Stephen, the somber and reserved, burst into the first tears he had shed since his childhood. “Always, he would tell me I had killed ‘his Mary’. He never said ‘your mother’ to me, so it was believing, I was, that not only my father hated me but my dead mother near Our Blessed Lord’s throne. I had divided love from itself. I had brought disaster, by being born, to those who loved each other dearly. That is the burden I have always borne, Father.”
Then he said, “I had not gone far. I had hidden in a barn in the country. For three days and three nights, without food. I had thought me that if I went away my Dada would die in peace, without the hatefulness of the sight of me before him.”
“Do you forgive him now, Stephen?” asked the priest, much moved.
“I never held it against him,” said the young man. “I held it against only myself.”
So Stephen, assured that his father had wanted him at the last, took another step forward in grace and faith, and the people of the village, by the time spring had returned, told each other that Stephen was ‘another lad’. Even Veronica’s parents stopped scowling at Stephen, particularly since the priest had informed them that Stephen had promised him that he would never ask Veronica to be his wife. He refrained, discreetly, from telling them the other condition Stephen had mentioned, that he would marry Veronica only when she asked him to do so.
The high summer came, with its yellow cloak of grain and its green leaves and its blossoms in the small meadows and its murmurs of mystery in the woods. Once Father O’Connor thought that as Stephen no longer spoke of a harp he had resigned himself to the probability of never having one. But after a fierce thunderstorm he told the priest, “I heard the music of creation last night, Father, and the singing of high strings, and the chattering of water on the trees, and then, at dawn, the sweet hymns of the birds. I know, without knowing how I know, that I could make a harp sing so, for God’s delight.”
He also said, “I know how the angels charm the ear of God, and my hands — they are idle.” He held the strong brownness before him, though he could not see them, and he sighed from his heart. “I hear the angelic music at night, Father, when all is still.”
It was over a year now since he had returned to Darcy. He was strong and well, and his tall wide frame was fleshed, and he had learned how to bundle hay and make hayricks as well as a man with eyes, for his hands had become his eyes at last. He was never tired of working. His dark eyes were bright with health. He laughed often, if softly, and sometimes he even joked. There was nowhere that he was not welcome, even in the house of the Killeens, who were impatiently pressing Veronica to marry the blacksmith’s brawny son. Stephen was now twenty-three, no longer a youth, no longer even young. He was not even a shadow of the boy who had gone off to the wars for the Sassenaghs’ shilling, and he was certainly not the crushed and hopeless man who had returned. The slow deadness of his voice had gone forever.
If it had not been for Stephen’s yearning for a harp Father O’Connor would have been content that Stephen had finally been accepted by his fellow-man for himself, that he was understood by them, and that he had some measure of love. The priest prayed, thanking God that Stephen had been accepted into the brotherhood of kindly men, and he told himself that surely it was enough. After all, all men had secret yearnings which were never destined to be fulfilled, because of the wisdom of God who knew best. Those most precious yearnings would be granted in heaven, where the noblest dreams are, and uncorrupted by the world.
Old Granny Guilfoyle, who had had a broken hip for several years, decided to die on a late summer morning, two hours after midnight. She had been dying regularly four times a year, but as she always chose a lovely night to do so, Father O’Connor was not vexed with her. Moreover, she was far over one hundred years in age and earned her own living by weaving mats for cold floors. When she felt that she was dying again she would rap her one window sharply with her crutch and a devoted neighbor would come running. The neighbor’s wife came for Father O’Connor this morning, begged his pardon and said that ould Granny must surely be dying now. She was lying with her eyes wide open and rolled back.
“Ah, and it’s sure I am now that the angels have come for me, Father,” she said to the priest when he entered the one stony room of her hut. Her voice was very strong and young — as usual when she was dying — and very happy. Everyone called her Granny, she who had never had a man of her own and no child. She was the pride of the village because of the sturdiness, common sense and virtue of her character, though, as the villagers said, “she had the sharp tongue on her, like knives.” No one could ever recall that she had ever uttered a malicious word, though she was a grand gossip and knew everyone ‘inside and out’. So as she was dying again there was a knot of people concernedly waiting near her open door, even at this dark warm hour of the morning.
As Granny had received Extreme Unction several years ago, she could not receive it again. She had sent for Father O’Connor to hear her confession and prepare her, through prayer, for the seat in heaven which had waited for her during these endless years.
“What makes you think, Granny, that you are going to die now?” asked Father O’Connor, yawning. Someone had lit the candles beside the bedside and had lifted the ancient woman on her rough pillows.
“It was the angels I heard,” said Granny. She was small and crippled and her white hair was very thin, and her cheeks had long ago fallen inwards. But her blue eyes were the eyes of a healthy girl — as always.
“And did you now?” said the priest, opening his book. He knew that Granny slept little, and he suspected that she found the nights lonely when all about her the village slept and the moon rode high.
