Through the dim corridors, the silent halls
Of Yesterday, the nuns move, whispering
Their rosary. Without, a robin calls
A drowsy blessing to his little mate,
For it is late,
And chapel aisles are filled with peace and prayer.
And Christ is there.
Ah, dreams that haunt these keys of ivory--!
_Et verbum caro factum est_, they sing,
And lo! the years are as a day to me.
I kneel among the quiet ones again
To lay the pain,
The joy of life, where light and shadow meet
At Jesus' feet.
Some time earlier, during the period when girl-emotions translate
themselves into verse as naturally as bird-emotions translate themselves
into song, Joan had composed these lines, with the odd prescience that
frequently came to her when she "took her pen in hand." She had stepped
aside from a heated game of handball one day to jot them down; and her
play-fellows, evincing no particular surprise, had murmured to each
other, "Leave Joan alone. She's writing Poetry." For poetry is as much a
part of convent school-life as is handball.
Now she was back among "the quiet ones" again, fulfilling her own
prophecy, come to lay her burden of pain and joy, if not at Jesus' feet,
at least in the safekeeping of his handmaidens. In her plain black
frock, such as convent girls wear, with her hair down in a braid and a
small apron tied about her waist, to protect her skirt from
embroidery-floss, the nuns found it hard to believe it was Joan Blair
who had come back to them out of the world, and not Joan Darcy. Only
this was a Joan who played harder than her younger self had ever played,
entering into the gaiety of the school, the basket-ball, the charades,
the skating-matches, the fancy-dress impromptus, with a feverish
eagerness which saddened the good ladies to see. Strange, vivid,
restless young creature--what she had learned of life in the short while
she had been away from them! Love, motherhood, and loss--the loss that
is saddest of all losses to women, be they wives or maids or
_religieuses_. While they in their silent corridors and hidden gardens
had listened to month after quiet month rung away by the bells, praying,
dreaming, working; tending the young life about them into blossom,
sometimes carrying with candles one of their number back to a still
place beyond the children's playground, sometimes--not often
now--receiving into their ranks one who had done with the world's ways
even before she came to know them. Truly "the quiet ones," blessed with
the peace of those who resign their wills to the will of God.
Joan, gazing into their serene, pure, almost childlike faces, envied
them from her heart; but, being Joan, she asked herself wonderingly how
they could be so sure it was the will of God to which they resigned
themselves. Intelligent, fine-natured women, deliberately turning their
backs on life, deliberately closing eyes and ears to what went on in the
street just outside their cloister, lest it distract them from
contemplation of their immortal souls--Joan shook her head sharply; and
putting a veil over her hair, slipped into the chapel, where a voice
behind the cloister-screen was repeating the rosary of the Sacred Heart:
"Oh, sacred heart of Jesus, burning with love for us,
Inflame our hearts with love for Thee."
The beautiful voice rose and fell in almost passionate cadence, as if it
were pleading. It ceased abruptly; and another, older voice took up the
words, with mystic tenderness. There was a faint fragrance in the
place--indeed throughout the old building--of incense and dying roses,
which Joan always called to herself "the odor of sanctity." It came back
to her sometimes poignantly in the most unexpected places.
A very old lay-sister, in a white coif and shoes that creaked a trifle,
pottered about among the statues of the saints, arranging small lamps
and vases of flowers, always dropping as she passed the altar a
business-like little curtsey. Now and then a child with a veil over her
head would slip in at the door, and genuflect, and sink to her knees for
a moment's prayer. Sunlight streamed in, multi-colored, through ruby and
purple and amber glass, across the white marble Christ who stood with
hands outstretched and head bowed, suffering little children to come
unto Him....
Joan, who had been reading Renan (a fact which would have certainly
caused her expulsion from that place had it been known), quoted to
herself:
"In our bustling civilization, the memory of the life of
Galilee has been like the perfume of another world."
It seemed to her one of the true miracles that it should indeed have
persisted through our bustling civilization, through persecution and
indifference, through crass hysterical religiosity, even to this day; if
only in such places as her convent school, and little country churches
here and there, and in the homes of the very poor. That lovely,
pastoral, gentle life of Galilee, exquisite as the name itself--who
could not have been good in Galilee?
"If Archie had lived then, he would have followed Christ," thought Joan
suddenly. "Followed him, and fought for him, too. And he'd never have
let the Jews get hold of him!"
