The Wide House

by Taylor Caldwell

  He stood up. He felt in feverish haste. “I shall go to him at once! Perhaps he will come today. He always loved you, Angus. He always spoke of—of your capacity for sacrifice. Remember how you wished to be a doctor?”

  Angus did not answer him. But suddenly he was gazing full at Stuart, and a glow was on his features, as if they had been struck by a light.

  Stuart continued, hurriedly: “Grundy used to say that you had one consuming desire—to sacrifice yourself for others, to live for others. I do not know whether he was wrong, or right. He is so—transcendental. But he is the kindest man. I’ll send him to you, Angus. Today. Within the hour.”

  He reached down, hesitated, then laid his warm hand on the cold rigid fingers on the coverlet. To his utter surprise, Angus laid his other hand on top of Stuart’s. The act touched Stuart to the heart His eyes dimmed. There was a lump in his throat.

  He said, hoarsely: “Wait for Grundy. Only he can help you, Angus. And God knows, you need help.”

  CHAPTER 74

  “You understand, sir, that you are admitted to this house under protest, and only by sufferance,” said Mrs. Schnitzel, with ponderous majesty, and gazing at Father Houlihan from the heights of her aversion and indignation.

  “Ma’am,” replied Father Houlihan, gently, “I am not annoyed when it is resented that I enter a place where Jesus has never been admitted.”

  Mrs. Schnitzel’s wits were not excessively subtle, or even normally so, therefore it was necessary that she mull for two hours over this quite obvious remark before the full impact of it assailed her, and took away her breath. By that time Father Houlihan was safely gone.

  She observed at this time, however, that his tone was peaceable and full of retiring mildness, so she allowed him to follow in her huge and billowing wake to Angus’ room, gathering up her enormous black skirts as if contagion pursued her. She flung open Angus’ door and announced loudly: “My dear, the—gentleman you desired to see is here. You must remember that you cannot see visitors for long, and I shall return shortly.”

  Father Houlihan entered the room, waited until the blackly suspicious Mrs. Schnitzel had retired, and came to Angus’ bedside. He smiled down at the young man, concealing his sorrowful shock at the sight of his changed sick face, his brilliant and desperate eyes.

  “Well, my lad, it’s sad I am to see you like this, in bed,” he said, his voice trembling. “But we’ll soon have you up and about, eh?”

  “Please sit down, Father,” said Angus, with a feeble wave of his hand. His head was swathed in wet compresses. The priest sat down, sighing, but still smiling determinedly.

  “It’s your head, then?” he said. “It is no better?”

  “It is unimportant,” replied Angus, in a dull and abstracted tone, touching the compresses.

  The priest hesitated. His tired old face was faintly luminous in the dusk. His blue eyes were kind and tender, filled with light. He said: “I have been told I have a way with headaches, Angus. Will you let me try?”

  Angus said nothing. He closed his eyes. Father Houlihan gazed sorrowfully at that pale gaunt profile. He had been amazed when Stuart had come to him, urging him to visit Angus at once, but he had also, if incredulous, been overjoyed. Stuart had forcibly pushed him into his carriage, and had sent him on his way, so that he had been conducted to this house in a veritable haze of bewilderment, prayer and conjecture. Stuart’s words had been incoherent; he had gathered little from them. Had Angus sent for him, or was this entirely Stuart’s idea? He could not know.

  He knew only, now, that a desperately sick and suffering man lay before him. And that sickness, that suffering, were the deep malaise of a soul in torment. He put aside his conjectures, his objectivity. He felt, and thought, with his heart. All trepidation, all uncertainty, all awkwardness, left him.

  He said: “Will you let me try?”

  Angus moved his head weakly, with exhausted impatience. The priest rose, carefully removed the pungent compresses, and laid his veined hands on the young man’s forehead. Angus suffered these ministrations, as if he were unconscious. Father Houlihan softly stroked the throbbing and bony brow, but his eyes were closed, and he prayed silently. He felt a peculiar, but familiar, surging in himself, as if he was gathering power from some outer and mysterious source, and directing the focus of that power into his hands and into Angus’ head. He felt himself vibrating, pulsing. Moment after moment passed. The vibrating grew less and less, withdrew, the power had gone. A faint weakness came over the priest, and he sat down again. Angus still lay motionless on his pillows. He seemed to sleep.

