Outside the wall was a long strip of woodland which rose gently to the
summit of a ridge half a mile away. This woodland was but little used.
Into it occasionally a lay-brother drove the gentle monastery cows to
pasture, or here a flock sheltered itself beneath forest oaks against
the noontide summer heat. Beyond the summit lay the homestead of a
gentleman farmer. As one descended this slope towards the abbey, he
beheld it from the most picturesque side, and visitors at the homestead
usually came to see it by this secluded approach.
If Father Palemon could have seen beyond the wall, he would have
discovered that the voices were those of a young man and a young
woman--the former a slight, dark cripple, and invalid. He led the way
along a foot-path up quite close to the wall, and the two sat down
beneath the shade of a great tree. Father Palemon, listening eagerly,
unconsciously, overheard the following conversation:
"I should like to take you inside the abbey wall, but, of course, that
is impossible, as no woman is allowed to enter the grounds. So we shall
rest here a while. I find that the walk tires me more than it once
did, and this tree has become a sort of outside shrine to me on my
pilgrimages."
"Do you come often?"
"Oh yes. When we have visitors, I am appointed their guide, probably
because I feel more interest in the place than any one else. If they
are men, I take them over the grounds inside; and if they are women, I
bring them thus far and try to describe the rest."
"As you will do for me now?"
"No; I am not in the mood for describing. Even when I am, my
description always disappoints me. How is one to describe such human
beings as these monks? Sometimes, during the long summer days, I walk
over here alone and lie for hours under this tree, until the influences
of the place have completely possessed me and I feel wrought up to the
point of description. The sensation of a chill comes over me. Look up
at these Kentucky skies! You have never seen them before. Are there
any more delicate and tender? Well, at such times, where they bend
over this abbey, they look as hard and cold as a sky of Landseer's.
The sun seems no longer to warm the pale cross on the spire yonder,
the great drifting white clouds send a shiver through me as though
uplifted snow-banks were passing over my head. I fancy that if I were
to go inside I should see the white butterflies dropping down dead from
the petals of the white roses, finding them stiff with frost, and that
the white rabbits would be limping trembling through the frozen grass,
like the hare in 'The Eve of St. Agnes.' Everything becomes cold to
me--cold, cold, cold! The bleak and rugged old monks themselves, in
their hoary cowls, turn to personifications of perpetual winter; and if
I were in the chapel, I should expect to meet in one of them Keats's
very beadsman--patient, holy man, meagre, wan--whose fingers were numb
while he told his rosary, and his breath frosted as it took flight for
heaven. Ugh! I am cold now. My blood must be getting very thin."
"No; you make _me_ shiver also."
"At least the impression is a powerful one. I have watched these old
monks closely. Whether it is from the weakness of vigils and fasts or
from positive cold, they all tremble--perpetually tremble. I fancy that
their souls ache as well. Are not their cowls the grave-clothes of a
death in life?"
"You seem to forget, Austin, that faith warms them."
"By extinguishing the fires of nature! Why should not faith and
nature grow strong together? I have spent my life on the hill-side
back yonder, as you know, and I have had leisure enough for studying
these monks. I have tried to do them justice. At different times I
have almost lived with St. Benedict at Subiaco, and St. Patrick on the
mountain, and St. Anthony in the desert, and St. Thomas in the cell.
I understand and value the elements of truth and beauty in the lives
of the ancient solitaries. But they belong so inalienably to the past.
We have outgrown the ideals of antiquity. How can a man now look upon
his body as his evil tenement of flesh? How can he believe that he
approaches sainthood by destroying his manhood? The highest type of
personal holiness is said to be attained in the cloister. That is not
true. The highest type of personal holiness is to be attained in the
thick of the world's temptations. Then it becomes sublime. It seems
to me that the heroisms worth speaking of nowadays are active, not
meditative. But why should I say this to you, who as much as any one
else have taught me to think thus--I who myself am able to do nothing?
But though I can do nothing, I can at least look upon the monastic
ideal of life as an empty, dead, husk, into which no man with the
largest ideas of duty will ever compress his powers. Even granting that
it develops personal holiness, this itself is but one element in the
perfect character, and not even the greatest one."
"But do you suppose that these monks have deliberately and freely
chosen their vocation? You know perfectly well that often there are
almost overwhelming motives impelling men and women to hide themselves
away from the world--from, its sorrows, its dangers, its temptations."
"You are at least orthodox. I know that such motives exist, but are
they sufficient? Of course there was a time when the cloister was a
refuge from dangers. Certainly that is not true in this country now.
And as for the sorrows and temptations, I say that they must be met in
the world. There is no sorrow _befalling_ a man in the world that he
should not _bear_ in the world--bear it as well for the sake of his
own character as for the sake of helping others who suffer like him.
This way lie moral heroism and martyrdom. This way, even, lies the
utmost self-sacrifice, if one will only try to see it. No, I have but
little sympathy with such cases. The only kind of monk who has all my
sympathy is the one that is produced by early training and education.
Take a boy whose nature has nothing in common with the scourge and the
cell. Immure him. Never let him get from beneath the shadow of convent
walls or away from the sound of masses and the waving of crucifixes.
