Project Gutenberg's Sister Dolorosa and Posthumous Fame, by James Lane Allen
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Title: Sister Dolorosa and Posthumous Fame
Author: James Lane Allen
Release Date: October 20, 2010 [EBook #34109]
Language: English
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SISTER DOLOROSA
AND
POSTHUMOUS FAME
BY
JAMES LANE ALLEN
_Copyright Edition_
EDINBURGH
DAVID DOUGLAS, CASTLE STREET
1892
EDINBURGH: Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE for
DAVID DOUGLAS
LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL AND CO.
TO HER
FROM WHOSE FRAIL BODY HE DREW LIFE IN THE
BEGINNING, FROM WHOSE STRONG SPIRIT HE
WILL DRAW LIFE UNTIL THE CLOSE, THESE
TALES, WITH ALL OTHERS HAPLY HEREAFTER
TO BE WRITTEN, ARE DEDICATED
AS A PERISHABLE MONUMENT
OF INEFFABLE
REMEMBRANCE
PREFACE TO BRITISH EDITION.
The Author is glad to know that a British Edition of his Kentucky Tales
is to be brought out by Mr. David Douglas of Edinburgh.
Generations ago his mother's ancestors came from Scotland and Ireland;
generations ago his father's came from England. Toward the three
countries his attention was fondly turned in early life; and the
interest then begotten has been but fostered since.
It is with peculiar pleasure, therefore, that he now avails himself of
the chance to ride hither and thither through these lands in his own
conveyance--albeit the vehicle, a little book, may turn out a slow
coach.
JAMES LANE ALLEN.
CHRISTMAS EVE,
LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY, 1891.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
SISTER DOLOROSA, 13
POSTHUMOUS FAME, 163
SISTER DOLOROSA.
I.
When Sister Dolorosa had reached the summit of a low hill on her way to
the convent, she turned and stood for a while looking backward. The
landscape stretched away in a rude, unlovely expanse of grey fields,
shaded in places by brown stubble, and in others lightened by pale, thin
corn--the stunted reward of necessitous husbandry. This way and that ran
wavering lines of low fences, some worm-eaten, others rotting beneath
over-clambering wild-rose and blackberry. About the horizon masses of
dense and rugged woods burned with sombre fires as the westering sun
smote them from top to underbrush. Forth from the edge of one a few
long-horned cattle, with lowered heads, wound meekly homeward to the
scant milking. The path they followed led towards the middle background
of the picture, where the weather-stained and sagging roof of a
farmhouse rose above the tops of aged cedars. Some of the branches,
broken by the sleet and snow of winters, trailed their burdens from the
thinned and desolated crests--as sometimes the highest hopes of the
mind, after being beaten down by the tempests of the world, droop around
it as memories of once transcendent aspirations.
Where she stood in the dead autumn fields few sounds broke in upon the
pervasive hush of the declining day. Only a cricket, under the warm clod
near by, shrilled sturdily with cheerful forethought of drowsy
hearthstones; only a lamb, timid of separation from the fold, called
anxiously in the valley beyond the crest of the opposite hill; only the
summoning whistle of a quail came sweet and clear from the depths of a
neighbouring thicket. Through all the air floated that spirit of vast
loneliness which at seasons seems to steal like a human mood over the
breast of the great earth and leave her estranged from her transitory
children. At such an hour the heart takes wing for home, if any home it
have; or when, if homeless, it feels the quick stir of that yearning for
the evening fireside with its half-circle of trusted faces, young and
old, and its bonds of love and marriage, those deepest, most enchanting
realities to the earthly imagination. The very landscape, barren and
dead, but framing the simple picture of a home, spoke to the beholder
the everlasting poetry of the race.
But Sister Dolorosa, standing on the brow of the hill whence the whole
picture could be seen, yet saw nothing of it. Out of the western sky
there streamed an indescribable splendour of many-hued light, and far
into the depths of this celestial splendour her steadfast eyes were
gazing.
She seemed caught up to some august height of holy meditation. Her
motionless figure was so lightly poised that her feet, just visible
beneath the hem of her heavy black dress, appeared all but rising from
the dust of the pathway; her pure and gentle face was upturned, so that
the dark veil fell away from her neck and shoulders; her lips were
slightly parted; her breath came and went so imperceptibly that her
hands did not appear to rise and fall as they clasped the cross to her
bosom. Exquisite hands they were--most exquisite--gleaming as white as
lilies against the raven blackness of her dress; and with startling
fitness of posture, the longest finger of the right hand pointed like a
marble index straight towards a richly-embroidered symbol over her left
breast--the mournful symbol of a crimson heart pierced by a crimson
spear. Whether attracted by the lily-white hands or by the red symbol, a
butterfly, which had been flitting hither and thither in search of the
gay races of the summer gone, now began to hover nearer, and finally
lighted unseen upon the glowing spot. Then, as if disappointed not to
find it the bosom of some rose, or lacking hope and strength for further
quest--there it rested, slowly fanning with its white wings the tortured
emblem of the divine despair.
Lower sank the sun, deeper and more wide-spread the splendour of the
sky, more rapt and radiant the expression of her face. A painter of the
angelic school, seeing her standing thus, might have named the scene the
transfiguration of angelic womanhood. What but heavenly images should
she be gazing on; or where was she in spirit but flown out of the
earthly autumn fields and gone away to sainted vespers in the
cloud-built realm of her own fantasies? Perhaps she was now entering
yon vast cathedral of the skies, whose white spires touched the blue
eternity; or toiling devoutly up yon grey mount of Calvary, with its
blackened crucifix falling from the summit.
Standing thus towards the close of the day, Sister Dolorosa had not yet
passed out of that ideal time which is the clear white dawn of life. She
was still within the dim, half-awakened region of womanhood, whose
changing mists are beautiful illusions, whose shadows about the horizon
are the mysteries of poetic feeling, whose purpling east is the palette
of the imagination, and whose up-springing skylark is blithe aspiration
that has not yet felt the weight of the clod it soars within. Before her
still was the full morning of reality and the burden of the mid-day
hours.
But if the history of any human soul could be perfectly known, who would
wish to describe this passage from the dawn of the ideal to the morning
of the real--this transition from life as it is imagined through hopes
and dreams to life as it is known through action and submission? It is
then that within the country of the soul occur events too vast,
melancholy, and irreversible to be compared to anything less than the
downfall of splendid dynasties, or the decay of an august religion. It
is then that there leave us for ever bright, aerial spirits of the
fancy, separation from whom is like grief for the death of the beloved.
The moment of this transition had come in the life of Sister Dolorosa,
and unconsciously she was taking her last look at the gorgeous western
clouds from the hill-tops of her chaste life of dreams.
A flock of frightened doves sped hurtling low over her head, and put an
end to her reverie. Pressing the rosary to her lips, she turned and
walked on towards the convent, not far away. The little footpath across
the fields was well trodden and familiar, running as it did between the
convent and the farmhouse behind her, in which lived old Ezra and Martha
Cross; and as she followed its windings, her thoughts, as is likely to
be true of the thoughts of nuns, came home from the clouds to the
humblest concerns of the earth, and she began to recall certain
incidents of the visit from which she was returning.
The aged pair were well known to the Sisters. Their daughters had been
educated at the convent; and, although these were married and scattered
now, the tie then formed had since become more close through their age
and loneliness. Of late word had come to the Mother Superior that old
Martha was especially ailing, and Sister Dolorosa had several times been
sent on visits of sympathy. For reasons better to be understood later
on, these visits had had upon her the effect of an April shower on a
thirsting rose. Her missions of mercy to the aged couple over, for a
while the white taper of ideal consecration to the Church always burned
in her bosom with clearer, steadier lustre, as though lit afresh from
the Light eternal. But to-day she could not escape the conviction that
these visits were becoming a source of disquietude; for the old couple,
forgetting the restrictions which her vows put upon her very thoughts,
had spoken of things which it was trying for her to hear--love-making,
marriage, and children. In vain had she tried to turn away from the
proffered share in such parental confidences. The old mother had even
read aloud a letter from her eldest son, telling them of his approaching
marriage, and detailing the hope and despair of his wooing. With burning
cheeks and downcast eyes Sister Dolorosa had listened till the close and
then risen and quickly left the house.
The recollection of this returned to her now as she pursued her way
along the footpath which descended into the valley; and there came to
her, she knew not whence or why, a piercing sense of her own separation
from all but the Divine love. The cold beauty of unfallen spirituality
which had made her august as she stood on the hill-top died away, and
her face assumed a tenderer, more appealing loveliness, as there crept
over it, like a shadow over snow, that shy melancholy under which those
women dwell who have renounced the great drama of the heart. She
resolved to lay her trouble before the Mother Superior to-night, and ask
that some other Sister be sent hereafter in her stead. And yet this
resolution gave her no peace, but a throb of painful renunciation; and
since she was used to the most scrupulous examination of her
conscience, to detect the least presence of evil, she grew so disturbed
by this state of her heart that she quite forgot the windings of the
pathway along the edge of a field of corn, and was painfully startled
when a wounded bird, lying on the ground a few feet in front of her,
flapped its wings in a struggle to rise. Love and sympathy were the
strongest principles of her nature, and with a little outcry she bent
over and took it up; but scarce had she done so, when, with a final
struggle, it died in her hand. A single drop of blood oozed out and
stood on its burnished breast.
She studied it--delicate throat, silken wings, wounded bosom--in the
helpless way of a woman, unwilling to put it down and leave it, yet more
unwilling to take it away. Many a time, perhaps, she had watched this
very one flying to and fro among its fellows in the convent elms.
Strange that any one should be hunting in these fields, and she looked
quickly this way and that. Then, with a surprised movement of the hands
that caused her to drop the bird at her feet, Sister Dolorosa
discovered, standing half hidden in the edge of the pale yellow corn a
few yards ahead, wearing a hunting-dress, and leaning on the muzzle of
his gun, a young man who was steadfastly regarding her. For an instant
they stood looking each into the other's face, taken so unprepared as to
lose all sense of convention. Their meeting was as unforeseen as another
far overhead, where two white clouds, long shepherded aimlessly and from
opposite directions across the boundless pastures by the unreasoning
winds, touched and melted into one. Then Sister Dolorosa, the first to
regain self-possession, gathered her black veil closely about her face,
and advancing with an easy, rapid step, bowed low with downcast eyes as
she passed him, and hurried on towards the convent.
She had not gone far before she resolved to say nothing about the
gossip to which she had listened. Of late the Mother Superior had seemed
worn with secret care and touched with solicitude regarding her. Would
it be kind to make this greater by complaining like a weak child of a
trivial annoyance? She took her conscience proudly to task for ever
having been disturbed by anything so unworthy. And as for this meeting
in the field, even to mention that would be to give it a certain
significance, whereas it had none whatever. A stranger had merely
crossed her path a moment and then gone his way. She would forget the
occurrence herself as soon as she could recover from her physical
agitation.
II.
The Convent of the Stricken Heart is situated in that region of Kentucky
which early became the great field of Catholic immigration. It was
established in the first years of the present century, when mild
Dominicans, starving Trappists, and fiery Jesuits hastened into the
green wildernesses of the West with the hope of turning them into
religious vineyards. Then, accordingly, derived from such sources as the
impassioned fervour of Italy, the cold, monotonous endurance of
Flanders, and the dying sorrows of ecclesiastical France, there sprang
up this new flower of faith, unlike any that ever bloomed in pious
Christendom. From the meagrest beginning, the order has slowly grown
rich and powerful, so that it now has branches in many States, as far as
the shores of the Pacific Ocean.
The convent is situated in a retired region of country, remote from any
village or rural highway. The very peace of the blue skies seems to
descend upon it. Around the walls great elms stand like tranquil
sentinels, or at a greater distance drop their shadows on the velvet
verdure of the artificial lawns. Here, when the sun is hot, some
white-veiled novice may be seen pacing soft-footed and slow, while she
fixes her sad eyes upon pictures drawn from the literature of the Dark
Ages, or fights the first battle with her young heart, which would
beguile her to heaven by more jocund pathways. Drawn by the tranquillity
of this retreat--its trees and flowers and dews--all singing-birds of
the region come here to build and brood. No other sounds than their pure
cadencies disturb the echoless air except the simple hymns around the
altar, the vesper bell, the roll of the organ, the deep chords of the
piano, or the thrum of the harp. It may happen, indeed, that some one of
the Sisters, climbing to the observatory to scan the horizon of her
secluded world, will catch the faint echoes of a young ploughman in a
distant field lustily singing of the honest passion in his heart, or
hear the shouts of happy harvesters as they move across the yellow
plains. The population scattered around the convent domain are largely
of the Catholic faith, and from all directions the country is threaded
by footpaths that lead to the church as a common shrine. It was along
one of these that Sister Dolorosa, as has been said, hastened homeward
through the falling twilight.
When she reached the convent, instead of seeking the Mother Superior as
heretofore with news from old Martha, she stole into the shadowy church
and knelt for a long time in wordless prayer--wordless, because no
petition that she could frame appeared inborn and quieting. An
unaccountable remorse gnawed the heart out of language. Her spirit
seemed parched, her will was deadened as by a blow. Trained to the most
rigorous introspection, she entered within herself and penetrated to the
deepest recesses of her mind to ascertain the cause. The bright flame of
her conscience thus employed was like the turning of a sunbeam into a
darkened chamber to reveal the presence of a floating grain of dust.
But nothing could be discovered. It was the undiscovered that rebuked
her as it often rebukes us all--the undiscovered evil that has not yet
linked itself to conscious transgression. At last she rose with a sigh,
and, dejected, left the church.
Later, the Mother Superior, noiselessly entering her room, found her
sitting at the open window, her hands crossed on the sill, her eyes
turned outward into the darkness.
"Child, child," she said hurriedly, "how uneasy you have made me! Why
are you so late returning?"
"I went to the church when I came back, Mother," replied Sister
Dolorosa, in a voice singularly low and composed. "I must have returned
nearly an hour ago."
"But even then it was late."
"Yes, Mother; I stopped on the way back to look at the sunset. The
clouds looked like cathedrals. And then old Martha kept me. You know it
is difficult to get away from old Martha."
The Mother Superior laughed slightly, as though her anxiety had been
removed. She was a woman of commanding presence, with a face full of
dignity and sweetness, but furrowed by lines of difficult resignation.
"Yes; I know," she answered. "Old Martha's tongue is like a terrestrial
globe; the whole world is mapped out on it, and a little movement of it
will show you a continent. How is her rheumatism?"
"She said it was no worse," replied Sister Dolorosa absently.
The Mother Superior laughed again. "Then it must be better. Rheumatism
is always either better or worse."
"Yes, Mother."
This time the tone caught the Mother Superior's ear. "You seem tired.
Was the walk too long?"
"I enjoyed the walk, Mother. I do not feel tired."
They had been sitting on opposite sides of the room. The Mother Superior
now crossed, and, laying her hand softly on Sister Dolorosa's head,
pressed it backward and looked fondly down into the upturned eyes.
"Something troubles you. What has happened?"
There is a tone that goes straight to the heart of women in trouble. If
there are tears hidden, they gather in the eyes. If there is any
confidence to give, it is given then.
A tremor, like that of a child with an unspent sob, passed across Sister
Dolorosa's lips, but her eyes were tearless.
"Nothing has happened, Mother. I do not know why, but I feel disturbed
and unhappy." This was the only confidence that she had to give.
The Mother Superior passed her hand slowly across the brow, white and
smooth like satin. Then she sat down, and as Sister Dolorosa slipped to
the floor beside her she drew the young head to her lap and folded her
aged hands upon it. What passionate, barren loves haunt the hearts of
women in convents! Between these two there existed a tenderness more
touching than the natural love of mother and child.
"You must not expect to know at all times," she said, with grave
gentleness. "To be troubled without any visible cause is one of the
mysteries of our nature. As you grow older you will understand this
better. We are forced to live in conscious possession of all faculties,
all feelings, whether or not there are outward events to match them.
Therefore you must expect to have anxiety within when your life is
really at peace without; to have moments of despair when no failure
threatens; to have your heart wrung with sympathy when no object of
sorrow is nigh; to be spent with the need of loving when there is no
earthly thing to receive your love. This is part of woman's life, and of
all women, especially those who, like you, must live, not to stifle the
tender, beautiful forces of nature, but to ennoble and unite them into
one divine passion. Do not think, therefore, to escape these hours of
heaviness and pain. No saint ever walked this earth without them.
Perhaps the lesson to be gained is this: that we may feel things before
they happen, so that if they do happen we shall be disciplined to bear
them."
The voice of the Mother Superior had become low and meditative; and,
though resting on the bowed head, her eyes seemed fixed on events long
past. After the silence of a few moments she continued in a brighter
tone--
"But, my child, I know the reason of _your_ unhappiness. I have warned
you that excessive ardour would leave you overwrought and nervous; that
you were being carried too far by your ideals. You live too much in your
sympathies and your imagination. Patience, my little St. Theresa! No
saint was ever made in a day, and it has taken all the centuries of the
Church to produce its martyrs. Only think that your life is but begun;
there will be time enough to accomplish everything. I have been watching,
and I know. This is why I send _you_ to old Martha. I want you to have
the rest, the exercise, the air of the fields. Go again to-morrow, and take
her the ointment. I found it while you were gone to-day. It has been in the
Church for centuries, and you know this bottle came from blessed Loretto in
Italy. It may do her some good. And, for the next few days, less reading
and study."
"Mother!" Sister Dolorosa spoke as though she had not been listening.
"What would become of me if I should ever--if any evil should ever
befall me?"
The Mother Superior stretched her hands out over the head on her knees
as some great, fierce, old, grey eagle, scarred and strong with the
storms of life, might make a movement to shield its imperilled young.
The tone in which Sister Dolorosa had spoken startled her as the
discovered edge of a precipice. It was so quiet, so abrupt, so terrifying
with its suggestion of an abyss. For a moment she prayed silently and
intensely.
"Heaven mercifully shield you from harm!" she then said, in an
awestricken whisper. "But, timid lamb, what harm can come to you?"
Sister Dolorosa suddenly rose and stood before the Mother Superior.
"I mean," she said, with her eyes on the floor and her voice scarcely
audible--"I mean--if I should ever fail, would you cast me out?"
"My child!--Sister!--Sister Dolorosa!--Cast you out!"
The Mother Superior started up and folded her arms about the slight dark
figure, which at once seemed to be standing aloof with infinite
loneliness. For some time she sought to overcome this difficult,
singular mood.
"And now, my daughter," she murmured at last, "go to sleep and forget
these foolish fears. I am near you!" There seemed to be a fortress of
sacred protection and defiance in these words; but the next instant her
head was bowed, her upward-pointing finger raised in the air, and in a
tone of humble self-correction she added: "Nay, not I; the Sleepless
guards you! Good-night."
Sister Dolorosa lifted her head from the strong shoulder and turned her
eyes, now luminous, upon the troubled face.
"Forgive me, Mother!" she said, in a voice of scornful resolution.
"Never--never again will I disturb you with such weakness as I have
shown to-night. I _know_ that no evil can befall me! Forgive me, Mother.
Good-night."
While she sleeps learn her history. Pauline Cambron was descended from
one of those sixty Catholic families of Maryland that formed a league in
1785 for the purpose of emigrating to Kentucky without the rending of
social ties or separation from the rites of their ancestral faith. Since
then the Kentucky branch of the Cambrons has always maintained friendly
relations with the Maryland branch, which is now represented by one of
the wealthy and cultivated families of Baltimore. On one side the
descent is French; and, as far back as this can be traced, there runs a
tradition that some of the most beautiful of its women became barefoot
Carmelite nuns in the various monasteries of France or on some
storm-swept island of the Mediterranean Sea.
The first of the Kentucky Cambrons settled in that part of the State in
which, nearly a hundred years later, lived the last generation of
them--the parents of Pauline. Of these she was the only child, so that
upon her marriage depended the perpetuation of the Kentucky family. It
gives to the Protestant mind a startling insight into the possibilities
of a woman's life and destiny in Kentucky to learn the nature of the
literature by which her sensitive and imaginative character was from the
first impressed. This literature covers a field wholly unknown to the
ordinary student of Kentucky history. It is not to be found in
well-known works, but in the letters, reminiscences, and lives of
foreign priests, and in the kindling and heroic accounts of the
establishment of Catholic missions. It abounds in such stories as those
of a black friar fatally thrown from a wild horse in the pathless
wilderness; of a grey friar torn to pieces by a saw-mill; of a starving
white friar stretched out to die under the green canopy of an oak; of
priests swimming half-frozen rivers with the sacred vestments in their
teeth; of priests hewing logs for a hut in which to celebrate the mass;
of priests crossing and recrossing the Atlantic and traversing Italy and
Belgium and France for money and pictures and books; of devoted women
laying the foundation of powerful convents in half-ruined log-cabins,
shivering on beds of straw sprinkled on the ground, driven by poverty to
search in the wild woods for dyes with which to give to their motley
worldly apparel the hue of the cloister, and dying at last, to be laid
away in pitiless burial without coffin or shroud.
Such incidents were to her the more impressive since happening in part
in the region where lay the Cambron estate; and while very young she was
herself repeatedly taken to visit the scenes of early religious
tragedies. Often, too, around the fireside there was proud reference to
the convent life of old France and to the saintly zeal of the
Carmelites; and once she went with her parents to Baltimore and
witnessed the taking of the veil by a cousin of hers--a scene that
afterwards burned before her conscience as a lamp before a shrine.
