Flute and Violin and other Kentucky Tales and Romances

Sweetness had forsaken the countenance of the aged shepherd. His tones rung hoarse and hollow, and the muscles of his face twitched and quivered as he went on:

"Reflect upon the tranquil life that you have spent here, preparing your soul for immortality. All your training has been for the solitude of the cloister. All your enemies have been only the spiritual foes of your own nature. You say that you are not fitted for this life. Are you then prepared for a life in the world? Foolish, foolish boy! You exchange the terrestrial solitude of heaven for the battle-field of hell. Its coarse, foul atmosphere will stifle and contaminate you. It has problems that you have not been taught to solve. It has shocks that you would never withstand. I see you in the world? Never, never! See you in the midst of its din and sweat of weariness, its lying and dishonor? You say that you love this woman. Heaven forgive you this sin! You would follow her. Do you not know that you may be deluded, trifled with, disappointed? She may love another. Ah! you are a child – a simple child!"

"Father Abbot, it is time that I were becoming a man."

But the abbot did not hear or pause, borne on now by a torrent of ungovernable feelings:

"Your parents committed a great sin." He suddenly lifted the cross from his bosom to his lips, which moved rapidly for an instant in silent prayer. "It has never been counted against you here, as it will never be laid to your charge in heaven. But the world will count it against you. It will make you feel its jeers and scorn. You have no father," again he bent over and passionately kissed his cross, "you have no name. You are an illegitimate child. There is no place for you in the world – in the world that takes no note of sin unless it is discovered. I warn you – I warn you by all the years of my own experience, and by all the sacred obligations of your holy order, against this fatal step."

"Though it be fatal, I must and will take it."

"I implore you! God in heaven, dost thou punish me thus? See! I am an old man. I have but a few years to live. You are the only tie of human tenderness that binds me to my race. My heart is buried in yours. I have watched over you since you were brought here, a little child. I have nursed you through months of sickness. I have hastened the final assumption of your vows, that you might be safe within the fold. I have stayed my last days on earth with the hope that when I am dead, as I soon shall be, you would perpetuate my spirit among your brethren, and in time come to be a shepherd among them, as I have been. Do not take this solace from me. The Church needs you – most of all needs you in this age and in this country. I have reared you within it that you might be glorified at last among the saints and martyrs. No, no! You will not go away!"

"Father Abbot, what better can I do than heed the will of Heaven in my own conscience?"

"I implore you!"

"I must go."

"I warn you, I say."

"Oh, my father! You only make more terrible the anguish of this moment. Bless me, and let me go in peace."

"Bless you?" almost shrieked the abbot, starting back with horror, his features strangely drawn, his uplifted arms trembling, his whole body swaying. "Bless you? Do this, and I will hurl upon you the awful curse of the everlasting Church!"

As though stricken by the thunderbolt of his own imprecation, he fell into one of the chairs and buried his head in his arms upon the table. Father Palemon had staggered backward, as though the curse had struck him in the forehead. These final words he had never thought of – never foreseen. For a moment the silence of the great chamber was broken only by his own quick breathing and by the convulsive agitation of the abbot. Then with a rapid movement Father Palemon came forward, knelt, and kissed the hem of the abbot's cowl, and, turning away, went out.

Love – duty – the world; in those three words lie all the human, all the divine, tragedy.

VI

Years soon pass away in the life of a Trappist priest.

For shade to shade will come too drowsily,And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.

Another June came quickly into the lonely valley of the Abbey of Gethsemane. Again the same sweet monastery bells in the purple twilights, and the same midnight masses. Monks again at work in the gardens, their cowls well tied up with hempen cords. Monks once more teaching the pious pupils in the school across the lane. The gorgeous summer came and passed beyond the southern horizon, like a mortal vision of beauty never to return. There were few changes to note. Only the abbot seemed to have grown much feebler. His hand trembled visibly now as he lifted the crosier, and he walked less than of yore among his brethren while they busied themselves with the duties of the waning autumn. But he was oftener seen pacing to and fro where the leaves fell sadly from the moaning choir of English elms. Or at times he would take a little foot-path that led across the brown November fields, and, having gained a crest on the boundary of the valley, would stand looking far over the outward landscape into imaginary spaces, limitless and unexplored.

