A Speckled Bird

CHAPTER XIX

If owners of old manorial houses kept frank and faithful log-books, strange domestic records might now and then be read, rivalling in tragic incidents those of passing ships. Conspicuously infelicitous was the stream of events beating against Calvary House and reducing an ancient, broad estate and handsome three-storied brick residence to a few impoverished acres, and a rambling structure partly destroyed by fire, and wholly abandoned to vacancy and isolation in consequence of grewsome gossip. During eighty years the proprietorship had been vested in only two families, totally unrelated; in the first, the reckless extravagance and unbridled careers of four beautiful women depleted the domestic coffer, necessitated the sacrifice and sale of the property, and drove a weakly indulgent father to suicide. In the second the vices of sons plunged the widowed mother into melancholia and an insane asylum.

From time to time portions of land were sold to enable the boys to continue their wild carousals. Fratricidal strife ensued, and one brother spent the dismal residue of his days in the penitentiary, expiating the murder of the other. The vicious round of horse-racing, cock-fighting, fox-hunting, gambling and drinking once madly run had ended in the final wreck, and what remained of the estate fell into the hands of Mr. Herriott's father, whose agent held the mortgage. Sufficiently grim was the foundation of facts; yet still more appalling the superstructure of neighborhood traditions, and the ghoulish tales of superstitious servants. Venerable trees, whose sheltering arms might have veiled the ruin, had been over-grown by mistletoe, until very few survived to stand guard, and when a hunter crept with his pointer through broom-sedge waist high all over the lawn, his cigar spark set the whole aflame, and only two fine old oaks close to the house were left as sentinels. Later, a lightning bolt destroyed one; two years after, an equinoctial gale blew the other half across the mossy roof. Stark, weather beaten, its broken windows like eyeless sockets in a skull, the old house, dumb in desolation, stood in dire need of the mercies of bell, candle, censer, and aspergill to exorcise its garrison of unholy spectres. Five years after the place had been given by Noel Herriott to the "Brothers of the Order of Calvary," lime, paint, wallpaper, patient toil and a wise appreciation of the adaptability of angles, corridors, dormer windows and verandas, in architectural alterations, had transformed it into a quaintly irregular but picturesque structure. Outside mouldy walls were curtained with ampelopsis lace, while from a circular belfry between the original square rock chimneys, a deep-toned bell swung below a tall gilt cross, and uttered its holy message of peace to a troubled and tragic past. The basement had been converted into a refectory, kitchen and store room, the large apartments were partitioned into individual cells, and an infirmary; and the long drawing-room became a chapel, with a small oratory adjoining. Here a pipe organ sounded through the arch leading into the chapel, and over this opening a purple curtain fell when service ended. Beyond and in line with the oratory, a one-story wing with a wide cloistered piazza looked toward the rear of the house, and held a sacristy; then three small chambers fronting the vine-draped cloister behind whose arches paced, book in hand, fathers, brothers and lay brothers.

In the early stages of the era of renovation the place had resembled an industrial farm rather than a religious retreat; but gradually, as orchard and vineyard were replanted, gardens outlined and cultivated, a solemn, peaceful silence enveloped Calvary House, broken by no ruder sounds than Angelus, chants from the chapel, low-swelling organ tones, and that peculiarly sweet, thrilling threnody of hedge sparrows moaning in a ragged thicket of very old lilacs. Along the front of the sloping lawn a fence divided it from the turnpike leading into the city, and over the wide wooden gate sprang an arch bearing in black letters, Calvary House, and surmounted by a cross. From the gate latch swung the porter's bell.

