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 fervor 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 path-ways. 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
cadences 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 foot-paths 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 hearts 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 ardor 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, gray 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
awe-stricken 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 gray 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 life-long 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 out-stretched 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 roles. 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--had she
not ordered 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 ardor of her studies and the rigor 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 road-side, 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 hill-side
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."
Harmonizing 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.