afraid that his leg was broken, for it was numb and throbbing. Despairingly, under moonlight as cold as ice, and as shifting as shadows, he rubbed the leg and prayed. He sat alone on the stone; he pulled up his trouser leg; there was an ugly gash, bleeding and deep, on his flesh. He wrapped his handkerchief about it, gasping with pain and despair. Then he cautiously flexed his leg. It was not broken. Still, when he pushed himself to his feet he almost fainted with the pain. Apparently be had torn ligaments. His ankle and knee pounded with fire and agony. The village was far to his left, and if he attempted to reach it for help and a wagon, he would lose time. The castle was nearer, though not to be seen as yet in this forest of great twisted trees and underbrush. “Even if I must crawl, I must get there,” he said, grimly, and prayed harder and more fervently than he had ever prayed in his life.

  Moving slowly and feebly, sweating an icy sweat in his pain, almost swooning, feeling the blood dripping down his leg, he moved from tree to tree, gasping, groaning. Thorns grasped at him; when the moon disappeared he collided with trees, knocking his head. He heard owls hooting, and the raucous cries of disturbed rooks, and rustlings in the undergrowth. Thankfully he recalled that there were no snakes in Ireland. Once or twice, without volition, he raised a weak shout for help, and only the owls answered him or some frightened bird. Once or twice he forgot where he was going, where he was, for the pain was worsening and was by now unbearable. He had to drag the leg after him, holding on to trees, to the tops of sturdy bushes. He blinked icy water from his eyes; his head was ringing like a great bell. The shoe on his injured foot felt like a cast of iron, for his flesh was swelling rapidly.

  Perhaps it was his pain and his despair that made the moonlight take on a weird cast, shimmering and dancing. He was only thankful that he could see a little better. His forehead was bruised from his collisions with trees. His whole tortured body cried for rest. His leg dragged behind him like a swollen log, smoldering with flame.

  He could not see the ground. He was knee-deep in swirling mist. He caught glimpses of floating white shapes in the forest, almost human, formed of the fog. And then he reached a tiny open glade in the forest, filled with the curiously moving moonlight.

  A young man was sitting on a log in the glade, smoking (at midnight!) a pipe as casually as if he were home before his fire. A handsome young man, handsomely clad in English hunting costume: pink coat, smart britches, polished boots, and gloves. He had a long head, covered with smooth yellow hair, and a thoughtful, well-bred face. A whip lay across his knees, and he played with it with one hand. His hunting cap was beside him on the log.

  The priest blinked, thinking that with each blink the young man would disappear. But he became clearer, instead. I am not dreaming! thought the priest. But what is such a man doing here, in the secret wilds of Ireland, at midnight, smoking a pipe pleasantly, as if it were midday and he waiting for hunting companions? Oh, I am dreaming! My leg has made me delirious.

  The young man looked up, smiling pleasantly. “Good evening, or rather, it should be good morning, should it not, Father Harrington-Smith?”

  The priest’s pale mouth fell open in astonishment. Then he felt a sudden rise of hope. “Is your horse here?” he asked, forgetting his amazement. “I — I have hurt myself. I must go to the castle yonder, immediately.”

  “Yes, I know,” said the young man, meditatively. “That is why I am here.”

  “Your horse!”

  “I suppose,” said the young man, as if thinking about it, “that I could produce a horse. To take you back to your rectory. You are badly hurt, are you not?” he added in a solicitous tone.

  “What does that matter?” cried the priest, only half hearing him in his extremity. “I must go to the castle at once.”

  The young man sighed and shook his head. “I am sorry. I am also sorry, though you would not credit it, that I had to command the wheel to fall from that appalling cart. What a vehicle for an English gentleman! Please rest yourself. I am afraid you have torn an artery in your leg. I am sorry about that, too.”

  I am certainly mad, dreaming or delirious, thought the priest. Staring, he watched the young man rise, and saw his white and glinting smile in the light of a moon that appeared huge and caught in the very branches of the tangled trees. “Please rest yourself,” repeated the young man, in a warm tone of sympathy, and in the best of English accents. “Let us talk about the matter.”

  The priest clung to the tree near him, gasped, closed his eyes for a moment. He saw the redness of agony and exhaustion behind his lids. He opened his eyes to see that the young man was regarding him with gravity. The cold dark forest, the awful moon, swam about the priest as he struggled to keep his consciousness. “In God’s name,” he groaned, “help me. I have to reach the castle yonder. A young man — ”

  The stranger’s face still smiled, but it was a cold smile. “Michael Cunningham? Yes, I know. He is about to kill himself; hanging. A very disagreeable and unpleasant way to dispatch oneself. But after all, a man’s life is his own, is it not?”

  “No,” said the priest, faintly. “It belongs to God.” He struggled to keep himself upright. “Don’t you understand, whoever you are? If Michael kills himself, with full knowledge and the assent of his will and soul, he will be forever barred from the presence of God?”

