Sister Dolorosa and Posthumous Fame Part 2

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-gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sage, 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; cheris.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.serted 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-gra.s.s kind, with farm, s.p.a.cious 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-gra.s.s 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 leaders.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sed and repa.s.sed 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.

IV.

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 fervour.

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 subtle 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 footpath 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, grey weeds of the field, and seemed ready to pause; but she had instinctively drawn her veil close, and was pa.s.sing 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 footpath.

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 hedgerow 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, recognising 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-fas.h.i.+oned flower-garden of the convent. The Sister opened the little latticed gate, and the others pa.s.sed 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?