Read Online Grandmother and the Priests by Taylor Caldwell - Free Book Online

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