Since the day when, standing at an open grave close to Leighton's mound in Evergreen, Father Temple had read the committal service as his wife's coffin was lowered, and pronounced the farewell benediction, the springs of his busy life seemed to have broken. Max Harlberg and the few who had followed the hearse, stole away, leaving the priest on his knees. Later, as stars came out to guard the hosts of sleepers, a watchman found him prone on the damp mound, and in a heavy stupor. An ambulance carried him to the nearest hospital, where he rallied slowly from an attack of pneumonia that left his lungs too weak to permit the possibility of preaching, and the doctors warned him a year's rest was imperative. Engagements for "missions" and "retreats" were cancelled, and his superior summoned him home, but after a few days advised him to go South and visit his relatives in Y – until the winds of March had blown out their fury. On his return, still thin and wan, he resumed his duties, and from Prime to Compline missed no service. After Vespers, the tolling of the De Profundis bell called all to their knees in silent prayer for the dead, and his bowed head was always the last lifted. How much penance was self-imposed none knew, but a change had come into the habitually sad face; keen mental strife, devouring anxiety, were at an end, and the large dark eyes told of an inward patience that was not yet peace, of an acceptance of the verdict that his life spelled hopeless failure. So marked was the alteration in figure and features, that one sunny day at Calvary House, as Mr. Herriott grasped his hand, he was painfully startled.

"Vernon! You are little more than a holy shadow! If starving is the regimen prescribed here, I do not feel tempted to tarry even for a day."

"Noel – God bless you, dear old fellow! At last you have remembered us, and how well you look! The bare sight of your superb strength is tonic. Come into the chapel. Terce bell is sounding. After a little the Brotherhood will greet you."

Under the guidance of Father Superior Elverton, a gaunt man of unusual height, with the ascetic jaw of a Trappist, and dreamy eyes mystical as Hugo of St. Victor, Mr. Herriott was shown fields, garden and buildings, and after dinner in the refectory, where, in honor of his presence, conversation was allowed, he asked the privilege of being left alone with Father Temple. It was a warm day, and drawing chairs to a shaded recess of the cloister, Mr. Herriott said:

"I am so glad the weather favored me to-day for this visit. It will rain soon."

"No; look at that deep blue, clear sky. I see no prophecy of rain, but you have tried so many climates, doubtless you are weather wise."

"If a man who has slept often in tents, open boats and on the bare ground learns nothing of nature's atmospheric signal code, he is far below savages in intelligence, and more ignorant than brutes. You of the shut-in clan are not skilled meteorologists, but time is too precious to be wasted in idle weather chat. Vernon, there is much I should like to know, yet I shrink from questioning you. Many letters have been lost, and my home news came in snatches, sometimes with no connection, no coherence. I have thought of you constantly, and now what you are willing to tell me of all that has happened since we parted in New York that Sunday night, I shall be glad to hear."

Leaning his elbow on the brick base of an arch and bowing his head in his palm, Father Temple narrated the circumstances that attended the death of his wife and son, withholding nothing. His muffled voice was steady and passionless, as if reading from the breviary, and when the face lifted it showed only the quiet hopelessness in eyes of one going back over a battle-field where all that was cherished went down.

"Thank you, Temple. It might have been worse, and at least you must be comforted in knowing that at the last she relented and did you justice."

"The last has become first. All that preceded it I have cast away, and that final hour of forgiveness, that touch on my head – that feeble clinging of her fingers – is what remains of my past life – what sustains me for the future."

"Try to avoid morbid retrospection. Your expiation has been so complete you have no grounds for self-reproach; you are still a young man, and your life work is ahead of you."

The priest threw out one hand, and his trained tone broke suddenly.

"Expiation will never end while I have breath to pray – not until the same grave that holds my victims covers me. You can not understand, because you know no more about love than the rubric! If you had ever felt your wife's lips on yours, or the clasp of your child's arms, and heard his glad, tender cry of 'father!' – you would realize that no expiation could be sufficient, if your hand had smitten them to ruin."