But Father Palemon, where was he? Amid what splendors of the great metropolis was he bursting Joy's grape against his palate fine? What of his dreams of love and duty, and a larger, more modern stature of manhood?

Late one chill, cloud-hung afternoon in November there came into the valley of Gethsemane the figure of a young man. He walked slowly along the road towards the abbey, with the air of one who is weary and forgetful of his surroundings. His head dropped heavily forward on his breast, and his empty hands hung listlessly down. At the iron gate of the porter's lodge entrance was refused him; the abbey was locked in repose for the night. Urging the importance of his seeing the abbot, he was admitted. He erased a name from a card and on it wrote another, and waited for the interview.

Again the same great dark room, lighted by a flickering spark. He did not stand half in light and half in shadow, but hid himself away in one of the darkest recesses. In a few moments the abbot entered, holding the card in his hand and speaking with tremulous haste:

"'Father Palemon?' – who wrote this name, 'Father Palemon?'"

Out of the darkness came a low reply:

"I wrote it."

"I do not know you."

"I am Father Palemon."

The calm of a great sadness was in the abbot's voice, as he replied, musingly:

"There —is– no – Father Palemon: he died long ago."

"Oh, my father! Is this the way you receive me?"

He started forward and came into the light. Alas! No; it was not Father Palemon. His long hair was unkempt and matted over his forehead, his face pinched and old with suffering, and ashen gray except for the red spots on his cheeks. Deep shadows lay under his hollow eyes, which were bloodshot and restless and burning.

"I have come back to lead the life of a monk. Will you receive me?"

"Twice a monk, no monk. Receive you for what time? Until next June?"

"Until death."

"I have received you once already until death. How many times am I to receive you until death?"

"I beseech you do not contest in words with me. It is too much. I am ill. I am in trouble."

He suddenly checked his passionate utterance, speaking slowly and with painful self-control:

"I cannot endure how to tell you all that has befallen me since I went away. The new life that I had begun in the world has come to an end. Father Abbot, she is dead. I have just buried her and my child in one grave. Since then the one desire I have had has been to return to this place. God forgive me! I have no heart now for the duties I had undertaken. I had not measured my strength against this calamity. It has left me powerless for good to any human creature. My plans were wrecked when she died. My purposes have gone to pieces. There is no desire in me but for peace and solitude and prayer. All that I can do now is to hide my poor, broken, ineffectual life here, until by God's will, sooner or later, it is ended."

"You speak in the extremity of present suffering. You are young. Nearly all your life lies yet before you. In time Nature heals nearly all the wounds that she inflicts. In a few years this grief which now unmans you – which you think incurable – will wear itself out. You do not believe this. You think me cruel. But I speak the truth. Then you may be happy again – happier than you have ever been. Then the world will resume its hold upon you. If the duties of a man's life have appealed to your conscience, as I believe they have, they will then appeal to it with greater power and draw you with a greater sense of their obligations. Moreover, you may love again – ah! Hush! Hear me through! You think this is more unfeeling still. But I must speak, and speak now. It is impossible to seclude you here against all temptation. Some day you may see another woman's face – hear another woman's voice. You may find your priestly vows intolerable again. Men who once break their holiest pledges for the sake of love will break them again, if they love again. No, no! If you were unfit for the life of a monk once, much more are you unfit now. Now that you are in the world, better to remain there."

"In Heaven's name, will you deny me? I tell you that this is the only desire left to me. The world is as dead to me as though it never existed, because my heart is broken. You misunderstood me then. You misunderstand me now. Does experience count for nothing in preparing a man for the cloister?"

"I did misunderstand you once; I thought that you were fitted for the life of a monk. I understand you now: I do not make the same mistake twice."

"This is the home of my childhood, and you turn me away?"

"You went away yourself, in the name of conscience and of your own passion."

"This is the house of God, and you close its doors against me?"

"You burst them open of your own self-will."

