The Guests Of Hercules.

by C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson.

I

THE GUESTS OF HERCULES

Long shadows of late afternoon lay straight and thin across the garden path; shadows of beech trees that ranged themselves in an undeviating line, like an inner wall within the convent wall of brick; and the soaring trees were very old, as old perhaps as the convent itself, whose stone had the same soft tints of faded red and brown as the autumn leaves which spa.r.s.ely jewelled the beeches' silver.

A tall girl in the habit of a novice walked the path alone, moving slowly across the stripes of sunlight and shadow which inlaid the gravel with equal bars of black and reddish gold. There was a smell of autumn on the windless air, bitter yet sweet; the scent of dying leaves, and fading flowers loth to perish, of rose-berries that had usurped the place of roses, of chrysanthemums chilled by frost, of moist earth deprived of sun, and of the green moss-like film overgrowing all the trunks of the old beech trees. The novice was saying goodbye to the convent garden, and the long straight path under the wall, where every day for many years she had walked, spring and summer, autumn and winter; days of rain, days of sun, days of boisterous wind, days of white feathery snow--all the days through which she had pa.s.sed, on her way from childhood to womanhood. Best of all, she had loved the garden and her favourite path in spring, when vague hopes like dreams stirred in her blood, when it seemed that she could hear the whisper of the sap in the veins of the trees, and the crisp stir of the buds as they unfolded.

She wished that she could have been going out of the garden in the brightness and fragrance of spring. The young beauty of the world would have been a good omen for the happiness of her new life. The sorrowful incense of Nature in decay cast a spell of sadness over her, even of fear, lest after all she were doing a wrong thing, making a mistake which could never be amended.

The spirit of the past laid a hand upon her heart. Ghosts of sweet days gone long ago beckoned her back to the land of vanished hours. The garden was the garden of the past; for here, within the high walls draped in flowering creepers and ivy old as history, past, present, and future were all as one, and had been so for many a tranquil generation of calm-faced, dark-veiled women. Suddenly a great homesickness fell upon the novice like an iron weight. She longed to rush into the house, to fling herself at Reverend Mother's feet, and cry out that she wanted to take back her decision, that she wanted everything to be as it had been before. But it was too late to change. What was done, was done.

Deliberately, she had given up her home, and all the kind women who had made the place home for her, from the time when she was a child eight years old until now, when she was twenty-four. Sixteen years! It was a lifetime. Memories of her child-world before convent days were more like dreams than memories of real things that had befallen her, Mary Grant.

And yet, on this her last day in the convent, recollections of the first were crystal clear, as they never had been in the years that lay between.

Her father had brought her a long way, in a train. Something dreadful had happened, which had made him stop loving her. She could not guess what, for she had done nothing wrong so far as she knew: but a few days before, her nurse, a kind old woman of a comfortable fatness, had put her into a room where her father was and gently shut the door, leaving the two alone together. Mary had gone to him expecting a kiss, for he was always kind, though she did not feel that she knew him well--only a little better, perhaps, than the radiant young mother whom she seldom saw for more than five minutes at a time. But instead of kissing her as usual, he had turned upon her a look of dislike, almost of horror, which often came to her afterward, in dreams. Taking the little girl by the shoulder not ungently, but very coldly, and as if he were in a great hurry to be rid of her, he pushed rather than led her to the door.

Opening it, he called the nurse, in a sharp, displeased voice. "I don't want the child," he said. "I can't have her here. Don't bring her to me again without being asked." Then the kind, fat old woman had caught Mary in her arms and carried her upstairs, a thing that had not happened for years. And in the nursery the good creature had cried over the "poor bairn" a good deal, mumbling strange things which Mary could not understand. But a few words had lingered in her memory, something about its being cruel and unjust to visit the sins of others on innocent babies. A few days afterward Mary's father, very thin and strange-looking, with hard lines in his handsome brown face, took her with him on a journey, after nurse had kissed her many times with streaming tears. At last they had got out of the train into a carriage, and driven a long way. At evening they had come to a tall, beautiful gateway, which had carved stone animals on high pillars at either side.

That was the gate of the Convent of Saint Ursula-of-the-Lake, the gate of Mary's home-to-be: and in a big, bare parlour, with long windows and a polished oak floor that reflected curious white birds and dragons of an escutcheon on the ceiling, Reverend Mother had received them. She had taken Mary on her lap; and when, after much talk about school and years to come, the child's father had gone, shadowy, dark-robed women had glided softly into the room. They had crowded round the little girl, like children round a new doll, petting and murmuring over her: and she had been given cake and milk, and wonderful preserved fruit, such as she had never tasted.

