Read Grandmother and the Priests for Free Online

the little one join us?”
     
    “An auld head on her shoulders,” said Grandmother, somberly, shaking her own, and speaking in her curious mixture of Scots and Irish burr. “It’s nae good thing for a lass to have. It’s a touch of the divil, himself.”
     
    She gave Rose a jumping and warning look, and Rose murmured it was past her bedtime. But she was led into the drawing-room, which she had rarely been permitted to enter before. It seemed to her at least half as large as the street on which she lived in London and was crowded with little gilt chairs covered by vari-colored damasks and tapestries, with rose damask glistening on the walls, and sofas everywhere and tall crystal lamps and portraits and mirrors and tables teeming with exquisite little ornaments and buhl cabinets in each corner filled with objets d’art and Spanish fans. A big fire danced in a fireplace in which a medium-sized ox could have stood, and over the mantelpiece hung a very fine portrait of Queen Victoria, whom Grandmother did not resemble in the slightest. If the dining-room had awed Rose, the drawing-room petrified her with its size and shine and magnificence. The windows, covered with rose shirred silk, over which were looped blue damask draperies, appeared to her to extend upward to infinity.
     
    Father McGlynn led Rose to a little polished steel stool, a sort of hob, which stood beside the fire, and he put a cushion on it, and then lifted her onto the cushion. “There, and that’s a comfort,” he said, and patted her cheek.
     
    Dazzled, trembling with anticipation of what she did not know, she crouched on the stool. The priests sat around the fire, with Grandmother in the semicircle, and all had big brandy glasses in their hands. There was just a little golden liquid at the bottom of the glasses; they swished the liquid around, inhaled the fumes, said “Ah!” in deep voices, and occasionally sipped. Rose was fascinated.
     
    Grandmother pulled up her skirts to warm her thin little shanks — she was always cold in spite of the incredible amount of alcohol she consumed daily — and said to Monsignor Harrington-Smith: “It’ll be your time to tell your tale, Monsignor.”
     
    “You know I am not superstitious, Rose Mary,” he said to Grandmother. The priests looked depressed. ‘Superstition’ was, of course, forbidden sternly by the Church, but they believed, with Shakespeare, that there are more things in heaven and earth than Englishmen would ever acknowledge or see or hear. Or perhaps they believed that no Sassenagh would be able to tell a tale that would keep a watchdog awake or curl a single hair of a more susceptible child.
     
    A priest said hastily, “Sure, and I am thinking it is my turn.”
     
    “Nay,” said Grandmother, with a wicked twinkle. “I remember me that it was to be Monsignor Harrington-Smith’s.”
     
    “I am not superstitious,” said the Monsignor, as if this little interlude had not taken place. “Nevertheless — ”
     
    The priests sat up, with more hopeful expressions. Monsignor was shaking his head, and frowning.
     
    “Ah,” said Father McGlynn, in a deep, expectant voice. Anything that could baffle Sassenaghs must be really extraordinary. Why, if St. Michael appeared before them they’d be wanting to examine his armor for authenticity, suspecting it had been stolen from Windsor Castle, and they’d doubtless sneer, “Sheffield steel,” when running skeptical fingers along his sword.
     
    “So — ” said Monsignor, and launched into his story with increasing reluctance, as if, someway, such things did not happen in the orderly course of events, to Englishmen of proper breeding. “It was in Ireland. Of course,” he began.
     
    “Ah!!!” said the priests in a body, nodding, and pulling their chairs closer. If it had happened in England — nothing would have happened. But Ireland!
     

Monsignor Harrington-Smith and the Dread Encounter
     
    Edward Albert Harrington-Smith was the