Hitherto the abbot had spoken for duty, for his church, for the inviolable sanctity of his order. Against these high claims the pent-up tenderness of his heart had weighed as nothing. But now as the young man, having fixed a long look upon his face, turned silently away towards the door, with out-stretched arms he tottered after him, and cried out in broken tones: "Stop! Stop, I pray you! You are ill. You are free to remain here a guest. No one was ever refused shelter. Oh, my God! what have I done?"

Father Palemon had reeled and fallen fainting in the door-way.

In this life, from earliest childhood, we are trained by merciful degrees to brave its many sorrows. We begin with those of infancy, which, Heaven knows, at the time seem grievous enough to be borne. As we grow older we somehow also grow stronger, until through the discipline of many little sufferings we are enabled to bear up under those final avalanches of disaster that rush down upon us in maturer years. Even thus fortified, there are some of us on whom these fall only to overwhelm.

But Father Palemon. Unnaturally shielded by the cloister up to that period of young manhood when feeling is deepest and fortitude least, he had suddenly appeared upon the world's stage only to enact one of the greatest scenes in the human tragedy – that scene wherein the perfect ecstasy of love by one swift, mortal transition becomes the perfect agony of loss. What wonder if he had staggered blindly, and if, trailing the habiliments of his sorrow, he had sought to return to the only place that was embalmed in his memory as a peaceful haven for the shipwrecked? But even this quiet port was denied him.

Into the awful death-chamber of the abbey they bore him one midnight some weeks later. The tension of physical powers during the days of his suspense and suffering, followed by the shock of his rejection, had touched those former well-nigh fatal ravages that had prostrated him during the period of his austere novitiate. He was dying. The delirium of his fever had passed away, and with a clear, dark, sorrowful eye he watched them prepare for the last agony.

On the bare floor of the death-chamber they sprinkled consecrated ashes in the form of a cross. Over these they scattered straw, and over the straw they drew a coarse serge cloth. This was his death-bed – a sign that in the last hour he was admitted once more to the fellowship of his order. From the low couch on which he lay he looked at it. Then he made a sign to the abbot, in the mute language of the brotherhood. The abbot repeated it to one of the attendant fathers, who withdrew and soon returned, bringing a white cowl. Lifting aside the serge cloth, he spread the cowl over the blessed cinders and straw. Father Palemon's request had been that he might die upon his cowl, and on this they now stretched his poor emaciated body, his cold feet just touching the old earth-stains upon its hem. He lay for a little while quite still, with closed eyes. Then he turned them upon the abbot and the monks, who were kneeling in prayer around him, and said, in a voice of great and gentle dignity:

"My father – my brethren, have I your full forgiveness?"

With sobs they bowed themselves around him. After this he received the crucifix, tenderly embracing it, and then lay still again, as if awaiting death. But finally he turned over on one side, and raising himself on one forearm, sought with the hand of the other among the folds of his cowl until he found a small blood-stain now faint upon its bosom. Then he lay down again, pressing his cheek against it; and thus the second time a monk, but even in death a lover, he breathed out his spirit with a faint whisper – "Madeline!"

And as he lay on the floor, so now he lies in the dim cemetery garth outside, wrapped from head to foot in his cowl, with its stains on the hem and the bosom.

SISTER DOLOROSA

I

When Sister Dolorosa had reached the summit of a low hill on her way to the convent she turned and stood for a while looking backward. The landscape stretched away in a rude, unlovely expanse of gray fields, shaded in places by brown stubble, and in others lightened by pale, thin corn – the stunted reward of necessitous husbandry. This way and that ran wavering lines of low fences, some worm-eaten, others rotting beneath over-clambering wild rose and blackberry. About the horizon masses of dense and rugged woods burned with sombre fires as the westering sun smote them from top to underbrush. Forth from the edge of one a few long-horned cattle, with lowered heads, wound meekly homeward to the scant milking. The path they followed led towards the middle background of the picture, where the weather-stained and sagging roof of a farm-house rose above the tops of aged cedars. Some of the branches, broken by the sleet and snow of winters, trailed their burdens from the thinned and desolated crests – as sometimes the highest hopes of the mind, after being beaten down by the tempests of the world, droop around it as memories of once transcendent aspirations.