Some of those dear women had gone since then, not as she was going, out into an unknown, maybe disappointing, world, but to a place where happiness was certain, according to their faith. Mary had not forgotten one of the kind faces--and all those who remained she loved dearly; yet she was leaving them to-day. Already it was time. She had wished to come out into the garden alone for this last walk, and to wear the habit of her novitiate, though she had voluntarily given up the right to it forever. She must go in and dress for the world, as she had not dressed for years which seemed twice their real length. She must go in, and bid them all goodbye--Reverend Mother, and the nuns, and novices, and the schoolgirls, of whose number she had once been.

She stood still, looking toward the far end of the path, her back turned toward the gray face of the convent.

"Goodbye, dear old sundial, that has told so many of my hours," she said. "Goodbye, sweet rose-trees that I planted, and all the others I've loved so long. Goodbye, dear laurel bushes, that know my thoughts.

Goodbye, everything."

Her arms hung at her sides, lost in the folds of her veil. Slowly tears filled her eyes, but did not fall until a delicate sound of light-running feet on gra.s.s made her start, and wink the tears away.

They rolled down her white cheeks in four bright drops, which she hastily dried with the back of her hand; and no more tears followed.

When she was sure of herself, she turned and saw a girl running to her from the house, a pretty, brown-haired girl in a blue dress that looked very frivolous and worldly in contrast to Mary's habit. But the bushes and the sundial, and the fading flowers that tapestried the ivy on the old wall, were used to such frivolities. Generations of schoolgirls, taught and guarded by the Sisters of Saint Ursula-of-the-Lake, had played and whispered secrets along this garden path.

"Dearest Mary!" exclaimed the girl in blue. "I begged them to let me come to you just for a few minutes--a last talk. Do you mind?"

Mary had wanted to be alone, but suddenly she was glad that, after all, this girl was with her. "You call me 'Mary'!" she said. "How strange it seems to be Mary again--almost wrong, and--frightening."

"But you're not Sister Rose any longer," the girl in blue answered.

"There's nothing remote about you now. You're my dear old chum, just as you used to be. And will you please begin to be frivolous by calling me Peter?"

Mary smiled, and two round dimples showed themselves in the cheeks still wet with tears. She and this girl, four years younger than herself, had begun to love each other dearly in school days, when Mary Grant was nineteen, and Mary Maxwell fifteen. They had gone on loving each other dearly till the elder Mary was twenty-one, and the younger seventeen.

Then Molly Maxwell--who named herself "Peter Pan" because she hated the thought of growing up--had to go back to her home in America and "come out," to please her father, who was by birth a Scotsman, but who had made his money in New York. After three gay seasons she had begged to return for six months to school, and see her friend Mary Grant--Sister Rose--before the final vows were taken. Also she had wished to see another Mary, who had been almost equally her friend ("the three Maries"

they had always been called, or "the Queen's Maries"); but the third of the three Maries had disappeared, and about her going there was a mystery which Reverend Mother did not wish to have broken.

"Peter," Sister Rose echoed obediently, as the younger girl clasped her arm, making her walk slowly toward the sundial at the far end of the path.

"It does sound good to hear you call me that again," Molly Maxwell said.

"You've been so stiff and different since I came back and found you turned into Sister Rose. Often I've been sorry I came. And now, when I've got three months still to stay, you're going to leave me. If only you could have waited, to change your mind!"

"If I had waited, I couldn't have changed it at all," Sister Rose reminded her. "You know----"

"Yes, I know. It was the eleventh hour. Another week, and you would have taken your vows. Oh, I don't mean what I said, dear. I'm glad you're going--thankful. You hadn't the vocation. It would have killed you."

"No. For here they make it hard for novices on purpose, so that they may know the worst there is to expect, and be sure they're strong enough in body and heart. I wasn't fit. I feared I wasn't----"

"You weren't--that is, your body and heart are fitted for a different life. You'll be happy, very happy."

"I wonder?" Mary said, in a whisper.

"Of course you will. You'll tell me so when we meet again, out in my world that will be your world, too. I wish I were going with you now, and I could, of course. Only I had to beg the pater so hard to let me come here, I'd be ashamed to cable him, that I wanted to get away before the six months were up. He wouldn't understand how different everything is because I'm going to lose you."

"In a way, you would have lost me if--if I'd stayed, and--everything had been as I expected."

"I know. They've let you be with me more as a novice than you could be as a professed nun. Still, you'd have been under the same roof. I could have seen you often. But I _am_ glad. I'm not thinking of myself. And we'll meet just as soon as we can, when my time's up here. Father's coming back to his dear native Fifeshire to fetch me, and I'll make him take me to you, wherever you are, or else you'll visit me; better still.