Is it strange if under such influences, living in a country place with
few associates, reading in her father's library books that were to be
had on the legends of the monastic orders and the lives of the
saints--is it strange if to the young Pauline Cambron this world before
long seemed little else than the battle-field of the Church, the ideal
man in it a monk, the ideal woman a nun, the human heart a solemn
sacrifice to Heaven, and human life a vast, sad pilgrimage to the shrine
eternal?
Among the places which had always appealed to her imagination as one of
the heroic sites of Kentucky history was the Convent of the Stricken
Heart, not far away. Whenever she came hither she seemed to be treading
on sacred ground. Happening to visit it one summer day before her
education was completed, she asked to be sent hither for the years that
remained. When these were past, here, with the difficult consent of her
parents, who saw thus perish the last hope of the perpetuation of the
family, she took the white veil. Here at last she hid herself beneath
the black. Her whole character at this stage of its unfolding may be
understood from the name she assumed--Sister Dolorosa. With this name
she wished not merely to extinguish her worldly personality, but to
clothe herself with a lifelong expression of her sympathy with the
sorrows of the world. By this act she believed that she would attain a
change of nature so complete that the black veil of Sister Dolorosa
would cover as in a funeral urn the ashes which had once been the heart
of Pauline Cambron. And thus her conventual life began.
But for those beings to whom the span on the summer-evening cloud is as
nothing compared with that fond arch of beauty which it is a necessity
of their nature to hang as a bow of promise above every beloved
hope--for such dreamers the sadness of life lies in the dissipation of
mystery and the disillusion of truth. When she had been a member of the
order long enough to see things as they were, Sister Dolorosa found
herself living in a large, plain, comfortable brick convent, situated in
a retired and homely region of Southern Kentucky. Around her were plain
nuns with the invincible contrariety of feminine temperament. Before her
were plain duties. Built up around her were plain restrictions. She had
rushed with outstretched arms towards poetic mysteries, and clasped
prosaic reality.
As soon as the lambent flame of her spirit had burned over this new
life, as a fire before a strong wind rushes across a plain, she one day
surveyed it with that sense of reality which sometimes visits the
imaginative with such appalling vividness. Was it upon this dreary waste
that her soul was to play out its drama of ideal womanhood?
She answered the question in the only way possible to such a nature as
hers. She divided her life in twain. Half, with perfect loyalty, she
gave out to duty; the other, with equal loyalty, she stifled within. But
perhaps this is no uncommon lot--this unmating of the forces of the
mind, as though one of two singing-birds should be released to fly forth
under the sky, while the other--the nobler singer--is kept voiceless in
a darkened chamber.
But the Sisters of the Stricken Heart are not cloistered nuns. Their
chief vow is to go forth into the world to teach. Scarcely had Sister
Dolorosa been intrusted with work of this kind before she conceived an
aspiration to become a great teacher of history or literature, and
obtained permission to spend extra hours in the convent library on a
wider range of sacred reading. Here began a second era in her life.
Books became the avenues along which she escaped from her present into
an illimitable world. Her imagination, beginning to pine, now took wing
and soared back to the remote, the splendid, the imperial, the august.
Her sympathies, finding nothing around her to fix upon, were borne afar
like winged seed and rooted on the colossal ruins of the centuries. Her
passion for beauty fed on holy art. She lived at the full flood of life
again.
If in time revulsion came, she would live a shy, exquisite, hidden life
of poetry in which she herself played the historic rôles. Now she would
become a powerful abbess of old, ruling over a hundred nuns in an
impregnable cloister. To the gates, stretched on a litter, wounded to
death, they bore a young knight of the Cross. She had the gates opened.
She went forth and bent over him; heard his dying message; at his
request drew the plighted ring from his finger to send to another land.
How beautiful he was! How many masses--how many, many masses--she had
celebrated for the peace of his soul! Now she was St. Agatha, tortured
by the proconsul; now she lay faint and cold in an underground cell, and
was visited by Thomas à Kempis, who read to her long passages from the
_Imitation_. Or she would tire of the past, and making herself an actor
in her own future, in a brief hour live out the fancied drama of all her
crowded years.
But whatever part she took in this dream existence and beautiful
passion-play of the soul, nothing attracted her but the perfect. For the
commonplace she felt a guileless scorn.
Thus for some time these unmated lives went on--the fixed outward life
of duty, and the ever-wandering inner life of love. In mid-winter,
walking across the shining fields, you have come to some little
frost-locked stream. How mute and motionless! You set foot upon it, the
ice is broken, and beneath is musical running water. Thus under the
chaste rigid numbness of convent existence the heart of Sister Dolorosa
murmured unheard and hurried away unseen to plains made warm and green
by her imagination. But the old may survive upon memories; the young
cannot thrive upon hope. Love, long reaching outward in vain, returns to
the heart as self-pity. Sympathies, if not supported by close realities,
fall in upon themselves like the walls of a ruined house. At last,
therefore, even the hidden life of Sister Dolorosa grew weary of the
future and the past, and came home to the present.
The ardour of her studies and the rigour of her duties combined--but
more than either that wearing away of the body by a restless mind--had
begun to affect her health. Both were relaxed, and she was required to
spend as much time as possible in the garden of the convent. It was like
lifting a child that has become worn out with artificial playthings to
an open window to see the flowers. With inexpressible relief she turned
from mediæval books to living nature; and her beautiful imagination,
that last of all faculties to fail a human being in an unhappy lot, now
began to bind nature to her with fellowships which quieted the need of
human association. She had long been used to feign correspondences with
the fathers of the Church; she now established intimacies with dumb
companions, and poured out her heart to them in confidence.
The distant woods slowly clothing themselves in green; the faint perfume
of the wild rose, running riot over some rotting fence; the majestical
clouds about the sunset; the moon dying in the spectral skies; the
silken rustling of doves' wings parting the soft foliage of the
sentinel elms; landscapes of frost on her window-pane; crumbs in winter
for the sparrows on the sill; violets under the leaves in the convent
garden; myrtle on the graves of the nuns--such objects as these became
the means by which her imprisoned life was released. On the sensuous
beauty of the world she spent the chaste ravishments of her virginal
heart. Her love descended on all things as in the night the dew fills
and bends down the cups of the flowers.
A few of these confidences--written on slips of paper, and no sooner
written than cast aside--are given here. They are addressed severally to
a white violet, an English sparrow, and a butterfly.
"I have taken the black veil, but thou wearest the white, and thou
dwellest in dim cloisters of green leaves--in the domed and
many-pillared little shrines that line the dusty roadside, or seem more
fitly built in the depths of holy woodlands. How often have I drawn near
with timid steps, and, opening the doors of thy tiny oratories, found
thee bending at thy silent prayers--bending so low that thy lips touched
the earth, while the slow wind rang thine Angelus! Wast thou blooming
anywhere near when He came into the wood of the thorn and the olive?
Didst thou press thy cool face against His bruised feet? Had I been
thou, I would have bloomed at the foot of the Cross, and fed His failing
lungs with my last breath. Time never destroys thee, little sister, or
stains thy whiteness; and thou wilt be bending at thy prayers among the
green graves on the twilight hillside ages after I who lie below have
finished mine. Pray for me then, pray for thine erring sister, thou
pure-souled violet!"
"How cold thou art! Shall I take thee in and warm thee on my bosom? Ah,
no! For I know who thou art! Not a bird, but a little brown mendicant
friar, begging barefoot in the snow. And thou livest in a cell under the
convent eaves opposite my window. What ugly feet thou hast, little
Father! And the thorns are on thy toes instead of about thy brow. That
is a bad sign for a saint. I saw thee in a brawl the other day with a
mendicant brother of thine order, and thou drovest him from roof to roof
and from icy twig to twig, screaming and wrangling in a way to bring
reproach upon the Church. Thou shouldst learn to defend a thesis more
gently. Who is it that visits thy cell so often? A penitent to confess?
And dost thou shrive her freely? I'd never confess to thee, thou cross
little Father! Thou'dst have no mercy on me if I sinned, as sin I must
since human I am. The good God is very good to thee that He keeps thee
from sinning while He leaves me to do wrong. Ah, if it were but natural
for me to be perfect! But that, little Father, is my idea of heaven. In
heaven it will be natural for me to be perfect. I'll feed thee no longer
than the winter lasts, for then thou'lt be a monk no longer, but a bird
again. And canst thou tell me why? Because, when the winter is gone,
thou'lt find a mate, and wert thou a monk thou'dst have none. For thou
knowest perfectly well, little Father, that monks do not wed."
"No fitting emblem of my soul art thou, fragile Psyche, mute and
perishable lover of the gorgeous earth. For my soul has no summer, and
there is no earthly object of beauty that it may fly to and rest upon as
thou upon the beckoning buds. It is winter where I live. All things are
cold and white, and my soul flies only above fresh fields of flowerless
snow. But no blast can chill its wings, no mire bedraggle, or rude touch
fray. I often wonder whether thou art mute, or the divine framework of
winged melodies. Thy very wings are shaped like harps for the winds to
play upon. So, too, my soul is silent never, though none can hear its
music. Dost thou know that I am held in exile in this world that I
inhabit? And dost thou know the flower that I fly ever towards and
cannot reach? It is the white flower of eternal perfection that blooms
and waits for the soul in Paradise. Upon that flower I shall some day
rest my wings as thou foldest thine on a faultless rose."
Harmonising with this growing passion for the beauty of the world--a
passion that marked her approach to riper womanhood--was the care she
took of her person. The coarse, flowing habit of the order gave no hint
of the curves and symmetry of the snow-white figure throbbing with eager
life within; but it could not conceal an air of refinement and movements
of the most delicate grace. There was likewise a suggestion of artistic
study in the arrangement of her veil, and the sacred symbol on her bosom
was embroidered with touches of elaboration.
It was when she had grown weary of books, of the imaginary drama of her
life, and the loveliness of Nature, that Sister Dolorosa was sent by the
Mother Superior on those visits of sympathy to old Martha Cross; and it
was during her return from one of them that there befell her that
adventure which she had deemed too slight to mention.
III.
Her outward history was that night made known to Gordon Helm by old
Martha Cross. When Sister Dolorosa passed him he followed her at a
distance until she entered the convent gates. It caused him subtle pain
to think what harm might be lurking to ensnare her innocence. But
subtler pain shot through him as he turned away, leaving her housed
within that inaccessible fold.
Who was she, and from what mission returning alone at such an hour
across those darkening fields? He had just come to the edge of the corn
and started to follow up the path in quest of shelter for the night,
when he had caught sight of her on the near hill-top, outlined with
startling distinctness against the jasper sky and bathed in a tremulous
sea of lovely light. He had held his breath as she advanced towards
him. He had watched the play of emotions in her face as she paused a few
yards off, and her surprise at the discovery of him--the timid start;
the rounding of the fawn-like eyes; the vermeil tint overspreading the
transparent purity of her skin: her whole nature disturbed like a
wind-shaken anemone. All this he now remembered as he returned along the
footpath. It brought him to the door of the farm-house, where he
arranged to pass the night.
"You are a stranger in this part of the country," said the old housewife
an hour later.
When he came in she had excused herself from rising from her chair by
the chimney-side; but from that moment her eyes had followed him--those
eyes of the old which follow the forms of the young with such despairing
memories. By the chimney-side sat old Ezra, powerful, stupid, tired,
silently smoking, and taking little notice of the others. Hardly a chill
was in the air, but for her sake a log blazed in the cavernous fireplace
and threw its flickering light over the guest who sat in front.
He possessed unusual physical beauty--of the type sometimes found in the
men of those Kentucky families that have descended with little admixture
from English stock; body and limbs less than athletic, but formed for
strength and symmetry; hair brown, thick, and slightly curling over the
forehead and above the ears; complexion blond, but mellowed into rich
tints from sun and open air; eyes of dark grey-blue, beneath brows low
and firm; a moustache golden-brown, thick, and curling above lips red
and sensuous; a neck round and full, and bearing aloft a head well
poised and moulded. The irresistible effect of his appearance was an
impression of simple joyousness in life. There seemed to be stored up in
him the warmth of the sunshine of his land; the gentleness of its
fields; the kindness of its landscapes. And he was young--so young! To
study him was to see that he was ripe to throw himself heedless into
tragedy; and that for him, not once, but nightly, Endymion fell asleep
to be kissed in his dreams by encircling love.
"You are a stranger in this part of the country," said the old
housewife, observing the elegance of his hunting-dress and his manner of
high breeding.
"Yes; I have never been in this part of Kentucky before." He paused; but
seeing that some account of himself was silently waited for, and as
though wishing at once to despatch the subject, he added: "I am from the
blue-grass region, about a hundred miles northward of here. A party of
us were on our way further south to hunt. On the train we fell in with a
gentleman who told us he thought there were a good many birds around
here, and I was chosen to stop over to ascertain. We might like to try
this neighbourhood as we return, so I left my things at the station and
struck out across the country this afternoon. I have heard birds in
several directions, but had no dog. However, I shot a few hoves in a
cornfield."
"There are plenty of birds close around here, but most of them stay on
the land that is owned by the Sisters, and they don't like to have it
hunted over. All the land between here and the convent belongs to them
except the little that's mine." This was said somewhat dryly by the old
man, who knocked the ashes off his pipe without looking up.
"I am sorry to have trespassed; but I was not expecting to find a
convent out in the country, although I believe I have heard that there
is an abbey of Trappist monks somewhere down here."
"Yes; the abbey is not far from here."
"It seems strange to me. I can hardly believe I am in Kentucky," he said
musingly, and a solemn look came over his face as his thoughts went back
to the sunset scene.
The old housewife's keen eyes pierced to his secret mood.
"You ought to go there."
"Do they receive visitors at the convent?" he asked quickly.
"Certainly; the Sisters are very glad to have strangers visit the place.
It's a pity you hadn't come sooner. One of the Sisters was here this
afternoon, and you might have spoken to her about it."
This intelligence threw him into silence, and again her eyes fed upon
his firelit face with inappeasable hunger. She was one of those women,
to be met with the world over and in any station, who are remarkable for
a love of youth and the world, which age, sickness, and isolation but
deepen rather than subdue; and his sudden presence at her fireside was
more than grateful. Not satisfied with what he had told, she led the
talk back to the blue-grass country, and got from him other facts of his
life, asking questions in regard to the features of that more fertile
and beautiful land. In return she sketched the history of her own
region, and dwelt upon its differences of soil, people, and
religion--chiefly the last. It was while she spoke of the Order of the
Stricken Heart that he asked a question he had long reserved.
"Do you know the history of any of these Sisters?"
"I know the history of all of them who are from Kentucky. I have known
Sister Dolorosa since she was a child."
"Sister Dolorosa!" The name pierced him like a spear.
"The nun who was here to-day is called Sister Dolorosa. Her real name
was Pauline Cambron."
The fire died away. The old man left the room on some pretext and did
not return. The story that followed was told with many details not given
here--traced up from parentage and childhood with that fine tracery of
the feminine mind which is like intricate embroidery, and which leaves
the finished story wrought out on the mind like a complete design, with
every point fastened to the sympathies.
As soon as she had finished he rose quickly from a desire to be alone.
So well had the story been knit to his mind that he felt it an
irritation, a binding pain. He was bidding her good-night when she
caught his hand. Something in his mere temperament drew women towards
him.
"Are you married?" she asked, looking into his eyes in the way with
which those who are married sometimes exchange confidences.
He looked quickly away, and his face flushed a little fiercely.
"I am not married," he replied, withdrawing his hand.
She threw it from her with a gesture of mock, pleased impatience; and
when he had left the room, she sat for a while over the ashes.
"If she were not a nun----" then she laughed and made her difficult way
to her bed. But in the room above he sat down to think.
Was this, then, not romance, but life in his own State? Vaguely he had
always known that further south in Kentucky a different element of
population had settled, and extended into the New World that mighty cord
of ecclesiastical influence which of old had braided every European
civilisation into an iron tissue of faith. But this knowledge had never
touched his imagination. In his own land there were no rural Catholic
churches, much less convents, and even among the Catholic congregations
of the neighbouring towns he had not many acquaintances and fewer
friends.
To descend as a gay bird of passage, therefore, upon these secluded,
sombre fields, and find himself in the neighbourhood of a powerful
Order--to learn that a girl, beautiful, accomplished, of wealth and high
social position, had of her own choice buried herself for life within
its bosom--gave him a startling insight into Kentucky history as it was
forming in his own time. Moreover--and this touched him especially--it
gave him a deeper insight into the possibilities of woman's nature; for
a certain narrowness of view regarding the true mission of woman in the
world belonged to him as a result of education. In the conservative
Kentucky society by which he had been largely moulded the opinion
prevailed that woman fulfilled her destiny when she married well and
adorned a home. All beauty, all accomplishments, all virtues and graces,
were but means for attaining this end.
As for himself, he came of a stock which throughout the generations of
Kentucky life, and back of these along the English ancestry, had stood
for the home; a race of men with the fireside traits: sweet-tempered,
patient, and brave; well-formed and handsome; cherishing towards women a
sense of chivalry; protecting them fiercely and tenderly; loving them
romantically and quickly for the sake of beauty; marrying early, and
sometimes at least holding towards their wives such faith, that these
had no more to fear from all other women in the world than from all
other men.
Descended from such a stock and moulded by the social ideals of his
region, Helm naturally stood for the home himself. And yet there was a
difference. In a sense he was a product of the new Kentucky. His infancy
had been rocked on the chasm of the Civil War; his childhood spent amid
its ruins; his youth ruled by two contending spirits--discord and peace:
and earliest manhood had come to him only in the morning of the new era.
It was because the path of his life had thus run between light and shade
that his nature was joyous and grave; only joy claimed him entirely as
yet, while gravity asserted itself merely in the form of sympathy with
anything that suffered, and a certain seriousness touching his own
responsibility in life.
Reflecting on this responsibility while his manhood was yet forming, he
felt the need of his becoming a better, broader type of man, matching
the better, broader age. His father was about his model of a gentleman;
but he should be false to the admitted progress of the times were he not
an improvement on his father. And since his father had, as judged by the
ideals of the old social order, been a blameless gentleman of the rural
blue-grass kind, with farm, spacious homestead, slaves, leisure, and a
library,--to all of which, except the slaves, he would himself succeed
upon his father's death--his dream of duty took the form of becoming a
rural blue-grass gentleman of the newer type, reviving the best
traditions of the past, but putting into his relations with his
fellow-creatures an added sense of helpfulness, a broader sense of
justice, and a certain energy of leadership in all things that made for
a purer, higher human life. It will thus be seen that he took seriously
not only himself, but the reputation of his State; for he loved it,
people and land, with broad, sensitive tenderness, and never sought or
planned for his future apart from civil and social ends.
It was perhaps a characteristic of him as a product of the period that
he had a mind for looking at his life somewhat abstractedly and with a
certain thought-out plan; for this disposition of mind naturally belongs
to an era when society is trembling upon the brink of new activities and
forced to the discovery of new ideals. But he cherished no religious
passion, being committed by inheritance to a mild, unquestioning,
undeviating Protestantism. His religion was more in his conduct than in
his prayers, and he tried to live its precepts instead of following them
from afar. Still, his make was far from heroic. He had many faults; but
it is less important to learn what these were than to know that, as far
as he was aware of their existence, he was ashamed of them, and tried to
overcome them.
Such, in brief, were Pauline Cambron and Gordon Helm: coming from
separate regions of Kentucky, descended from unlike pasts, moulded by
different influences, striving towards ends in life far apart and
hostile. And being thus, at last they slept that night.
When she had been left alone, and had begun to prepare herself for bed,
across her mind passed and repassed certain words of the Mother
Superior, stilling her spirit like the waving of a wand of peace: "To be
troubled without any visible cause is one of the mysteries of our
nature." True, before she fell asleep there rose all at once a
singularly clear recollection of that silent meeting in the fields; but
her prayers fell thick and fast upon it like flakes of snow, until it
was chastely buried from the eye of conscience; and when she slept, two
tears, slowly loosened from her brain by some repentant dream, could
alone have told that there had been trouble behind her peaceful eyes.
IV.
Sister Dolorosa was returning from her visit to old Martha on the
following afternoon. When she awoke that morning she resolutely put away
all thought of what had happened the evening before. She prayed oftener
than usual that day. She went about all duties with unwonted fervour.
When she set out in the afternoon, and reached the spot in the fields
where the meeting had taken place, it was inevitable that a nature
sensitive and secluded like hers should be visited by some question
touching who he was and whither he had gone; for it did not even occur
to her that he would ever cross her path again. Soon she reached old
Martha's; and then--a crippled toad with a subtle tongue had squatted
for an hour at the ear of Eve, and Eve, beguiled, had listened. And now
she was again returning across the fields homeward. Homeward?
Early that afternoon Helm had walked across the country to the station,
some two miles off, to change his dress, with the view of going to the
convent the next day. As he came back he followed the course which he
had taken the day before, and this brought him into the same footpath
across the fields.
Thus they met the second time. When she saw him, had she been a bird,
with one sudden bound she would have beaten the air down beneath her
frightened wings and darted high over his head straight to the convent.
But his step grew slower and his look expectant. When they were a few
yards apart he stepped out of the path into the low, grey weeds of the
field, and seemed ready to pause; but she had instinctively drawn her
veil close, and was passing on. Then he spoke quickly.
"I beg your pardon, but are strangers allowed to visit the convent?"
