Sister Dolorosa was returning from her visit to old Martha on the
following afternoon. When she awoke that morning she resolutely put
away all thought of what had happened the evening before. She prayed
oftener than usual that day. She went about all duties with unwonted
fervor. When she set out in the afternoon, and reached the spot in
the fields where the meeting had taken place, it was inevitable that
a nature sensitive and secluded like hers should be visited by some
question touching who he was and whither he had gone; for it did not
even occur to her that he would ever cross her path again. Soon she
reached old Martha's; and then--a crippled toad with a subtile tongue
had squatted for an hour at the ear of Eve, and Eve, beguiled, had
listened. And now she was again returning across the fields homeward.
Homeward?
Early that afternoon Helm had walked across the country to the station,
some two miles off, to change his dress, with the view of going to the
convent the next day. As he came back, he followed the course which he
had taken the day before, and this brought him into the same foot-path
across the fields.
Thus they met the second time. When she saw him, had she been a bird,
with one sudden bound she would have beaten the air down beneath her
frightened wings and darted high over his head straight to the convent.
But his step grew slower and his look expectant. When they were a few
yards apart he stepped out of the path into the low, gray weeds of the
field, and seemed ready to pause; but she had instinctively drawn her
veil close, and was passing on. Then he spoke quickly.
"I beg your pardon, but are strangers allowed to visit the convent?"
There was no mistaking the courtesy of the tone. But she did not lift
her face towards him. She merely paused, though seeming to shrink away.
He saw the fingers of one hand lace themselves around the cross. Then a
moment later, in a voice very low and gentle, she replied, "The Mother
Superior is glad to receive visitors at the convent," and, bowing,
moved away.
He stood watching her with a quick flush of disappointment. Her voice,
even more than her garb, had at once waved off approach. In his mind
he had crossed the distance from himself to her so often that he had
forgotten the actual abyss of sacred separation. Very thoughtfully he
turned at last and took his way along the foot-path.
As he was leaving the farm-house the next day to go to the convent,
Ezra joined him, merely saying that he was going also. The old man had
few thoughts; but with that shrewd secretiveness which is sometimes
found in the dull mind he kept his counsels to himself. Their walk was
finished in silence, and soon the convent stood before them.
Through a clear sky the wan light fell upon it as lifeless as though
sent from a dead sun. The air hung motionless. The birds were gone.
Not a sound fell upon the strained ear. Not a living thing relieved
the eye. And yet within what tragedies and conflicts, what wounds and
thorns of womanhood! Here, then, she lived and struggled and soared.
An unearthly quietude came over him as he walked up the long avenue
of elms, painfully jarred on by the noise of Ezra's shuffling feet
among the dry leaves. Joyous life had retired to infinite remoteness;
and over him, like a preternatural chill in the faint sunlight, crept
the horror of this death in life. Strangely enough he felt at one and
the same time a repugnance to his own nature of flesh and a triumphant
delight in the possession of bodily health, liberty--the liberty of the
world--and a mind unfettered by tradition.
A few feet from the entrance an aged nun stepped from behind a
hedge-row of shrubbery and confronted them.
"Will you state your business?" she said, coldly, glancing at Helm and
fixing her eyes on Ezra, who for reply merely nodded to Helm.
"I am a stranger in this part of the country, and heard that I would be
allowed to visit the convent."
"Are you a Catholic?"
"No; I am a Protestant."
"Are you acquainted with any of the young ladies in the convent?"
"I am not."
She looked him through and through. He met her scrutiny with frank
unconsciousness.
"Will you come in? I will take your name to the Mother Superior."
They followed her into a small reception-room, and sat for a long time
waiting. Then an inner door opened, and another aged nun, sweet-faced
and gentle, entered and greeted them pleasantly, recognizing Ezra as an
acquaintance.
"Another Sister will be sent to accompany us," she said, and sat down
to wait, talking naturally the while to the old man. Then the door
opened again, and the heart of Helm beat violently; there was no
mistaking the form, the grace. She crossed to the Sister, and spoke in
an undertone.
"Sister Generose is engaged. Mother sent me in her place, Sister." Then
she greeted Ezra and bowed to Helm, lifting to him an instant, but
without recognition, her tremulous eyes. Her face had the whiteness of
alabaster.
"We will go to the church first," said the Sister, addressing Helm, who
placed himself beside her, the others following.