But it seems a long time to wait, for I really _did_ come back here to be a 'parlour boarder,' a heap more to see you than for any other reason. And, besides, there's another thing. Only I hardly know how to say it, or whether I dare say it at all."

Sister Rose looked suddenly anxious, as if she were afraid of something that might follow. "What is it?" she asked quickly, almost sharply. "You must tell me."

"Why, it's nothing to _tell_--exactly. It's only this: I'm worried.

I'm glad you're not going to be a nun all your life, dear; delighted--enchanted. You're given back to me. But--I worry because I can't help feeling that I've got something to do with the changing of your mind so suddenly; that if ever you should regret anything--not that you will, but if you should--you might blame me, hate me, perhaps."

"I never shall do either, whatever happens," the novice said, earnestly and gravely. She did not look at her friend as she spoke, though they were so nearly of the same height as they walked, their arms linked together, that they could gaze straight into one another's eyes.

Instead, she looked up at the sky, through the groined gray ceiling of tree-branches, as if offering a vow. And seeing her uplifted profile with its pure features and clear curve of dark lashes, Peter thought how beautiful she was, of a beauty quite unearthly, and perhaps unsuited to the world. With a pang, she wondered if such a girl would not have been safer forever in the convent where she had lived most of her years. And though she herself was four years younger, she felt old and mature, and terribly wise compared with Sister Rose. An awful sense of responsibility was upon her. She was afraid of it. Her pretty blond face, with its bright and shrewd gray eyes, looked almost drawn, and lost the fresh colour that made the little golden freckles charming as the dust of flower-pollen on her rounded cheeks.

"But I _have_ got something to do with it, haven't I?" she persisted, longing for contradiction, yet certain that it would not come.

"I hardly know--to be quite honest," Mary answered. "I don't know what I might have done if you hadn't come back and told me things about your life, and all your travels with your father--things that made me tingle.

Maybe I should never have had the courage without that incentive. But, Peter, I'll tell you something I couldn't have told you till to-day.

Since the very beginning of my novitiate I was never happy, never at rest."

"Truly? You wanted to go, even then, for two whole years?"

"I don't know what I wanted. But suddenly all the sweet calm was broken.

You've often looked out from the dormitory windows over the lake, and seen how a wind springing up in an instant ruffles the clear surface.

It's just like a mirror broken into a thousand tiny fragments. Well, it was so with me, with my spirit. And after all these years, when I'd been so contented, so happy that I couldn't even bear, as a schoolgirl, to go away for two or three days to visit Lady MacMillan in the holidays, without nearly dying of homesickness before I could be brought back! As a postulant I was just as happy, too. You know, I wouldn't go out into the world to try my resolve, as Reverend Mother advised. I was so sure there could be no home for me but this. Then came the change. Oh, Peter, I hope it wasn't the legacy! I pray I'm not so mean as that!"

"How long was it after your novitiate began that the money was left you?" Peter asked: for this was the first intimate talk alone and undisturbed that she had had with her old school friend since coming back to the convent three months ago. She knew vaguely that a cousin of Mary's dead father had left the novice money, and that it had been unexpected, as the lady was not a Roman Catholic, and had relations just as near, of her own religion. But Peter did not quite know when the news had come, or what had happened then.

"It was the very next day. That was odd, wasn't it? Though I don't know, exactly, why it should have seemed odd. It had to happen on some day.

Why not that one? I was glad I should have a good dowry--quite proud to be of some use to the convent. I didn't think what I might have done for myself, if I'd been in the world--not then. But afterward, thoughts crept into my head. I used to push them out again as fast as they crawled in, and I told myself what a good thing I had a safe refuge, remembering my father, what he wrote about himself, and my mother."

For a moment she was silent. There was no need to explain, for Peter knew all about the terrible letter that had come from India with the news of Major Grant's death. It had arrived before Mary resolved to take vows, while she was still a fellow schoolgirl of Peter's, older than most of the girls, looked up to and adored, and probably it had done more than anything else to decide her that she had a "vocation." Mary had told about the letter at the time, with stormy tears: how her father in dying wrote down the story of the past, as a warning to his daughter, whom he had not loved; told the girl that her mother had run away with one of his brother officers; that he, springing from a family of reckless gamblers, had himself become a gambler; that he had thrown away most of his money; and that his last words to Mary were, "You have wild blood in your veins. Be careful: don't let it ruin your life, as two other lives have been ruined before you."

"Then," Mary went on, while Peter waited, "for a few weeks, or a few days, I would be more peaceful. But the restlessness always came again.

And, after the end of the first year, it grew worse. I was never happy for more than a few hours together. Still I meant to fight till the end.

I never thought seriously of giving it up."

"Until after I came?" Peter broke in.