II.

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 fervour 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 pathways. 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

cadencies 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 footpaths 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 heart 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 ardour 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, grey 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

awestricken 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 grey 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 lifelong 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 outstretched 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--she had

celebrated 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 a 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 ardour of her studies and the rigour 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 mediaeval 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 roadside, 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 hillside 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."

Harmonising 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.