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 insnare 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 foot-path. 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 gray-blue,
beneath brows low and firm; a mustache 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 farther 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 neighborhood 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
doves 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 farther 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 civilization 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 neighboring 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 neighborhood 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.