Bend him, train him, break him, until he turns monk despite nature's
purposes, and ceases to be a man without becoming a saint. I have
sympathy for _him_. Sympathy! I do not know of any violation of the law
of personal liberty that gives me so much positive suffering."
"But why suffer over imaginary cases? Such constraint belongs to the
past."
"On the contrary, it is just such an instance of constraint that has
colored my thoughts of this abbey. It is this that has led me to haunt
the place for years from a sort of sad fascination. Men find their way
to this valley from the remotest parts of the world. No one knows from
what inward or outward stress they come. They are hidden away here and
their secret histories are buried with them. But the history of one of
these fathers is known, for he has grown up here under the shadow of
these monastery walls. You may think the story one of mediæval flavor,
but I believe its counterpart will here and there be found as long as
monasteries rise and human beings fall.
"He was an illegitimate child. Who his father was, no one ever so much
as suspected. When his mother died he was left a homeless waif in one
of the Kentucky towns. But some invisible eye was upon him. He was soon
afterwards brought to the boarding-school for poor boys which is taught
by the Trappist fathers here. Perhaps this was done by his father, who
wished to get him safely out of the world. Well, he has never left this
valley since then. The fathers have been his only friends and advisers.
He has never looked on the face of a woman since he looked into his
mother's when a child. He knows no more of the modern world--except
what the various establishments connected with the abbey have taught
him--than the most ancient hermit. While he was in the Trappist school,
during afternoons and vacations he worked in the monastery fields with
the lay-brothers. With them he ate and slept. When his education was
finished he became a lay-brother himself. But amid such influences
the rest of the story is foreseen; in a few years he put on the brown
robe and leathern girdle of a brother of the order, and last year he
took final vows, and now wears the white cowl and black scapular of a
priest."
"But if he has never known any other life, he, most of all, should be
contented with this. It seems to me that it would be much harder to
have known human life and then renounce it."
"That is because you are used to dwell upon the good, and strive to
better the evil. No; I do not believe that he is happy. I do not
believe nature is ever thwarted without suffering, and nature in
him never cried out for the monkish life, but against it. His first
experience with the rigors of its discipline proved nearly fatal. He
was prostrated with long illness. Only by special indulgence in food
and drink was his health restored. His system even now is not inured to
the cruel exactions of his order. You see, I have known him for years.
I was first attracted to him as a lonely little fellow with the sad
lay-brothers in the fields. As I would pass sometimes, he would eye me
with a boy's unconscious appeal for the young and for companionship. I
have often gone into the abbey since then, to watch and study him. He
works with a terrible pent-up energy. I know his type among the young
Kentuckians. They make poor monks. Time and again they have come here
to join the order. But all have soon fallen away. Only Father Palemon
has ever persevered to the taking of the vows that bind him until
death. My father knew his mother and says that he is much like her--an
impulsive, passionate, trustful, beautiful creature, with the voice of
a seraph. Father Palemon himself has the richest voice in the monks'
choir. Ah, to hear him, in the dark chapel, sing the _Salve Regina_!
The others seem to moderate their own voices, that his may rise clear
and uncommingled to the vaulted roof. But I believe that it is only
the music he feels. He puts passion and an outcry for human sympathy
into every note. Do you wonder that I am so strongly drawn towards
him? I can give you no idea of his appearance. I shall show you his
photograph, but that will not do it. I have often imagined you two
together by the very law of contrast. I think of you at home in New
York City, with your charities, your missions, your energetic, untiring
beneficence. You stand at one extreme. Then I think of him at the
other--doing nothing, shut up in this valley, spending his magnificent
manhood in a never-changing, never-ending routine of sterile vigils
and fasts and prayers. Oh, we should change places, he and I! I should
be in there and he out here. He should be lying here by your side,
looking up into your face, loving you as I have loved you, and winning
you as I never can. Oh, Madeline, Madeline, Madeline!"
The rapid, broken utterance suddenly ceased.
In the deep stillness that followed, Father Palemon heard the sound of
a low sob and a groan.
He had sat all this time rivetted to the spot, and as though turned
into stone. He had hardly breathed. A bright lizard gliding from out
a crevice in the wall had sunned itself in a little rift of sunshine
between his feet. A bee from the honeysuckles had alighted unnoticed
upon his hand. Others sounds had died away from his ears, which were
strained to catch the last echoes of these strange voices from another
world.
Now all at once across the gardens came the stroke of a bell summoning
to instant prayer. Why had it suddenly grown so loud and terrible? He
started up. He forgot priestly gravity and ran--fairly ran, headlong
and in a straight course, heedless of the tender plants that were being
crushed beneath his feet. From another part of the garden an aged
brother, his eye attracted by the sunlight glancing on a bright moving
object, paused while training a grape-vine and watched with amazement
the disorderly figure as it fled. As he ran on, the skirts of his cowl,
which he had forgotten to tie up, came down. When at last he reached
the door of the chapel and stooped to unroll them, he discovered that
they had been draggled over the dirt and stained against the bruised
weeds until they were hardly recognizable as having once been spotless
white. A pang of shame and alarm went through him. It was the first
stain.