Where she stood in the dead autumn fields few sounds broke in upon the pervasive hush of the declining day. Only a cricket, under the warm clod near by, shrilled sturdily with cheerful forethought of drowsy hearth-stones; only a lamb, timid of separation from the fold, called anxiously in the valley beyond the crest of the opposite hill; only the summoning whistle of a quail came sweet and clear from the depths of a neighboring thicket. Through all the air floated that spirit of vast loneliness which at seasons seems to steal like a human mood over the breast of the great earth and leave her estranged from her transitory children. At such an hour the heart takes wing for home, if any home it have; or when, if homeless, it feels the quick stir of that yearning for the evening fireside with its half-circle of trusted faces young and old, and its bonds of love and marriage, those deepest, most enchanting realities to the earthly imagination. The very landscape, barren and dead, but framing the simple picture of a home, spoke to the beholder the everlasting poetry of the race.

But Sister Dolorosa, standing on the brow of the hill whence the whole picture could be seen, yet saw nothing of it. Out of the western sky there streamed an indescribable splendor of many-hued light, and far into the depths of this celestial splendor her steadfast eyes were gazing.

She seemed caught up to some august height of holy meditation. Her motionless figure was so lightly poised that her feet, just visible beneath the hem of her heavy black dress, appeared all but rising from the dust of the path-way; her pure and gentle face was upturned, so that the dark veil fell away from her neck and shoulders; her lips were slightly parted; her breath came and went so imperceptibly that her hands did not appear to rise and fall as they clasped the cross to her bosom. Exquisite hands they were – most exquisite – gleaming as white as lilies against the raven blackness of her dress; and with startling fitness of posture, the longest finger of the right hand pointed like a marble index straight towards a richly embroidered symbol over her left breast – the mournful symbol of a crimson heart pierced by a crimson spear. Whether attracted by the lily-white hands or by the red symbol, a butterfly, which had been flitting hither and thither in search of the gay races of the summer gone, now began to hover nearer, and finally lighted unseen upon the glowing spot. Then, as if disappointed not to find it the bosom of some rose, or lacking hope and strength for further quest – there it rested, slowly fanning with its white wings the tortured emblem of the divine despair.

Lower sank the sun, deeper and more wide-spread the splendor of the sky, more rapt and radiant the expression of her face. A painter of the angelic school, seeing her standing thus, might have named the scene the transfiguration of angelic womanhood. What but heavenly images should she be gazing on; or where was she in spirit but flown out of the earthly autumn fields and gone away to sainted vespers in the cloud-built realm of her own fantasies? Perhaps she was now entering yon vast cathedral of the skies, whose white spires touched blue eternity; or toiling devoutly up yon gray mount of Calvary, with its blackened crucifix falling from the summit.

Standing thus towards the close of the day, Sister Dolorosa had not yet passed out of that ideal time which is the clear white dawn of life. She was still within the dim, half-awakened region of womanhood, whose changing mists are beautiful illusions, whose shadows about the horizon are the mysteries of poetic feeling, whose purpling east is the palette of the imagination, and whose upspringing skylark is blithe aspiration that has not yet felt the weight of the clod it soars within. Before her still was the full morning of reality and the burden of the mid-day hours.

But if the history of any human soul could be perfectly known, who would wish to describe this passage from the dawn of the ideal to the morning of the real – this transition from life as it is imagined through hopes and dreams to life as it is known through action and submission? It is then that within the country of the soul occur events too vast, melancholy, and irreversible to be compared to anything less than the downfall of splendid dynasties, or the decay of an august religion. It is then that there leave us forever bright, aerial spirits of the fancy, separation from whom is like grief for the death of the beloved.

The moment of this transition had come in the life of Sister Dolorosa, and unconsciously she was taking her last look at the gorgeous western clouds from the hill-tops of her chaste life of dreams.

