Grandmother and the Priests by Taylor Caldwell Page B

luxuries, for he knew that Scotsmen will bend themselves backwards until their heads touch their heels rather than use favoritism where favoritism among other races is the natural thing, and expected. So he began to fear that his uncle was about to assign him to a parish where he would be lucky to get a joint of mutton once a month, and where the old ladies put buttons in the offering plates rather than shillings, or even pennies, and where his church would be about the most poverty-stricken building in the whole county.
     
    The Bishop was short. He was also stout, which was amazing, considering the tiny funds at his disposal and the condition of his larder. Robert was convinced all his life that in some mysterious way the angels must have fed the Bishop while he slept his innocent sleep, or that sheer piety gave him his roundness of face and figure. It could have been nothing else — the angels or the piety. It simply could not have been roast beef and pasties and other luscious things, or even potatoes. The Bishop was also rosy and jolly, the latter unusual for a Scotsman, and he had a high and subtle humor, another trait not customarily found in his countrymen. He was a philosopher and a learned man, possessed of miraculous patience and great gentleness. The gentleness was incredible, considering the state of the Church in Scotland. It was merely a heavenly bonus granted by God to the harassed priests in their Bishop’s character. If he could ‘take a’ that like a ‘mon’, then a priest could ‘take’ what he had to, and he always had to.
     
    Robert, incessantly hungry because he was young as well as poor, was diverted from direful premonitions when he discovered that in some mystifying way his uncle had been able to secure a leg of young lamb, potatoes, some sprouts, white bread, and ale in honor of his nephew’s visit, not to mention lemon-cheese tarts which made a man’s mouth water at the mere look of them. (With these the Bishop, with noble gestures, produced a fourth of a bottle of brandy, hoarded for just this occasion.) Robert was further astonished at being offered a glass of Scotland’s best whiskey. He was so overcome with affection, and amazement, that he almost forgot his forebodings. Then it came to him: he was being fattened like a lamb for the slaughter. Or, to use another simile, it was the condemned man’s final meal.
     
    The lamb and the condemned man, both simultaneously present in young Robert, did not mar his appetite, however. He even forgot to glance apologetically at his uncle’s rueful face when he took the fourth offering of young mutton, after he had first had a monster bowl of broth stiff with barley, carrots and potatoes, a dish which would have surfeited anyone, in itself, but a hungry young priest. “My, my,” marveled the Bishop, when Robert had demolished five tarts, and inhaled several cups of tea rich with cream and sugar. “It gives an auld heart pleasure to see such an appetite. They’d not be feedin’ ye well, in the Seminary, young Bob?”
     
    Robert, blissful with food, ale, whiskey and brandy and tarts, sighed dolefully and shook his head. “I’ve nae had a meal like this since I was a lad.”
     
    And not even then, thought the Bishop, sighing. Nor, he added to himself, will I hae another, mysel’. It had all cost him three pounds, which he had been saving for a long time for this night. They retired to what the Bishop called his library, a mere hole of a little room solidly walled with books, cold as death, and with a handful of coals on the hearth. A table stood in the center of the room, and there were two hard chairs in front of the fire, which gave out practically no heat. Robert, feeling drowsy and stuffed, would have liked to absorb that fire, but his uncle was now all brisk business. He was spreading a map on the table, his bald head shining like a big egg in the light of the one dull lamp, and seeing that map, and the Bishop’s busyness,