The Bishop was sitting stunned at the grotesque story when there was a knock at the study door. Gregory answered it. Mrs. Farley, the housekeeper, murmured something to him and Gregory excused himself to the Bishop and walked into the living room.
Susan Garth was there, waiting for him.
“Hello, Susan.”
“Hello, Father.”
“What can I do for you?”
She shrugged. “I just thought . . . maybe you could help me . . . maybe we could just talk about it . . . or whatever you want to do . . .”
“Does your father know you’re here?”
“He knows.”
“Fine. Well, Susan, you come at a rather bad time. I have a visitor. Perhaps—”
Mrs. Farley entered the living room and put a note into Gregory’s hand. “His Excellency heard me tell you she was here,” she whispered in explanation.
The note read, simply: Let me see her.
Pocketing it, Gregory said to the girl, “Well, maybe this isn’t such a bad time, after all. As matter of fact, Susan, I’d like you to meet someone. His Excellency, Bishop Crimmings. Do you mind?”
“No, I—guess not.”
“Then come along.” He led her to the study and opened the door. The study looked to Susan about the same as it had the one and only time she had been in it. Perhaps the books were different; there was a typewriter that had not been there before; and seated in the leather chair Father Halloran had occupied was a big old man with white hair and a stern face.
Gregory asked the Bishop, “You’ll want me to stay, won’t you, Your Excellency?”
“No, Father,” said the Bishop crisply. “You may go.”
“Please stay, Father Sargent!” the girl pleaded. “I don’t want to be alone here with—” She looked down at her lean strong hands.
“You may go, Father,” the Bishop repeated.
Gregory left the study, closing the door.
It was very quiet in the room, but the quiet did not spell peace to Susan, as it had before. It seemed swollen with potential violence.
“Come here, miss.” The Bishop’s voice was clipped.
Susan walked reluctantly toward him.
“Sit down.”
She sat opposite him, in the same chair she had sat in before. But, before, everything had been cozy and friendly. There was nothing friendly about this unsmiling, unblinking old man.
“Your name is?” he asked.
“Susan Garth.”
“I,” he said coldly, “am by the grace of God a bishop of Holy Mother Church. Is that the way you address me?”
“No, Your—Excellency.”
“I am told you are a bad girl.”
“I—”
“Silence,” he said cuttingly. “A bad girl; a girl with a filthy tongue; a girl who cursed her own father; a girl with hideous, unclean thoughts. A dangerous person. A violent person. A person who attacked her own spiritual advisor and would have murdered him had she not been prevented by sheer force. A person so depraved she cannot come near the door of the church without drawing back as if it were the gate of Hell itself. Is all this true?”
“Yes,” she said almost in a whisper, “Your Excellency.”
“Is it true, then,” he went on relentlessly, “that you looked with lust upon a priest of God, and laid the hands of lust upon his body? That you accused him of harboring lustful thoughts toward you?”
She nodded.
“Is it true that you cursed this holy man in fearful terms?”
She nodded again.
“All these terrible things are true?”
Avoiding his eyes, she murmured, “Yes. They—”
“Look at me when you speak!”
With difficulty she raised her eyes and looked at the granite face.
“They’re all true,” she said. “All those things.”
The Bishop rose from his chair, slowly, solemnly, towering above her. He walked away from her, his hands clasped behind his back. Without looking at her, he said, “Adjoining this house we are in, this rectory, is a church. It is your church, the Church of St. Michael. It is only one of many churches in a diocese of which I, as Bishop, am the head. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Your Excellency.”
Still with his back to her, he continued: “Then you must understand that when I say something to you, it is not the same thing as if it were only your father speaking to you, or your priest, or the nuns in school. You are in the presence of your Bishop. Is this clear?”
She nodded. He could not, of course, see her.
“Is—this—clear! I want to hear your voice, girl!”
Near tears, her voice quavering, she said, “It’s all clear to me, Your Excellency.”
He turned around. “Very well. Then listen to me. I want you to stand up.” She did.
“I want you to walk over here to me.”
She did, but as if each step were bringing her close to death.
He put out his large hand. “I want you to take my hand.”
She drew back.
“Take my hand!!”
She did, her lips trembling. His hand, twice the size of hers, cold and rough, enfolded her hand completely and held it in a clamp-like grip.
“Now,” he said, “you see this door? No, not the one you just came through; this other door. Did you know it leads directly to the church?” He felt her freeze. “Directly to the church, with its altar and its candles and its crucifix?” She could not remove her eyes from the door. “You and I,” he said, “are going to walk hand in hand through that door and into the church.”
“No!” She pulled but he held her firm.
“As your Bishop, I order you!”
“No, no, I won’t, I can’t!” She made a mighty effort, broke away from him and sprang to the door by which she had entered the study. She twisted the knob, rattled it; the door was locked. She pounded on it. Finally, trembling, sobbing, her teeth chattering, she sank to the floor.
The Bishop sighed. The business about the door was sheer improvisation, of course; he wasn’t sure—it had been a long time since he had set foot inside this rectory—but he believed it led to the dining room. The rectory was not physically connected to the church at all. Rectories seldom are. But so blinding had been the girl’s terror that she had completely forgotten that.
He walked over to her, lifted her from the floor, led her to a chair. “Please sit down, my poor child,” he said gently. He sat down opposite her. “Now then. All those things were true, you said; all those awful things. But you are not a bad girl, are you? Not really.”
“I am. I am.”
“How can that be, dear? You are very disturbed by these things, very sorry. A bad person would not be sorry.”
She said nothing. She had not stopped trembling.
“My dear,” he asked, “why do you do these things?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you—describe, can you tell me what it feels like when these things happen, when you do and say these terrible things?”
She tried. “It’s—like it isn’t me at all. Like it’s someone else, taking over.”
A ventriloquist’s dummy. Wasn’t that the term Gregory had used?
The Bishop patted her hand, and sat back in his chair. Suddenly, brightly, he said, “How would you like to play a little game?”
“A game?”
“With me.”
“All right . . .”
“Good.” He reached into his trousers pocket. “We will take a quarter . . . and a half dollar . . .” He selected these coins and put the rest back in his pocket. “You see?”
She nodded. Her eyes were red, but the tears had stopped.
“Now you must close your eyes,” he said, “and I will touch your arm with one or the other of these two coins several times and you must tell me which coin it is, the quarter or the half dollar. All right?”
She nodded, and almost smiled.
“Fine. Now close your eyes.” She did. The Bishop placed the quarter flat against her bare arm.
“I think . . .” she said, uncertainly, “. . . is it the half dollar?”
“I mustn’t tell you until it’s all over. That’s part of the game.” He touched her arm again, this time with the half dollar.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The quarter? But it could be the half dollar again.”
Now the Bishop abandoned the quarter entirely. He pressed only the half dollar to her arm, several times. She said: “The half dollar . . . The quarter? . . . The quarter again, I think . . . The half dollar . . .”
While the girl went on guessing, the Bishop’s free hand was carefully, silently searching for something in another pocket.
“The quarter . . . I’ll say the half dollar . . . Still the half dollar . . . The quarter? . . .”
Again and again he placed the coin on her arm. “The half dollar . . . The quarter . . . The quarter . . .”
And then she yanked away her arm and yelped in pain. “You burned me!” she screamed, opening her eyes. “You burned me with something! What was it?” She moaned in agony and shattered trust, one hand clapped tightly over the hurt spot. The Bishop pried her hand away and looked—with fear and sadness but no surprise—at the burn, which had begun to glow a vicious pink.
It was precisely the size and shape of the crucifix dangling from his rosary.