Part 4 (1/2)
They turned their faces outward upon the landscape once more. Across it wound the little footpath 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...o...b..t, 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 hillside, and stepped softly within the sacred enclosure. A graveyard of nuns! O Mother Earth, all-bearing, pa.s.sion-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 att.i.tude 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 gra.s.s 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, civilisation, 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, l.u.s.trous 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 play-fellow of childhood summers, already dim but never to grow dimmer?