  Then at last he opened his eyes, and they were fixed, as if listening. An expression of surprise moved his mouth. He said, wonderingly: “The pain has gone.”

  The priest passed the back of his hand over his forehead. He smiled, tremulously. “God is merciful,” he said.

  Angus started. He turned his head to the priest and gazed at him steadily. He said: “I had forgotten you were here, Father.”

  “But you wished to see me, Angus, my son?”

  Angus did not answer for a moment. And then he said, in a loud and hurried tone: “Yes. Yes. I always wish to see you! Always!”

  He moved on his pillows, raised himself on them. An odd strength appeared to galvanize him. He leaned on his elbow. He began to speak, and his breathless sentences were disjointed. But the priest understood. From the welter of phrases flung wildly at him, he pieced, together the whole portrait of a tortured soul, bursting out from its confines, looking about it in madness and misery.

  He had heard many strange confessions, but none so Strange as this. He had heard confessions from men who had struggled with the evil forces and circumstances about them and had been defeated. He had heard confessions of weakness, of betrayals, of treacheries, of stupidities. But he had never before heard the confession of a man who had deliberately, coldly and with iron calculation, chosen the evil in himself, and had known it was evil, and then had rationalized it and made it a malignant good. Yes, he had taken avarice, cruelty, remorselessness and betrayal, and had sublimated them into virtues, justified of God, beamed upon by Heaven, approved by man, sanctioned by the soul.

  He listened to Angus’ voice, and he knew that here was a man betrayed, not by his own weaknesses, not by other men, but by himself, and all to the accompaniment of noble phrases, pious texts and rigid virtue. Doubtless, thought the priest, the world is full of such men, yet I have never known it before. He was appalled; he was terrified. He felt his own sense of values thrown together in a disjointed heap. Could a man be so self-conceived, and not be a madman? Yes, he could be so self-deceived, and he need not be mad. The priest was horrified. Was there any saving of such souls? For these souls were armored in the most stringent virtue, armed with sanctity, helmeted with their strong and perverted justice. They did evil things and thought them good, and considered themselves pure in the sight of the angels.

  He could not say to Angus: You are a liar and a hypocrite. For this was not true. Angus was full of integrity; he did not know the meaning of hypocrisy. The power of evil had destroyed him with holy words and with the gestures of holiness, and had made him impregnable to mercy and kindness and love, and to holiness, itself.

  “I do not understand!” cried Angus. “I still do not understand! And there is none to tell me! What have I done that was wicked: Yet, I know everything I have done has been evil and twisted. I know it, but I do not see where, or how!

  “It was in that room, when—Allstairs died, that I first knew it, though I must have felt it all these years.” He fell back on his pillows, struggled for breath. He stared at the ceiling as a dead man, who has expired in agony, stares. “I heard him—Stuart—speak. He said: ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’ His friend had been murdered by Allstairs. He had been ruined by Allstairs. Allstairs had pursued him relentlessly. Yet, he said: ‘May God have mercy on your soul.’”

  Angus turned his head feverishly, passionately, to the priest. “Why did
he say that? When he said that, I saw the most terrible things. I saw myself. Why did Stuart say that?”

  Tears stood in the priest’s eyes. He said, softly, deeply: “Because Stuart is a good man. You can’t understand that, can you, Angus? You can’t understand that there is a goodness of the heart which has nothing to do with the acts of a weak body, or the words of a licentious mouth. There is a goodness in some men which the good Lord called ‘charity,’ file thing which is greater than hope, greater than faith, more beloved of God than all the other virtues. Stuart, for all that he is, is full of love and compassion and charity. In my sight—and I know, in my heart, in the sight of God, also—he is a good and blessed man, and I have no fear for him.”

  “And I,” said Angus, with neutral calm, still staring at the ceiling, “did evil things and called them virtuous.”

  He lifted his hand and indicated his briefcase on a table beside his bed. “Please give me that, father.” The priest brought him the case and laid it near his hand. He sat down again. He could not understand his own trembling, as if portentous things were taking place in that room.

