Charred Wood | Page 6

had been the loving care of the successive priests for fifty years and served as an effectual bar to the curiosity of the casual passer-by. In the little yard behind its shelter the priest could read or doze, free from the intrusive gaze of the village.
Father Murray, who was comfortably reading on the veranda, arose as his two visitors approached.
Saunders spoke quickly. "Don't worry, Padre. I ain't goin' to get after you again to sell you another set. I just thought I'd like to have you meet my friend, Mr. Griffin. I know you'll like him. He's bookish, too, and an Englishman. Then, I'm off." Suiting the action to the word, the agent, raising his hat, walked down the graveled path and down toward the hotel.
Father Murray took Mark's hand with a friendly grip quite different from the bone-crushing handshake he so often met in America. Mark gazed thoughtfully at his host. With his thin but kindly face and commanding presence, the priest seemed almost foreign. What Mark saw was a tall--he was six feet at least of bone and muscle--and good-looking man, with an ascetic nose and mouth; with hair, once black, but now showing traces of white, falling in thick waves over a broad brow. Mark noticed that his cassock was old and faded, but that reddish buttons down its front distinguished it from the cassocks of other village priests he had seen on his travels.
"You are welcome, Mr. Griffin--very welcome." Mark found Father Murray's voice pleasing. "Sit down right over there. That chair is more comfortable than it looks. I call it 'Old Hickory' because, though it isn't hickory, yet it began life in this old house and has outlived three pastors. Smoke?"
"Thanks, I do--but a pipe, you know. I'm hopelessly British." Mark pulled out his pipe and a pouch of tobacco.
Turning to the wicker table beside him, the priest dug down into an old cigar box filled with the odds and ends that smokers accumulate. He found a pipe and filled it from Mark's extended tobacco pouch.
"It's poor hospitality, Mr. Griffin, to take your tobacco; but I offered you a cigar. You know, this cigar habit has so grown into me that it's a rare occasion that brings me back to old times and my pipe." Father Murray pressed the tobacco down into the bowl. "How long are you to be with us, Mr. Griffin?"
Mark was dropping into a lazy mood again; it was very comfortable on the veranda. "I haven't fixed a time for going on. I beg your pardon, but aren't those buttons significant? I once spent six months in Rome. Aren't you what they call a Monsignore?"
"Don't tell them so here, or I'll lose my standing. Yes, I am a prelate, a Domestic Prelate to His Holiness. I am afraid it is the domesticity of the title that sticks here in Sihasset, rather than the prelacy. My people are poor--mostly mill workers. I have never shown them the purple. It might frighten them out of saying 'Father.'"
"But surely--" Mark hesitated.
"Oh, yes, I know what you are thinking. I did like it at first, but I was younger then, and more ambitious. You know, Mr. Griffin, I find that the priesthood is something like a river. The farther you go from the source the deeper and wider it gets; and it's at its best as it nears the ocean. Even when it empties into the wider waters, it isn't quite lost. It's in the beginning that you notice the flowers on the bank. Coming toward the end, it's--well, different."
"You are not beginning to think you are old?"
"No." Father Murray was very positive. "I am not old yet; but I'm getting there, for I'm forty-five. Only five years until I strike the half-century mark. But why talk about priests and the priesthood? You are not a Catholic?"
"I don't know," said Mark. "The difference between us religiously, Monsignore, is that I was and am not; you were not and behold you are."
Father Murray looked interested.
"Yes, yes," he said; "I am a convert. It was long ago, though. I was a young Presbyterian minister, and it's odd how it came about. Newman didn't get me, though he shook his own tree into the Pope's lap; I wasn't on the tree. It was Brownson--a Presbyterian like myself--who did the business. You don't know him? Pity! He's worth knowing. I got to reading him, and he made it so plain that I had to drop. I didn't want to, either--but here I am. Now, Mr. Griffin, how did you happen to go the other way?"
"I didn't go--that is, not deliberately. I just drifted. Mother died, and father didn't care, in fact rather opposed; so I just didn't last. Later on, I studied the church and I could not see."
"Studied