There was no mistaking the courtesy of the tone. But she did not lift
her face towards him. She merely paused, though seeming to shrink away.
He saw the fingers of one hand lace themselves around the cross. Then a
moment later, in a voice very low and gentle, she replied, "The Mother
Superior is glad to receive visitors at the convent," and, bowing, moved
away.
He stood watching her with a quick flush of disappointment. Her voice,
even more than her garb, had at once waved off approach. In his mind he
had crossed the distance from himself to her so often that he had
forgotten the actual abyss of sacred separation. Very thoughtfully he
turned at last and took his way along the footpath.
As he was leaving the farm-house the next day to go to the convent, Ezra
joined him, merely saying that he was going also. The old man had few
thoughts; but with that shrewd secretiveness which is sometimes found in
the dull mind he kept his counsels to himself. Their walk was finished
in silence, and soon the convent stood before them.
Through a clear sky the wan light fell upon it as lifeless as though
sent from a dead sun. The air hung motionless. The birds were gone. Not
a sound fell upon the strained ear. Not a living thing relieved the eye.
And yet within what tragedies and conflicts, what wounds and thorns of
womanhood! Here, then, she lived and struggled and soared. An unearthly
quietude came over him as he walked up the long avenue of elms,
painfully jarred on by the noise of Ezra's shuffling feet among the dry
leaves. Joyous life had retired to infinite remoteness; and over him,
like a preternatural chill in the faint sunlight, crept the horror of
this death in life. Strangely enough he felt at one and the same time a
repugnance to his own nature of flesh and a triumphant delight in the
possession of bodily health, liberty--the liberty of the world--and a
mind unfettered by tradition.
A few feet from the entrance an aged nun stepped from behind a hedgerow
of shrubbery and confronted them.
"Will you state your business?" she said coldly, glancing at Helm and
fixing her eyes on Ezra, who for reply merely nodded to Helm.
"I am a stranger in this part of the country, and heard that I would be
allowed to visit the convent."
"Are you a Catholic?"
"No; I am a Protestant."
"Are you acquainted with any of the young ladies in the convent?"
"I am not."
She looked him through and through. He met her scrutiny with frank
unconsciousness.
"Will you come in? I will take your name to the Mother Superior."
They followed her into a small reception-room, and sat for a long time
waiting. Then an inner door opened, and another aged nun, sweet-faced
and gentle, entered and greeted them pleasantly, recognising Ezra as an
acquaintance.
"Another Sister will be sent to accompany us," she said, and sat down to
wait, talking naturally the while to the old man. Then the door opened
again, and the heart of Helm beat violently; there was no mistaking the
form, the grace. She crossed to the Sister, and spoke in an undertone.
"Sister Generose is engaged. Mother sent me in her place, Sister." Then
she greeted Ezra and bowed to Helm, lifting to him an instant, but
without recognition, her tremulous eyes. Her face had the whiteness of
alabaster.
"We will go to the church first," said the Sister, addressing Helm, who
placed himself beside her, the others following.
When they entered the church he moved slowly around the walls, trying to
listen to his guide and to fix his thoughts upon the pictures and the
architecture. Presently he became aware that Ezra had joined them, and
as soon as pretext offered he looked back. In a pew near the door
through which they had entered he could just see the kneeling form and
bowed head of Sister Dolorosa. There she remained while they made the
circuit of the building, and not until they were quitting it did she
rise and again place herself by the side of Ezra. Was it her last prayer
before her temptation?
They walked across the grounds towards the old-fashioned flower-garden
of the convent. The Sister opened the little latticed gate, and the
others passed in. The temptation was to begin in the very spot where
Love had long been wandering amid dumb companions.
"Ezra!" called the aged Sister, pausing just inside the gate and looking
down at some recently dug bulbs, "has Martha taken up her tender bulbs?
The frost will soon be falling." The old man sometimes helped at the
convent in garden work.
"Who is this young man?" she inquired carelessly a few moments later.
But Ezra was one of those persons who cherish a faint dislike of all
present company. Moreover, he knew the good Sister's love of news. So he
began to resist her with the more pleasure that he could at least evade
her questions.
"I don't know," he replied, with a mysterious shake of the head.
"Come this way," she said beguilingly, turning aside into another walk,
"and look at the chrysanthemums. How did you happen to meet him?"
* * * * *
When Sister Dolorosa and Helm found themselves walking slowly side by
side down the garden-path--this being what he most had hoped for and she
most had feared--there fell upon each a momentary silence of
preparation. Speak she must; if only in speaking she might not err.
Speak he could; if only in speaking he might draw from her more
knowledge of her life, and in some becoming way cause her to perceive
his interest in it.
Then she, as his guide, keeping her face turned towards the border of
flowers, but sometimes lifting it shyly to his, began with great
sweetness and a little hurriedly, as if fearing to pause--
"The garden is not pretty now. It is full of flowers, but only a few are
blooming. These are daffodils. They bloomed in March, long ago. And here
were spring beauties. They grow wild, and do not last long. The Mother
Superior wished some cultivated in the garden, but they are better if
let alone to grow wild. And here are violets, which come in April. And
here is Adam and Eve, and tulips. They are gay flowers, and bloom
together for company. You can see Adam and Eve a long way off, and they
look better at a distance. These were the white lilies, but one of the
Sisters died, and we made a cross. That was in June. Jump-up-Johnnies
were planted in this bed, but they did not do well. It has been a bad
year. A storm blew the hollyhocks down, and there were canker-worms in
the roses. That is the way with the flowers: they fail one year, and
they succeed the next. They would never fail if they were let alone. It
is pleasant to see them starting out in the Spring to be perfect each in
its own way. It is pleasant to water them and to help. But some will be
perfect, and some will be imperfect, and no one can alter that. They are
like the children in the school; only the flowers would all be perfect
if they had their way, and the children would all be wrong if they had
theirs--the poor, good children! This is touch-me-not. Perhaps you have
never heard of any such flower. And there, next to it, is
love-lies-bleeding. We have not much of that; only this one little
plant." And she bent over and stroked it.
His whole heart melted under the white radiance of her innocence. He had
thought her older; now his feeling took the form of the purest delight
in some exquisite child nature. And therefore, feeling thus towards her,
and seeing the poor, dead garden with only common flowers, which
nevertheless she separately loved, oblivious of their commonness, he
said with sudden warmth, holding her eyes with his--
"I wish you could see my mother's garden and the flowers that bloom in
it." And as he spoke there came to him a vision of her as she might look
in a certain secluded corner of it, where ran a trellised walk;
over-clambering roses, pale golden, full blown or budding, and bent with
dew; the May sun golden in the heavens; far and near birds singing and
soaring in ecstasy; the air lulling the sense with perfume, quickening
the blood with freshness; and there, within that frame of roses, her
head bare and shining, her funereal garb for ever laid aside for one
that matched the loveliest hue of living nature around, a flower at her
throat, flowers in her hand, sadness gone from her face, there the pure
and radiant incarnation of a too-happy world, this exquisite
child-nature, advancing towards him with eyes of love.
Having formed this picture, he could not afterwards destroy it; and as
they resumed their walk he began very simply to describe his mother's
garden, she listening closely because of her love for flowers, which had
become companions to her, and merely saying dreamily, half to herself
and with guarded courtesy half to him, "It must be beautiful."
* * * * *
"The Mother Superior intends to make the garden larger next year, and to
have fine flowers in it, Ezra. It has been a prosperous year in the
school, and there will be money to spare. This row of lilacs is to be
dug up, and the fence set back so as to take in the onion patch over
there. When does he expect to go away?" The aged Sister had not made
rapid progress.
"I haven't heard him say," replied the old man.
"Perhaps Martha has heard him say."
Ezra only struck the toe of his stout boot with his staff.
"The Mother Superior will want _you_ to dig up the lilacs, Ezra. You
can do it better than any one else."
The old man shook his head threateningly at the bushes. "I can settle
them," he said.
"Better than any one else. Has Martha heard him say when he is going
away?"
"To-morrow," he replied, conceding something in return for the lilacs.
* * * * *
"These are the chrysanthemums. They are white, but some are perfect and
some are imperfect, you see. Those that are perfect are the ones to feel
proud of, but the others are the ones to love."
"If all were perfect would you no longer love them?" he said gently,
thinking how perfect she was and how easy it would be to love her.
"If all were perfect, I could love all alike, because none would need to
be loved more than others."
"And when the flowers in the garden are dead, what do you find to love
then?" he asked, laughing a little and trying to follow her mood.
"It would not be fair to forget them because they are dead. But they are
not dead; they go away for a season, and it would not be fair to forget
them because they have gone away." This she said simply and seriously as
though her conscience were dealing with human virtues and duties.
"And are you satisfied to love things that are not present?" he asked,
looking at her with sudden earnestness.
* * * * *
"The Mother Superior will wish him to take away a favourable impression
of the convent," said the Sister. "Young ladies are sometimes sent to us
from that region." And now, having gotten from Ezra the information she
desired and turned their steps towards the others, she looked at Helm
with greater interest.
"Should you like to go upon the observatory?" she meekly asked, pointing
to the top of the adjacent building. "From there you can see how far the
convent lands extend. Besides, it is the only point that commands a view
of the whole country."
The scene of the temptation was to be transferred to the pinnacle of the
temple.
"It is not asking too much of you to climb so far for my pleasure?"
"It is our mission to climb," she replied wearily; "and if our strength
fails, we rest by the way."
Of herself she spoke literally; for when they came to the topmost story
of the building, from which the observatory was reached by a short
flight of steps, she sank into a seat placed near as a resting-place.
"Will you go above, Sister?" she said feebly. "I will wait here."
On the way up, also, the old man had been shaking his head with a stupid
look of alarm and muttering his disapproval.
"There is a high railing, Ezra," she now said to him, "You could not
fall." But he refused to go further; he suffered from vertigo.
The young pair went up alone.
For miles in all directions the landscape lay shimmering in the autumnal
sunlight--a poor, rough, homely land, with a few farmhouses of the
plainest kind. Briefly she traced for him the boundary of the convent
domain. And then he, thinking proudly of his own region, now lying heavy
in varied autumnal ripeness and teeming with noble, gentle animal life;
with rolling pastures as green as May under great trees of crimson and
gold; with flashing streams and placid sheets of water, and great
secluded homesteads--he, in turn, briefly described it; and she, loving
the sensuous beauty of the world, listened more dreamily, merely
repeating over and over, half to herself, and with more guarded courtesy
half to him, "It must be very beautiful."
But whether she suddenly felt that she had yielded herself too far to
the influence of his words and wished to counteract this, or whether she
was aroused to offset his description by another of unlike interest,
scarcely had he finished when she pointed towards a long stretch of
woodland that lay like a mere wavering band of brown upon the western
horizon.
"It was through those woods," she said, her voice trembling slightly,
"that the procession of Trappists marched behind the cross when they
fled to this country from France. Beyond that range of hills is the home
of the Silent Brotherhood. In this direction," she continued, pointing
southward, "is the creek which used to be so deep in winter that the
priests had to swim it as they walked from one distant mission to
another in the wilderness, holding above the waves the crucifix and the
sacrament. Under that tree down there the Father who founded this
convent built with his own hands the cabin that was the first church,
and hewed out of logs the first altar. It was from those trees that the
first nuns got the dyes for their vestments. On the floor of that cabin
they sometimes slept in mid-winter with no other covering than an armful
of straw. Those were heroic days."
If she had indeed felt some secret need to recover herself by reciting
the heroisms of local history, she seemed to have succeeded. Her face
kindled with emotion; and as he watched it he forgot even her creed in
this revelation of her nature, which touched in him also something
serious and exalted. But as she ceased he asked, with peculiar
interest--
"Are there any Kentuckians among the Trappist Fathers?"
"No," she replied, after a momentary silence, and in a voice lowered to
great sadness. "There was one a few years ago. His death was a great
blow to the Fathers. They had hoped that he might some day become the
head of the order in Kentucky. He was called Father Palemon."
For another moment nothing was said. They were standing side by side,
looking towards that quarter of the horizon which she had pointed out as
the site of the abbey. Then he spoke meditatively, as though his mind
had gone back unawares to some idea that was very dear to him--
"No, this does not seem much like Kentucky; but, after all, every
landscape is essentially the same to me if there are homes on it. Poor
as this country is, still it is history; it is human life. Here are the
eternal ties and relations. Here are the eternal needs and duties;
everything that keeps the world young and the heart at peace. Here is
the unchanging expression of our common destiny, as creatures who must
share all things, and bear all things, and be bound together in life and
death."
"Sister!" called up the nun waiting below, "is not the wind blowing?
Will you not take cold?"
"The wind is not blowing, Sister, but I am coming."
They turned their faces outward upon the landscape once more. Across it
wound the little footpath towards the farm-house in the distance. By a
common impulse their eyes rested upon the place of their first meeting.
He pointed to it.
"I shall never forget that spot," he said impulsively.
"Nor I!"
Her words were not spoken. They were not uttered within. As unexpectedly
and silently as in the remotest profound of the heavens at midnight some
palest little star is loosened from its orbit, shoots a brief span, and
disappears, this confession of hers traced its course across the depths
of her secret consciousness; but, having made it to herself, she kept
her eyes veiled, and did not look at him again that day.
"I think you have now seen everything that could be of any interest,"
the aged Sister said doubtfully, when they stood in the yard below.
"The place is very interesting to me," he answered, looking around that
he might discover some way of prolonging his visit.
"The graveyard, Sister. We might go there." The barely audible words
were Sister Dolorosa's. The scene of the temptation was to be
transferred for the third time.
They walked some distance down a sloping hillside, and stepped softly
within the sacred enclosure. A graveyard of nuns! O Mother Earth,
all-bearing, passion-hearted mother! Thou that sendest love one for
another into thy children, from the least to the greatest, as thou
givest them life! Thou that livest by their loves and their myriad
plightings of troth and myriad marriages! With what inconsolable sorrow
must thou receive back upon thy bosom, the chaste dust of lorn virgins,
whose bosoms thou didst mould for a lover's arms and a babe's slumbers!
As marble vestals of the ancient world, buried and lost, they lie,
chiselled into a fixed attitude of prayer through the silent centuries.
The aspect and spirit of the place: the simple graves placed side by
side like those of the nameless poor, or of soldiers fallen in an
unfriendly land: the rude wooden cross at the head of each, bearing the
sacred name of her who was dust below; the once chirruping nests of
birds here and there in the grass above the songless lips; the sad
desolation of this unfinished end--all were the last thing needed to
wring the heart of Helm with dumb pity and an ungovernable anguish of
rebellion. This, then, was to be her portion. His whole nature cried
aloud against it. His ideas of human life, civilisation, his age, his
country, his State, rose up in protest. He did not heed the words of the
Sister beside him. His thoughts were with Sister Dolorosa, who followed
with Ezra in a silence which she had but once broken since her last
words to him. He could have caught her up and escaped back with her into
the liberty of life, into the happiness of the world.
Unable to endure the place longer, he himself led the way out. At the
gate the Sister fell behind with Ezra.
"He seems deeply impressed by his visit," she said in an undertone, "and
should bear with him a good account of the convent. Note what he says,
Ezra. The order wants friends in Kentucky, where it was born and has
flourished;" and looking at Sister Dolorosa and Helm, who were a short
distance in front, she added to herself--
"In her, more than in any other one of us, he will behold the perfect
spiritual type of the convent. By her he will be made to feel the power
of the order to consecrate women, in America, in Kentucky, to the
service of the everlasting Church."
Meantime, Sister Dolorosa and Helm walked side by side in a silence
that neither could break. He was thinking of her as a woman of
Kentucky--of his own generation--and trying to understand the motive
that had led her to consecrate herself to such a life. His own ideal of
duty was so different.
"I have never thought," he said at length, in a voice lowered so as to
reach her ear alone--"I have never thought that my life would not be
full of happiness. I have never supposed I could help being happy if I
did my duty."
She made no reply, and again they walked on in silence and drew near the
convent building. There was so much that he wished to say, but scarcely
one of his thoughts that he dared utter. At length he said, with
irrepressible feeling--
"I wish your life did not seem to me so sad. I wish, when I go away
to-morrow, that I could carry away, with my thoughts of this place, the
thought that you are happy. As long as I remember it I wish I could
remember you as being happy."
"You have no right to remember me at all," she said quickly, speaking
for the nun and betraying the woman.
"But I cannot help it," he said.
"Remember me, then, not as desiring to be happy, but as living to
become blessed."
This she said, breaking the long silence which had followed upon his too
eager exclamation. Her voice had become hushed into unison with her meek
and patient words. And then she paused, and, turning, waited for the
Sister to come up beside them. Nor did she even speak to him again,
merely bowing without lifting her eyes when, a little later, he thanked
them and took his leave.
In silence he and the old man returned to the farm-house, for his
thoughts were with her. In the garden she had seemed to him almost as a
child, talking artlessly of her sympathies and ties with mute
playthings; then on the heights she had suddenly revealed herself as the
youthful transcendent devotee; and finally, amid the scenes of death,
she had appeared a woman too quickly aged and too early touched with
resignation. He did not know that the effect of convent life is to force
certain faculties into maturity while others are repressed into
unalterable unripeness; so that in such instances as Sister Dolorosa's
the whole nature resembles some long, sloping mountain-side, with an
upper zone of ever-lingering snow for childhood, below this a green
vernal belt for maidenhood, and near the foot fierce summer heats and
summer storms for womanhood. Gradually his plan of joining his friends
the next day wavered for reasons that he could hardly have named.
And Sister Dolorosa--what of her when the day was over? Standing that
night in a whitewashed, cell-like room, she took off the heavy black
veil and hood which shrouded her head from all human vision, and then
unfastening at waist and throat the heavier black vestment of the order,
allowed it to slip to the floor, revealing a white under-habit of the
utmost simplicity of design. It was like the magical transformation of a
sorrow-shrouded woman back into the shape of her own earliest
maidenhood.
Her hair, of the palest gold, would, if unshorn, have covered her figure
in a soft, thick golden cloud; but shorn, it lay about her neck and ears
in large, lustrous waves that left defined the contour of her beautiful
head, and gave to it the aerial charm that belongs to the joyousness of
youth. Her whole figure was relaxed into a posture slightly drooping;
her bare arms, white as the necks of swans, hung in forgotten grace at
her sides; her eyes, large, dark, poetic, and spiritual, were bent upon
the floor, so that the lashes left their shadows on her cheeks, while
the delicate, overcircling brows were arched high with melancholy. As
the nun's funereal robes had slipped from her person had her mind
slipped back into the past, that she stood thus, all the pure oval of
her sensitive face stilled to an expression of brooding pensiveness? On
the urn which held the ashes of her heart had some legend of happy
shapes summoned her fondly to return?--some garden? some radiant
play-fellow of childhood summers, already dim but never to grow dimmer?
Sighing deeply, she stepped across the dark circle on the floor which
was the boundary of her womanhood. As she did so her eyes rested on a
small table where lay a rich veil of white that she had long been
embroidering for a shrine of the Virgin. Slowly, still absently, she
walked to it, and, taking it up, threw it over her head, so that the
soft fabric enveloped her head and neck and fell in misty folds about
her person; she thinking the while only of the shrine; she looking down
on this side and on that, and wishing only to judge how well this design
and that design, patiently and prayerfully wrought out, might adorn the
image of the Divine Mother in the church of the convent.
But happening to be standing quite close to the white wall of the room
with the lamp behind her, when she raised her eyes she caught sight of
her shadow, and with a low cry clasped her hands, and for an instant,
breathless, surveyed it. No mirrors are allowed in the convent. Since
entering it Sister Dolorosa had not seen a reflection of herself, except
perhaps her shadow in the sun or her face in a troubled basin of water.
Now, with one overwhelming flood of womanly self-consciousness, she bent
forward, noting the outline of her uncovered head, of her bared neck and
shoulders and arms. Did this accidental adorning of herself in the veil
of a bride, after she had laid aside the veil of the Church, typify her
complete relapse of nature? And was this the lonely marriage-moment of
her betrayed heart?
For a moment, trembling, not before the image on the wall, but before
that vivid mirror which memory and fancy set before every woman when no
real mirror is nigh, she indulged her self-surrender to thoughts that
covered her, on face and neck, with a rosy cloud more maidenly than the
white mist of the veil. Then, as if recalled by some lightning stroke of
conscience, with fearful fingers she lifted off the veil, extinguished
the lamp, and, groping her way on tiptoe to the bedside, stood beside
it, afraid to lie down, afraid to pray, her eyes wide open in the
darkness.
V.
Sleep gathers up the soft threads of passion that have been spun by us
during the day, and weaves them into a tapestry of dreams on which we
see the history of our own characters. We awake to find our wills more
inextricably caught in the tissues of their own past; we stir, and
discover that we are the heirs to our dead selves of yesterday, with a
larger inheritance of transmitted purpose.
When Gordon awoke the next morning, among his first thoughts was the
idea of going on to join his friends that day, and this thought now
caused him unexpected depression. Had he been older, he might have
accepted this unwillingness to go away as the best reason for leaving;
but, young, and habitually self-indulgent towards his desires when they
were not connected with vice, he did not trouble himself with any
forecast of consequences.
"You ought not to go away to-day," the old housewife said to him in the
morning, wishing to detain him through love of his company. "To-morrow
will be Sunday, and you ought to go to vespers and hear Sister Dolorosa
sing. There is not such another voice in any convent in Kentucky."