When they entered the church he moved slowly around the walls, trying
to listen to his guide and to fix his thoughts upon the pictures and
the architecture. Presently he became aware that Ezra had joined them,
and as soon as pretext offered he looked back. In a pew near the door
through which they had entered he could just see the kneeling form
and bowed head of Sister Dolorosa. There she remained while they made
the circuit of the building, and not until they were quitting it did
she rise and again place herself by the side of Ezra. Was it her last
prayer before her temptation?
They walked across the grounds towards the old-fashioned flower-garden
of the convent. The Sister opened the little latticed gate, and the
others passed in. The temptation was to begin in the very spot where
Love had long been wandering amid dumb companions.
"Ezra!" called the aged Sister, pausing just inside the gate and
looking down at some recently dug bulbs, "has Martha taken up her
tender bulbs? The frost will soon be falling." The old man sometimes
helped at the convent in garden work.
"Who is this young man?" she inquired carelessly a few moments later.
But Ezra was one of those persons who cherish a faint dislike of all
present company. Moreover, he knew the good Sister's love of news. So
he began to resist her with the more pleasure that he could at least
evade her questions.
"I don't know," he replied, with a mysterious shake of the head.
"Come this way," she said beguilingly, turning aside into another walk,
"and look at the chrysanthemums. How did you happen to meet him?"
* * * * *
When Sister Dolorosa and Helm found themselves walking slowly side
by side down the garden-path--this being what he most had hoped for
and she most had feared--there fell upon each a momentary silence
of preparation. Speak she must; if only in speaking she might not
err. Speak he could; if only in speaking he might draw from her more
knowledge of her life, and in some becoming way cause her to perceive
his interest in it.
Then she, as his guide, keeping her face turned towards the border
of flowers, but sometimes lifting it shyly to his, began with great
sweetness and a little hurriedly, as if fearing to pause:
"The garden is not pretty now. It is full of flowers, but only a few
are blooming. These are daffodils. They bloomed in March, long ago.
And here were spring beauties. They grow wild, and do not last long.
The Mother Superior wished some cultivated in the garden, but they are
better if let alone to grow wild. And here are violets, which come in
April. And here is Adam and Eve, and tulips. They are gay flowers,
and bloom together for company. You can see Adam and Eve a long way
off, and they look better at a distance. These were the white lilies,
but one of the Sisters died, and we made a cross. That was in June.
Jump-up-Johnnies were planted in this bed, but they did not do well.
It has been a bad year. A storm blew the hollyhocks down, and there
were canker-worms in the roses. That is the way with the flowers: they
fail one year, and they succeed the next. They would never fail if they
were let alone. It is pleasant to see them starting out in the Spring
to be perfect each in its own way. It is pleasant to water them and
to help. But some will be perfect, and some will be imperfect, and no
one can alter that. They are like the children in the school; only the
flowers would all be perfect if they had their way, and the children
would all be wrong if they had theirs--the poor, good children! This
is touch-me-not. Perhaps you have never heard of any such flower. And
there, next to it, is love-lies-bleeding. We have not much of that;
only this one little plant." And she bent over and stroked it.
His whole heart melted under the white radiance of her innocence. He
had thought her older; now his feeling took the form of the purest
delight in some exquisite child nature. And therefore, feeling thus
towards her, and seeing the poor, dead garden with only common flowers,
which nevertheless she separately loved, oblivious of their commonness,
he said with sudden warmth, holding her eyes with his:
"I wish you could see my mother's garden and the flowers that bloom in
it." And as he spoke there came to him a vision of her as she might
look in a certain secluded corner of it, where ran a trellised walk;
over-clambering roses pale-golden, full-blown or budding, and bent with
dew; the May sun golden in the heavens; far and near birds singing and
soaring in ecstasy; the air lulling the sense with perfume, quickening
the blood with freshness; and there, within that frame of roses, her
head bare and shining, her funereal garb forever laid aside for one
that matched the loveliest hue of living nature around, a flower at
her throat, flowers in her hand, sadness gone from her face, there
the pure and radiant incarnation of a too-happy world, this exquisite
child-nature, advancing towards him with eyes of love.
Having formed this picture, he could not afterwards destroy it; and as
they resumed their walk he began very simply to describe his mother's
garden, she listening closely because of her love for flowers, which
had become companions to her, and merely saying dreamily, half to
herself and with guarded courtesy half to him, "It must be beautiful."
* * * * *
"The Mother Superior intends to make the garden larger next year, and
to have fine flowers in it, Ezra. It has been a prosperous year in the
school, and there will be money to spare. This row of lilacs is to be
dug up, and the fence set back so as to take in the onion patch over
there. When does he expect to go away?" The aged Sister had not made
rapid progress.
