Chapter 2

They were Jeffrey Whiting and his mother and her sister, neighbours whom Arsene had brought.

The Bishop was much relieved with their coming. He could do nothing more now, and the long night ride was still ahead of him.

He told the young man that the girl, Ruth, had gone out into the cold, and asked him to find her.

Jeffrey Whiting went out quickly. He had played with Ruth Lansing since she was a baby, for they were the only children on Lansing Mountain. He knew where he would find her.

Mrs. Whiting, a keen-faced, capable woman of the hills, where people had to meet their problems and burdens alone, took command at once.

"No, sir," she replied to the Bishop's question, "there's nobody to send for. The Lansings didn't have a relation living that anybody ever heard of, and I knew the old folks, too, Tom Lansing's father and mother. They're buried out there on the hill where he'll be buried.

"There's some old soldiers down the West Slope towards Beaver River. They'll want to take charge, I suppose. The funeral must be on Monday," she went on rapidly, sketching in the programme. "We have a preacher if we can get one. But when we can't my sister Letty here sings something."

"Tom Lansing was a comrade of mine, in a way," said the Bishop slowly. "At least, I was at Fort Fisher with him. I think I should like to--"

"Were you at Fort Fisher?" broke in the sister Letty, speaking for the first time. "And did you see Curtis' colour bearer? He was killed in the first charge. A tall, dark boy, Jay Hamilton, with long, black hair?"

"He had an old scar over his eye-brow." The Bishop supplemented the description out of the memory of that day.

"He got it skating on Beaver Run, thirty-five years ago to-morrow," said the woman trembling. "You saw him die?"

"He was dead when I came to him," said the Bishop quietly, "with the stock of the colour standard still clenched in his hand."

"He was my--my--" Sweetheart, she wanted to say. But the hill women do not say things easily.

"Yes?" said the Bishop gently. "I understand." She was a woman of his people. Clearly as if she had taken an hour to tell it, he could read the years of her faithfulness to the memory of that lean, dark face which he had once seen, with the purple scar above the eye-brow.

Mrs. Whiting put her arm protectingly about her sister.

"Are you--?" she questioned, hesitating strangely. "Are you the White Horse Chaplain?"

"The boys called me that," said the Bishop. "Though it was only a name for a day," he added.

"It was true, then?" she said slowly, as if still unready to believe. "We never half believed our boys when they came home from the war--the ones that did come home--and told about the white horse and the priest riding the field. We thought it was one of the things men see when they're fighting and dying."

Then Jeffrey Whiting came back into the room leading Ruth Lansing by the hand.

The girl was shaking with cold and grief. The Bishop drew her over to the fire.

"I must go now, child," he said. "To-morrow I must be in French Village. Monday I will be here again.

"Our comrade is gone. Did you hear what he said to me, about you?"

The girl looked up slowly, searchingly into the Bishop's face, then nodded her head.

"Then, we must think and pray, child, that we may know how to do what he wanted us to do. God will show us what is the best. That is what he wanted.

"God keep you brave now. Your friends here will see to everything for you. I have to go now."

He crossed the room and laid his hand for a moment on the brow of the dead man, renewing in his heart the promise he had made.

Then, with a hurried word to Mrs. Whiting that he would be back before noon Monday, he went out to where Arsene and his horses were stamping in the snow.

The little man had replaced the broken trace, and the ponies, fretting with the cold and eager to get home, took hungrily to the trail.

But the Bishop forgot to practise his French further upon Arsene. He told him briefly what had happened, then lapsed into silence.

Now the Bishop remembered what Tom Lansing had said about the girl. She knew more now than he did. Not more than Tom Lansing knew now. But more than Tom Lansing had known half an hour ago.

She would want to see the world. She would want to know life and ask her own questions from life and the world. In the broad open space between her eye-brows it was written that she would never take anybody's word for the puzzles of the world. She was marked a seeker; one of those who look unafraid into the face of life, and demand to know what it means. They never find out. But, heart break or sparrow fall, they must go on ever and ever seeking truth in their own way. The world is infinitely the better through them. But their own way is hard and lonely.

