Grandmother and the Priests by Taylor Caldwell Page B

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