"I haven't heard him say," replied the old man.
"Perhaps Martha has heard him say."
Ezra only struck the toe of his stout boot with his staff.
"The Mother Superior will want _you_ to dig up the lilacs, Ezra. You
can do it better than any one else."
The old man shook his head threateningly at the bushes. "I can settle
them," he said.
"Better than any one else. Has Martha heard him say when he is going
away?"
"To-morrow," he replied, conceding something in return for the lilacs.
* * * * *
"These are the chrysanthemums. They are white, but some are perfect and
some are imperfect, you see. Those that are perfect are the ones to
feel proud of, but the others are the ones to love."
"If all were perfect would you no longer love them?" he said gently,
thinking how perfect she was and how easy it would be to love her.
"If all were perfect, I could love all alike, because none would need
to be loved more than others."
"And when the flowers in the garden are dead, what do you find to love
then?" he asked, laughing a little and trying to follow her mood.
"It would not be fair to forget them because they are dead. But they
are not dead; they go away for a season, and it would not be fair to
forget them because they have gone away." This she said simply and
seriously as though her conscience were dealing with human virtues and
duties.
"And are you satisfied to love things that are not present?" he asked,
looking at her with sudden earnestness.
* * * * *
"The Mother Superior will wish him to take away a favorable impression
of the convent," said the Sister. "Young ladies are sometimes sent to
us from that region." And now, having gotten from Ezra the information
she desired and turned their steps towards the others, she looked at
Helm with greater interest.
"Should you like to go upon the observatory?" she meekly asked,
pointing to the top of the adjacent building. "From there you can see
how far the convent lands extend. Besides, it is the only point that
commands a view of the whole country."
The scene of the temptation was to be transferred to the pinnacle of
the temple.
"It is not asking too much of you to climb so far for my pleasure?"
"It is our mission to climb," she replied, wearily; "and if our
strength fails, we rest by the way."
Of herself she spoke literally; for when they came to the topmost story
of the building, from which the observatory was reached by a short
flight of steps, she sank into a seat placed near as a resting-place.
"Will you go above, Sister?" she said feebly. "I will wait here."
On the way up, also, the old man had been shaking his head with a
stupid look of alarm and muttering his disapproval.
"There is a high railing, Ezra," she now said to him. "You could not
fall." But he refused to go farther; he suffered from vertigo.
The young pair went up alone.
For miles in all directions the landscape lay shimmering in the
autumnal sunlight--a poor, rough, homely land, with a few farm houses
of the plainest kind. Briefly she traced for him the boundary of the
convent domain. And then he, thinking proudly of his own region, now
lying heavy in varied autumnal ripeness and teeming with noble, gentle
animal life; with rolling pastures as green as May under great trees
of crimson and gold; with flashing streams and placid sheets of water,
and great secluded homesteads--he, in turn, briefly described it; and
she, loving the sensuous beauty of the world, listened more dreamily,
merely repeating over and over, half to herself, and with more guarded
courtesy half to him, "It must be very beautiful."
But whether she suddenly felt that she had yielded herself too far
to the influence of his words and wished to counteract this, or
whether she was aroused to offset his description by another of unlike
interest, scarcely had he finished when she pointed towards a long
stretch of woodland that lay like a mere wavering band of brown upon
the western horizon.
"It was through those woods," she said, her voice trembling slightly,
"that the procession of Trappists marched behind the cross when they
fled to this country from France. Beyond that range of hills is the
home of the Silent Brotherhood. In this direction," she continued,
pointing southward, "is the creek which used to be so deep in winter
that the priests had to swim it as they walked from one distant mission
to another in the wilderness, holding above the waves the crucifix and
the sacrament. Under that tree down there the Father who founded this
convent built with his own hands the cabin that was the first church,
and hewed out of logs the first altar. It was from those trees that
the first nuns got the dyes for their vestments. On the floor of that
cabin they sometimes slept in mid-winter with no other covering than an
armful of straw. Those were heroic days."
If she had indeed felt some secret need to recover herself by reciting
the heroisms of local history, she seemed to have succeeded. Her face
kindled with emotion; and as he watched it he forgot even her creed
in this revelation of her nature, which touched in him also something
serious and exalted. But as she ceased he asked, with peculiar interest:
"Are there any Kentuckians among the Trappist Fathers?"
"No," she replied, after a momentary silence, and in a voice lowered to
great sadness. "There was one a few years ago. His death was a great
blow to the Fathers. They had hoped that he might some day become the
head of the order in Kentucky. He was called Father Palemon."