"I will stay," he replied quickly; and the next afternoon he was seated
in the rear of the convent church, surrounded by rural Catholic
worshippers who had assembled from the neighbourhood. The entire front
of the nave on one side was filled with the black-veiled Sisters of the
order; that on the other with the white-veiled novices--two
far-journeying companies of consecrated souls who reminded him in the
most solemn way how remote, how inaccessible, was that young pilgrim
among them of whom for a long time now he had been solely thinking. With
these two companies of sacrificial souls before him he understood her
character in a new light.
He beheld her much as a brave, beautiful boy volunteer, who, suddenly
waving a bright, last adieu to gay companions in some gay-streeted town,
from motives of the loftiest heroism, takes his place in the rear of
passing soldiery, marching to misguided death: who, from the rear,
glowing with too impetuous ardour, makes his way from rank to rank ever
towards the front; and who, at last, bearing the heavy arms and wearing
the battle-stained uniform of a veteran, steps forward to the van at
the commander's side, and sets his fresh, pure face undaunted towards
destruction. As he thought of her thus, deeper forces stirred within his
nature than had ever been aroused by any other woman. In comparison
every one that he had known became for the moment commonplace, human
life as he was used to it gross and uninspiring, and his own ideal of
duty a dwarfish mixture of selfishness and luxurious triviality.
Impulsive in his recognition of nobleness of nature wherever he
perceived it, for this devotedness of purpose he began to feel the
emotion which of all that ever visit the human heart is at once the most
humbling, the most uplifting, and the most enthralling--the hero-worship
of a strong man for a fragile woman.
The service began. As it went on he noticed here and there among those
near him such evidences of restlessness as betray in a seated throng
high-wrought expectancy of some pleasure too long deferred. But at last
these were succeeded by a breathless hush, as, from the concealed
organ-loft above, a low, minor prelude was heard, groping and striving
nearer and nearer towards the concealed motive, as a little wave creeps
further and further along a melancholy shore. Suddenly, beautiful and
clear, more tender than love, more sorrowful than death, there floated
out upon the still air of the church the cry of a woman's soul that has
offended, and that, shrinking from every prayer of speech, pours forth
its more intense, inarticulate, and suffering need through the diviner
faculty of song.
At the sound every ear was strained to listen. Hitherto the wont had
been to hear that voice bear aloft the common petition as calmly as the
incense rose past the altar to the roof; but now it quivered over
troubled depths of feeling, it rose freighted with the burden of
self-accusal. Still higher and higher it rose, borne triumphantly upward
by love and aspiration, until the powers of the singer's frame seemed
spending themselves in one superhuman effort of the soul to make its
prayer understood to the divine forgiveness. Then, all at once, at the
highest note, as a bird soaring towards the sun has its wings broken by
a shot from below, it too broke, faltered, and there was a silence. But
only for a moment: another voice, poor and cold, promptly finished the
song; the service ended; the people poured out of the church.
When Gordon came out there were a few groups standing near the door
talking; others were already moving homeward across the grounds. Not
far off he observed a lusty young countryman, with a frank, winning
face, who appeared to be waiting, while he held a child that had laid
its bright head against his tanned, athletic neck. Gordon approached
him, and said with forced calmness--
"Do you know what was the matter in the church?"
"My wife has gone to see," he replied warmly. "Wait; she'll be here in a
minute. Here she is now."
The comely, Sunday-dressed young wife came up and took the child, who
held out its arms, fondly smiling.
"She hadn't been well, and they didn't want her to sing to-day; but she
begged to sing, and broke down." Saying this, the young mother kissed
her child, and slipping one hand into the great brown hand of her
husband, which closed upon it, turned away with them across the lawn
homeward.
When Sister Dolorosa, who had passed a sleepless, prayerless night,
stood in the organ-loft and looked across the church at the scene of
the Passion, at the shrine of the Virgin, at the white throng of novices
and the dark throng of the Sisters, the common prayer of whom was to be
borne upward by her voice, there came upon her like a burying wave a
consciousness of how changed she was since she had stood there last.
Thus at the moment when Gordon, sitting below, reverently set her far
above him, as one looks up to a statue whose feet are above the level of
his head, she, thinking of what she had been and had now become, seemed
to herself as though fallen from a white pedestal to the miry earth. But
when, to a nature like hers, absolute loyalty to a sinless standard of
character is the only law of happiness itself, every lapse into
transgression is followed by an act of passionate self-chastisement and
by a more passionate outburst of love for the wronged ideal; and
therefore scarce had she begun to sing, and in music to lift up the
prayer she had denied herself in words, before the powers of her body
succumbed, as the strings of an instrument snap under too strenuous a
touch of the musician.
Gordon walked out of the grounds beside the rustic young husband and
wife, who plainly were lovers still.
"The Sister who sang has a beautiful voice," he said.
"None of them can sing like her," replied the wife. "I love her better
than any of the others."
"I tin sing!" cried the little girl, looking at Gordon resentfully, as
though he had denied her that accomplishment.
"But you'll never sing in a convent, missy," cried the father, snatching
her from her mother. "You'll sing for some man till he marries you as
your mother did me. I was going to join the Trappist monks, but my wife
said I was too good a sweetheart to spoil, and she had made up her mind
to have me herself," he added, turning to Gordon with a laugh.
"I'd have been a Sister long ago if you hadn't begged and begged me
not," was the reply, with the coquettish toss of a pretty head.
"I doin' be Tap monk," cried the little girl, looking at Gordon still
more assertively, but joining in the laugh that followed with a scream
of delight at the wisdom of her decision.
Their paths here diverged, and Gordon walked slowly on alone, but not
without turning to watch the retreating figures, his meeting with whom
at such a moment formed an episode in the history of that passion under
the influence of which he was now rapidly passing. For as he had sat in
the church his nature, which was always generous in its responsiveness,
had lent itself wholly to the solicitations of the service; and for a
time the stillness, the paintings portraying the divine sorrow, the slow
procession of nameless women, the tapers, the incense, the hoary
antiquity of the ceremonial, had carried him into a little-known region
of his religious feeling. But from this he had been sharply recalled by
the suggestion of a veiled personal tragedy close at hand in that
unfinished song. His mood again became one of vast pity for her; and
issuing from the church with this feeling, there, near the very
entrance, he had come upon a rustic picture of husband, wife, and child,
with a sharpness of transition that had seemed the return of his spirit
to its own world of flesh and blood. There to him was the poetry and the
religion of life--the linked hands of lovers; the twining arms of
childhood; health and joyousness; and a quiet walk over familiar fields
in the evening air from peaceful church to peaceful home. And so,
thinking of this as he walked on alone, and thinking also of her, the
two thoughts blended, and her image stood always before him in the
pathway of his ideal future.
The history of the next several days may soon be told. He wrote to his
friends, stating that there was no game in the neighbourhood, and that
he had given up the idea of joining them and would return home. He took
the letter to the station, and waited for the train to pass southward,
watching it rush away with a subtle pleasure at being left on the
platform, as though the bridges were now burned behind him. Then he
returned to the farm-house, where Ezra met him with that look of stupid
alarm which was natural to him whenever his few thoughts were agitated
by a new situation of affairs.
Word had come from the convent that he was wanted there to move a fence
and make changes in the garden, and, proud of the charge, he wished to
go; but certain autumnal work in his own orchard and garden claimed his
time, and hence the trouble. But Gordon, who henceforth had no reason
for tarrying with the old couple, threw himself eagerly upon this
opportunity to do so, and offered his aid in despatching the tasks. So
that thus a few days passed, during which he unconsciously made his way
as far as any one had ever done into the tortuous nature of the old man,
who began to regard him with blind trustfulness.
But they were restless, serious days. One after another passed, and he
heard nothing of Sister Dolorosa. He asked himself whether she were ill,
whether her visits to old Martha had been made to cease; and he shrank
from the thought of bearing away into his life the haunting pain of such
uncertainty. But some inner change constrained him no longer to call her
name. As he sat with the old couple at night the housewife renewed her
talks with him, speaking sometimes of the convent and of Sister
Dolorosa, the cessation of whose visits plainly gave her secret concern;
but he listened in silence, preferring the privacy of his own thoughts.
Sometimes, under feint of hunting, he would take his gun in the
afternoon and stroll out over the country; but always the presence of
the convent made itself felt over the landscape, dominating it, solitary
and impregnable, like a fortress. It began to draw his eyes with a
species of fascination. He chafed against its assertion of barriers, and
could have wished that his own will might be brought into conflict with
it. It appeared to watch him; to have an eye at every window; to see in
him a lurking danger. At other times, borne to him across the darkening
fields would come the sweet vesper bell, and in imagination he would see
her entering the church amid the long procession of novices and nuns,
her hands folded across her breast, her face full of the soft glories of
the lights that streamed in through the pictured windows. Over the
fancied details of her life more and more fondly he lingered.
And thus, although at first he had been interested in her wholly upon
general grounds, believing her secretly unhappy, thus by thinking always
of her, and watching for her, and walking often beside her in his
dreams, with the folly of the young, with the romantic ardour of his
race, and as part of the never-ending blind tragedy of the world, he
came at last to feel for her, among women, that passionate pain of
yearning to know which is to know the sadness of love.
Sleepless one night, he left the house after the old couple were asleep.
The moon was shining, and unconsciously following the bent of his
thoughts, he took the footpath that led across the fields. He passed the
spot where he had first met her, and, absorbed in recollection of the
scene, he walked on until before him the convent towered high in light
and shadow. He had reached the entrance to the long avenue of elms. He
traversed it, turned aside into the garden, and, following with many
pauses around its borders, lived over again the day when she had led him
through it. The mere sense of his greater physical nearness to her
enthralled him. All her words came back: "These are daffodils. They
bloomed in March, long ago.... And here are violets, which come in
April." After awhile, leaving the garden, he walked across the lawn to
the church and sat upon the steps, trying to look calmly at this whole
episode in his life, and to summon resolution to bring it to an end. He
dwelt particularly upon the hopelessness of his passion; he made himself
believe that if he could but learn that she were not ill and
suffering--if he could but see her once more, and be very sure--he would
go away, as every dictate of reason urged.
Across the lawn stood the convent building. There caught his eye the
faint glimmer of a light through a half-opened window, and while he
looked he saw two of the nuns moving about within. Was some one dying?
Was this light the taper of the dead? He tried to throw off a sudden
weight of gloomy apprehension, and resolutely got up and walked away;
but his purpose was formed not to leave until he had intelligence of
her.
One afternoon, a few days later, happening to come to an elevated point
of the landscape, he saw her figure moving across the fields in the
distance below him. Between the convent and the farm-house, in one of
the fields, there is a circular, basin-like depression; and it was here,
hidden from distant observation, with only the azure of the heavens
above them, that their meeting took place.
On the day when she had been his guide he had told her that he was going
away on the morrow, and as she walked along now it might have been seen
that she thought herself safe from intrusion. Her eyes were bent on the
dust of the pathway. One hand was passing bead by bead upward along her
rosary. Her veil was pushed back, so that between its black border and
the glistening whiteness of her forehead there ran, like a rippling band
of gold, the exposed edges of her shining hair. In the other hand she
bore a large cluster of chrysanthemums, whose snow-white petals and
green leaves formed a strong contrast with the crimson symbol that they
partly framed against her sable bosom.
He had come up close before the noise of his feet in the stubble drew
her attention. Then she turned and saw him. But certain instincts of
self-preservation act in women with lightning quickness. She did not
recognise him, or give him time to recognise her. She merely turned
again and walked onward at the same pace. But the chrysanthemums were
trembling with the beating of her heart, and her eyes had in them that
listening look with which one awaits the on-coming of danger from
behind.
But he had stopped. His nature was simple and trustful, and he had
expected to renew his acquaintanceship at the point where it had ceased.
When, therefore, she thus reminded him, as indeed she must, that there
was no acquaintanceship between them, and that she regarded herself as
much alone as though he were nowhere in sight, his feelings were
arrested as if frozen by her coldness. Still, it was for this chance
that he had waited all these days. Another would not come; and whatever
he wished to say to her must be said now. A sensitiveness wholly novel
to his nature held him back, but a moment more and he was walking
beside her.
"I hope I do not intrude so very far," he said, in a tone of apology,
but also of wounded self-respect.
It was a difficult choice thus left to her. She could not say "Yes"
without seeming unpardonably rude; she could not say "No" without
seeming to invite his presence. She walked on for a moment, and then,
pausing, turned towards him.
"Is there anything that you wished to ask me in regard to the convent?"
This she said in the sweetest tone of apologetic courtesy, as though in
having thought only of herself at first she had neglected some larger
duty.
If he had feared that he would see traces of physical suffering on her
face, he was mistaken. She had forgotten to draw her veil close, and the
sunlight fell upon its loveliness. Never had she been to him half so
beautiful. Whatever the expression her eyes had worn before he had come
up, in them now rested only inscrutable calmness.
"There is one thing I have wished very much to know," he answered
slowly, his eyes resting on hers. "I was at the church of the convent
last Sunday and heard you sing. They said you were not well. I have
hoped every day to hear that you were better. I have not cared to go
away until I knew this."
Scarcely had he begun when a flush dyed her face, her eyes fell, and she
stood betrayed by the self-consciousness of what her own thoughts had
that day been. One hand absently tore to pieces the blooms of the
chrysanthemums, so that the petals fell down over her dark habit like
snowflakes. But when he finished, she lifted her eyes again.
"I am well now, thank you," she said; and the first smile that he had
ever seen came forth from her soul to her face. But what a smile! It
wrung his heart more than the sight of her tears could have done.
"Then I shall hope to hear you sing again to-morrow," he said quickly,
for she seemed on the point of moving away.
"I shall not sing to-morrow," she replied a little hurriedly, with
averted face, and again she started on. But he walked beside her.
"In that case I have still to thank you for the pleasure I have had. I
imagine that one would never do wrong if he could hear you sing whenever
he is tempted," he said, looking sidewise at her with a quiet, tentative
smile.
"It is not my voice," she replied more hurriedly. "It is the music of
the service. Do not thank me. Thank God."
"I have heard the service before. It was your voice that touched me."
She drew her veil about her face, and walked on in silence.
"But I have no wish to say anything against your religion," he
continued, his voice deepening and trembling. "If it has such power over
the natures of women, if it lifts them to such ideals of duty, if it
develops in them such characters, that merely to look into their faces,
to be near them, to hear their voices, is to make a man think of a
better world, I do not know why I should say anything against it."
How often, without meaning it, our words are like a flight of arrows
into another's heart. What he said but reminded her of her
unfaithfulness. And therefore while she revolved how with perfect
gentleness she might ask him to allow her to continue her way alone, she
did what she could: she spoke reverently, though all but inaudibly, in
behalf of her order.
"Our vows are perfect and divine. If they ever seem less, it is the
fault of those of us who dishonour them."
The acute self-reproach in her tone at once changed his mood.
"On the other hand, I have also asked myself this question: Is it the
creed that makes the natures of you women so beautiful, or is it the
nature of woman that gives the beauty to the creed? Is it not so with
any other idea that women espouse? with any other cause that they
undertake? Is it not so with anything that they spend their hearts upon,
toil for, and sacrifice themselves for? Do I see any beauty in your vows
except such as your life gives to them? I can believe it. I can believe
that if you had never taken those vows your life would still be
beautiful. I can believe that you could change them for others and find
yourself more nearly the woman that you strive to be--that you were
meant to be!" He spoke in the subdued voice with which one takes leave
of some hope that brightens while it disappears.
"I must ask you," she said, pausing--"I must ask you to allow me to
continue my walk alone," and her voice quivered.
He paused, too, and stood looking into her eyes in silence with the
thought that he should never see her again. The colour had died out of
his face.
"I can never forgive your vows," he said, speaking very slowly and
making an effort to appear unmoved. "I can never forgive your vows that
they make it a sin for me to speak to you. I can never forgive them that
they put between us a gulf that I cannot pass. Remember, I owe you a
great deal. I owe you higher ideas of a woman's nature and clearer
resolutions regarding my own life. Your vows perhaps make it even a sin
that I should tell you this. But by what right? By what right am I
forbidden to say that I shall remember you always, and that I shall
carry away with me into my life----"
"Will you force me to turn back?" she asked in greater agitation; and
though he could not see her face, he saw her tears fall upon her hands.
"No," he answered sadly; "I shall not force you to turn back. I know
that I have intruded. But it seemed that I could not go away without
seeing you again, to be quite sure that you were well. And when I saw
you, it seemed impossible not to speak of other things. Of course this
must seem strange to you--stranger, perhaps, than I may imagine, since
we look at human relationships so differently. My life in this world can
be of no interest to you. You cannot, therefore, understand why yours
should have any interest for me. Still, I hope you can forgive me," he
added abruptly, turning his face away as it flushed and his voice
faltered.
She lifted her eyes quickly, although they were dim. "Do not ask me to
forgive anything. There is nothing to be forgiven. It is I who must
ask--only leave me!"
"Will you say good-bye to me?" And he held out his hand.
She drew back, but, overborne by emotion he stepped forward, gently took
her hand from the rosary, and held it in both his own.
"Good-bye! But, despite the cruel barriers that they have raised between
us, I shall always----"
She foresaw what was coming. His manner told her that. She had not
withdrawn her hand. But at this point she dropped the flowers that were
in her other hand, laid it on her breast so that the longest finger
pointed towards the symbol of the transfixed heart, and looked quickly
at him with indescribable warning and distress. Then he released her,
and she turned back towards the convent.
"Mother," she said, with a frightened face, when she reached it, "I did
not go to old Martha's. Some one was hunting in the fields, and I came
back. Do not send me again, Mother, unless one of the Sisters goes with
me." And with this half-truth on her lips and full remorse for it in her
heart, she passed into that deepening imperfection of nature which for
the most of us makes up the inner world of reality.
Gordon wrote to her that night. He had not foreseen his confession. It
had been drawn from him under the influences of the moment; but since it
was made, a sense of honour would not have allowed him to stop there,
even had feeling carried him no further. Moreover, some hope had been
born in him at the moment of separation, since she had not rebuked him,
but only reminded him of her vows.
His letter was full of the confidence and enthusiasm of youth, and its
contents may be understood by their likeness to others. He unfolded the
plan of his life--the life which he was asking her to share. He dwelt
upon its possibilities, he pointed out the field of its aspirations. But
he kept his letter for some days, unable to conceive a way by which it
might be sent to its destination. At length the chance came in the
simplest of disguises.
Ezra was starting one morning to the convent. As he was leaving the
room, old Martha called to him. She sat by the hearthstone, with her
head tied up in red flannel, and her large, watery face flushed with
pain, and pointed towards a basket of apples on the window-sill.
"Take them to Sister Dolorosa, Ezra," she said. "Mind that you see
_her_, and give them to her with your own hands. And ask her why she
hasn't been to see me, and when she is coming." On this point her mind
seemed more and more troubled. "But what's the use of asking _you_ to
find out for me?" she added, flashing out at him with heroic anger.
The old man stood in the middle of the room, dry and gnarled, his small
eyes kindling into a dull rage at a taunt made in the presence of a
guest whose good opinion he desired. But he took the apples in silence
and left the room.
As Gordon followed him beyond the garden, noting how his mind was
absorbed in petty anger, a simple resolution came to him.
"Ezra," he said, handing him the letter, "when you give the Sister the
apples, deliver this. And we do not talk about business, you know,
Ezra."
The old man took the letter and put it furtively into his pocket, with a
backward shake of his head towards the house.
"Whatever risks I may have to run from other quarters, he will never
tell _her_," Gordon said to himself.
When Ezra returned in the evening he was absorbed, and Gordon noted with
relief that he was also unsuspicious. He walked some distance to meet
the old man the next two days, and his suspense became almost
unendurable, but he asked no questions. The third day Ezra drew from his
pocket a letter, which he delivered, merely saying--
"The Sister told me to give you this."
Gordon soon turned aside across the fields, and having reached a point
screened from observation, he opened the letter and read as follows:--
"I have received your letter. I have read it. But how could I
listen to your proposal without becoming false to my vows? And if
you knew that I had proved false to what I held most dear and
binding, how could you ever believe that I would be true to
anything else? Ah, no! Should you unite yourself to one who for
your sake had been faithless to the ideal of womanhood which she
regarded as supreme, you would soon withdraw from her the very love
that she had sacrificed even her hopes of Heaven to enjoy.
"But it seems possible that in writing to me you believe my vows no
longer precious to my heart and sacred to my conscience. You are
wrong. They are more dear to me at this moment than ever before,
because at this moment, as never before, they give me a mournful
admonition of my failure to exhibit to the world in my own life the
beauty of their ineffable holiness. For had there not been
something within me to lead you on--had I shown to you the sinless
nature which it is their office to create--you would never have
felt towards me as you do. You would no more have thought of loving
me than of loving an angel of God.
"The least reparation I can make for my offence is to tell you that
in offering me your love you offer me the cup of sacred
humiliation, and that I thank you for reminding me of my duty,
while I drain it to the dregs.
"After long deliberation I have written to tell you this; and if it
be allowed me to make one request, I would entreat that you will
never lay this sin of mine to the charge of my religion and my
order.
"We shall never meet again. Although I may not listen to your
proposal, it is allowed me to love you as one of the works of God.
And since there are exalted women in the world who do not
consecrate themselves to the church, I shall pray that you may find
one of these to walk by your side through life. I shall pray that
she may be worthy of you; and perhaps you will teach her sometimes
to pray for one who will always need her prayers.
