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His soft hands caressed her hair: black, shiny, smooth, silken. He drew it back from her cheek and chin, revealing the whiteness of her neck. The shawl had fallen from her shoulders. He gently replaced it. She was sobbing. Her shoulders were shaking. Her breasts were heaving. He could feel the pressure of her breasts against his knees.
“Don’t cry, Caitlin. Please don’t cry. I’ll give you all the help I can.”
He lowered his head slowly. The sweet scent of her skin and hair stirred his deepest feelings. An emotion strange and new and disturbing shook his body. Then, with the tenderness of a lover, he kissed the warm, moist cheek of the weeping woman.
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“My God, my God, my God! What terrible wrong I have done. What mortal sin I have committed.”
Padraig swung himself out of bed and sat on the edge of it in his nightshirt, his elbows on his knees, his head held tightly between his hands. He sat for a long time in a desolation of remorse. Then he turned round onto his knees on the floor and prayed, his lips moving, making indistinguishable murmurings, his face strained with the anguish in his soul. Then he wept.
Slowly he raised himself to his feet and crossed the wooden floor to the wardrobe. From one of the bottom drawers he pulled out a dark, heavy garment: a hair shirt. An old Jesuit priest had given it to him in Rome; now he would put it on. And he vowed never to remove it. He would wear it every day for the rest of his life. He would go to meet his Maker wearing it, and God alone would take it from him if He chose so to do. Padraig hauled off his nightshirt and stood naked in his cell, his thin, bony body as white as milk. He looked down at himself. He wished he could pluck away that limp, offending thing, tear it out of his body like a weed. Padraig shivered, as much from shame and contrition as from cold. He pulled the coarse, scratchy, horsehair shirt over his head, savouring its prickly discomfort. Then he dressed. Except when he was celebrating Mass he would spend the rest of the day on his knees seeking God’s forgiveness for his sin. Having so resolved, he left his room, left the silent rectory and walked to the church.
There, slumped over the chancel steps, lay Caitlin. She appeared to be asleep.
Padraig’s first inclination was to turn back immediately to his room in the rectory like a rabbit into its hole. He did not want to see Caitlin.
Libros Libertad 