It was the first time she had thought of her husband in many days....
Archie's letters came with faithful regularity, but he was one of the
personalities who do not carry well by letter. He informed her that he
missed her, but she was not to hurry home on his account; that Ellen was
keeping down the grocer-bill nicely; that the new man he had put on the
road wasn't doing well and he thought of putting Johnny Carmichael in
his place; that one of the water-pipes had burst and made a spot on the
wall, but nothing to fret about; and that if she needed more money be
sure to let him know. Or words to that effect.
Archie, somehow, was never quite in the picture. She was better able to
reconstruct her lost girlhood without him.
And Archie understood. It was he who had suggested the Convent when
Joan's doctor admitted himself dissatisfied with her condition, her slow
return to normality.
"You've got a peculiarly sensitive nervous organism to deal with here,"
the doctor said. "It takes very little to throw such natures off the
balance. You say she never speaks of her babies at all? I don't like
that! I'd rather have her crying about all over the place."
"So would I," said poor Archie. "Then she'd cry on me, and I could
comfort her. Now I don't dare!"
"I wouldn't," advised the doctor, frankly. "Better let her alone."
So Archie, out of the wisdom of his love, wrote secretly to the nuns and
asked them to invite her to the Convent for awhile; and because of the
tragedy involved, the good ladies waived their rule of never permitting
married women to live in the community. They welcomed her casually, as
if her coming were no strange thing, gave her work to do, made her
useful running errands and taking the smaller girls about; for in a
religious community no one is ever idle. And Joan proved Archie's wisdom
by gradually losing her tenseness, her frantic clutching at amusement,
and growing daily in strength and poise until at last she was able to
enjoy again solitude and thought, two things of which she had for some
time been afraid.
Indeed, Archie's experiment was almost too successful; for the simple,
orderly routine of the Convent was so soothing to her that she dreaded
the idea of leaving it. Days slipped into weeks; and still she postponed
the thought of going back to her empty house, to Effie May's
uncontrolled mourning, to that nursery which had been so happily
prepared for the little occupants who never occupied it.
She was frightened sometimes to realize how utterly she seemed able to
forget her husband when he was not with her. If Archie was rather
frightened, too, he never admitted it, even to himself. After all, Joan
was his wife; and in his simple creed wives were bound to love their
husbands, else how could they remain wives?
"She's had an awful shock," he reminded Ellen, who was growing restive.
"We've got to give her plenty of time to get over it."
"Humph! and what about you? I suppose you ain't had a good deal of a
shock yourself?" muttered the old woman, savage with sympathy. "Wasn't
you bringing home toys and truck every day of the world, trains and
dolls and I don't know what all--and them not a week old yet? Your top
chiffoneer drawer's full of toys this minute."
"Better give them away to the children in the neighborhood before she
sees them."
"No such thing! I'll be savin' 'em for the next," said Ellen,
stoutly....
Oddly enough, Joan was presently restored to her husband and her duty
through the medium of no less a person than Eduard Desmond.
She was chaperoning some of the younger girls in town one day, when she
met him on the street. She was surprised by the encounter, for she had
not known he was in Washington; and she bowed uncertainly, expecting him
to be a little embarrassed.
But he stopped, and held out his hand with evident pleasure. "Mrs.
Blair! you?" he exclaimed. "What wonderful luck brings you to
Washington? and where are you stopping?"
Joan briefly explained.
"Then," he said with a notable accession of eagerness, "Mr. Blair is not
with you?"
Some long-slumbering imp of malice awoke and stirred in Joan. His
expression as he looked her up and down was unmistakable. Evidently
matrimony had detracted nothing from her in his eyes. On the contrary.
"No, Mr. Blair is not with me," she replied demurely. "I am on a
vacation. Why should one carry a husband about on a vacation?"
This was Longmeadow language, the native tongue of Mr. Desmond.
"Why, indeed?" he murmured. "And when am I to come to see you?"
"I'm not sure you are to come at all. We're not allowed masculine
callers at the Convent, I think; are we, dear?" she asked the young girl
nearest to her.
"Oh, yes, Mrs. Blair!--on Wednesday afternoons, if they're brothers or
cousins or anything like that," replied the child shyly.
Eduard smiled. "I am not a cousin or a brother--fortunately--but perhaps
I may be called 'something like that!'--Next Wednesday afternoon, then?"