"I only know that God orders our lives according to His goodness.
My feet He set in one path of duty, yours in another, and He had
separated us for ever long before He allowed us to meet. If,
therefore, having thus separated us, He yet brought us together
only that we should thus know each other and then be parted, I
cannot believe that there was not in it some needed lesson for us
both. At least, if He will deign to hear the ceaseless, fervent
petition of one so erring, He will not leave you unhappy on account
of that love for me, which in this world it will never be allowed
me to return. Farewell!"
The first part of this letter awakened in Gordon keen remorse and a
faltering of purpose, but the latter filled him with a joy that excluded
every other feeling.
"She loves me!" he exclaimed; and, as though registering a vow, he added
aloud, "And nothing--God help me!--nothing shall keep us apart."
Walking to a point of the landscape that commanded a view of the
convent, he remained there while the twilight fell, revolving how he was
to surmount the remaining barriers between them, for these now seemed
hardly more than cobwebs to be brushed aside by his hand; and often,
meanwhile, he looked towards the convent, as one might look longingly
towards some forbidden shrine, which the coming night would enable him
to approach.
VI.
A night for love it was. The great sun at setting had looked with
steadfast eye at the convent standing lonely on its wide landscape, and
had then thrown his final glance across the world towards the east; and
the moon had quickly risen and hung about it the long silvery twilight
of her heavenly watchfulness. The summer, too, which had been moving
southward, now came slowly back, borne on warm airs that fanned the
convent walls and sighed to its chaste lattices with the poetry of dead
flowers and vanished songsters. But sighed in vain. With many a prayer,
with many a cross on pure brow and shoulder and breast, with many a
pious kiss of crucifix, the convent slept. Only some little novice,
lying like a flushed figure of Sleep on a couch of snow, may have
stirred to draw one sigh, as those zephyrs, toying with her warm hair,
broke some earthly dream of too much tenderness. Or they may merely have
cooled the feverish feet of a withered nun, who clasped her dry hands in
ecstasy, as on her cavernous eyes there dawned a vision of the glories
and rewards of Paradise. But no, not all slept. At an open window on the
eastern side of the convent stood the sleepless one looking out into the
largeness of the night like one who is lost in the largeness of her
sorrow.
Across the lawn, a little distance off, stood the church of the convent.
The moonlight rested on it like a smile of peace, the elms blessed it
with tireless arms, and from the zenith of the sky down to the horizon
there rested on outstretched wings, rank above rank and pinion brushing
pinion, a host of white, angelic cloud-shapes, as though guarding the
sacred portal.
But she looked at it with timid yearning. Greater and greater had become
the need to pour into some ear a confession and a prayer for pardon. Her
peace was gone. She had been concealing her heart from the Mother
Superior. She had sinned against her vows. She had impiously offended
the Divine Mother. And to-day, after answering his letter in order that
she might defend her religion, she had acknowledged to her heart that
she loved him. But they would never meet again. To-morrow she would make
a full confession of what had taken place. Beyond that miserable ordeal
she dared not gaze into her own future.
Lost in the fears and sorrows of such thoughts, long she stood looking
out into the night, stricken with a sense of alienation from human
sympathy. She felt that she stood henceforth estranged from the entire
convent--Mother Superior, novice, and nun--as an object of reproach, and
of suffering into which no one of them could enter.
Sorer yet grew her need, and a little way across the lawn stood the
church, peaceful in the moonlight. Ah, the divine pity! If only she
might steal first alone to the shrine of her whom most she had offended,
and to an ear gracious to sorrow make confession of her frailty. At
length, overcome with this desire and gliding noiselessly out of the
room, she passed down the moonlit hall, on each side of which the nuns
were sleeping. She descended the stairway, took from the wall the key of
the church, and then softly opening the door, stepped out into the
night. For a moment she paused, icy and faint with physical fear; then,
passing like a swift shadow across the silvered lawn, she went round to
the side entrance of the church, unlocked the door, and, entering
quickly, locked herself inside. There she stood for some time with hands
pressed tightly to her fluttering heart, until bodily agitation died
away before the recollection of her mission; and there came upon her
that calmness with which the soul enacts great tragedies. Then slowly,
very slowly, hidden now, and now visible where the moonlight entered the
long, Gothic windows, she passed across the chancel towards the shrine
of one whom ancestral faith had taught her to believe divine; and before
the image of a Jewish woman--who herself in full humanity loved and
married a carpenter nearly two thousand years ago, living beside him as
blameless wife and becoming blameless mother to his children--this poor
child, whose nature was unstained as snow on the mountain peaks, poured
out her prayer to be forgiven the sin of her love.
To the woman of the world, the approaches of whose nature are defended
by the intricacies of wilfulness and the barriers of deliberate reserve;
to the woman of the world, who curbs and conceals that feeling to which
she intends to yield herself in the end, it may seem incredible that
there should have rooted itself so easily in the breast of one of her
sex this flower of a fatal passion. But it should be remembered how
unbefriended that bosom had been by any outpost of feminine
self-consciousness; how exposed it was through very belief in its
unearthly consecration; how, like some unwatched vase that had long been
collecting the sweet dews and rains of heaven, it had been silently
filling with those unbidden intimations that are shed from above as the
best gifts of womanhood. Moreover, her life was unspeakably isolate. In
the monotony of its routine a trifling event became an epoch; a fresh
impression stirred within the mind material for a chapter of history.
Lifted far above commonplace psychology of the passions, however, was
the planting and the growth of an emotion in a heart like hers.
Her prayer began. It began with the scene of her first meeting with him
in the fields, for from that moment she fixed the origin of her
unfaithfulness. Of the entire hidden life of poetic reverie and
unsatisfied desires which she had been living before, her innocent soul
took no account. Therefore, beginning with that afternoon, she passed in
review the history of her thoughts and feelings. The moon outside,
flooding the heavens with its beams, was not so intense a lamp as
memory, now turned upon the recesses of her mind. Nothing escaped
detection. His words, the scenes with him in the garden, in the
field--his voice, looks, gestures--his anxiety and sympathy--his
passionate letter--all were now vividly recalled, that they might be
forgotten; and their influence confessed, that it might for ever be
renounced. Her conscience stood beside her love as though it were some
great fast-growing deadly plant in her heart, with deep-twisted roots
and strangling tendrils, each of which to the smallest fibre must be
uptorn so that not a germ should be left.
But who can describe the prayer of such a soul? It is easy to ask to be
rid of ignoble passions. They come upon us as momentary temptations and
are abhorrent to our better selves; but of all tragedies enacted within
the theatre of the human mind what one is so pitiable as that in which a
pure being prays to be forgiven the one feeling of nature that is the
revelation of beauty, the secret of perfection, the solace of the world,
and the condition of immortality?
The passing of such a tragedy scars the nature of the penitent like the
passing of an age across a mountain rock. If there had lingered thus
long on Sister Dolorosa's nature any upland of childhood snows, these
vanished in that hour; if any vernal belt of maidenhood, it felt the hot
breath of that experience of the world and of the human destiny which
quickly ages whatever it does not destroy. So that while she prayed
there seemed to rise from within her and take flight for ever that
spotless image of herself as she once had been, and in its place to
stand the form of a woman, older, altered, and set apart by sorrow.
At length her prayer ended and she rose. It had not brought her the
peace that prayer brings to women; for the confession of her love before
the very altar--the mere coming into audience with the Eternal to
renounce it--had set upon it the seal of irrevocable truth. It is when
the victim is led to the altar of sacrifice that it turns its piteous
eyes upon the sacrificing hand and utters its poor dumb cry for life;
and it was when Sister Dolorosa bared the breast of her humanity that it
might be stabbed by the hand of her religion, that she, too, though
attempting to bless the stroke, felt the last pangs of that deep thrust.
With such a wound she turned from the altar, walked with bowed head once
more across the church, unlocked the door, stepped forth and locked it.
The night had grown more tender. The host of seraphic cloud-forms had
fled across the sky; and as she turned her eyes upward to the heavens,
there looked down upon her from their serene, untroubled heights only
the stars, that never falter or digress from their fore-written courses.
The thought came to her that never henceforth should she look up to them
without being reminded of how her own will had wandered from its orbit.
The moon rained its steady beams upon the symbol of the sacred heart on
her bosom, until it seemed to throb again with the agony of the
crucifixion. Never again should she see it without the remembrance that
_her_ sin also had pierced it afresh.
With what loneliness that sin had surrounded her! As she had issued from
the damp, chill atmosphere of the church, the warm airs of the south
quickened within her long-sleeping memories; and with the yearning of
stricken childhood she thought of her mother, to whom she had turned of
yore for sympathy; but that mother's bosom was now a mound of dust. She
looked across the lawn towards the convent where the Mother Superior and
the nuns were sleeping. To-morrow she would stand among them a greater
alien than any stranger. No; she was alone; among the millions of human
beings on the earth of God there was not one on whose heart she could
have rested her own. Not one save him--him--whose love had broken down
all barriers that it might reach and infold her. And him she had
repelled. A joy, new and indescribable, leaped within her that for him,
and not for another she suffered and was bound in this tragedy of her
fall.
Slowly she took her way along the side of the church towards the front
entrance, from which a paved walk led to the convent building. She
reached the corner, she turned, and then she paused as one might pause
who had come upon the beloved dead, returned to life.
For he was sitting on the steps of the church, leaning against one of
the pillars, his face lifted upward so that the moonlight fell upon it.
She had no time to turn back before he saw her. With a low cry of
surprise and joy he sprang up and followed along the side of the church;
for she had begun to retrace her steps to the door, to lock herself
inside. When he came up beside her, she paused. Both were trembling; but
when he saw the look of suffering on her face, acting upon the impulse
which had always impelled him to stand between her and unhappiness, he
now took both of her hands.
"Pauline!"
He spoke with all the pleading love, all the depth of nature, that was
in him.
She had attempted to withdraw her hands; but at the sound of that once
familiar name, she suddenly bowed her head as the wave of memories and
emotions passed over her; then he quickly put his arms around her, drew
her to him, and bent down and kissed her.
VII.
For hours there lasted an interview, during which he, with the delirium
of hope, she with the delirium of despair, drained at their young lips
that cup of life which is full of the first confession of love.
In recollections so overwhelming did this meeting leave Gordon on the
next morning, that he was unmindful of everything beside; and among the
consequences of absentmindedness was the wound that he gave himself by
the careless handling of his gun.
When Ezra had set out for the convent that morning he had walked with
him, saying that he would go to the station for a daily paper, but
chiefly wishing to escape the house and be alone. They had reached in
the fields a rotting fence, on each side of which grew briers and
underwood. He had expected to climb this fence, and as he stood beside
it speaking a few parting words to Ezra he absently thrust his gun
between two of the lower rails, not noticing that the lock was sprung.
Caught in the brush on the other side, it was discharged, making a wound
in his left leg a little below the thigh. He turned to a deadly
paleness, looked at Ezra with that stunned, bewildered expression seen
in the faces of those who receive a wound, and fell.
By main strength the old man lifted and bore him to the house and
hurried off to the station, near which the neighbourhood physician and
surgeon lived. But the latter was away from home; several hours passed
before he came; the means taken to stop the hæmorrhage had been
ineffectual; the loss of blood had been very great; certain foreign
matter had been carried into the wound; the professional treatment was
unskilful; and septic fever followed, so that for many days his life
hung upon a little chance. But convalescence came at last, and with it
days of clear, calm thinking. For he had not allowed news of his
accident to be sent home or to his friends; and except the old couple,
the doctor, and the nurse whom the latter had secured, he had no company
but his thoughts.
No tidings had come to him of Sister Dolorosa since his accident; and
nothing had intervened to remove that sad image of her which had haunted
him through fever and phantasy and dream since the night of their final
interview. For it was then that he had first realised in how pitiless a
tragedy her life had become entangled, and how conscience may fail to
govern a woman's heart in denying her the right to love, but may still
govern her actions in forbidding her to marry. To plead with her had
been to wound only the more deeply a nature that accepted even this
pleading as a further proof of its own disloyalty, and was forced by it
into a state of more poignant humiliation. What wonder, therefore, if
there had been opened in his mind from that hour a certain wound which
grew deeper and deeper, until, by comparison, his real wound seemed
painless and insignificant.
Nevertheless, it is true that during this interview he had not been able
to accept her decision as irreversible. The spell of her presence over
him was too complete; even his wish to rescue her from a lot, henceforth
unhappier still, too urgent; so that in parting he had clung to the
secret hope that little by little he might change her conscience, which
now interposed the only obstacle between them.
Even the next day, when he had been wounded and life was rapidly flowing
from him, and earthly ties seemed soon to be snapped, he had thought
only of this tie, new and sacred, and had written to her. Poor boy!--he
had written, as with his heart's blood, his brief, pathetic appeal that
she would come and be united to him before he died. In all ages of the
world there have been persons, simple in nature and simple in their
faith in another life, who have forgotten everything else in the last
hour but the supreme wish to grapple to them those they love, for
eternity, and at whatever cost. Such simplicity of nature and faith
belonged to him; for although in Kentucky the unrest of the century
touching belief in the supernatural, and the many phases by which this
expresses itself, are not unknown, they had never affected him. He
believed as his fathers had believed, that to be united in this world in
any relation is to be united in that relation, mysteriously changed yet
mysteriously the same, in another.
But this letter had never been sent. There had been no one to take it at
the time; and when Ezra returned with the physician he had fainted away
from loss of blood.
Then had followed the dressing of the wound, days of fever and
unconsciousness, and then the assurance that he would get well. Thus,
nearly a month had passed, and for him a great change had come over the
face of nature and the light of the world. With that preternatural calm
of mind which only an invalid or a passionless philosopher ever obtains,
he now looked back upon an episode which thus acquired fictitious
remoteness. So weak that he could scarcely lift his head from his
pillow, there left his heart the keen, joyous sense of human ties and
pursuits. He lost the key to the motives and forces of his own
character. But it is often the natural result of such illness that while
the springs of feeling seem to dry up, the conscience remains sensitive,
or even burns more brightly, as a star through a rarer atmosphere. So
that, lying thus in the poor farm-house during dreary days, with his
life half-gone out of him, and with only the sad image of her always
before his eyes, he could think of nothing but his cruel folly in having
broken in upon her peace; for perfect peace of some sort she must have
had in comparison with what was now left her.
Beneath his pillow he kept her letter, and as he often read it over he
asked himself how he could ever have hoped to change the conscience
which had inspired such a letter as that. If her heart belonged to him,
did not her soul belong to her religion; and if one or the other must
give way, could it be doubtful with such, a nature as hers which would
come out victorious? Thus he said to himself that any further attempt to
see her could but result in greater suffering to them both, and that
nothing was left him but what she herself had urged--to go away and
resign her to a life from which he had too late found out that she could
never be divorced.
As soon as he had come to this decision, he began to think of her as
belonging only to his past. The entire episode became a thing of memory
and irreparable incompleteness; and with the conviction that she was
lost to him her image passed into that serene, reverential sanctuary of
our common nature, where all the highest that we have grasped at and
missed, and all the beauty that we have loved and lost, take the forms
of statues around dim walls and look down upon us in mournful,
never-changing perfection.
As he lay one morning revolving his altered purpose, Ezra came quietly
into the room and took from a table near the foot of the bed a waiter on
which were a jelly-glass and a napkin.
"_She_ said I'd better take these back this morning," he observed,
looking at Gordon for his approval, and motioning with his head towards
that quarter of the house where Martha was supposed to be.
"Wait awhile, will you, Ezra?" he replied, looking at the old man with
the dark, quiet eye of an invalid. "I think I ought to write a few lines
this morning to thank them for their kindness. Come back in an hour,
will you?"
The things had been sent from the convent; for, from the time that news
had reached the Mother Superior of the accident of the young stranger
who had visited the convent some days before, there had regularly come
to him delicate attentions which could not have been supplied at the
farmhouse. He often asked himself whether they were not inspired by
_her_; and he thought that when the time came for him to write his
thanks, he would put into the expression of them something that would
be understood by her alone--something that would stand for gratitude and
a farewell.
When Ezra left the room, with the thought of now doing this another
thought came unexpectedly to him. By the side of the bed there stood a
small table on which were writing materials and a few books that had
been taken from his valise. He stretched out his hand, and opening one
of them took from it a letter which bore the address, "Sister Dolorosa."
It contained those appealing lines that he had written her on the day of
his accident; and with calm, curious sadness he now read them over and
over, as though they had never come from him. From the mere monotony of
this exercise sleep overtook him, and he had scarcely restored the
letter to the envelope and laid it back on the table before his eyelids
closed.
While he still lay asleep, Ezra came quietly into the room again, and
took up the waiter with the jelly-glass and the napkin. Then he looked
around for the letter that he was to take. He was accustomed to carry
Gordon's letters to the station, and his eye now rested on the table
where they were always to be found. Seeing one on it, he walked across,
took it up and read the address, "Sister Dolorosa," hesitated, glanced
at Gordon's closed eyes, and then, with an intelligent nod to signify
that he could understand without further instruction, he left the room
and set out briskly for the convent.
Sister Dolorosa was at the cistern filling a bucket with water when he
came up and, handing her the letter, passed on to the convent kitchen.
She looked at it with indifference; then she opened and read it; and
then in an instant everything whirled before her eyes, and in her ears
the water sounded loud as it dropped from the chain back into the
cistern. And then she was gone--gone with a light, rapid step, down, the
avenue of elms, through the gate, across the meadows, out into the
fields--bucket and cistern, Mother Superior and sisterhood, vows and
martyrs, zeal of Carmelite, passion of Christ, all forgotten.
When, nearly a month before, news had reached the Mother Superior of the
young stranger's accident, in accordance with the rule which excludes
from the convent worldly affairs, she had not made it known except to
those who were to aid in carrying out her kindly plans for him. To
Sister Dolorosa, therefore, the accident had just occurred, and
now--now as she hastened to him--he was dying.
During the intervening weeks she had undergone by insensible degrees a
deterioration of nature. Prayer had not passed her lips. She believed
that she had no right to pray. Nor had she confessed. From such, a
confession as she had now to make, certain new-born instincts of
womanhood bade her shrink more deeply into the privacy of her own being.
And therefore she had become more scrupulous, if possible, of outward
duties, that no one might be led to discover the paralysis of her
spiritual life. But there was that change in her which soon drew
attention; and thenceforth, in order to hide her heart, she began to
practise with the Mother Superior little acts of self-concealment and
evasion, and by-and-by other little acts of pretence and feigning,
until--God pity her!--being most sorely pressed by questions, when
sometimes she would be found in tears or sitting listless with her hands
in her lap like one who is under the spell of mournful phantasies, these
became other little acts of positive deception. But for each of them
remorse preyed upon her the more ruthlessly, so that she grew thin and
faded, with a shadow of fear darkening always her evasive eyes.
What most held her apart, and most she deemed put upon her the angry ban
of Heaven, was the consciousness that she still loved him, and that she
was even bound to him the more inseparably since the night of their last
meeting. For it was then that emotions had been awakened which drew her
to him in ways that love alone could not have done. These emotions had
their source in the belief that she owed him reparation for the
disappointment which she had brought upon his life. The recollection of
his face when she had denied him hope rose in constant reproach before
her; and since she held herself blamable that he had loved her, she took
the whole responsibility of his unhappiness.
It was this sense of having wronged him that cleft even conscience in
her and left her struggling. But how to undo the wrong--this she vainly
pondered; for he was gone, bearing away into his life the burden of
enticed and baffled hope.
On the morning when she was at the cistern--for the Sisters of the Order
have among them such interchange of manual offices--if, as she read the
letter that Ezra gave her, any one motive stood out clear in the stress
of that terrible moment, it was, that having been false to other duties
she might at least be true to this. She felt but one desire--to atone to
him by any sacrifice of herself that would make his death more peaceful.
Beyond this everything was void and dark within her as she hurried on,
except the consciousness that by this act she separated herself from her
Order and terminated her religious life in utter failure and disgrace.
The light, rapid step with which she had started soon brought her across
the fields. As she drew near the house, Martha, who had caught sight of
her figure through the window, made haste to the door and stood awaiting
her. Sister Dolorosa merely approached and said--
"Where is he?"
For a moment the old woman did not answer. Then she pointed to a door at
the opposite end of the porch, and with a sparkle of peculiar pleasure
in her eyes she saw Sister Dolorosa cross and enter it. A little while
longer she stood, watching the keyhole furtively, but then went back to
the fireside, where she sat upright and motionless with the red flannel
pushed back from her listening ears.
The room was dimly lighted through half-closed shutters. Gordon lay
asleep near the edge of the bed, with his face turned towards the door.
It might well have been thought the face of one dying. Her eyes rested
on it a moment, and then with a stifled sob and moan she glided across
the room and sank on her knees at the bedside. In the utter
self-forgetfulness of her remorse, pity, and love, she put one arm
around his neck, she buried her face close beside his.