"Perhaps I do understand the torture more thoroughly than you imagine, and you must allow me to say that were I as sadly circumstanced as yourself, I should set my back to the past, and resolutely hunt for sunshine in coming years. Deliberate, intentional villainy was never your sin, and for a foolish boy's rash haste you did everything possible to atone. I shall be sorry to see you so unmanly as to sink down in the mildew of an abject melancholy. Your surroundings invite morbid memories, and just here, Vernon, let me say I do not like your refectory. It is dark, damp, mouldy, and you must make a change. I should enjoy breakfasting in the catacombs quite as much. Ask your superior to estimate the cost of building a refectory on this floor, say to the left yonder, and perhaps the matter may be arranged satisfactorily. Another bell! What office comes next?"

"That is to notify us 'free time' is over for the day. We have an hour in which to employ ourselves without direction. Below the vegetable garden Brother Theodore comes from his pet strawberry bed, and over yonder, what looks like a huge black bird with flapping white wings is Brother Aristide dusting the leaves of his grapevines with some insecticide powder. He came from Burgundy, and believes that ledge behind the line of cherry trees lying south-southeast will give him Chambertin equal to the best in Côte d'Or. You see even here each trundles his recreation hoop once a day."

An east wind had spun fine silver cloud lines curving across the blue, clustering, widening into two vast, fleecy pinions that were floating slowly to the gates of the west. Despite sunshine, chilliness edged the air, and Father Temple coughed hoarsely.

"Your reverence should not stay here next winter. It is too humid. As the crow flies and the wind sweeps, the Atlantic can not be more than twenty miles away, and when northeast gales howl from Barnegat to Hatteras, this is no sanatorium for you. If you have no special preference for tuberculosis, and have not vowed slow suicide on that altar, I should be glad if you would select some other mode of exit when you finally say good-bye. Consumption robbed me of my father – I hope I shall not lose my friend also thereby."

The priest smiled, and laid his thin hand on his companion's knee.

"In many characteristics we differ so widely, I have often wondered that you care at all for me."

"You were so honest and fearless and manly when we met at college. You showed such genuine pluck in that hazing scandal, so much quiet, heroic magnanimity when the official investigation followed. Vernon, for God's sake, wake up! You have talent; don't doze like a toad under a stone wall. Come out of shadows that paralyze you, and try to make your mark in the world of letters. I do not wish to change my – "

He paused and frowned. A flush tinged Father Temple's sallow cheek.

"You do not wish to consider me unmanly now?"

"That is exactly it, and if you force me to do so I swear I never will forgive you. Don't brood and mope. Go back to Plato and Horace – they are the best brooms for cloistral cobwebs – and promise me you will not stay here next winter."

"My cousin Allison Kent and Eglah insist I shall spend December and January with them, in Y – , and since I am forbidden to preach at present, I may accept the invitation. I was there on a brief visit several months ago."

"Tell me about them. It has been long since I heard directly."

"The judge has grown extremely stout, and says he enjoys the lazy leisure of Southern life among the opulent, but he seemed restless and abstracted, and was often absent on fishing excursions. Eglah perplexes me. She is graver, more reticent, and far more beautiful, but reminds me of a person walking in troubled sleep, determined, yet vaguely apprehensive. At times it occurred to me that her relations with her father were not as tenderly cordial as I remembered in the Washington life; he never caressed her, and she seemed in a certain degree aloof, but her careful deference in manner and speech was exquisite. She told me his retirement from a senatorial position was the supreme disappointment of her life, and her chief solace now is the preparation of a volume of his speeches, prefaced by a biographical sketch she intends to write. I think her father is very unpopular with the majority of old families in Y – , who will never forgive his course while Federal judge, and as they represent the best social element, conditions beyond her control have embarrassed Eglah, but she gives no hint and fronts the situation with admirable cool calmness."

Leaning back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head, Mr. Herriott seemed to watch the narrowing circles of a hawk beneath which three frantic pigeons dashed aimlessly round and round, and in the final swift swoop one white bird disappeared in a vanishing brown shadow.

"You have lost a pigeon."

"We have none. The lay brothers complain of their depredations in the garden, and sometimes trap those that belong in the city, but they are always carried off and set free."