  “Do you believe that?” asked the young man, indulgently. “Oh, yes, I had forgotten that you are a priest. My dear fellow! You are a gentleman, of family and culture. You are, in your way, a philosopher, and possess some logic. You are not really superstitious, are you, with all that nonsense about God’s eternal anger?”

  A sickness such as he had never known before struck the priest, for he thought, I am surely going to collapse. He put his hand on his stomach; he could feel the leaping of his heart. Then, very slowly, his hand dropped.

  “How did you know about Michael Cunningham?” he whispered.

  The stranger shrugged. “A shepherd came to you, did he not? Perhaps I talked with him, too.”

  “If you know him, you can let him die, in mortal sin?”

  The stranger laughed a little. “My dear fellow, is that any concern of mine? I have some respect for a man’s dignity; whatever he chooses to do is entirely his own affair. Yes, I know you are a priest, and priests have peculiar ideas. But again, you are a gentleman, and of a family of gentlemen. It surprises me that you can mouth such idiocies concerning God’s anger and ‘mortal sin’. Has God taken you into His confidence that you know His thoughts? Do you know the extent of His mercy? Have you considered the life of man, full of misery and pain, and whether it was worth the living? Let Michael Cunningham have the peace he is searching for; is it your affair to keep him from it?”

  The priest gulped, and made a feeble gesture with his hand. “Let me pass,” he said, in a broken voice. He took a step. It was as if he had come face to face with a sheet of invisible glass that barred his passage. Horrified, he lifted his hand to push it aside, and it was as if he touched stone. Yet it was transparent, and beyond it he saw the stranger, who was looking at him most seriously, and who spoke again.

  “You are a young man, for all you are a priest. You have been very vexed, have you not, at the absurd superstitions of the old women and the people o
f this hamlet? You have admonished them for their belief in ghosts and fairies and the little people, and the return of the dead, and vampires, and their conviction that virtue resides in some objects and evil in others. Excellent. You are quite right. I have often listened to your thoughts, the doubts in the midst of your prayers. You know the teaching of the Church, that Satan is absolute spirit, as are his angels. So he cannot annoy or trouble man with little hoaxes and pranks, such as your foolish people believe. In fact,” the stranger said, contemplatively, “you once considered if Evil could not, in fact, be merely man’s perverse nature. Your superiors were alarmed when you discussed that with them, and they told you that the greatest triumph of Satan was when he convinced mankind he did not exist. You accepted their word, by an act of your will. But you did not truly believe in the actual person of Satan, did you?”

  A cold and deathly certainty came to the priest. His lips moved soundlessly. The moon glared nearer, a sinister white globe.

  “Let me pass,” said the priest finally, putting his hand to his throat.

  The stranger frowned. “I am not preventing you, in this dreadful state of yours, from going anywhere you wish, my dear sir. You alone are preventing yourself.” He felt in his pocket and drew out a gold watch, which glittered in the moonlight. “Ah! Michael is adjusting the rope about his neck. There is some blabbering at the locked door. His little silly wife, and that shepherd. They are pleading with him. He will not listen. He cries that he killed his brother, that he is guilty of murder, and so must die, himself. But those blabberers!”

  “Father of lies, a liar from the beginning,” said the priest, and thrust his shoulder against the invisible wall.

  “My dear sir! Now you are speaking like one of your peasants! I thought better of you, Edward Albert Harrington-Smith! Your intellect has declined in these past months.” The stranger threw back his head and laughed indulgently. Even in the unspeakable terror of those moments the priest saw how handsome he was, how at ease, how young. Then he remembered what he had been taught: that Satan is pure spirit, and can assume any shape he desires at any time, and any aspect.

  “You are Satan,” said the priest, and shuddered.

  The young man frowned at him haughtily. “My dear Edward! This is absurd of you. I thought better of your intellect. Satan is only an abstract.”

  Michael was about to kill himself, and live forever in a realm that would be without God for eternity. Only a week ago, thought the priest, in his overpowering despair, I considered that as God’s mercy is infinite, and though there is surely hell, it is possible that no human soul dwells in it! Only a week ago I thought, again, that Evil is only in man, himself — ”

  “God have mercy!” he cried in a loud and shattered voice. “God have mercy on me! Christ have mercy! Lord have mercy! Christ have mercy — !” He sank to his knees, crossed himself, covered his face with his hands. He moaned as if dying, “Lord have mercy! Christ have mercy! Forgive me! Help me! The most worthless of Your servants, the most detestable! But let me save Michael! Deliver me from Evil — from Evil — from Evil!”