He had awaked, bewildered, as he saw her coming towards him. He now took
her arm from around his neck, pressed her hand again and again to his
lips, and then laying it on his heart crossed his arms over it, letting
one of his hands rest on her head. For a little while he could not trust
himself to speak; his love threatened to overmaster his
self-renunciation. But then, not knowing why she had come unless from
some great sympathy for his sufferings, or perhaps to see him once more
since he was now soon to go away, and not understanding any cause for
her distress but the tragedy in which he had entangled her life--feeling
only sorrow for her sorrow and wishing only by means of his last words
to help her back to such peace as she still might win, he said to her
with immeasurable gentleness--
"I thought you would never come! I thought I should have to go away
without seeing you again! They tell me it is not yet a month since the
accident, but it seems to me so _long_--a lifetime! I have lain here
day after day thinking it over, and I see things differently now--so
differently! That is why I wanted to see you once more. I wanted you to
understand that I felt you had done right in refusing--in refusing to
marry me. I wanted to ask you never to blame yourself for what has
happened--never to let any thought of having made _me_ unhappy add
to the sorrow of your life. It is my fault, not yours. But I meant it--God
_knows_, I meant it!--for the happiness of us both? I believed that
your life was not suited to you. I meant to make you happy! But since you
_cannot_ give up your life, I have only been unkind. And since you
think it wrong to give it up, I am glad that you are so true to it! If you
_must_ live it, Heaven only knows how glad I am that you will live it
heroically. And Heaven keep me equally true to the duty in mine, that I
also shall not fail in it! If we never meet again, we can always think
of each other as living true to ourselves and to one another. Don't deny
me this! Let me believe that your thoughts and prayers will always follow
me. Even your vows will not deny me this! It will always keep us near each
other, and it will bring us together where they cannot separate us."
He had spoken with entire repression of himself, in the slow voice of an
invalid, and on the stillness of the room each word had fallen with hard
distinctness. But now, with the thought of losing her, by a painful
effort he moved closer to the edge of the bed, put his arms around her
neck, drew her face against his own, and continued--
"But do not think it is easy to tell you this! Do not think it is easy
to give you up! Do not think that I do not love you! O Pauline--not in
_another_ life, but in _this_--_in this_!" He could say no
more; and out of his physical weakness tears rose to his eyes and fell
drop by drop upon her veil.
VIII.
Sister Dolorosa had been missed from the convent. There had been inquiry
growing ever more anxious, and search growing ever more hurried. They
found her bucket overturned at the cistern, and near it the print of her
feet in the moist earth. But she was gone. They sought her in every
hidden closet, they climbed to the observatory and scanned the
surrounding fields. Work was left unfinished, prayer unended, as the
news spread through the vast building; and as time went by and nothing
was heard of her, uneasiness became alarm, and alarm became a vague,
immeasurable foreboding of ill. Each now remembered how strange of late
had been Sister Dolorosa's life and actions, and no one had the heart to
name her own particular fears to any other or to read them in any
other's eyes. Time passed on and discipline in the convent was
forgotten. They began to pour out into the long corridors, and in
tumultuous groups passed this, way and that, seeking the Mother
Superior. But the Mother Superior had gone to the church with the same
impulse that in all ages has brought the human heart to the altar of God
when stricken by peril or disaster; and into the church they also
gathered. Into the church likewise came the white flock of the novices,
who had burst from their isolated quarter of the convent with a sudden
contagion of fear. When, therefore, the Mother Superior rose from where
she had been kneeling, turned, and in the dark church saw them assembled
close around her, pallid, anxious, disordered, and looking with helpless
dependence to her for that assurance for which she had herself in
helpless dependence looked to God, so unnerved was she by the spectacle
that strength failed her and she sank upon the steps of the altar,
stretching out her arms once more in voiceless supplication towards the
altar of the Infinite helpfulness.
But at that moment a little novice, whom Sister Dolorosa loved and whom
she had taught the music of the harp, came running into the church,
wringing her hands and crying. When she was half-way down the aisle, in
a voice that rang through the building she called out--
"O Mother, she is coming! Something has happened to her! Her veil is
gone!" and, turning again, she ran out of the church.
They were hurrying after her when a note of command, inarticulate but
imperious, from the Mother Superior arrested every foot and drew every
eye in that direction. Voice had failed her, but with a gesture full of
dignity and reproach she waved them back, and supporting her great form
between two of the nuns, she advanced slowly down the aisle of the
church and passed out by the front entrance. But they forgot to obey her
and followed; and when she descended the steps to the bottom and made a
sign that she would wait there, on the steps behind they stood grouped
and crowded back to the sacred doors.
Yes, she was coming--coming up the avenue of elms--coming slowly, as
though her strength were almost gone. As she passed under the trees on
one side of the avenue she touched their trunks one by one for support.
She walked with her eyes on the ground and with the abstraction of one
who has lost the purpose of walking. When she was perhaps half-way up
the avenue, as she paused by one of the trees and supported herself
against it, she raised her eyes and saw them all waiting to receive her
on the steps of the church. For a little while she stood and surveyed
the scene; the Mother Superior standing in front, her sinking form
supported between two Sisters, her hands clasping the crucifix to her
bosom; behind her the others, step above step, back to the doors; some
looking at her with frightened faces; others with their heads buried on
each other's shoulders; and hiding somewhere in the throng, the little
novice, only the sound of whose sobbing revealed her presence. Then she
took her hand from the tree, walked on quite steadily until she was
several yards away, and paused again.
She had torn off her veil and her head was bare and shining. She had
torn the sacred symbol from her bosom, and through the black rent they
could see the glistening whiteness of her naked breast. Comprehending
them in one glance, as though she wished them all to listen, she looked
into the face of the Mother Superior, and began to speak in a voice
utterly forlorn, as of one who has passed the limits of suffering.
"Mother!----"
"Mother!----"
She passed one hand slowly across her forehead, to brush away some cloud
from her brain, and for the third time she began to speak--
"Mother!----"
Then she paused, pressed both palms quickly to her temples, and turned
her eyes in bewildered appeal towards the Mother Superior. But she did
not fall. With a cry that might have come from the heart of the
boundless pity the Mother Superior broke away from the restraining arms
of the nuns and rushed forward and caught her to her bosom.
IX.
The day had come when Gordon was well enough to go home. As he sat
giving directions to Ezra, who was awkwardly packing his valise, he
looked over the books, papers, and letters that lay on the table near
the bed.
"There is one letter missing," he said, with a troubled expression, as
he finished his search. Then he added quickly, in a tone of helpless
entreaty--
"You couldn't have taken it to the station and mailed it with the
others, could you, Ezra? It was not to go to the station. It was to
have gone to the convent."
The last sentence he uttered rather to his own thought than for the ear
of his listener.
"I _took_ it to the convent," said Ezra, stoutly raising himself from
over the valise in the middle of the floor. "I didn't _take_ it to the
station!"
Gordon wheeled on him, giving a wrench to his wound which may have
caused the groan that burst from him, and left him white and trembling.
"You took it _to the convent_! Great God, Ezra! When?"
"The day you _told_ me to take it," replied Ezra simply. "The day the
Sister came to see you."
"O _Ezra_!" he cried piteously, looking into the rugged, faithful
countenance of the old man, and feeling that he had not the right to
censure him.
Now for the first time he comprehended the whole significance of what
had happened. He had never certainly known what motive had brought her
to him that day. He had never been able to understand why, having come,
she had gone away with such abruptness. Scarcely had he begun to speak
to her when she had strangely shrunk from him; and scarcely had he
ceased speaking when she had left the room without a word, and without
his having so much as seen her face.
Slowly now the sad truth forced itself upon his mind that she had come
in answer to his entreaty. She must have thought his letter just
written, himself just wounded and dying. It was as if he had betrayed
her into the utmost expression of her love for him and in that moment
had coldly admonished her of her duty. For him she had broken what was
the most sacred obligation of her life, and in return he had given her
an exhortation to be faithful to her vows.
He went home to one of the older secluded country-places of the
Blue-grass Region not far from Lexington. His illness served to account
for a strange gravity and sadness of nature in him. When the winter had
passed and spring had come, bringing perfect health again, this sadness
only deepened. For health had brought back the ardour of life. The
glowing colours of the world returned; and with these there flowed back
into his heart, as waters flow back into a well that has gone dry, the
perfect love of youth and strength with which he had loved her and tried
to win her at first. And with this love of her came back the first
complete realisation that he had lost her; and with this pain, that
keenest pain of having been most unkind to her when he had striven to be
kindest.
He now looked back upon his illness, as one who has gained some clear
headland looks down upon a valley so dark and overhung with mist that he
cannot trace his own course across it. He was no longer in sympathy with
that mood of self-renunciation which had influenced him in their last
interview. He charged himself with having given up too easily; for might
he not, after all, have won her? Might he not, little by little, have
changed her conscience, as little by little he had gained her love?
Would it have been possible, he asked himself again and again, for her
ever to have come to him as she had done that day, had not her
conscience approved? Of all his torturing thoughts, none cost him
greater suffering than living over in imagination what must have
happened to her since then--the humiliation, perhaps public exposure;
followed by penalties and sorrows of which he durst not think, and
certainly a life more unrelieved in gloom and desolation.
In the summer his father's health began to fail and in the autumn he
died. The winter was passed in settling the business of the estate, and
before the spring passed again Gordon found himself at the head of
affairs, and stretching out before him, calm and clear, the complete
independence of his new-found manhood. His life was his own to make it
what he would. As fortunes go in Kentucky he was wealthy, his farm being
among the most beautiful of the beautiful ones which make up that land,
and his homestead being dear through family ties and those intimations
of fireside peace which lay closest the heart of his ideal life. But
amid all his happiness, that one lack which made the rest appear
lacking--that vacancy within which nothing would fill! The beauty of the
rich land henceforth brought him the dream-like recollection of a rough,
poor country a hundred miles away. Its quiet homesteads, with the
impression they create of sweet and simple lives, reminded him only of a
convent standing lonely and forbidding on its wide landscape. The calm
liberty of woods and fields, the bounding liberty of life, the
enlightened liberty of conscience and religion, which were to him the
best gifts of his State, his country, and his time, forced on him
perpetual contrast with the ancient confinement in which she languished.
Still he threw himself resolutely into his duties. In all that he did or
planned he felt a certain sacred, uplifting force added to his life by
that high bond through which he had sought to link their sundered
pathways. But, on the other hand, the haunting thought of what might
have befallen her since became a corrosive care, and began to eat out
the heart of his resolute purposes.
So that when the long, calm summer had passed and autumn had come,
bringing him lonelier days in the brown fields, lonelier rides on
horseback through the gorgeous woods, and lonelier evenings beside his
rekindled hearth-stones, he could bear the suspense no longer, and made
up his mind to go back, if but to hear tidings whether she yet were
living in the convent. He realised, of course, that under no
circumstances could he ever again speak to her of his love. He had put
himself on the side of her conscience against his own cause; but he felt
that he owed it to himself to dissipate uncertainty regarding her fate.
This done, he could return, however sadly, and take up the duties of his
life with better heart.
X.
One Sunday afternoon he got off at the little station. From one of the
rustic loungers on the platform he learned that old Ezra and Martha had
gone the year before to live with a son in a distant State, and that
their scant acres had been absorbed in the convent domain.
Slowly he took his way across the sombre fields. Once more he reached
the brown footpath and the edge of the pale, thin corn. Once more the
summoning whistle of the quail came sweet and clear from the depths of a
neighbouring thicket. Silently in the reddening west were rising the
white cathedrals of the sky. It was on yonder hill-top he had first seen
her, standing as though transfigured in the evening light. Overwhelmed
by the memories which the place evoked, he passed on towards the
convent. The first sight of it in the distance smote him with a pain so
sharp that a groan escaped his lips as from a reopened wound.
It was the hour of the vesper service. Entering the church he sat where
he had sat before. How still it was, how faint the autumnal sunlight
stealing in through the sainted windows, how motionless the dark company
of nuns seated on one side of the nave, how rigid the white rows of
novices on the other!
With sad fascination of search his eyes roved among the black-shrouded
devotees. She was not there. In the organ-loft above, a voice, poor and
thin, began to pour out its wavering little tide of song. She was not
there, then. Was her soul already gone home to Heaven?
Noiselessly from behind the altar the sacristine had come forth and
begun to light the candles. With eyes strained and the heart gone out of
him he hung upon the movements of her figure. A slight, youthful figure
it was--slighter, as though worn and wasted; and the hands which so
firmly bore the long taper looked too white and fragile to have upheld
aught heavier than the stalk of a lily.
With infinite meekness and reverence she moved hither and thither about
the shrine, as though each footfall were a step nearer the glorious
Presence, each breath a prayer. One by one there sprang into being,
beneath her touch of love, the silvery spires of sacred flame. No angel
of the night ever more softly lit the stars of heaven. And it was thus
that he saw her for the last time--folded back to the bosom of that
faith from which it was left him to believe that he had all but rescued
her to love and happiness, and set, as a chastening admonition, to tend
the mortal fires on the altar of eternal service.
Looking at her across the vast estranging gulf of destiny, heart-broken,
he asked himself in his poor yearning way whether she longer had any
thought of him or longer loved him. For answer he had only the assurance
given in her words, which now rose as a benediction in his memory--
"If He will deign to hear the ceaseless, fervent petition of one so
erring, He will not leave you unhappy on account of that love for me
which in this world it will never be allowed me to return."
One highest star of adoration she kindled last, and then turned and
advanced down the aisle. He was sitting close to it, and as she came
towards him, with irresistible impulse he bent forward to meet her, his
lips parted as though to speak, his eyes implored her for recognition,
his hands were instinctively moved to attract her notice. But she passed
him with unuplifted eyes. The hem of her dress swept across his foot. In
that intense moment, which compressed within itself the joy of another
meeting and the despair of an eternal farewell--in that moment he may
have tried to read through her face and beyond it in her very soul the
story of what she must have suffered. To any one else, on her face
rested only that beauty, transcending all description, which is born of
the sorrow of earth and the peace of God.
Mournful as was this last sight of her, and touched with remorse, he
could yet bear it away in his heart for long remembrance not untempered
by consolation. He saw her well; he saw her faithful; he saw her bearing
the sorrows of her lot with angelic sweetness. Through years to come the
beauty of this scene might abide with him, lifted above the realm of
mortal changes by the serenitude of her immovable devotion.
XI.
There was thus spared him knowledge of the great change that had taken
place regarding her within the counsels of the Order; nor, perhaps, was
he ever to learn of the other changes, more eventful still, that were
now fast closing in upon her destiny.
When the Creator wishes to create a woman, the beauty of whose nature is
to prefigure the types of an immortal world, He endows her more
plenteously with the faculty of innocent love. The contravention of this
faculty has time after time resulted in the most memorable tragedies
that have ever saddened the history of the race. He had given to the
nature of Pauline Cambron two strong, unwearying wings: the pinion of
faith and the pinion of love. It was His will that she should soar by
the use of both. But they had denied her the use of one; and the vain
and bewildered struggles which marked her life thenceforth were as those
of a bird that should try to rise into the air with one of its wings
bound tight against its bosom.
After the illness which followed upon the events of that terrible day,
she took towards her own conduct the penitential attitude enjoined by
her religion. There is little need to lay bare all that followed. She
had passed out of her soft world of heroic dreams into the hard world of
unheroic reality. She had chosen a name to express her sympathy with the
sorrows of the world, and the sorrows of the world had broken in upon
her. Out of the white dawn of the imagination she had stepped into the
heat and burden of the day.
Long after penances and prayers were over, and by others she might have
felt herself forgiven, she was as far as ever from that forgiveness
which comes from within. It is not characteristic of a nature such as
hers to win pardon so easily for such an offence as she considered hers.
Indeed, as time passed on, the powers of her being seemed concentrated
more and more in one impassioned desire to expiate her sin; for, as time
passed on, despite penances and prayers, she realised that she still
loved him.
As she pondered this she said to herself that peace would never come
unless she should go elsewhere and begin life over in some place that
was free from the memories of her fall, there was so much to remind her
of him. She could not go into the garden without recalling the day when
they had walked through it side by side. She could not cross the
threshold of the church without being reminded that it was the scene of
her unfaithfulness and of her exposure. The graveyard, the footpath,
across the fields, the observatory--all were full of disturbing images.
And therefore she besought the Mother Superior to send her away to some
one of the missions of the Order, thinking that thus she would win
forgetfulness of him and singleness of heart.
But while the plan of doing this was yet being considered by the Mother
Superior, there happened one of those events which seem to fit into the
crises of our lives as though determined by the very laws of fate. The
attention of the civilised world had not yet been fixed upon the heroic
labours of the Belgian priest, Father Damien, among the lepers of the
island of Molokai. But it has been stated that near the convent are the
monks of La Trappe. Among these monks were friends of the American
priest, Brother Joseph, who for years was one of Father Damien's
assistants; and to these friends this priest from time to time wrote
letters, in which he described at great length the life of the leper
settlement and the work of the small band of men and women who had gone
to labour in that remote and awful vineyard. The contents of these
letters were made known to the ecclesiastical superior of the convent;
and one evening he made them the subject of a lecture to the assembled
nuns and novices, dwelling with peculiar eloquence upon the devotion of
the three Franciscan Sisters who had become outcasts from human society
that they might nurse and teach leprous girls, until inevitable death
should overtake them also.
Among that breathless audience of women there was one soul on whom his
words fell with the force of a message from the Eternal. Here, then, at
last, was offered her a pathway by following meekly to the end of which
she might perhaps find blessedness. The real Man of Sorrows appeared to
stand in it and beckon her on to the abodes of those abandoned creatures
whose sufferings He had with peculiar pity so often stretched forth His
hand to heal. When she laid before the Mother Superior her petition to
be allowed to go, it was at first refused, being regarded as a momentary
impulse; but months passed, and at intervals, always more earnestly, she
renewed her request. It was pointed out to her that when one has gone
among the lepers there is no return; the alternatives are either
lifelong banishment, or death from leprosy, usually at the end of a few
years. But always her reply was--
"In the name of Christ, Mother, let me go!"
Meantime it had become clear to the Mother Superior that some change of
scene must be made. The days of Sister Dolorosa's usefulness in the
convent were too plainly over.
It had not been possible in that large household of women to conceal the
fact of her unfaithfulness to her vows. As one black veil whispered to
another--as one white veil communed with its attentive neighbour--little
by little events were gathered and pieced together, until, in different
forms of error and rumour, the story became known to all. Some from
behind window lattices had watched her in the garden with the young
stranger on the day of his visiting the convent. Others had heard of his
lying wounded at the farm-house. Still others were sure that under
pretext of visiting old Martha she had often met him in the fields. And
then the scene on the steps of the church, when she had returned soiled
and torn and fainting.
So that from the day on which she arose from her illness and began to go
about the convent, she was singled out as a target for those small
arrows which the feminine eye directs with such faultless skill at one
of its own sex. With scarcely perceptible movements they would draw
aside when passing her, as though to escape corrupting contact. Certain
ones of the younger Sisters, who were jealous of her beauty, did not
fail to drop inuendoes for her to overhear. And upon some of the
novices, whose minds were still wavering between the church and the
world, it was thought that her example might have a dangerous influence.
It is always wrong to judge motives; but it is possible that the head of
the Order may have thought it best that this ruined life should take on
the halo of martyrdom, from which fresh lustre would be reflected upon
the annals of the church. However this may be, after about eighteen
months of waiting, during which correspondence was held with the
Sandwich Islands, it was determined that Sister Dolorosa should be
allowed to go thither and join the labours of the Franciscan Sisters.
From the day when consent was given she passed into that peace with
which one ascends the scaffold or awaits the stake. It was this look of
peace that Gordon had seen on her face as she moved hither and thither
about the shrine.
Only a few weeks after he had thus seen her the day came for her to go.
Of those who took part in the scene of farewell she was the most
unmoved. A month later she sailed from San Francisco for Honolulu; and
in due time there came from Honolulu to the Mother Superior the
following letter. It contains all that remains of the earthly history of
Pauline Cambron--
XII.
"KALAWAO, MOLOKAI, HAWAIIAN ISLANDS,
"_January 1, 188--_.
"DEAR MOTHER,--I entreat you not to let the sight of this strange
handwriting, instead of one that must be so familiar, fill you with too
much alarm. I hasten to assure you that before my letter closes you will
understand why Sister Dolorosa has not written herself.
"Since the hour when the vessel sailed from the American port, bearing
to us that young life as a consecrated helper in our work among these
suffering outcasts of the human race, I know that your thoughts and
prayers have followed her with unceasing anxiety; so that first I should
give you tidings that the vessel reached Honolulu in safety. I should
tell you also that she had a prosperous voyage, and that she is now
happy--far happier than when she left you. I know, likewise, that your
imagination has constantly hovered about this island, and that you have
pictured it to yourself as the gloomiest of all spots in the universe of
God; so that in the next place I should try to remove this impression by
giving you some description of the island itself, which has now become
her unchanging home.
"The island of Molokai, then, on which the leper settlement has been
located by the Government, is long, and shaped much like the leaf of the
willow-tree. The Sandwich Islands, as you well know, are a group of
volcanoes out of which the fires have for the most part long since died.
Molokai, therefore, is really but a mountain of cooled lava, half of
which perhaps is beneath the level of the sea. The two leper villages
are actually situated in the cup of an ancient crater. The island is
very low along the southern coast, and slopes gradually to its greatest
altitude on the northern ridge, from which the descent to the sea is in
places all but perpendicular. It is between the bases of these northern
cliffs and the sea that the villages are built. In the rear of them is a
long succession of towering precipices and wild ravines, that are solemn
and terrible to behold; and in front of them there is a coast-line so
rough with pointed rocks that as the waves rush in upon them spray is
often thrown to the height of fifty or a hundred feet. It is this that
makes the landing at times so dangerous; and at other times, when a
storm has burst, so fatal. So that shipwrecks are not unknown, dear
Mother, and sometimes add to the sadness of life in this place.