"Vernon, why does not your cousin Eglah marry Roger Hull? He is as nearly worthy of her as any man she will ever meet; he is eminently good looking, bright, a spirited debater, and as it is said he carries the votes of his district in his vest pocket, he has an assured political position where she could gratify her ambition. If he lives he will sit in the Senate. He was very devoted in his attentions. Is he still loyal?"

"No. I hear he is reported engaged to a pretty girl in Washington, whose father is a naval officer. Certainly Eglah does not lack beaux. She has very fine horses, rides daily, and one of her most frequent escorts was a Dr. Burbridge, very handsome and a specialist in neurology. I don't know Hull, but he has been twice to Nutwood since Eglah came back from Europe, and Cousin Allison said that she froze him so completely on his last visit that he gave up the chase, and consoled himself with a more responsive charmer. If political life allures her, Hull certainly offered an attractive opportunity, but I am sure her father did not favor that suit, and as her ambition was more for his preferment than from any personal fondness for a congressional career, she will soon cease to regret, and find contentment in her lovely surroundings."

"I am afraid not. Pardon the simile – but take a thoroughbred filly raised and trained on the race track, and when she is champing her bit, trembling for the signal to start, lead her aside, shut her in a pasture, fasten her to a plough trace, or harness her with a mule on the other side of a wagon-tongue, and do you wonder the load comes to grief, or the furrows are crooked when she sees the racers flash by, and hears the rush of hoofs, the roar of cheering thousands? Eglah knows what she wants, and disdains compromise. The present environment suits her as little as a stagnant millpond would a yacht cup challenger."

"I wish she could marry happily, but the day I came away we stood at the front steps and I told her I hoped I might have the privilege of performing the ceremony, if during my life she consented to make some man happy. The judge laughed and tapped me on the shoulder. 'I will see you get that wedding fee. When you are needed I shall telegraph you.' She stepped a little closer to him, put her hands behind her, and looked at him with strange intentness; then turning to me she said, with singular emphasis: 'I shall never marry. As I have been baptized, only one more ceremony can be performed for me, and if Ma-Lila does not insist upon a Methodist minister, I promise that you shall pronounce 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust' – when mother earth takes me back to her heart.'

"Just then Mrs. Mitchell dropped her basket, and the clatter of keys and scissors broke the strain, which I could not understand. But Eglah's eyes recalled something I have not thought of for years. Do you recollect a picture of the Norns we saw that summer we walked through Wales?"

"Three figures, one veiled? We could not find out who painted it, but I never shall forget the wonderful eyes of Urd."

"They looked at me again that day in Nutwood. The expression was as inscrutable as the smile of Mona Lisa – not defiance, nor yet renunciation, neither scorn nor bitterness, but deathless pride and a pain so hopeless no sound could voice it."

There was a brief silence, broken by the muffled chanting in the chapel, and Mr. Herriott's hands were gripped so tight behind his head the nails were purple, but his face showed no emotion, and when he spoke his tone betrayed only quiet sympathy.

"For many years I have associated her with a passage in Jeremiah: 'As a speckled bird, the birds round about are against her.'' Poor little speckled bird, beating out her life. Battling alone against a host of hawks is dreary work."

"I suppose you are going to Y – ?"

"No, I must get back home. I have been away too long. My poor faithful Susan is dead."

"I hope you are tired of globe-trotting, and ready to anchor yourself at your own fireside."

"As yet I have made no definite plans; have been considering two recent offers. One is the presidency of a great railroad system – a position I might possibly fit myself to occupy if I went into the machine shops and roundhouses and worked hard for the next five years. It happens that the shares and bonds of one short but very important line which my father practically owned when the middle West was comparatively undeveloped, have appreciated enormously, and now that road is the link absolutely necessary to the contemplated consolidation of a new route that will touch the Pacific. I cabled my refusal to sell out, and the next bait was the presidency. Mr. Stadmeyer and I have controlling interests and our views accord. Two days ago we had a meeting, at which I declined office, and we leased our road for thirty years. That relieved me from one horn of the dilemma; the other still threatens. A Polar expedition will be ready next year, and I have been asked to take a place aboard ship."