For another moment nothing was said. They were standing side by side,
looking towards that quarter of the horizon which she had pointed out
as the site of the abbey. Then he spoke meditatively, as though his
mind had gone back unawares to some idea that was very dear to him:
"No, this does not seem much like Kentucky; but, after all, every
landscape is essentially the same to me if there are homes on it. Poor
as this country is, still it is history; it is human life. Here are
the eternal ties and relations. Here are the eternal needs and duties;
everything that keeps the world young and the heart at peace. Here is
the unchanging expression of our common destiny, as creatures who must
share all things, and bear all things, and be bound together in life
and death."
"Sister!" called up the nun waiting below, "is not the wind blowing?
Will you not take cold?"
"The wind is not blowing, Sister, but I am coming."
They turned their faces outward upon the landscape once more. Across
it wound the little foot-path towards the farm-house in the distance.
By a common impulse their eyes rested upon the place of their first
meeting. He pointed to it.
"I shall never forget that spot," he said, impulsively.
"Nor I!"
Her words were not spoken. They were not uttered within. As
unexpectedly and silently as in the remotest profound of the heavens at
midnight some palest little star is loosened from its orbit, shoots a
brief span, and disappears, this confession of hers traced its course
across the depths of her secret consciousness; but, having made it to
herself, she kept her eyes veiled, and did not look at him again that
day.
"I think you have now seen everything that could be of any interest,"
the aged Sister said, doubtfully, when they stood in the yard below.
"The place is very interesting to me," he answered, looking around that
he might discover some way of prolonging his visit.
"The graveyard, Sister. We might go there." The barely audible
words were Sister Dolorosa's. The scene of the temptation was to be
transferred for the third time.
They walked some distance down a sloping hill-side, and stepped softly
within the sacred enclosure. A graveyard of nuns! O Mother Earth,
all-bearing, passion-hearted mother! Thou that sendest love one for
another into thy children, from the least to the greatest, as thou
givest them life! Thou that livest by their loves and their myriad
plightings of troth and myriad marriages! With what inconsolable sorrow
must thou receive back upon thy bosom the chaste dust of lorn virgins,
whose bosoms thou didst mould for a lover's arms and a babe's slumbers!
As marble vestals of the ancient world, buried and lost, they lie,
chiselled into a fixed attitude of prayer through the silent centuries.
The aspect and spirit of the place: the simple graves placed side
by side like those of the nameless poor or of soldiers fallen in an
unfriendly land; the rude wooden cross at the head of each, bearing
the sacred name of her who was dust below; the once chirruping nests
of birds here and there in the grass above the songless lips; the sad
desolation of this unfinished end--all were the last thing needed to
wring the heart of Helm with dumb pity and an ungovernable anguish of
rebellion. This, then, was to be her portion. His whole nature cried
aloud against it. His ideas of human life, civilization, his age, his
country, his State, rose up in protest. He did not heed the words of
the Sister beside him. His thoughts were with Sister Dolorosa, who
followed with Ezra in a silence which she had but once broken since her
last words to him. He could have caught her up and escaped back with
her into the liberty of life, into the happiness of the world.
Unable to endure the place longer, he himself led the way out. At the
gate the Sister fell behind with Ezra.
"He seems deeply impressed by his visit," she said, in an undertone,
"and should bear with him a good account of the convent. Note what he
says, Ezra. The order wants friends in Kentucky, where it was born and
has flourished;" and looking at Sister Dolorosa and Helm, who were a
short distance in front, she added to herself:
"In her, more than in any other one of us, he will behold the perfect
spiritual type of the convent. By her he will be made to feel the power
of the order to consecrate women, in America, in Kentucky, to the
service of the everlasting Church."
Meantime, Sister Dolorosa and Helm walked side by side in a silence
that neither could break. He was thinking of her as a woman of
Kentucky--of his own generation--and trying to understand the motive
that had led her to consecrate herself to such a life. His own ideal of
duty was so different.
"I have never thought," he said, at length, in a voice lowered so as to
reach her ear alone--"I have never thought that my life would not be
full of happiness. I have never supposed I could help being happy if I
did my duty."
She made no reply, and again they walked on in silence and drew near
the convent building. There was so much that he wished to say, but
scarcely one of his thoughts that he dared utter. At length he said,
with irrepressible feeling:
"I wish your life did not seem to me so sad. I wish, when I go away
to-morrow, that I could carry away, with my thoughts of this place, the
thought that you are happy. As long as I remember it I wish I could
remember you as being happy."