"But from this description you would get only a mistaken idea of the
aspect of the island. It is sunny and full of tropical loveliness. The
lapse of centuries has in places covered the lava with exquisite
verdure. Soft breezes blow here, about the dark cliffs hang purple
atmospheres, and above them drift pink and white clouds. Sometimes the
whole island is veiled in golden mist. Beautiful streams fall down its
green precipices into the sea, and the sea itself is of the most
brilliant blue. In its depths are growths of pure white corals, which
are the homes of fishes of gorgeous colours.
"If I should speak no longer of the island, but of the people, I could
perhaps do something further still to dissipate the dread with which you
and other strangers must regard us. The inhabitants are a simple,
generous, happy race; and there are many spots in this world--many in
Europe and Asia, perhaps some in your own land--where the scenes of
suffering and death are more poignant and appalling. The lepers live for
the most part in decent white cottages. Many are the happy faces that
are seen among them; so that, strange as it may seem, healthy people
would sometimes come here to live if the laws did not forbid. So much
has Christianity done that one may now be buried in consecrated ground.
"If all this appears worldly and frivolous, dear Mother, forgive me! If
I have chosen to withhold from you news of her, of whom alone I know you
are thinking, it is because I have wished to give you as bright a
picture as possible. Perhaps you will thus become the better prepared
for what is to follow.
"So that before I go further, I shall pause again to describe to you one
spot which is the loveliest on the island. About a mile and a half from
the village of Kalawao there is a rocky point which is used as an
irregular landing-place when the sea is wild. Just beyond this point
there is an inward curve of the coast, making an inlet of the sea; and
from the water's edge there slopes backward into the bosom of the island
a deep ravine. Down this ravine there falls and winds a gleaming white
cataract, and here the tropical vegetation grows most beautiful. The
trees are wreathed with moist creepers; the edges and crevices of the
lava blocks are fringed with ferns and moss. Here the wild ginger blooms
and the crimson lehua. Here grow trees of orange and palm and punhala
groves. Here one sees the rare honey-bird with its plumage of scarlet
velvet, the golden plover, and the beautiful white bos'un-bird, wheeling
about the black cliff heights. The spot is as beautiful as a scene in
some fairy tale. When storms roll in from the sea the surf flows far
back into this ravine, and sometimes--after the waters have subsided--a
piece of wreckage from the ocean is left behind.
"Forgive me once more, O dear Mother! if again I seem to you so idle and
unmeaning in my words. But I have found it almost impossible to go on;
and, besides, I think you will thank me, after you have read my letter
through, for telling you first of this place.
"From the day of our first learning that there was a young spirit among
you who had elected, for Christ's sake, to come here and labour with us,
we had counted the days till she should arrive. The news had spread
throughout the leper settlement. Father Damien had made it known to the
lepers in Kalawao, Father Wendolen had likewise told it among the lepers
in Kalapaupa, and the Protestant ministers spoke of it to their flocks.
Thus her name had already become familiar to hundreds of them, and many
a prayer had been offered up for her safety.
"Once a week there comes to Molokai from Honolulu a little steamer
called _Mokolii_. When it reached here last Saturday morning it brought
the news that just before it sailed from Honolulu the vessel bearing
Sister Dolorosa had come into port. She had been taken in charge by the
Sisters until the _Mokolii_ should return and make the next trip. I
should add that the steamer leaves at about five o'clock in the
afternoon, and that it usually reaches here at about dawn of the
following morning in ordinary weather.
"And now, dear Mother, I beseech you to lay my letter aside! Do not read
further now. Lay it aside, and do not take it up again until you have
sought in prayer the consolation of our divine religion for the sorrows
of our lives.
"I shall believe that you have done this, and that, as you now go on
with the reading of my letter, you have gained the fortitude to hear
what I have scarcely the power to write. Heaven knows that in my poor
way I have sought to prepare you!
"As it was expected that the steamer would reach the island about dawn
on Saturday morning, as usual, it had been arranged that many of us
should be at the landing-place to give her welcome. But about midnight
one of the terrific storms which visit this region suddenly descended,
enveloping the heavens, that had been full of the light of the stars, in
impenetrable darkness. We were sleepless with apprehension that the
vessel would be driven upon the rocks--such was the direction of the
storm--long before it could come opposite the villages: and a few hours
before day Father Damien, accompanied by Father Conradi, Brother James,
and Brother Joseph, went down to the coast. Through the remaining hours
of the night they watched and waited, now at one point, and now at
another, knowing that the vessel could never land in such a storm. As
the dawn broke they followed up the coast until they came opposite that
rocky point of which I have already spoken as being an irregular
landing-place.
"Here they were met by two or three men who were drenched with the sea,
and just starting towards the villages, and from them they learned that,
an hour or two before, the steamer had been driven upon the hidden rocks
of the point. It had been feared that it would soon be sunk or dashed to
pieces, and as quickly as possible a boat had been put off, in which
were the leper girls that were being brought from Honolulu. There was
little hope that it would ever reach the shore, but it was the last
chance of life. In this boat, dear Mother, Sister Dolorosa also was
placed. Immediately afterwards a second boat was put off, containing the
others that were on board.
"Of the fate of the first boat they had learned nothing. Their own had
been almost immediately capsized, and, so far as they knew, they were
the sole survivors. The Hawaiians are the most expert of swimmers, being
almost native to the sea; and since the distance was short, and only
these survived, you will realise how little chance there was for any
other.
"During the early hours of the morning, which broke dark and
inexpressibly sad for us, a few bodies were found washed ashore, among
them those of two leper girls of Honolulu. But our search for her long
proved unavailing. At length Father Damien suggested that we follow up
the ravine which I have described, and it was thither that he and
Brother Joseph and I accordingly went. Father Damien thought it well
that I should go with them.
"It was far inland, dear Mother, that at last we found her. She lay
outstretched on a bare, black rock of lava, which sloped upward from the
sea. Her naked white feet rested on the green moss that fringed its
lower edge, and her head was sheltered from the burning sun by branches
of ferns. Almost over her eyes--the lids of which were stiff with the
salt of the ocean--there hung a spray of white poppies. It was as though
nature would be kind to her in death.
"At the sight of her face, so young, and having in it the purity and the
peace of Heaven, we knelt down around her without a word, and for a
while we could do nothing but weep. Surely nothing so spotless was ever
washed ashore on this polluted island! If I sinned, I pray to be
forgiven; but I found a strange joy in thinking that the corruption of
this terrible disease had never been laid upon her. Heaven had accepted
in advance her faithful spirit, and had spared her the long years of
bodily suffering.
"At Father Damien's direction Brother Joseph returned to the village for
a bier and for four lepers who should be strong enough to bear it. When
they came we laid her on it, and bore her back to the village, where
Mother Marianne took the body in charge and prepared it for burial.
"How shall I describe her funeral? The lepers were her pall-bearers. The
news of the shipwreck had quickly spread throughout the settlement, and
these simple, generous people yield themselves so readily to the emotion
of the hour. When the time arrived, it seemed that all who could walk
had come to follow her to the churchyard. It was a moving sight--the
long, wavering train of that death-stricken throng, whose sufferings had
so touched the pity of our Lord when He was on earth, and the desolation
of whose fate she had come to lessen. There were the young and the old
alike, Protestants and Catholics without distinction, children with
their faces so strangely aged with ravages of the leprosy, those
advanced in years with theirs so mutilated and marred. Others, upon whom
the leprosy had made such advances that they were too weak to walk, sat
in their cottage doors and lifted their husky voices in singing that
wailing native hymn in which they bemoan their hopeless fate. Some of
the women, after a fashion of their own, wore large wreaths of blue
blossoms and green leaves about their withered faces.
"And it was thus that we lepers--I say we lepers because I am one of
them, since I cannot expect long to escape the disease--it was thus that
we lepers followed her to the graveyard in the rock by the blue sea,
where Father Damien with his own hands had helped to dig her grave. And
there, dear Mother, all that is mortal of her now rests. But we know
that ere this she has heard the words: 'I was sick, and ye visited me.'
"Mother Marianne would herself have written, but she was called away to
the Leproserie.
"SISTER AGATHA."
POSTHUMOUS FAME; OR, A LEGEND OF THE BEAUTIFUL
I.
There once lived in a great city, where the dead were all but
innumerable, a young man by the name of Nicholas Vane, who possessed a
singular genius for the making of tombstones. So beautiful they were,
and so fitly designed to express the shadowy pain of mortal memory or
the bright forecasting of eternal hope, that all persons were held
fortunate who could secure them for the calm resting-places of their
beloved sleepers. Indeed, the curious tale was whispered round that the
bereft were not his only patrons, but that certain personages who were
peculiarly ambitious of posthumous fame--seeing they had not long to
live, and unwilling to intrust others with the grave responsibility of
having them commemorated--had gone to his shop and secretly advised with
him respecting such monuments as might preserve their memories from too
swift oblivion.
However this may fall out, certain it is that his calling had its
secrets; and once he was known to observe that no man could ever
understand the human heart until he had become a maker of tombstones.
Whether the knowledge thus derived should make of one a laughing or a
weeping philosopher, Nicholas himself remained a joyous type of youthful
manhood--so joyous, in fact, that a friend of his who wrought in colour,
strolling one day into the workshop where Nicholas stood surrounded by
the exquisite shapes of memorial marbles, had asked to paint the scene
as a representation of Life chiselling to its beautiful purposes the
rugged symbols of Death, and smiling as it wove the words of love and
faith across the stony proofs of the universal tragedy. Afterwards, it
is true, a great change was wrought in the young artisan.
He had just come in one morning and paused to look around at the
various finished and unfinished mortuary designs.
"Truly," he said to himself all at once, "if I were a wise man, I'd
begin this day's business by chiselling my own head-stone. For who knows
but that before sunset my brother the gravedigger may be told to build
me one of the houses that last till doomsday! And what man could then
make the monument to stop the door of _my_ house with. But why should I
have a monument? If I lie beneath it, I shall not know I lie there. If I
lie not there, then it will not stand over me. So, whether I lie there,
or lie not there, what will it matter to me then? Ay; but what if, being
dead only to this world and living in another, I should yet look on the
monument erected to my memory and therefore be the happier? I know not;
nor to what end we are vexed with this desire to be remembered after
death. The prospect of vanishing from a poor, toilsome life fills us
with such consternation and pain! It is therefore we strive to impress
ourselves ineffaceably on the race, so that, after we have gone hence,
or ceased to be, we may still have incorporeal habitation among all
coming generations."
Here he was interrupted by a low knock at the door. Bidden to come in,
there entered a man of delicate physiognomy, who threw a hurried glance
around and inquired in an anxious tone--
"Sir, are you alone?"
"I am never alone," replied Nicholas in a ringing voice; "for I dwell
hard by the gate-way of life and death, through which a multitude is
always passing."
"Not so loud, I beseech you," said the visitor, stretching forth his
thin, white hands with eager deprecation. "I would not, for the world,
have any one discover that I have been here."
"Are you, then, a personage of such importance to the world?" said
Nicholas, smiling, for the stranger's appearance argued no worldly
consideration whatsoever. The suit of black, which his frail figure
seemed to shrink away from with very sensitiveness, was glossy and
pathetic with more than one covert patch. His shoes were dust-covered
and worn. His long hair went round his head in a swirl, and he bore
himself with an air of damaged, apologetic, self-appreciation.
"I am a poet," he murmured with a flush of pain, dropping his large
mournful eyes beneath the scrutiny of one who might be an unsympathetic
listener. "I am a poet, and I have come to speak with you privately of
my--of the--of a monument. I am afraid I shall be forgotten. It is a
terrible thought."
"Can you not trust your poems to keep you remembered?" asked Nicholas,
with more kindliness.
"I could if they were as widely read as they should be." He appeared
emboldened by his hearer's gentleness. "But, to confess the truth, I
have not been accepted by my age. That, indeed, should give me no pain,
since I have not written for it, but for the great future to which alone
I look for my fame."
"Then why not look to it for your monument also?"
"Ah, sir!" he cried, "there are so many poets in the world that I might
be entirely overlooked by posterity, did there not descend to it some
sign that I was held in honour by my own generation."
"Have you never noticed," he continued, with more earnestness, "that
when strangers visit a cemetery they pay no attention to the thousands
of little head-stones that lie scattered close to the ground, but hunt
out the highest monuments, to learn in whose honour they were erected?
Have you never heard them exclaim: 'Yonder is a great monument! A great
man must be buried there. Let us go and find out who he was and what he
did to be so celebrated.' O sir, you and I know that this is a poor way
of reasoning, since the greatest monuments are not always set over the
greatest men. Still the custom has wrought its good effects, and
splendid memorials do serve to make known in years to come those whom
they commemorate, by inciting posterity to search for their actions or
revive their thoughts. I warrant you the mere bust of Homer----"
"You are not mentioning yourself in the same breath with Homer, I hope,"
said Nicholas, with great good-humour.
"My poems are as dear to me as Homer's were to him," replied the poet,
his eyes filling.
"What if you _are_ forgotten? Is it not enough for the poet to have
lived for the sake of beauty?"
"No!" he cried passionately. "What you say is a miserable error. For the
very proof of the poet's vocation is in creating the beautiful. But how
know he has created it? By his own mind? Alas, the poet's mind tells him
only what is beautiful to _him_! It is by fame that he knows it--fame,
the gratitude of men for the beauty he has revealed to them! What is so
sweet, then, as the knowledge that fame has come to him already, or
surely awaits him after he is dead?"
"We labour under some confusion of ideas, I fear," said Nicholas, "and,
besides, are losing time. What kind of mon----"
"That I leave to you," interrupted the poet. "Only, I should like my
monument to be beautiful. Ah, if you but knew how all through this poor
life of mine I have loved the beautiful! Never, never have I drawn near
it in any visible form without almost holding my breath as though I were
looking deep, deep into God's opened eyes. But it was of the epitaph I
wished to speak."
Hereupon, with a deeper flush, he drew from a large inside
breast-pocket, that seemed to have been made for the purpose, a worn
duodecimo volume, and fell to turning the much-fingered pages.
"This," he murmured fondly, without looking up, "is the complete
collection of my poems."
"Indeed!" exclaimed Nicholas, with deep compassion.
"Yes, my complete collection. I have written a great deal more, and
should have liked to publish all that I have written. But it was
necessary to select, and I have included here only what it was
intolerable to see wasted. There is nothing I value more than a group of
elegiac poems, which every single member of my large family--who are
fine critics--and all my friends, pronounce very beautiful. I think it
would be a good idea to inscribe a selection from one on my monument,
since those who read the selection would wish to read the entire poem,
and those who read the entire poem would wish to read the entire
collection. I shall now favour you with these elegies."
"I should be happy to hear them; but my time!" said Nicholas
courteously. "The living are too impatient to wait on me; the dead too
patient to be defrauded."
"Surely you would not refuse to hear one of them," exclaimed the poet,
his eyes flashing.
"Read _one_, by all means." Nicholas seated himself on a monumental
lamb.
The poet passed one hand gently across his forehead, as though to brush
away the stroke of rudeness; then, fixing upon Nicholas a look of
infinite remoteness, he read as follows:--
"He suffered, but he murmured not;
To every storm he bared his breast;
He asked but for the common lot--
To be a man among the rest.
"Here lies he now----"
"If you ask but for the common lot," interrupted Nicholas, "you should
rest content to be forgotten."
But before the poet could reply, a loud knock caused him to flap the
leaves of the "Complete Collection" together with one hand, while with
the other he gathered the tails of his long coat about him, as though
preparing to pass through some difficult aperture. The exaltation of his
mood, however, still showed itself in the look and tone of proud
condescension with which he said to Nicholas--
"Permit me to retire at once by some private passway."
Nicholas led him to a door in the rear of the shop, and there, with a
smile and a tear, stood for a moment watching the precipitate figure of
the retreating bard, who suddenly paused when disappearing and tore open
the breast of his coat to assure himself that his beloved elegies were
resting safe across his heart.
The second visitor was of another sort. He hobbled on a cork leg, but
inexorably disciplined the fleshly one into old-time firmness and
precision. A faded military cloak draped his stalwart figure. Part of
one bushy grey eyebrow had been chipped away by the same sword-cut that
left its scar across his battle-beaten face.
"I have come to speak with you about my monument," he said, in a gruff
voice that seemed to issue from the mouth of a rusty cannon. "Those of
my old comrades that did not fall at my side are dead. My wife died long
ago, and my little children. I am old and forgotten. It is a time of
peace. There's not a boy who will now listen to me while I tell of my
campaigns. I live alone. Were I to die to-morrow my grave might not have
so much as a head-stone. It might be taken for that of a coward. Make me
a monument for a true soldier."
"Your grateful country will do that," said Nicholas.
"Ha!" exclaimed the veteran, whom the shock of battle had made deaf long
ago.
"Your country," shouted Nicholas, close to his ear, "your country--will
erect a monument--to your memory."
"My country!" The words were shot out with a reverberating, melancholy
boom. "My country will do no such a thing. How many millions of soldiers
have fallen on her battle-fields! Where are their monuments? They would
make her one vast cemetery."
"But is it not enough for you to have been a true soldier? Why wish to
be known and remembered for it?"
"I know I do not wish to be forgotten," he replied simply. "I know I
take pleasure in the thought that long after I am forgotten there will
be a tongue in my monument to cry out to every passing stranger, 'Here
lies the body of a true soldier.' It is a great thing to be brave!"
"Is, then, this monument to be erected in honour of bravery, or of
yourself?"
"There is no difference," said the veteran bluntly. "Bravery _is_
myself."
"It is bravery," he continued, in husky tones, and with, a mist
gathering in his eyes that made him wink as though he were trying to see
through the smoke of battle--"it is bravery that I see most clearly in
the character of God. What would become of us if He were a coward? I
serve Him as my brave Commander; and though I am stationed far from Him
and may be faint and sorely wounded, I know that He is somewhere on the
battle-field, and that I shall see Him at last, approaching me as He
moves up and down among the ranks."
"But you say that your country does not notice you--that you have no
friends; do you, then, feel no resentment?"
"None, none," he answered quickly, though his head dropped on his bosom.
"And you wish to be remembered by a world that is willing to forget
you?"
He lifted his head proudly. "There are many true men in the world," he
said, "and it has much to think of. I owe it all I can give, all I can
bequeath; and I can bequeath it nothing but the memory of a true man."
One day, not long after this, there came into the workshop of Nicholas a
venerable man of the gravest, sweetest, and most scholarly aspect, who
spoke not a word until he had led Nicholas to the front window and
pointed a trembling finger at a distant church spire.
"You see yon spire?" he said. "It almost pierces the clouds. In the
church beneath I have preached to men and women for nearly fifty years.
Many that I have christened at the font I have married at the altar;
many of these I have sprinkled with dust. What have I not done for them
in sorrow and want! How have I not toiled to set them in the way of
purer pleasures and to anchor their tempest-tossed hopes! And yet how
soon they will forget me! Already many say I am too old to preach. Too
old! I preach better than I ever did in my life. Yet it may be my lot to
wander down into the deep valley, an idle shepherd with an idle crook. I
have just come from the writing of my next sermon, in which I exhort my
people to strive that their names be not written on earthly monuments
or human hearts, but in the Book of Life. It is my sublimest theme. If I
am ever eloquent, if I am ever persuasive, if I ever for one moment draw
aside to spiritual eyes the veil that discloses the calm, enrapturing
vistas of eternity, it is when I measure my finite strength against this
mighty task. But why? Because they are the sermons of my own aspiration.
I preach them to my own soul. Face to face with that naked soul I pen
those sermons--pen them when all are asleep save the sleepless Eye that
is upon me. Even in the light of that Eye do I recoil from the thought
of being forgotten. How clearly I foresee it! Ashes to ashes, dust to
dust! Where then will be my doctrines, my prayers, my sermons?"
"Is it not enough for you to have scattered your handful of good
broadcast, to ripen as endlessly as the grass? What if they that gather
know naught of him that sowed?"
"It is not enough. I should like the memory of _me_ to live on and
on in the world, inseparable from the good I may have done. What am I but
the good that is in me? 'Tis this that links me to the infinite and the
perfect. Does not the Perfect One wish His goodness to be associated
with His name? No! No! I do not wish to be forgotten!"
"It is mere vanity."
"Not vanity," said the aged servitor meekly. "Wait until you are old,
till the grave is at your helpless feet: it is the love of life."
But some years later there befell Nicholas an event that transcended all
past experiences, and left its impress on his whole subsequent life.
II.
The hour had passed when any one was likely to enter his shop. A few
rays of pale sunlight, straggling in through crevices of the door,
rested like a dying halo on the heads of the monumental figures grouped
around. Shadows, creeping upward from the ground, shrouded all else in
thin, penetrable half-gloom, through which the stark grey emblems of
mortality sent forth more solemn suggestions. A sudden sense of the
earthly tragedy overwhelmed him. The chisel and the hammer dropped from
his hands, and, resting his head on the block he had been carving, he
gave himself up to that mood of dim, distant reverie in which the soul
seems to soar and float far above the shock and din of the world's
disturbing nearness. On his all but oblivious ear, like the faint
washings of some remote sea, beat the waves of the city's tide-driven
life in the streets outside. The room itself seemed hushed to the awful
stillness of the high aerial spaces. Then all at once this stillness was
broken by a voice, low, clear, and tremulous, saying close to his ear--
"Are you the maker of gravestones?"