Granny’s eyes snapped at the priest, who was young enough to be her great-grandson, and they were fiery blue in the candlelight. “It’s mocking me you are, Father,” she said with some sharpness. She leaned sideways to look at the page in the book, and though she had never worn spectacles she could see like a hawk. “It’s the wrong page you have, boyo,” she remarked reprovingly. She was quite right, and the priest hastily found the proper page. Granny settled down on her pillows with contentment. “Aye, I heard the angels, and it was no wind I heard. I heard their wings and their words.”
As Granny had never remarked on any angelic visitations before, but had been convinced that her time in Purgatory would be very long because of her really nonexistent sins, Father O’Connor was a little curious. He was also an Irishman, and to the Irish the supernatural is always very close. “What did the angels say, Granny?” he asked.
She regarded him thoughtfully. “You’ll be mocking me again, Father, but I will tell you the truth. Oh, it was the lovely voice the passing angel had! He said, ‘This is the first time, I am thinking, when one was ever given before.’ ”
“Well?” said Father O’Connor, impatiently. “And what does that mean, Granny? ‘Before’ what?”
“Now, Father, is it for the likes of me to know what that meant? You have not been brought up proper,” she added, somewhat severely. “Questioning, you are, an ould woman on her deathbed. The young are impudent these days. But when one angel said that, the other said, ‘Great is the mercy of Almighty God, and it’s hoping, I am, that it will not be misunderstood or treated profanely.’ Oh, it was the lovely voices they had as they flew over me house!”
She looked at the kneeling friends near her bed. “You’ll be leaving for a bit,” she said to them, “while I am confessing to this boyo.”
The neighbors retired obediently. Father O’Connor sat and thought. Then he shook himself. It was a strange conversation for angels to be having as they flew over a very old lady’s house, and it meant nothing at all. Father O’Connor also doubted that angels would speak in an Irish fashion so that Granny, overhearing, would understand them. He was of the opinion that pure spirits spoke a language not to be heard by human ears, if they spoke in tongues at all. So Father O’Connor dismissed the angelic story and settled down to listen to Granny
’s long list of sins, practically all of them imaginary. She made a perfect Act of Contrition. Then the priest came to the most solemn part of all — the dispatching of a human soul about to take wing from its body at any instant. He hesitated. Granny was most decidedly not about to take wing or anything else, and he glanced up at her. He started.
For Granny was surely dying now! There was no doubt of it. The color had gone from her skin, from her eyes, from her lips. The unmistakable shadow of death was on her face, like the gray shadow of some unseen and hovering wing. But she was smiling serenely at the priest and her hands were crossed over her breast. The priest hastily called three of Granny’s closest friends and began the prayer for the dying. The mournful litany murmured through the room.
“Lord, have mercy on her.
Christ, have mercy on her.
Holy Mary,
All you holy Angels and Archangels,
Holy Abel,
All you Choirs of the Just,
Holy Abraham,
St. John the Baptist — ”
“Go forth from this world, O Christian soul, in the Name of God the Father Almighty, who created you; in the Name of Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, who suffered for you; in the Name of the Holy Spirit, who has been poured forth upon you — ”
No one knew precisely the moment when Granny gave her last breath, for there was no death sound, no death agony. She lay on her pillows smiling, and there was no change on her antique face even when it was evident that she had gone. The neighbors began to weep and there were tears in the priest’s eyes. He had known Granny all his life, just as he had known the oaks on their knoll, the brownness of the brooks in spring, the look of great rocks in the sunlight, the broken and colored marble of April skies. His parents had known her before him, and so had his grandparents. Granny had taken much of Darcy with her to heaven, and silently the priest sent one message to her in her flight: “Don’t forget us, Granny, Pray for us.” He was always sure, after that, that she had momentarily paused to hear him, and that she had nodded reassuringly. So he was consoled, and happy.
He left Granny to the loving care of her friends. The knot of men and women outside were sobbing quietly. Granny had never been the picture of a gentle saint; she had not been particularly benevolent, for she had despised shirkers and ill-doers and the whining. She had not been tender with children, for she had darkly considered children as potential citizens of hell unless their parents were dutifully strict about religious and family and village duties. But children had loved her; her doorstep had always been teeming with them, in spite of her way of cracking her thimble on obstreperous heads. And the village had loved her, not for the gentleness she had not possessed or any helpfulness she had ever extended, but purely because she had been a woman of upright character, absolute honesty and sense and pride. Never once had she been charitable about deliberate sin, and never once had she expressed any excuse for it. For these virtues alone she had been loved and respected.
At one time, when Stephen Doyle had uncertainly tapped his way past her house, she had called him sternly to her, and had said, “My boyo, God has taken away your sight so that you can think of Him, and never see an evil thing again.” That was during the first week of Stephen’s return. He had said nothing, but as the priest now left Granny’s house he was sure that Stephen had thought of Granny’s words many times.