"Noel, I beg of you, dismiss that thought. Of all scientific follies, that Pole-hunting mania is the wildest, the most indefensible. To add your bleaching bones to the cairns heaped on the eternal ice altar of Polar night is no ambition worthy of you. Don't think me childish, but the sight of you is such a comfort I could not bear to have you risk your life searching for mares' nests so far away."

Mr. Herriott laughed – a genial, hearty, deep-chested sound rarely heard in cloisters.

"Get rid of that cough, and I will take you along as chaplain to christen the Pole – presumably it is pagan at present. I wish you would go down to New Mexico or Arizona and make a sensible effort to build up your constitution, which seems suing you for damages. Leave medicine and the breviary in your cell, and lie under the stars and inhale that wonderful, healing air. When you wish to pray go down into the Grand Cañon, you will find you can succeed without needing a book to help you. In that sky verily 'the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth His handiwork.' Mission work, and to spare, would interest you at a Moqui Pueblo, and I can recommend one whose primeval, idyllic repose dwells in my memory like an eclogue of Virgil's. It is spread over the crown and sides of a precipice where terraces tilt their outer edges upward to prevent water from draining the little gardens. Masonry-lined cisterns gleam under moonlight like molten silver, sheep and goats bleat in their stone enclosures, a frieze of kids runs below the cornice of brown cupids drowsing on the wall, and all about the mesa a pink cloud of blooming peach trees and a yellow mist of acacias. Weigh this cure scheme, discuss it in Sanhedrim, and if you think favorably of it let me hear from you before October, as I have several friends among ranchmen, and some of the Moquis have not forgotten me."

"Do you intend to settle down now at your lake-shore house?"

"Yes, for the present. I have been invited to write for two scientific magazines, and one of the subjects suggested rather appeals to me – a comparison of the fiords of Norway with those of Alaska and British Columbia, but I have not fully decided. However, I am committed to help Chalcott verify numerous citations from Strabo's tenth book, relative to Crete, and I must brush up my classics. Chalcott is sanguine of 'great finds' around the site of ancient Knossos in the near future. He has been stung by the Pelasgian bee, and I have promised to hunt and copy some passages from Strabo."

He took his hat from the floor and rose.

"Now I must say good-bye to father superior and the brethren."

"We hoped you would spend at least one night with us, in the room we have named and set apart for you."

"I must get back to Philadelphia in time for a meeting to-morrow of stockholders and directors of our railroad. Mr. Stadmeyer requested me to attend, though he is really our watchdog. Don't delay the refectory improvements, and since you are all so good as to give me a special penitential apartment, I wish you would brighten it up with a cheerful paper, and allow me the privilege of sending some human derelict to anchor here in peace. God knows, there are fleets of souls adrift, and I should be glad if, for my sake, you can tow some into the snug harbor of my cell, until the day comes when my sins culminate and force me here for penance."

When the two walked down to the outer gate, the contrast between the virile athlete and the shadowy black form of the priest was pathetically vivid.

The busy shuttles of the east wind had spread their cirrus laces even along the western horizon where the sun had vanished, and the sky was one huge arching shell enamelled with mother-of-pearl, as the cloudlets burned in the after-glow.

"Vernon, don't look back. You have balanced your books with the past. Dear old fellow, I wish to think of you as fulfilling the rich promise of our college days."

"Assure me you will give up that Arctic whim. The thought of it distresses me."

"Do not worry about me. The expedition could not be ready to start for at least a year, and by that time I may not need to go. Sir John Franklin's ghost may chat with mine and tell me all the secrets of the Pole, which doubtless he discovered when Arctic ice claimed his body."

He laughed, they shook hands, and parted.

At a bend in the road he turned, looked back and waved his hat to the watching figure standing under the gilt cross, and silhouetted in sharp lines against the opal dome of the west.