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 ensnare 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
footpath. 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 grey-blue, beneath brows low
and firm; a moustache 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 further 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 neighbourhood 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 hoves 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 further 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
civilisation 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 neighbouring 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 neighbourhood 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.