  He groveled in his grief and anguish and remorse. His hands fell on the stones and needles and dead leaves of the forest, and they disappeared in the mist. Slowly he raised his tortured head and saw the young man watching him coldly. Slowly, inch by inch, he pushed himself to his feet, bit his lip to keep from shrieking with pain. And never did he take his starting eyes from the stranger. His lips moved in a litany, in the simplest prayer he had ever uttered. He caught the trunk of a tree and pulled himself upright. He took a step. The wall had gone. Still watching the stranger in utter horror and revulsion, he staggered nearer him. Now they were abreast and looking into each other’s silent eyes. The stranger stepped back, a single step, and staggering and weaving, the priest passed him, his garments soaked with his own cold sweat.

  He went on, dragging step by step. After a little, he glanced fearfully over his shoulder. The stranger was still watching him. Then, suddenly, he was there no longer, and the moonlight was dimmer. From somewhere, near or far, there was a howl as of a wolf. “Deliver me,” whispered the priest. “Deliver me. From Evil.”

  He accepted his pain as his punishment for his urbane sophistication. He rejoiced in his suffering. “But please, dear Lord, do not visit my sin upon Michael. He — that Horror — where is he? Has he gone for Michael’s soul? Mary, most tender — ”

  There was a sudden blankness in his mind, filled with darkness and scarlet flashes. When he could see again he saw the castle on its low rise before him. His exhaustion and pain overcame him again, and he fell to his knees. He heard running footsteps on the stones, the falling of gravel and pebbles. He shivered, and shrank. Then he saw another of Michael’s shepherds before him, and the youth, exclaiming in pity and fear, was helping him to his feet.

  “Hurry. Let us hurry,” whispered the priest. “No, do not mind me. Just let me lean on your shoulder, your arm.”

  “Sure, and it’s hurt you are, Faether — ”

  “No, no. It is nothing. Just help me, a little.”

  The shepherd was strong and young; he half carried, half dragged the priest up the rise. Sometimes, panting, he had to rest, so that the priest stood on his own feet, wincing with the savage pain in his leg, and urgently begging for no delay. The castle appeared to move down towards them, gray and crumbling in the moonlight, with only a slit of dim radiance piercing, here and there, its silent bulk, its one remaining tower cutting off the brilliance of stars. The moon floated among her rags of black and rushing clouds, and occasionally disappeared behind them, leaving a wan shine on the black earth. “Hurry, hurry, in God’s name,” whispered the priest, and the sweating shepherd drew on all his strength. His clothing smelled of sheep-fat and boiled mutton and cabbage; his breath was thick with raw whiskey. At many times the priest had fastidiously closed his nostrils against this stench in the confines of the Confessional. Now he breathed it in deeply, with gratitude, for it was the human smell of a man who was helping him to reach another man on the very edge of hell.

  If I do not reach Michael in time, then I dare be a priest no longer, he said to himself, as the pebbles and rubble rattled about them and shifted under their feet. I am not worthy. I have been rejected — if Michael dies. He shut his mind from the unspeakable Evil he had seen in the forest, for at the very thought his mind leapt madly in terror. He knew, as Satan had implied, that the invisible wall had been his own intellectual doubts concerning the absolute, personal quality of Evil. With his acceptance of the frightful truth the wall had disappeared.

  He had been in the castle a few times before, but after observing that the brothers were hardly less poor than himself, and that they had been straining their resources to feed him adequately at dinner, he had delicately found a way to avoid invitations. Moreover, the castle was not much more attractive than his small and battered rectory. The always-icy hall, with its mossy flags, its tattered banners, its rattling armor, its faint lantern and dripping stone walls, its echoing roof, its smell of ancient dankness and decay, had always depressed his spirits for days afterwards. Once this hall had blazed with torchlight and the jewels of fair women, and a fire had jumped on the enormous hearth, and there had been the sound of music and the laughter of Irish kings and noblemen and knights, and songs, and the skirling of bagpipes and the wind of dancing. Once minstrels had sat here and told the sagas of ancient and mighty men, and wine had been drunk from gemmed goblets. All this was gone, through the poverty induced by taxes, through loss of fortune, through oppression. The hall was inhabited by mournful ghosts, who cried soundlessly of harps and freedom and the glory of old Ireland.

  It was more dismal and gloomy tonight than ever before. The stone stairway led up into darkness. From a high distance came the faint cries of a woman, the pleas of a youth. “I’ll tell the Lady Dolores that your Reverence is here,” said the shepherd, but the priest shook his head. He had no strength for speech any longer. He could only indicate th
e stairs with a slight movement of his hand and lean towards them. Blood dripped on the wet flags from his wounded leg. The shepherd led him, protesting, to the stairs, and on his hands and knees, like a desperate penitent, the priest climbed the stones, one by one, his mind swimming in red and black waves. The edges of the steps tortured him afresh; he hardly felt it now. He had only one destination. Ages passed as he climbed, his lips moving in unheard prayer. Then two pairs of hands were helping him up the last steps, and two strong, manly shoulders were supporting him. He looked beyond them to a closed oaken door where Dolores crouched in a pale and sobbing heap in the light of a lantern which swung from the stone wall.