  Angus laid his hands on the brief-case and turned his head again to his old friend. “I wanted to be a doctor,” he said, listlessly.

  “Yes, Angus, I know,” said the priest, with eagerness, leaning forward.

  “It is too late, now. I—I studied a little. I visited the hospital. But it is too late for all that now. What little knowledge I have must suffice.”

  “Suffice for what, Angus?”

  Angus’ eyes were suddenly blazing, filled with vitality and strength. “For what I want to do! For the service I wish to do! Father, only you can help me!”

  Amazed, incredulous, the priest listened, wetting his lips grown dry in his confoundment, in the surge of his shaken emotions. He felt the quivering of his heart, as he listened to Angus, who was speaking quickly, but with gathering strength. Again and again, the priest crossed himself. Once he said, in his shaking mind: How strange and lovely are the ways of God. Sometimes he would shake his head, thinking: It is not possible. I am dreaming. Sometimes he whispered inwardly: I thank Thee, Father. All at once he was filled with a blazing joy, and a profound humility.

  Angus had ceased to speak now. He lay back in his bed. But he was smiling, his face illuminated, young and gentle again. He held out his hand, and the priest took it. “You will not reject me?” he asked, and his voice was the voice of a child.

  “Reject you?” whispered the priest. “Who am I to reject you? God receives you, my son. I—I must think. I must talk to my bishop—Yes, yes, it shall be arranged. What God desires cannot be frustrated.”

  Angus’ hands were fumbling with the straps of his case. He opened it. He held out a paper to the priest. “Read this, father,” he said, humbly. “Tell me if it is right.”

  The priest’s trembling hand fumbled for his spectacles. He read the long sheaf of foolscap written in Angus’ tiny exact script. He read, and his head swam.

  He put down the paper. He looked long and steadily at Angus. They smiled at each other.

  Then the priest knelt beside the bed, and prayed. Angus listened. When the priest had finished, and still knelt, with bowed head, Angus slept as he had not slept in a long time.

  CHAPTER 75

  It seems to me, thought Stuart, ruefully, as he quietly entered Janie’s house on Porter Avenue, that I am always paying visits of consolation these days. What have I become? A damned praying parson? It’s not in my nature, and I abhor it.

  The dark and shrouded atmosphere of the house enveloped him, shut out the memory of the warm May day outside. The house was also very chill and dank, every window shuttered, every door somberly closed. It was a house of death, though no corpse lay in it. Stuart cursed to himself, hating the gloomy air, the weighted solemnity.

  The maid whispered to him. He stumbled up the stairs in her wake to Janie’s apartments. He heard no sound. He entered Janie’s sitting-room, and smelled the pungent odors of camphor and lavender. He blinked his eyes, for the sun had been brilliant, and it was some moments before he could perceive that Janie, in her bed, was lying motionless, and that her son, Robbie, was beside her with his weeping little wife, Alice.

  Robbie stood up as Stuart entered, and extended his hand. The small man was very pale, his eyes sleepless and haunted. But his manner, as usual, was precise and controlled. His hand was cold and lifeless.

  Stuart, sweating with awkwardness and pity, bowed to Alice, glanced anxiously at Janie. He asked a question with an inclination of his head. Robbie shrugged, despairingly. “She is taking it rather hard,” he whispered. He smiled wearily. “After all, Bertie was her darling.”

  And you, thought Stuart, are not taking ft easily. He looked around uncertainly for a chair, and when Robbie indicated one he sat down, feeling huge and bulky in that room of mourning, and an intruder.

  Alice wiped her eyes. Her pretty little face was blotched with tears. Robbie sat beside her, put his arm about her. He did not look at his mother. He looked at his wife, and when he did so, it was with with awakened yearning, with sad passion and devotion, as though he saw her for the first time, and knew her. “Hush, my pet,” he whispered. “It isn’t good for you, you know.” For Alice was recovering from a bout of summer fever, and had not long been out of her own bed.

  She leaned her head on his shoulder, and tried to stifle her tears and sobs. She clung to him, and he held her tightly against him, and kissed away her tears.

