Grandmother and the Priests by Taylor Caldwell Read Free Book Online

during an absence. How had his people come to know that he was slowly becoming one with them at last? It was a mystery, but it was also a fact. Even the Mother Superior’s old seamed face cracked in a smile for him. But this was much, much later, after the Cunningham tragedy.
     
    He tried, but he knew he would never be truly humble. That was his cross, and he bore it. But he found himself unbending. He stopped to speak to little boys playing marbles in muddy gutters. He inspected little babies he had baptized. He listened, with deliberate patience, to the complaints of housewives; he admonished men who liked their beer too much, but in an understanding tone. (That is why he frequently found a pitcher of beer on his table at night, and occasionally a small crock of raw Irish whiskey.) He was less stern in the Confessional, and more gentle. He sighed, rather than found cold and bitter words, when some shawled girl whimpered to him that she had “not been very good, Father,” in the wild fields of moonlit spring with their tiny daisies and buttercups. His inflicted penances were given with a measure of mercy. Sometimes, at dawn, before Mass, he would enter the decrepit little church and stand, in meditation, before the crucifix, and think strange thoughts for an Englishman. He found poverty no longer disgraceful, and the leisurely way of his people no longer ‘feckless’. There was more to life than a fine house and busyness.
     
    When he was called to a cottage by a distracted father who feared his girl-wife was dying during her delivery, and he looked upon the girl as she struggled to give birth, he would invoke Mary’s help with all his heart, and without any irreverence at all: “Salve, sancta Parens, enixa puerpera regem qui caelum terramque regit in saecula saeculorum. Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum…” For, who knew what the coming child would be? Perhaps a great and humble man, perhaps an inspiration and a joy to his people, perhaps a deliverer from war, perhaps a priest who might one clay sit in Peter’s Chair. Or, perhaps above all, a gentle girl who would give a saint to the Church. All women were one with Mary, in their hour of giving birth. She was not remote in heaven; she was here, with her suffering daughter. He had not thought that before. But this change of understanding did not come to the priest until much later, after the Cunningham affair.
     
    There was only one family in the vicinity which could be called ‘gentry’. The master was Michael, Lord Cunningham, his young wife, Dolores, and his brother, the Honorable Henry Laurance.
     
    “Fine names,” said Monsignor Harrington-Smith to his listening audience of Grandmother and her priests, “and a fine Irish family, very old. They went back to the Celtic kings of Ireland, back to legend and history and the Crusades. They were also very poor, as poor I was, myself.”
     
    Michael, Lord Cunningham lived with his wife, Dolores, in what once had been a noble castle, centuries before. Now less than a quarter of it was habitable. The rest was crumbling away, the walls littered deep in rubble, the moat dried to a trench which stank in the spring and was filled with a jungle of wild flowers in the summer. It stood upon a low hill overlooking the village. Two of its three towers were only stumps now; the one that remained had been built three centuries later than the others. Nevertheless, it had slowly detached itself from the castle; there was a chink some four feet wide between itself and the castle proper. Roofs on various rooms of the castle had fallen in chaos, so that only jagged fragments stood where once great halls had been alive with festivity. There had been a private chapel; it was now a ruin, smashed by the centuries. The beautiful gardens had decayed into a wilderness of snarled and dying trees. The castle stood against the skies in utter silence, except for the fierce cries of rooks or the sharp utterances of foxes. Gray, desolate, the