A Speckled Bird

"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.