"You have no right to remember me at all," she said, quickly, speaking
for the nun and betraying the woman.
"But I cannot help it," he said.
"Remember me, then, not as desiring to be happy, but as living to
become blessed."
This she said, breaking the long silence which had followed upon his
too eager exclamation. Her voice had become hushed into unison with her
meek and patient words. And then she paused, and, turning, waited for
the Sister to come up beside them. Nor did she even speak to him again,
merely bowing without lifting her eyes when, a little later, he thanked
them and took his leave.
In silence he and the old man returned to the farm-house, for his
thoughts were with her. In the garden she had seemed to him almost
as a child, talking artlessly of her sympathies and ties with mute
playthings; then on the heights she had suddenly revealed herself as
the youthful transcendent devotee; and finally, amid the scenes of
death, she had appeared a woman too quickly aged and too early touched
with resignation. He did not know that the effect of convent life is to
force certain faculties into maturity while others are repressed into
unalterable unripeness; so that in such instances as Sister Dolorosa's
the whole nature resembles some long, sloping mountain-side, with an
upper zone of ever-lingering snow for childhood, below this a green
vernal belt for maidenhood, and near the foot fierce summer heats and
summer storms for womanhood. Gradually his plan of joining his friends
the next day wavered for reasons that he could hardly have named.
And Sister Dolorosa--what of her when the day was over? Standing
that night in a whitewashed, cell-like room, she took off the heavy
black veil and hood which shrouded her head from all human vision,
and then unfastening at waist and throat the heavier black vestment
of the order, allowed it to slip to the floor, revealing a white
under-habit of the utmost simplicity of design. It was like the magical
transformation of a sorrow-shrouded woman back into the shape of her
own earliest maidenhood.
Her hair, of the palest gold, would, if unshorn, have covered her
figure in a soft, thick golden cloud; but shorn, it lay about her neck
and ears in large, lustrous waves that left defined the contour of
her beautiful head, and gave to it the aerial charm that belongs to
the joyousness of youth. Her whole figure was relaxed into a posture
slightly drooping; her bare arms, white as the necks of swans, hung
in forgotten grace at her sides; her eyes, large, dark, poetic, and
spiritual, were bent upon the floor, so that the lashes left their
shadows on her cheeks, while the delicate, overcircling brows were
arched high with melancholy. As the nun's funereal robes had slipped
from her person had her mind slipped back into the past, that she stood
thus, all the pure oval of her sensitive face stilled to an expression
of brooding pensiveness? On the urn which held the ashes of her heart
had some legend of happy shapes summoned her fondly to return?--some
garden? some radiant playfellow of childhood summers, already dim but
never to grow dimmer?
Sighing deeply, she stepped across the dark circle on the floor which
was the boundary of her womanhood. As she did so her eyes rested on
a small table where lay a rich veil of white that she had long been
embroidering for a shrine of the Virgin. Slowly, still absently, she
walked to it, and, taking it up, threw it over her head, so that the
soft fabric enveloped her head and neck and fell in misty folds about
her person; she thinking the while only of the shrine; she looking
down on this side and on that, and wishing only to judge how well this
design and that design, patiently and prayerfully wrought out, might
adorn the image of the Divine Mother in the church of the convent.
But happening to be standing quite close to the white wall of the room
with the lamp behind her, when she raised her eyes she caught sight of
her shadow, and with a low cry clasped her hands, and for an instant,
breathless, surveyed it. No mirrors are allowed in the convent. Since
entering it Sister Dolorosa had not seen a reflection of herself,
except perhaps her shadow in the sun or her face in a troubled basin of
water. Now, with one overwhelming flood of womanly self-consciousness,
she bent forward, noting the outline of her uncovered head, of her
bared neck and shoulders and arms. Did this accidental adorning of
herself in the veil of a bride, after she had laid aside the veil of
the Church, typify her complete relapse of nature? And was this the
lonely marriage-moment of her betrayed heart?
For a moment, trembling, not before the image on the wall, but before
that vivid mirror which memory and fancy set before every woman when
no real mirror is nigh, she indulged her self-surrender to thoughts
that covered her, on face and neck, with a rosy cloud more maidenly
than the white mist of the veil. Then, as if recalled by some lightning
stroke of conscience, with fearful fingers she lifted off the veil,
extinguished the lamp, and, groping her way on tiptoe to the bedside,
stood beside it, afraid to lie down, afraid to pray, her eyes wide open
in the darkness.