  The single-minded Stuart was interested in this, and pleased. He watched them with the open satisfaction of a child, and forgot Janie.

  When he remembered her, it was with remorse. He got up, tiptoed to the bed, and looked down at his old kinswoman, his old friend, his old playmate, and his old enemy. Janie had aged. She was sleeping now, under the influence of a sedative administered by her physician. She was an old and broken hag. She sobbed and murmured feebly in her lethargic slumber. Her red hair was dishevelled on the pillow, her large nose pointed and quivering. Her eyes were swollen and scarlet.

  Poor devil, thought Stuart, with overwhelming compassion. This is hard for you. You never loved any other soul. You’ve come a long way, poor old Janie. We must be better friends now. You have no one left. You never wanted anyone but Bertie, so the whole world has left you, and has only a few reluctant tears for you. Yes, we must be better friends now, damn you, and we’ll be friends whether you want it or not.—Janie, do you remember how we roasted potatoes in the autumn leaves, at home? And how we plotted how we’d conquer the whole infernal world? And now we laughed? You had the scrawniest legs, but you were full of ginger, and could swing in the trees like a monkey. Remember how we raced through the meadows? We’ve got a lot to remember, Janie, and we’ll remember it together, and laugh over it.

  He accompanied Robbie and Alice out of the room. They closed the door softly behind them. “This is the first time in two nights she’s slept,” said Robbie, as they stood downstairs in the shrouded parlor.

  Stuart went to the windows, flung aside the draperies, opened the shutters. The May sunlight streamed into the room, caught up eddies of golden dust motes. They heard the voices of children in the street. A maid brought in a tray of wine and glasses, and little cakes. She sniffled. Stuart glared at her. He poured the wine, forced a glass on Robbie, and another on Alice. He smiled at them quite cheerfully.

  “Well, here’s to old Bertie. He did his duty, you know”

  Alice said, in a gentle voice hoarse with tears: “Did you see the letter from the President, Stuart? Such a lovely letter! It said that Bertie had died in heroic action, after saving fifty men from certain death. Such a wonderful letter! Were so proud of him.”

  She stretched out her hand to her husband, and he took it at once, and smiled at her with sad tenderness. She looked at him, and said: “We are proud of him, aren’t we, Robbie? It was the way he’d want to die. He was such a fine man, and we loved him so.”

  Robbie raised her h
and to his lips.

  Alice regarded Stuart quietly, but there was a glow in her eyes. “There was a medal from the President, too, a Congressional medal. ‘For gallantry in action.’ When poor mother is better, and able to understand she will be so proud, too.”

  Stuart doubted it. It would take more than a medal to console poor old Janie. Her heart lay somewhere in Virginia, and it would pulse there forever. Well, she would no longer speak of “going home.” She would always remain in America, where Bertie had lived and died in gallant action.

  He wondered, briefly, about Bertie. But that young man had always been a puzzle to him, and he shrugged.

  Robbie did not wish to talk of his brother. He was very composed. He said only: “I knew we’d never see him again. I knew it from the beginning. So it isn’t too great a shock to me.”

  He stared before him, blindly. But he still held Alice’s hand, and from time to time he kissed it, not in absent-mindedness, but with tender passion.

  “Perhaps it was best for Bertie,” he said, as if thinking aloud. “Best, yes. I can’t regret it too much.”

  Now his eyes focussed on Stuart, and he could not resist a smile. “How are things with you, Stuart? I understand I must congratulate you.”

  Stuart tried not to look too pleased in this house of mourning. “Damned good, amazingly good, of Angus. I still don’t understand it. Leaving me thirty percent of his stock in the shops, leaving me in complete control. Forty percent for your mother, and the other thirty to the Church. Who’d ever think he’d wanted to be a Catholic! It’s beyond me. I don’t understand people at all.”

  Robbie smiled wryly. “When Ma has time to think, there’ll be an explosion. Her puir wee lad, Angus, going into a monastery, to study to be a confounded missionary to the lepers! She’ll have conversation for years.”

  “It seems such a strange thing for Angus to do,” said Alice. “I never really knew Angus. He was so odd. But, if this makes him happy, what does anything else matter? But, it does seem so strange.”