Atlantic Narratives Part 7

I could not understand then, nor did I understand late that night when my father's laugh woke me up.

'Poor Emma!' he chuckled. 'What did she say?'

And my mother answered, her voice curiously smothered, 'Why, you see, she couldn't very well say anything after what she had just said before.'

'I suppose not. Poor Emma, I suppose not.'

My father's laugh broke out again.

'S-sh, George--you'll wake Martha.'

THE DEBT

BY KATHLEEN CARMAN

THE convent was a large square building of red brick, harsh of outline, unlovely in its proportions. It stood on the rise of a barren hill, unfriended by the trees of the little valley below, unsoftened by the pleasant landscape above which its ugly bulk arose, stern and domineering. To the south and west lay fertile fields and huddling farm-buildings; to the east, beyond the little valley, rose many closely wooded hills; while to the north,--ah, the north!--one of the greatest wonders of all this wonderful world lay there; for if one climbed to the highest story of the convent and looked out of any window to the north, one beheld that never-ceasing miracle--the sea!

Sister Anne had known no other home but the convent for nearly half a century, but the sight of those unresting waves never failed to set her spirit free: free of unknown and enchanted worlds, worlds of wonder, of mystery, and of heart-stirring beauty. She was merely a plain, silent, hard-working, rather stupid old woman, who had never been in all her life admired or considered, or even loved, unless one counts the tepid affection of those with whom she lived. She had been brought here as a young girl from the orphanage where she had pa.s.sed her childhood; and since she had been one of those who are always willing to do what is asked of them, no matter how unpleasant or hard it may be, there had fallen to her share all the humblest and meanest of the household tasks, all the petty drudgeries which must be done and which no one wishes to do. Her place was always in the kitchen or the laundry. She would have liked to cook, but that had never been suggested. She had always been put to washing dishes. Here again she had a preference: she would have liked to wash the gla.s.sware, which came out of the hot suds like bubbles and must be polished on the softest and cleanest of towels; or even the clumsy plated forks and spoons, which to her were very beautiful. There was nothing delicate or lovely about the great iron soup-kettles which her patient hands must cleanse, or about the greasy roasting pans. And it was the same way in the laundry. Only the coa.r.s.est, heaviest of the washing was given to her: the rag mats that lay beside the beds in the dormitories, the big ap.r.o.ns that the working sisters wore, the cloths that were used in cleaning the lamps. Not for her the intricacies of starching and skillful ironing and fluting.

Yet all the years of toil had not saddened Sister Anne. If any one had questioned her and she had been able to express herself, she might have said that the forces which had formed her st.u.r.dy body had given her also a spirit capable of sustaining itself on the most meagre happiness. But no one questioned her, and she was at all times slow and scant of speech.

The sources of her contentment lay all without the convent walls; and being there, it was strange that she should have discovered them. As a matter of fact she had not discovered them. They had come, through a slow and unconscious process, to be a part of her life. It had begun, humbly enough, in the kitchen garden. When first she came to the convent she had not been very well, and they had set her to weeding the vegetables in order that she might be out of doors as much as possible.

Her simple, kindly nature had turned in solicitude and affection to this springing life that responded to her tendance. No great and lovely lady in her garden ever looked with more pride and admiration on her roses and lilies than did Sister Anne on her beans and cabbages and early peas. Through them she had come to watch with interest every change in the weather, anxious for the needed rain, fearful of the early frost, rejoicing when sun and air and moisture did their kindly best.

And thus it was, through a process simple, gradual, inevitable, that her heart had wakened to the wonder and the beauty of the world about her.

At first she saw no farther than the garden, finding joy in the clear green of the new shoots, pleasure in the st.u.r.dy growth of some robust plant, or a still ecstasy in the dew-crowned freshness of the bean flowers in the early morning. But soon that morning magic lay before her marveling eyes upon the near-by fields and the distant hills, and in time she beheld the wonderful pageant from mystic dawn to dawn, and that still more wonderful pageant of the changing months.

No one knew or guessed the joy that filled her life from this dumb intercourse with flying cloud or snow-hung cherry tree, or from the deep stillness of a green-clad hill in a summer noon. When she was younger, she used sometimes to speak of these things to her companions; but she had early learned that they neither understood nor cared to understand the feelings which she would have shared with them. But this did not disturb her. She felt for those with whom she lived good-will and a mild affection, but hers was not a nature to expect or need sympathy. She had a profound and sincere humility which rendered her incapable of envy.