"That is my sad calling," he cried bitterly, starting up with
instinctive forebodings.
He saw before him a veiled figure. To support herself, she rested one
hand on the block he had been carving, while she pressed the other
against her heart, as though to stifle pain.
"Whose monument is this?"
"A neglected poet's who died not long ago. Soon, perhaps, I shall be
making one for an old soldier, and one for a holy man, whose soul, I
hear, is about to be dismissed."
"Are not some monuments sadder to make than others?"
"Ay, truly."
"What is the saddest you ever made?"
"The saddest monument I ever made was one for a poor mother who had lost
her only son. One day a woman came in who had no sooner entered than she
sat down and gave way to a passionate outburst of grief.
"'My good woman,' I said, 'why do you weep so bitterly?'
"'Do not call me good,' she moaned, and hid her face.
"I then perceived her fallen character. When she recovered self-control
she drew from her sinful bosom an old purse filled with coins of
different values.
"'Why do you give me this?' I asked.
"'It is to pay for a monument for my son,' she said, and the storm of
her grief swept over her again.
"I learned that for years she had toiled and starved to hoard up a sum
with which to build a monument to his memory, for he had never failed of
his duty to her after all others had cast her out. Certainly he had his
reward, not in the monument, but in the repentance which came to her
after his death. I have never seen such sorrow for evil as the memory of
his love wrought in her. For herself she desired only that the spot
where she should be buried might be unknown. This longing to be
forgotten has led me to believe that none desire to be remembered for
the evil that is in them, but only for some truth, or beauty, or
goodness by which they have linked their individual lives to the general
life of the race. Even the lying epitaphs in cemeteries prove how we
would fain have the dead arrayed on the side of right in the thoughts of
their survivors. This wretched mother and human outcast, believing
herself to have lost everything that makes it well to be remembered,
craved only the mercy of forgetfulness."
"And yet I think she died a Christian soul."
"You knew her, then?"
"I was with her in the last hours. She told me her story. She told me
also of you, and that you would accept nothing for the monument you were
at such care to make. It is perhaps for this reason that I have felt
some desire to see you, and that I am here now to speak with you of----"
A shudder passed over her.
"After all, that was not a sad, but a joyous monument to fashion," she
added abruptly.
"Ay, it was joyous. But to me the joyous and the sad are much allied in
the things of this life."
"And yet there might be one monument wholly sad, might there not?"
"There might be, but I know not whose it would be."
"If she you love should die, would not hers be so?"
"Until I love, and she I love is dead, I cannot know," said Nicholas,
smiling.
"What builds the most monuments?" she asked quickly, as though to
retreat from her levity.
"Pride builds many--splendid ones. Gratitude builds some, forgiveness
some, and pity some. But faith builds more than these, though often
poor, humble ones; and love!--love builds more than all things else
together."
"And what, of all things that monuments are built in memory of, is most
loved and soonest forgotten?" she asked, with intensity.
"Nay, I cannot tell that."
"Is it not a beautiful woman? This, you say, is the monument of a poet.
After the poet grows old, men love him for the songs he sang; they love
the old soldier for the battles he fought, and the preacher for his
remembered prayers. But a woman! Who loves her for the beauty she once
possessed, or rather regards her not with the more distaste? Is there in
history a figure so lonely and despised as that of the woman, who, once
the most beautiful in the world, crept back into her native land a
withered hag? Or, if a woman die while she is yet beautiful, how long is
she remembered? Her beauty is like heat and light--powerful only for
those who feel and see it."
But Nicholas had scarcely heard her. His eyes had become riveted upon
her hand, which rested on the marble, as white as though grown out of it
under the labours of his chisel.
"My lady," he said, with the deepest respect, "will you permit me to
look at your hand? I have carved many a one in marble, and studied many
a one in life; but never have I seen anything so beautiful as yours."
He took it with an artist's impetuosity and bent over it, laying its
palm against one of his own and stroking it softly with the other. The
blood leaped through his heart, and he suddenly lifted it to his lips.
"God only can make the hand beautiful," he said.
Displaced by her arm which he had upraised, the light fabric that had
concealed her figure parted on her bosom and slipped to the ground. His
eyes swept over the perfect shape that stood revealed. The veil still
concealed her face. The strangely mingled emotions that had been
deepening within him all this time now blended themselves in one
irrepressible wish.
"Will you permit me to see your face?"
She drew quickly back. A subtle pain was in his voice as he cried--
"O my lady! I ask it as one who has pure eyes for the beautiful."
"My face belongs to my past. It has been my sorrow; it is nothing now."
"Only permit me to see it!"
"Is there no other face you would rather see?"
Who can fathom the motive of a woman's questions?
"None, none!"
She drew aside her veil, and her eyes rested quietly on his like a
revelation. So young she was as hardly yet to be a woman, and her beauty
had in it that seraphic purity and mysterious pathos which is never seen
in a woman's face until the touch of another world has chastened her
spirit into the resignation of a saint. The heart of Nicholas was wrung
by the sight of it with a sudden sense of inconsolable loss and longing.
"O my lady!" he cried, sinking on one knee and touching his lips to her
hand with greater gentleness. "Do you indeed think the beauty of a woman
so soon forgotten? As long as I live, yours will be as fresh in my
memory as it was the moment after I first saw it in its perfection and
felt its power."
"Do not recall to me the sorrow of such thoughts." She touched her
heart. "My heart is a tired hour-glass. Already the sands are wellnigh
run through. Any hour it may stop, and then--out like a light! Shapeless
ashes! I have loved life well, but not so well that I have not been able
to prepare to leave it."
She spoke with the utmost simplicity and calmness, yet her eyes were
turned with unspeakable sadness towards the shadowy recesses of the
room, where from their pedestals the monumental figures looked down upon
her as though they would have opened their marble lips and said, "Poor
child! Poor child!"
"I have had my wish to see you and to see this place. Before long some
one will come here to have you carve a monument to the most perishable
of all things. Like the poor mother who had no wish to be
remembered----"
Nicholas was moved to the deepest.
"I have but little skill," he said. "The great God did not bestow on me
the genius of His favourite children of sculpture. But if so sad and
sacred a charge should ever become mine, with His help I will rear such
a monument to your memory that as long as it stands none who see it will
ever be able to forget you. Year after year your memory shall grow as a
legend of the beautiful."
When she was gone he sat self-forgetful until the darkness grew
impenetrable. As he groped his way out at last along the thick
guide-posts of death, her voice seemed to float towards him from every
head-stone, her name to be written in every epitaph.
The next day a shadow brooded over the place. Day by day it deepened. He
went out to seek intelligence of her. In the quarter of the city where
she lived he discovered that her name had already become a nucleus
around which were beginning to cluster many little legends of the
beautiful. He had but to hear recitals of her deeds of kindness and
mercy. For the chance of seeing her again he began to haunt the
neighbourhood; then, having seen her, he would return to his shop the
victim of more unavailing desire. All things combined to awake in him
that passion of love whose roots are nourished in the soul's finest soil
of pity and hopelessness. Once or twice, under some pretext, he made
bold to accost her; and once, under the stress of his passion, he mutely
lifted his eyes, confessing his love; but hers were turned aside.
Meantime he began to dream of the monument he chose to consider she had
committed to his making. It should be the triumph of his art; but more,
it would represent in stone the indissoluble union of his love with her
memory. Through him alone would she enter upon her long after-life of
saint-like reminiscence.
When the tidings of her death came, he soon sprang up from the
prostration of his grief with a burning desire to consummate his
beloved work.
"Year after year your memory shall grow as a legend of the beautiful."
These words now became the inspiration of his masterpiece. Day and night
it took shape in the rolling chaos of his sorrow. What sculptor in the
world ever espoused the execution of a work that lured more irresistibly
from their hiding-places the shy and tender ministers of his genius?
What one ever explored with greater boldness the utmost limits of
artistic expression, or wrought in sterner defiance of the laws of our
common forgetfulness?
III.
One afternoon, when people thronged the great cemetery of the city, a
strolling group were held fascinated by the unique loveliness of a newly
created monument.
"Never," they exclaimed, "have we seen so exquisite a masterpiece. In
whose honour is it erected?"
But when they drew nearer, they found carved on it simply a woman's
name.
"Who was she?" they asked, puzzled and disappointed. "Is there no
epitaph?"
"Ay," spoke up a young man lying on the grass and eagerly watching the
spectators. "Ay, a very fitting epitaph."
"Where is it?"
"Carved on the heart of the monument!" he cried, in a tone of triumph.
"On the heart of the monument? Then we cannot see it."
"It is not meant to be seen."
"How do _you_ know of it?"
"I made the monument."
"Then tell us what it is."
"It cannot be told. It is there only because it is unknown."
"Out on you! You play your pranks with the living and the dead."
"You will live to regret this day," said a thoughtful bystander. "You
have tampered with the memory of the dead."
"Why, look you, good people," cried Nicholas, springing up and
approaching his beautiful master-work. He rested one hand lovingly
against it and glanced around him pale with repressed excitement, as
though a long-looked-for moment had at length arrived. "I play no pranks
with the living or the dead. Young as I am, I have fashioned many
monuments, as this cemetery will testify. But I make no more. This is my
last; and as it is the last, so it is the greatest. For I have fashioned
it in such love and sorrow for her who lies beneath it as you can never
know. If it is beautiful, it is yet an unworthy emblem of that brief and
transporting beauty which was hers; and I have planted it here beside
her grave, that as a delicate white flower it may exhale the perfume of
her memory for centuries to come.
"Tell me," he went on, his lips trembling, his voice faltering with the
burden of oppressive hope--"tell me, you who behold it now, do you not
wed her memory deathlessly to it? To its fair shape, its native and
unchanging purity?"
"Ay," they interrupted impatiently. "But the epitaph?"
"Ah!" he cried, with tenderer feeling, "beautiful as the monument is to
the eye, it would be no fit emblem of her had it not something sacred
hidden within. For she was not lovely to the sense alone, but had a
perfect heart. So I have placed within the monument that which is its
heart, and typifies hers. And, mark you!" he cried, in a voice of such
awful warning that those standing nearest him instinctively shrank back,
"the one is as inviolable as the other. No more could you rend the heart
from the human bosom than this epitaph from the monument. My deep and
lasting curse on him who attempts it! For I have so fitted the parts of
the work together, that to disunite would be to break them in pieces;
and the inscription is so fragile and delicately poised within, that so
much as rudely to jar the monument would shiver it to atoms. It is put
there to be inviolable. Seek to know it, you destroy it. This I but
create after the plan of the Great Artist, who shows you only the fair
outside of His masterpieces. What human eye ever looked into the
mysterious heart of His beautiful--that heart which holds the secret of
inexhaustible freshness and eternal power? Could this epitaph have been
carved on the outside, you would have read it and forgotten it with
natural satiety. But uncomprehended, what a spell I mark it exercises!
You will--nay, you _must_--remember it for ever! You will speak of it
to others. They will come. And thus in ever-widening circle will be
borne afar the memory of her whose name is on it, the emblem of whose
heart is hidden within. And what more fitting memorial could a man rear
to a woman, the pure shell of whose beauty all can see, the secret of
whose beautiful being no one ever comprehends?"
He walked rapidly away, then, some distance off, turned and looked back.
More spectators had come up. Some were earnestly talking, pointing now
to the monument, now towards him. Others stood in rapt contemplation of
his master-work.
Tears rose to his eyes. A look of ineffable joy overspread his face.
"O my love!" he murmured, "I have triumphed. Death has claimed your
body, heaven your spirit; but the earth claims the saintly memory of
each. This day about your name begins to grow the Legend of the
Beautiful."
The sun had just set. The ethereal white shape of the monument stood
outlined against a soft background of rose-coloured sky. To his
transfiguring imagination it seemed lifted far into the cloud-based
heavens, and the evening star, resting above its apex, was a celestial
lamp lowered to guide the eye to it through the darkness of the
descending night.
IV.
Mysterious complexity of our mortal nature and estate that we should so
desire to be remembered after death, though born to be forgotten! Our
words and deeds, the influences of our silent personalities, do indeed
pass from us into the long history of the race and abide for the rest of
time: so that an earthly immortality is the heritage, nay, the
inalienable necessity, of even the commonest lives; only it is an
immortality not of self, but of its good and evil. For Nature sows us
and reaps us, that she may gather a harvest, not of us, but from us. It
is God alone that gathers the harvest of us. And well for us that our
destiny should be that general forgetfulness we so strangely shrink
from. For no sooner are we gone hence than, even for such brief times as
our memories may endure, we are apt to grow by processes of accumulative
transformation into what we never were. Thou kind, kind fate,
therefore--never enough named and celebrated--that biddest the sun of
memory rise on our finished but imperfect lives, and then lengthenest or
shortenest the little day of posthumous reminiscence, according as thou
seest there is need of early twilight or of deeper shadows!
* * * * *
Years passed. City and cemetery were each grown vaster. It was again an
afternoon when the people strolled among the graves and monuments. An
old man had courteously attached himself to a group that stood around a
crumbling memorial. He had reached a great age; but his figure was
erect, his face animated by strong emotions, and his eyes burned beneath
his brows.
"Sirs," said he, interposing in the conversation, which turned wholly on
the monument, "you say nothing of him in whose honour it was erected."
"We say nothing because we know nothing."
"Is he then wholly forgotten?"
"We are not aware that he is at all remembered."
"The inscription reads: 'He was a poet.' Know you none of his poems?"
"We have never so much as heard of his poems."
"My eyes are dim; is there nothing carved beneath his name?"
One of the bystanders went up and knelt down close to the base.
"There _was_ something here, but it is effaced by time--Wait!" And
tracing his finger slowly along, he read like a child--
"He--asked--but--for--the--common--lot.
"That is all," he cried, springing lightly up. "Oh, the dust on my
knees!" he added with vexation.
"He may have sung very sweetly," pursued the old man.
"He may, indeed!" they answered carelessly.
"But, sirs," continued he, with a sad smile, "perhaps you are the very
generation that he looked to for the fame which his own denied him;
perhaps he died believing that _you_ would fully appreciate his poems."
"If so, it was a comfortable faith to die in," they said, laughing, in
return. "He will never know that we did not. A few great poets have
posthumous fame: we know _them_ well enough." And they passed on.
"This," said the old man, as they paused elsewhere, "seems to be the
monument of a true soldier; know you aught of the victories he helped to
win?"
"He may not have helped to win any victories. He may have been a coward.
How should _we_ know? Epitaphs often lie. The dust is peopled with
soldiers." And again they moved on.
"Does any one read his sermons now, know you?" asked the old man as they
paused before a third monument.
"Read his sermons!" they exclaimed, laughing more heartily. "Are sermons
so much read in the country you come from? See how long he has been
dead! What should the world be thinking of, to be reading his musty
sermons?"
"At least does it give you no pleasure to read 'He was a good man'?"
inquired he plaintively.
"Ay; but if he was good, was not his goodness its own reward?"
"He may have also wished long to be remembered for it."
"Naturally; but we have not heard that his wish was gratified."
"Is it not sad that the memory of so much beauty and truth and goodness
in our common human life should perish? But, sirs,"--and here the old
man spoke with sudden energy--"if there should be one who combined
perfect beauty and truth and goodness in one form and character, do you
not think such a rare being would escape the common fate and be long and
widely remembered?"
"Doubtless."
"Sirs," said he, quickly stepping in front of them with flashing eyes,
"is there in all this vast cemetery not a single monument that has kept
green the memory of the being in whose honour it was erected?"
"Ay, ay," they answered readily. "Have you not heard of it?"
"I am but come from distant countries. Many years ago I was here, and
have journeyed hither with much desire to see the place once more. Would
you kindly show me this monument?"
"Come!" they answered eagerly, starting off. "It is the best known of
all the thousands in the cemetery. None who see it can ever forget it."
"Yes, yes!" murmured the old man. "That is why I have--I foresaw---- Is
it not a beautiful monument? Does it not lie--in what direction does it
lie?"
A feverish eagerness seized him. He walked now beside, now before, his
companions. Once he wheeled on them.
"Sirs, did you not say it perpetuates the memory of her--of the one--who
lies beneath it?"
"Both are famous. The story of this woman and her monument will never be
forgotten. It is impossible to forget it."
"Year after year----" muttered he, brushing his hand across his eyes.
They soon came to a spot where the aged branches of memorial evergreens
interwove a sunless canopy, and spread far around a drapery of gloom
through which the wind passed with an unending sigh. Brushing aside the
lowest boughs, they stepped in awestricken silence within the dank,
chill cone of shade. Before them rose the shape of a grey monument, at
sight of which the aged traveller, who had fallen behind, dropped his
staff and held out his arms as though he would have embraced it. But,
controlling himself, he stepped forward, and said, in tones of thrilling
sweetness--
"Sirs, you have not told me what story is connected with this monument
that it should be so famous. I conceive it must be some very touching
one of her whose name I read--some beautiful legend----"
"Judge you of that!" interrupted one of the group, with a voice of stern
sadness and not without a certain look of mysterious horror. "They say
this monument was reared to a woman by the man who once loved her. She
was very beautiful, and so he made her a very beautiful monument. But
she had a heart so hideous in its falsity that he carved in stone an
enduring curse on her evil memory, and hung it in the heart of the
monument because it was too awful for any eye to see. But others tell
the story differently. They say the woman not only had a heart false
beyond description, but was in person the ugliest of her sex. So that
while the hidden curse is a lasting execration of her nature, the
beautiful exterior is a masterpiece of mockery which her nature, and not
her ugliness, maddened his sensitive genius to perpetrate. There can be
no doubt that this is the true story, as hundreds tell it now, and that
the woman will be remembered so long as the monument stands--ay, and
longer--not only for her loathsome---- Help the old man!"
He had fallen backward to the ground. They tried in vain to set him on
his feet. Stunned, speechless, he could only raise himself on one elbow
and turn his eyes towards the monument with a look of preternatural
horror, as though the lie had issued from its treacherous shape. At
length he looked up to them, as they bent kindly over him, and spoke
with much difficulty--
"Sirs, I am an old man--a very old man, and very feeble. Forgive this
weakness. And I have come a long way, and must be faint. While you were
speaking my strength failed me. You were telling me a story--were you
not?--the story--the legend of a most beautiful woman, when all at once
my senses grew confused and I failed to hear you rightly. Then my ears
played me such a trick! O sirs! if you but knew what a damnable trick my
ears played me, you would pity me greatly, very, very greatly. This
story touches me. It is much like one I seemed to have heard for many
years, and that I have been repeating over and over to myself until I
love it better than my life. If you would but go over it
again--carefully--very carefully."
"My God, sirs!" he exclaimed, springing up with the energy of youth when
he had heard the recital a second time, "tell me _who_ started this
story! Tell me _how_ and _where_ it began!"
"We cannot. We have heard many tell it, and not all alike."
"And do they--do you--believe--it is--true?" he asked helplessly.
"We all _know_ it is true; do not _you_ believe it?"
"I can never forget it!" he said, in tones quickly grown harsh and
husky. "Let us go away from so pitiful a place."
It was near nightfall when he returned, unobserved, and sat down beside
the monument as one who had ended a pilgrimage.
"They all tell me the same story," he murmured wearily. "Ah, it was the
hidden epitaph that wrought the error! But for it, the sun of her memory
would have had its brief, befitting day and tender setting. Presumptuous
folly, to suppose they would understand my masterpiece, when they so
often misconceive the hidden heart of His beautiful works, and convert
uncomprehended good and true into a curse of evil!"
The night fell. He was awaiting it. Nearer and nearer rolled the dark,
suffering heart of a storm; nearer towards the calm, white breasts of
the dead. Over the billowy graves the many-footed winds suddenly fled
away in a wild, tumultuous cohort. Overhead, great black bulks swung
heavily at one another across the tremulous stars.
Of all earthly spots, where does the awful discord of the elements seem
so futile and theatric as in a vast cemetery? Blow, then, winds, till
you uproot the trees! Pour, floods, pour, till the water trickles down
into the face of the pale sleeper below! Rumble and flash, ye clouds,
till the earth trembles and seems to be aflame! But not a lock of hair,
so carefully put back over the brows, is tossed or disordered. The
sleeper has not stretched forth an arm and drawn the shroud closer
about his face, to keep out the wet. Not an ear has heard the riving
thunderbolt, nor so much as an eyelid trembled on the still eyes for all
the lightning's fury.
But had there been another human presence on the midnight scene, some
lightning flash would have revealed the old man, a grand, a terrible
figure, in sympathy with its wild, sad violence. He stood beside his
masterpiece, towering to his utmost height in a posture of all but
superhuman majesty and strength. His long white hair and longer white
beard streamed outward on the roaring winds. His arms, bared to the
shoulder, swung aloft a ponderous hammer. His face, ashen-grey as the
marble before him, was set with an expression of stern despair. Then, as
the thunder crashed, his hammer fell on the monument. Bolt after bolt,
blow after blow. Once more he might have been seen kneeling beside the
ruin, his eyes strained close to its heart, awaiting another flash to
tell him that the inviolable epitaph had shared in the destruction.
For days following many curious eyes came to peer into the opened heart
of the shattered structure, but in vain.
Thus the masterpiece of Nicholas failed of its end, though it served
another. For no one could have heard the story of it, before it was
destroyed, without being made to realise how melancholy that a man
should rear a monument of execration to the false heart of the woman he
once had loved; and how terrible for mankind to celebrate the dead for
the evil that was in them instead of the good.
THE END.
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