A flock of frightened doves sped hurtling low over her head, and put an end to her reverie. Pressing the rosary to her lips, she turned and walked on towards the convent, not far away. The little foot-path across the fields was well trodden and familiar, running as it did between the convent and the farm-house behind her in which lived old Ezra and Martha Cross; and as she followed its windings, her thoughts, as is likely to be true of the thoughts of nuns, came home from the clouds to the humblest concerns of the earth, and she began to recall certain incidents of the visit from which she was returning.

The aged pair were well known to the Sisters. Their daughters had been educated at the convent; and, although these were married and scattered now, the tie then formed had since become more close through their age and loneliness. Of late word had come to the Mother Superior that old Martha was especially ailing, and Sister Dolorosa had several times been sent on visits of sympathy. For reasons better to be understood later on, these visits had had upon her the effect of an April shower on a thirsting rose. Her missions of mercy to the aged couple over, for a while the white taper of ideal consecration to the Church always burned in her bosom with clearer, steadier lustre, as though lit afresh from the Light eternal. But to-day she could not escape the conviction that these visits were becoming a source of disquietude; for the old couple, forgetting the restrictions which her vows put upon her very thoughts, had spoken of things which it was trying for her to hear – love-making, marriage, and children. In vain had she tried to turn away from the proffered share in such parental confidences. The old mother had even read aloud a letter from her eldest son, telling them of his approaching marriage and detailing the hope and despair of his wooing. With burning cheeks and downcast eyes Sister Dolorosa had listened till the close and then risen and quickly left the house.

The recollection of this returned to her now as she pursued her way along the foot-path which descended into the valley; and there came to her, she knew not whence or why, a piercing sense of her own separation from all but the divine love. The cold beauty of unfallen spirituality which had made her august as she stood on the hill-top died away, and her face assumed a tenderer, more appealing loveliness, as there crept over it, like a shadow over snow, that shy melancholy under which those women dwell who have renounced the great drama of the heart. She resolved to lay her trouble before the Mother Superior to-night, and ask that some other Sister be sent hereafter in her stead. And yet this resolution gave her no peace, but a throb of painful renunciation; and since she was used to the most scrupulous examination of her conscience, to detect the least presence of evil, she grew so disturbed by this state of her heart that she quite forgot the windings of the path-way along the edge of a field of corn, and was painfully startled when a wounded bird, lying on the ground a few feet in front of her, flapped its wings in a struggle to rise. Love and sympathy were the strongest principles of her nature, and with a little outcry she bent over and took it up; but scarce had she done so, when, with a final struggle, it died in her hand. A single drop of blood oozed out and stood on its burnished breast.

She studied it – delicate throat, silken wings, wounded bosom – in the helpless way of a woman, unwilling to put it down and leave it, yet more unwilling to take it away. Many a time, perhaps, she had watched this very one flying to and fro among its fellows in the convent elms. Strange that any one should be hunting in these fields, and she looked quickly this way and that. Then, with a surprised movement of the hands that caused her to drop the bird at her feet, Sister Dolorosa discovered, standing half hidden in the edge of the pale-yellow corn a few yards ahead, wearing a hunting-dress, and leaning on the muzzle of his gun, a young man who was steadfastly regarding her. For an instant they stood looking each into the other's face, taken so unprepared as to lose all sense of convention. Their meeting was as unforeseen as another far overhead, where two white clouds, long shepherded aimlessly and from opposite directions across the boundless pastures by the unreasoning winds, touched and melted into one. Then Sister Dolorosa, the first to regain self-possession, gathered her black veil closely about her face, and advancing with an easy, rapid step, bowed low with downcast eyes as she passed him, and hurried on towards the convent.

She had not gone far before she resolved to say nothing about the gossip to which she had listened. Of late the Mother Superior had seemed worn with secret care and touched with solicitude regarding her. Would it be kind to make this greater by complaining like a weak child of a trivial annoyance? She took her conscience proudly to task for ever having been disturbed by anything so unworthy. And as for this meeting in the field, even to mention that would be to give it a certain significance, whereas it had none whatever. A stranger had merely crossed her path a moment and then gone his way. She would forget the occurrence herself as soon as she could recover from her physical agitation.