She felt herself, without bitterness, to be the inferior of all with whom she came in contact. The fact that they were indifferent to what were to her the purest sources of happiness never seemed to her a lack in them, but only an accentuation of the fact that she was less clever than they. To read, to embroider, to converse, to make long devotions, were all beyond her powers. She was not 'spiritual-minded.' Prayers were to her a tedious and difficult task, to be fulfilled conscientiously but always finished with relief. This indeed came by slow degrees to be a source of pain and anxiety to her. She felt herself a sinner. In the laborious and inarticulate processes of her mind there gradually took form the knowledge that she would rather do any kind of work than pray; that she would rather, far rather, sit in idleness, looking out upon the familiar, beloved landscape, than pray. This seemed to her inexplicably wicked, but it never occurred to her to change, although she sometimes felt that she would go to h.e.l.l because of it.

Such thoughts were, however, neither frequent nor enduring with her.

When she made her preparation for confession, she used sometimes to endeavor to formulate this general sense of wrongdoing; but the matter was too subtle for her limited powers of expression, and she never got beyond the specific instance, as when she neglected the kettles so that she might watch a storm coming up across the hills, or walked five miles on a singing May morning to get a not indispensable supply of fresh eggs from a farmhouse. Not for many penances would she have foregone the clean joy of that walk. Spring came late and slowly to this bit of world beside the sea, but came none the less surely, none the less with magic and enchantment in its wings; the new color on field and hill, the wonderful smell of the earth and of the budding shoots, the divine air, that now blew chill and austere as from the cave of winter itself and now touched the cheek with a shyness, a softness, a warmth, like early love.

Sister Anne had no imagery. She was sixty years old, ignorant, unread, unimaginative, slow and dull of wit. Yet walking through this newly-created world, she felt that joy more keen than pain--that wordless ecstasy whose channel is the senses, but which sends the spirit groping back toward G.o.d who gave it life. Although she felt that this marvelous universe came from the beneficent hand of some supreme Good, she never identified it with the Deity to whom she made her difficult devotions. Deep in her heart there grew a strong sense of grat.i.tude, of obligation, a wish vague and unformed, yet compelling, that in some way she might make return for the happiness which life had brought her.

She tried to spend more time in the chapel and to say an extra number of Aves; but this did not satisfy her, and even her unseeking mind felt some doubt as to the worth of such mechanical and joyless prayers.

So the placid months and years slipped by, and at last there came to Sister Anne, as does not come to all of us, her great hour.

It was a cloudless, windless, intolerably hot day in midsummer. Sister Anne had been on an errand to a fisherman's hut at some distance from the convent. As she walked slowly home through the woods, she reached a place in the path which led near the sh.o.r.e and from which a few steps brought her out upon a little promontory. Never, it seemed to her, had the sea looked so blue or the sails of the distant ships so white. She stood for a long time gazing out toward the horizon before she saw anything nearer; but when she did see, she hurried down to where she could get out on the beach. On a tiny rocky islet some two hundred feet or so from the sh.o.r.e lay the figure of a man in a swimming-suit. It was evident that he was either dead or unconscious.

Sister Anne considered for a while and then without even removing her shoes, waded out to him. He was not dead, she found at once, but stunned by a blow on the head, apparently from one of the sharp rocks on which he lay. Sister Anne cleansed and bound the wound with her kerchief, and then sat for a few moments, her face grave and perplexed. Her bit of human wreckage was only a boy of sixteen or so, tall, slender, with thick, rough blond hair and skin fair as a child's. Sister Anne, by putting forth her whole strength, had been able to move him only a few inches so that it was manifestly impossible for her to get him to the sh.o.r.e. The fisherman's hut from which she had just come was deserted, its owner off on a cruise; there was not even a boat there. The convent was a good three quarters of an hour away, make what haste she would, and it would take as much longer to return with help. In an hour, she well knew, the islet would be submerged by the rising tide. She knew of no other fishing-hut and of no farmhouse nearer than the convent.

The water had been nearly to her waist in one place as she came, and she could see that it had risen a little, even in this short time. She took off her black robe and did what she could with its aid to put the helpless lad in a more comfortable position; then, desperately, by every means at her command, she set about restoring him to consciousness. For a long time she met no response to her efforts. Indeed, more than once she anxiously leaned her ear against his chest, to be sure that his heart still beat. At last, when she had almost given up, discouraged, he made a slight sound, and a moment later tried to sit up, only to sink back into coma again. In a few minutes more, however, he opened his eyes and looked at her with manifest intelligence. Instantly she spoke to him with all the urgency she could summon.

'You must swim ash.o.r.e as soon as you can. The tide is coming in and if you stay here you will be drowned, unless you are able to swim. If you can start now you will be able to walk part of the way between here and the beach; but part you must swim, even now.'

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 shifted 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 shining eyes and flushing 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, wishing 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 fashion to convey this much to her sympathetic listener, she paused and looked at him wistfully.