Part 7 (2/2)

Again he struggled to sit up and this time succeeded, although for a moment he had to lean against Sister Anne's shoulder.

'As soon as you are able,' she reiterated anxiously, 'you must swim ash.o.r.e.'

He s.h.i.+fted himself and gazed at her in considerable perplexity.

'Do you know how I hurt my head?' he asked. 'I must have fallen as I was climbing up here. And how did you come here?'

'I was pa.s.sing,' Sister Anne explained, 'and I saw you lying here. I waded out to you. The water was not as deep then. Now--'

She paused, and a look of fear and anguish grew in her dull eyes.

'You cannot swim?' asked the boy.

'Oh, no, no!' she answered, her head sinking on her breast.

'Yet you stayed here to help me when you might have got safe ash.o.r.e if you had left me? Did you know that you would be caught by the tide?'

'I am old,' she answered; 'it must come to me before many years in any case. But you are so young. I could not leave you. Your mother--'

The boy looked at her a moment with s.h.i.+ning eyes and flus.h.i.+ng face. Then he rose cautiously, and tentatively flexed the muscles of his legs and arms.

'Will you take off your shoes?' he said gently.

She gazed at him in bewilderment, and he explained to her carefully what he would do and what she must do. It took some time to make her understand, for her slow mind had not compa.s.sed such a possibility; but when once it was clear to her what was to be done, she was docility itself. Well for Sister Anne now that the strongest habit of her life was obedience. But for that, the lad, strong swimmer as he was, could not have brought her safe to sh.o.r.e.

That night the placid life of the convent throbbed and thrilled with an excitement unknown in its history. Sister Anne, for the first time in her existence, was the centre of a storm of solicitude, of attention, of agitation. She herself was unmoved. She came back from death as unemotionally as she had gone to meet it. She sat by the window of her room, wis.h.i.+ng that she might be left alone to watch the moon rise above the quiet hills.

The Mother Superior, the cure himself, had visited her, had said strange and wonderful things to her which she scarcely understood. The whole Sisterhood buzzed about her like a hive, for it seemed that the fair-skinned lad of her adventure was the heir of a house whose name was famous in many lands, and the father was even now standing at her threshold.

Sister Anne was not embarra.s.sed by the great presence, fame and wealth and high birth and all the glories of this world being indeed less than words to her. Moreover, her visitor brought to this interview with an old unlettered woman all the charm and suavity and tact of which he was so well the master. The tale his son had told had seemed to him incredible and touching, and he felt a desire to understand the impulses which had made possible so singular an episode. He soon found that she had indeed faced death in full knowledge of what she did; that she had wittingly given up her chance of escape that the boy might have his. But to find the motive was not so simple. Delicately he probed one channel after another: duty, heroism, religious training, in none of these could he find the clue. Her life, he reflected, could hardly have been so full of happiness as to have attached her very strongly to this world, and deftly he pursued that trail, still unsuccessfully.

Baffled for the moment, he was silent, watching her unrevealing face.

The late summer twilight was darkening into deep shadows on the hillside, but the eastern sky was still clear yellow from the sunset.

Just beyond that bank of clouds, Sister Anne thought, the moon would rise before long. The man beside her, still pondering his problem, made some comment on the cl.u.s.tering trees in the valley below.

She turned to him at once with a changed look.

'They are at their thickest now,' was all she said; but he saw that at last he had opened the closed door.

In a few moments more, under his skillful touch, were revealed to him the simple and profound sources of happiness on which her spirit fed. In sentences so incomplete, in thoughts so inarticulate as to be mere suggestion, he comprehended her, and at length, with infinite gentleness, drew forth the thread of explanation which he had sought so patiently.

She had felt for long, he gathered, that she owed a heavy debt in return for all the joy in life that had been hers. She felt that her life had held more happiness than she deserved, happiness for which she had made, it seemed to her, but inadequate return. When she had found the helpless lad, she had found also, it seemed, her chance of payment. If she might save his life or at least give her own in the effort, this debt that she owed the world would be lessened.

When she had managed in some fas.h.i.+on to convey this much to her sympathetic listener, she paused and looked at him wistfully.

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