"I'm not really sure that I shall be able to see you," she demurred.
"I am!" replied Eduard calmly; and, lifting his hat, he passed on.
He proved himself a true prophet. Joan could not deny herself the bitter
satisfaction of seeing at what a small fire she had managed so to scorch
her young wings.
He had been waiting half an hour in the convent parlor when she came to
him, however; and half an hour in a convent parlor is an ordeal few
forget. It was a large, bleak room divided midway by a grille, on the
inner side of which sat a lay-sister, knitting. The other side was left
for the reception of male relatives and connections; and a tongue-tied,
uneasy lot they were, slipping about on the horsehair sofas, staring
furtively at the undecorative saints who adorned the walls, conducting
their conversation obviously with a view to the other side of the
grille.
"For heaven's sake, get me out of this!" murmured Desmond as Joan
approached. "I feel as if the eye of God were on me constantly!"
"It's only the eye of Sister Veronica," reassured Joan, "and more her
ear than her eye, I fancy."
"You don't mean that she can hear what we are saying, in there?"
"I've been told there's a sounding-board concealed about this room
somewhere. It may not be true, of course; but it's wonderful how much
does get back to the Convent from the parlor."
Eduard shuddered. "There's goose-flesh up and down my spine! Do come out
for a walk somewhere."
She shook her head, smiling. "Can't be done! But of course you haven't
anything to say to me that Sister Veronica shouldn't hear."
"Haven't I, just?" he muttered.
The imp of malice stirred in her again. She asked softly, "What, for
instance?"
He gave her a quick look, glanced toward the grille, and plunged, albeit
in a very low voice.
"For one thing I want to tell you how lovely you've grown!"
"Louder, please?" said Joan, "I missed that."
He repeated it, with additions. "And you need not pretend you did not
hear me, either, you witch. What's happened to you, Joan? I always knew
you'd be a wonderful creature some day, but already!--Those exquisite
shadows under the eyes, the hollow of your cheek, your lips--What I'd
give to paint you now, my dear! Only that it would waste our time
together. How much time have you, by the way? For me, I mean?"
"You find me improved, then?" she enquired, demurely.
"Improved! I find you--never mind what I find you! There's a subtlety, a
fascination--But I can't express it."
"There must be a subtlety indeed if _you_ can't express it," she
commented; and added, "How is Mrs. Rossiter?"
If she expected to disconcert him, she was disappointed. He informed her
at length as to the health, appearance, and conjugal felicity of Mrs.
Rossiter.
"They're actually pulling it off," he said interestedly. "They're making
a go of it. I've always had the theory that once a divorcee always a
divorcee--the old-fashioned gentlewoman is more to my taste. Divorce
always seems to me so--so unnecessary--But in this case it appears I am
mistaken, and nobody is happier to admit it. They positively fancy each
other, Philemon and Baucis, all that sort of thing!--By the way, I had
no idea you had made such friends with May. You gave her my bracelet, it
seems. Cruel of you, Joan!"
"Did it hurt your feelings?" she murmured, dimpling.
"Oh, frightfully. How did you have the heart? She positively gloated
over me."
"Father would never have allowed me to accept anything so handsome from
a passing acquaintance. One had to do something with it, you see, so--"
"Passing acquaintance!" he interrupted, reproachfully. "Surely I was
more to you than that? Our evening under the beech-tree--shall I ever
forget it?"
Joan, paling a little, remarked, "Sister Veronica appears interested."
"Damn!" muttered Eduard, and shortly took his leave. But first he gave
her a note from Mrs. Desmond urging her to dine with them on any evening
she cared to name.
"Betty is abroad," wrote Mrs. Desmond, "and I know you have no
heart for gaieties just now, so there will be only the four of
us, a family party."
Joan hesitated.
"Of course we all realize that you are not in a mood for gaiety," said
Eduard with a sympathetic glance at her black. "But I _must_ see you
somehow!--and among old friends, who understand--"
To ward off any mention of things that hurt, she hastily agreed to dine
with the Desmonds on the following Saturday.
Sister Veronica, (who happened to be quite deaf) wondered what could
have occurred to give the poor child such an expression of--not exactly
pleasure. It was more like triumph. She would have made no sense of what
Joan was muttering under her breath, Salome-wise, as she left the
parlor: "Off with his head! Oh, off with his head, _and step on it_!"