The first pearly light of dawn was in the east, and Father O’Connor wearily hoped for an hour or two of sleep before the Mass. The summer had been neither too wet nor too dry, and so the mud road was not dusty and it was not soft, but evenly packed and comfortable to the foot. The little cottages that lined it were still dark, and the vast sky above them stretched widely to the hills bulking against the brilliant starlight. The village was far from the sea, but a wind brought a vague scent of salt. Then, all at once, the priest stopped to sniff, for surely that had been the fragrance of lilies and roses on the light breeze. It was an intense fragrance, and he remembered it from a visit to a holy cathedral in Rome — St. Maria Major. There was not a garden in this little village which grew roses and lilies, for the area was too damp for roses and the season for lilies had gone. The priest stood in absolute silence, opening his nostrils to the beautiful and powerful scent. As quickly as it had come to him, as quickly it disappeared.
Bemused, he walked on a few paces. The gray light of the dawn had become a vague blueness in the village street. It was later than Father O’Connor had thought, then. If he could sleep an hour he would be lucky. He glanced up; he was standing before Stephen Doyle’s tiny cottage. He looked, and then he looked again, and his mouth went dry.
For, standing close to the high step, and slightly leaning against it, was a huge covered shape, somewhat triangular, and Father O’Connor knew what it was at once, hidden as it was. No Irishman could ever mistake that shape; it was engraved on his heart. Trembling, the priest approached it on the balls of his feet, blinking his eyes to see clearer in that dim blue light of the dawn’s beginning, and half expecting that the object would disappear with the next blink. But it did not. It stood there, waiting and majestic, covered with what appeared to be purple velvet with a fringe of gold on the bottom. There was a slight glimmering as of silk in the protective cloth, or gilt threads. And it was the largest object of its kind that Father O’Connor had ever seen. Not even in Rome had he seen one so tall and so broad. Once, twice, three times, the priest put out his hand to touch the cloth, to verify what his eyes were seeing, and each time he withdrew the hand as if he had been about to commit a blasphemous act.
The light was becoming stronger; the velvet cloth shone softly; the golden fringe glittered. The priest drew in a very sharp breath, and was conscious of the cool morning wind on his wet forehead. Then he put out his hand again and touched the cloth. It was, it appeared, the most delicate of velvets, like a butterfly’s wing. And, in the fine folds, there was a thick film of dust, as if it had come a long distance, a long distance indeed.
All the priest’s restraint left him, and he found himself hammering wildly on Stephen’s door, and calling. It seemed forever before he heard Stephen’s slow step and tapping within the cottage, and forever before the door opened. Then the priest fell silent, and he could only point at the great object waiting so patiently for Stephen Doyle.
“What is it? Who is it?” asked Stephen, as he stood in his nightshirt on the step, his large eyes wandering and blindly seeking. He put out his hand to search, and it touched the top of the object, and the hand paused rigidly. The first fire of the sun suddenly struck the top of the highest trees. Stephen’s hand began to move over the covered shape. He murmured, “A harp. A harp!”
“A harp,” said the priest. “A harp for you, Stephen.”
He put his hand on Stephen’s arm, but the young man stood very still, staring before him emptily, his face white and quiet. “Who?” asked Stephen.
“That I do not know,” said Father O’Connor. “But let us get it in the house, or all the street will be about us in a moment, I am fearing.”
Stephen was a powerful young man and the priest was no weakling, himself, but it took all their combined strength to lift the harp over the threshold inch by inch. Once or twice the cloth must have brushed against the hidden strings, for as the harp was moved into Stephen’s one little room, where he lived and slept and worked, a faint high singing came to their ears, a far sound as of voices behind the clouds. Finally it was fully within the room, near the one small window, and the priest, panting, wiped his forehead. Stephen fell to his knees; he ran his shaking hands over the shape, and he murmured over and over just under his breath, as if praying, “Who, who, who?”
“Let us see it,” said the priest, forgetting Stephen’s blindness. He found the pearl buttons of the cloth, and reverently unfastened them and lifted the cloth from the harp. Then he was struck dumb again with astonishment and rapture, and more than a little fear.
This was no ordinary harp; it must have cost so
meone thousands of pounds. Stephen sat back on his heels. “Oh, God, who?” he cried. “Tell me, Father, what it is like, this blessed harp!”
“It is as tall as a man, almost as tall as you, Stephen,” said the priest, in a strange voice. “The frame is of gold, and an angel’s head, as large as yours, is mounted on its top. And its strings are bright and shining like silver, and its base is white and gold marble! Stephen!”
It was not possible, of course, but the impossible had come to Stephen in the night. The young man laughed softly, and tears ran down his face. He put his fingers delicately on the strings, he who had never touched a harp string in his life, and instantly the room was filled with a sound of musical waters rippling under the sun. Then, as Stephen’s fingers, those loving, caressing and knowing fingers, moved again more quickly, the room resounded with angelic voices, pure, rejoicing, calling, praying. Never had the priest heard such exultant harmony, such transcendent joy, such echoes which appeared to be composed of light made sound.
Stephen clasped his hands in a gesture of prayer and ecstasy, and turned his blind face to the priest. “Who could have done this, Father, for the likes of me, a man who is nobody, hidden in Darcy beyond the world?”