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“But they reinforce atheism in those who follow it,” Caitlin countered.
“Yes, I am afraid they do.”
Caitlin silently started reading the letter again.
As for her nine-year-old son, he disappeared. After searching in vain for several weeks after the discovery of his mother’s wasted body, the constabulary came to the conclusion that the boy had died from exposure, or accidental drowning, or “from cause or causes unknown”. Miss MacArtan’s murderer admitted to having seen the boy lying asleep, close to his mother in the hay-barn, but strenuously denied having laid a hand on him. Padraig has told me only that he ran away from fear, and driven by that same fear he stayed away from roads and hid from human beings, crossing moors and trackless countryside on foot and eating nothing but berries until he arrived, exhausted, famished, cold and dirty, not in Plockton but in Kyle of Lochalsh where my wife and I found him, asleep in the doorway of a haberdashery in this little town.
As you know, Mr. MacLir, Padraig lived with us for just over three years, from October 1898 until you took him away, with our reluctant consent, last November. Being of the Roman Catholic persuasion ourselves, we initiated the boy into that faith and enrolled him in the local elementary school for Roman Catholic children. His attendance at school stopped at Christmas after he had suffered repeated seizures that terrified his fellow pupils and even one or two of the teachers, who should have known better. My wife, a former schoolteacher herself, undertook Padraig’s education at home, and I taught him the rudiments of Latin which he learned with surprising ease. He has a logical mind, and intelligence sharp beyond his years. On his eleventh birthday in January of last year, he declared his intention to become a priest like Father Fergus Cameron in our church, who was himself very good to Padraig in many ways. “God has sent him here to test us,” Father Cameron has said. “Sadly many of us have failed the test. That laddie is more divine than satanic.”
My wife and I were, of course, extremely curious to learn the history of this little boy who came so unexpectedly into our lives, but enquiries turned up nothing. No one in Kyle of Lochalsh had seen or heard of him before his physically taxing peregrinations ended in our town. Even the local police had heard nothing concerning his identity, and Padraig himself gave us only his Christian name and age and birthday. Then we read the reports of the murder trial, and I have confirmed that Padraig is, in all truth, the murdered woman’s son. But we have not informed the police nor the MacArtan family that the laddie is alive and in our care. We have not told even Padraig himself. After much discussion with my wife…
Libros Libertad 