In a shadowy solitary valley of Southern Kentucky and beside a
noiseless stream there stands to-day a great French abbey of
white-cowled Trappist monks. It is the loneliest of human habitations.
Though not a ruin, an atmosphere of gray antiquity hangs about and
forever haunts it. The pale-gleaming cross on the spire looks as though
it would fall to the earth, weary of its aged unchangeableness. The
long Gothic windows; the rudely carven wooden crucifixes, suggesting
the very infancy of holy art; the partly encompassing wall, seemingly
built to resist a siege; the iron gate of the porter's lodge, locked
against profane intrusion--all are the voiceless but eloquent emblems
of a past that still enchains the memory by its associations as it once
enthralled the reason by its power.
Over the placid stream and across the fields to the woody crests around
float only the sounds of the same sweet monastery bells that in the
quiet evening air ages ago summoned a ruder world to nightly rest
and pious thoughts of heaven. Within the abbey at midnight are heard
the voices of monks chanting the self-same masses that ages ago were
sung by others, who all night long from icy chapel floors lifted up
piteous hands with intercession for poor souls suffering in purgatory.
One almost expects to see coming along the dusty Kentucky road which
winds through the valley meek brown palmers returning from the Holy
Sepulchre, or through an upper window of the abbey to descry lance and
visor and battle-axe flashing in the sunlight as they wind up a distant
hill-side to the storming of some perilous citadel.
Ineffable influences, too, seem to bless the spot. Here, forsooth, some
saint, retiring to the wilderness to subdue the devil in his flesh,
lived and struggled and suffered and died, leaving his life as an
heroic pattern for others who in the same hard way should wish to win
the fullest grace of Christlike character. Perhaps even one of the old
monks, long since halting towards the close of his pilgrimage, will
reverently lead you down the aisle to the dim sepulchre of some martyr,
whose relics repose under the altar while his virtues perpetually
exhale heavenward like gracious incense.
The beauty of the region, and especially of the grounds surrounding
the abbey, thus seems but a touching mockery. What have these
inward-gazing, heavenward-gazing souls to do with the loveliness of
Nature, with change of season, or flight of years, with green pastures
and waving harvest-fields outside the wall, with flowers and orchards
and vineyards within?
It was in a remote corner of the beautiful gardens of the monastery
that a young monk, Father Palemon, was humbly at work one morning some
years ago amid the lettuces and onions and fast-growing potatoes.
The sun smote the earth with the fierce heat of departing June; and
pausing to wipe the thick bead of perspiration from his forehead, he
rested a moment, breathing heavily. His powerful legs were astride a
row of the succulent shoots, and his hands clasped the handle of the
hoe that gave him a staff-like support in front. He was dressed in the
sacred garb of his order. His heavy sabots crushed the clods in the
furrows. His cream-colored serge cowl, the long skirt of which would
have touched the ground, had been folded up to his knees and tied with
hempen cords. The wide sleeves, falling away, showed up to the elbows
the superb muscles of his bronzed arms; and the calotte, pushed far
back from his head, revealed the outlines of his neck, full, round,
like a column. Nearly a month had passed since the convent barber had
sheared his poll, and his yellow hair was just beginning to enrich his
temples with a fillet of thick curling locks. Had Father Palemon's
hair been permitted to grow, it would have fallen down on each side
in masses shining like flax and making the ideal head of a saint. But
his face was not the face of a saint. It had in it no touch of the
saint's agony--none of those fine subtle lines that are the material
net-work of intense spirituality brooding within. Scant vegetarian diet
and the deep shadows of cloistral life had preserved in his complexion
the delicate hues of youth, noticeable still beneath the tan of recent
exposure to the summer sun. His calm, steady blue eyes, also, had the
open look peculiar to self-unconscious childhood; so that as he stood
thus, tall, sinewy, supple, grave, bareheaded under the open sky,
clad in spotless white, a singular union of strength, manliness, and
unawakened innocence, he was a figure startling to come upon.
As he rested, he looked down and discovered that the hempen cords
fastening the hem of his cowl were becoming untied, and walking to the
border of grass which ran round the garden just inside the monastery
wall, he sat down to secure the loosened threads. He was very tired.
He had come forth to work before the first gray of dawn. His lips
were parched with thirst. Save the little cup of cider and a slice of
black bread with which he had broken his fast after matins, he had not
tasted food since the frugal meal of the previous noon. Both weary
and faint, therefore, he had hardly sat down before, in the weakness
of his flesh, a sudden powerful impulse came upon him to indulge in a
moment's repose. His fingers fell away from the untied cords, his body
sank backward against the trunk of the gnarled apple-tree by which he
was shaded, and closing his eyes, he drank in eagerly all the sweet
influences of the perfect day.
For Nature was in an ecstasy. The sunlight never fell more joyous
upon the unlifting shadows of human life. The breeze that cooled his
sweating face was heavy with the odor of the wonderful monastery roses.
In the dark green canopy overhead two piping flame-colored orioles
drained the last bright dew-drop from the chalice of a leaf. All the
liquid air was slumbrous with the minute music of insect life, and from
the honeysuckles clambering over the wall at his back came the murmur
of the happy, happy bees.
But what power have hunger and thirst and momentary weariness over
the young? Father Palemon was himself part of the pure and beautiful
nature around him. His heart was like some great secluded crimson
flower that is ready to burst open in a passionate seeking of the sun.
As he sat thus in the midst of Nature's joyousness and irrepressible
unfoldings, and peaceful consummations, he forgot hunger and thirst
and weariness in a feeling of delicious languor. But beneath even
this, and more subtle still, was the stir of restlessness and the low
fever of vague desire for something wholly beyond his experience. He
sighed and opened his eyes. Right before them, on the spire beyond the
gardens, was the ancient cross to which he was consecrated. On his
shoulders were the penitential wounds he had that morning inflicted
with the knotted scourge. In his ears was the faint general chorus of
saints and martyrs, echoing backward ever more solemnly to the very
passion of Christ. While Nature was everywhere clothing itself with
living greenness, around his gaunt body and muscular limbs--over his
young head and his coursing hot blood--he had wrapped the dead white
cowl of centuries gone as the winding-sheet of his humanity. These
were not clear thoughts in his mind, but the vaguest suggestions of
feeling, which of late had come to him at times, and now made him sigh
more deeply as he sat up and bent over again to tie the hempen cords.
As he did so, his attention was arrested by the sound of voices just
outside the monastery wall, which was low here, so that in the general
stillness they became entirely audible.