She must go out. She must have education. She must have a chance to face life and wrest its lessons from it in her own way. It did not promise happiness for her. But she could go no other way. For hers was the high, stony way of those who demand more than jealous life is ready to give.

The Bishop only knew that he had this night given a promise which had sent a man contentedly on his way. Somehow, God would show him how best to keep that promise.

And when they halloed at Father Ponfret's house in French Village he had gotten no farther than that.

Tom Lansing lay in dignified state upon his couch. Clean white sheets had been draped over the skins of the couch. The afternoon sun looking in through the west window picked out every bare thread of his service coat and glinted on the polished brass buttons. His bayonet was slung into the belt at his side.

Ruth Lansing sat mute in her grief at the head of the couch, listening to the comments and stumbling condolences of neighbours from the high hills and the lower valleys. They were good, kindly people, she knew. But why, why, must every one of them repeat that clumsy, monotonous lie-- How natural he looked!

He did not. He did not. He did _not_ look natural. How could her Daddy Tom look natural, when he lay there all still and cold, and would not speak to his Ruth!

He was dead. And what was death-- And why? _Why?_

Who had ordered this? And _why?_

And still they came with that set, borrowed phrase--the only thing they could think to say--upon their lips.

Out in Tom Lansing's workshop on the horse-barn floor, Jacque Lafitte, the wright, was nailing soft pine boards together.

Ruth could not stand it. Why could they not leave Daddy Tom to her? She wanted to ask him things. She knew that she could make him understand and answer.

She slipped away from the couch and out of the house. At the corner of the house her dog joined her and together they circled away from the horse-barn and up the slope of the hill to where her father had been working yesterday.

She found her father's cap where it had been left in her fright of yesterday, and sat down fondling it in her hands. The dog came and slid his nose along her dress until he managed to snuggle into the cap between her hands.

So Jeffrey Whiting found her when he came following her with her coat and hood.

"You better put these on, Ruth," he said, as he dropped the coat across her shoulder. "It's too cold here."

The girl drew the coat around her obediently, but did not look up at him. She was grateful for his thought of her, but she was not ready to speak to any one.

He sat down quietly beside her on the stump and drew the dog over to him.

After a little he asked timidly:

"What are you going to do, Ruth? You can't stay here. I'll tend your stock and look after the place for you. But you just can't stay here."

"You?" she questioned finally. "You're going to that Albany school next week. You said you were all ready."

"I was all ready. But I ain't going. I'll stay here and work the two farms for you."

"For me?" she said. "And not be a lawyer at all?"

"I--I don't care anything about it any more," he lied. "I told mother this morning that I wasn't going. She said she'd have you come and stay with her till Spring."

"And then?" the girl faced the matter, looking straight and unafraid into his eyes. "And then?"

"Well, then," he hesitated. "You see, then I'll be twenty. And you'll be old enough to marry me," he hurried. "Your father, you know, he always wanted me to take care of you, didn't he?" he pleaded, awkwardly but subtly.

"I know you don't want to talk about it now," he went on hastily. "But you'll come home with mother to-morrow, won't you? You know she wants you, and I--I never had to tell you that I love you. You knew it when you wasn't any higher than Prince here."

"Yes. I always knew it, and I'm glad," the girl answered levelly. "I'm glad now, Jeff. But I can't let you do it. Some day you'd hate me for it."

"Ruth! You know better than that!"

"Oh, you'd never tell me; I know that. You'd do your best to hide it from me. But some day when your chance was gone you'd look back and see what you might have been, 'stead of a humpbacked farmer in the hills. Oh, I know. You've told me all your dreams and plans, how you're going down to the law school, and going to be a great lawyer and go to Albany and maybe to Washington."

"What's it all good for?" said the boy sturdily. "I'd rather stay here with you."

The girl did not answer. In the strain of the night and the day, she had almost forgotten the things that she had heard her father say to the White Horse Chaplain, as she continued to call the Bishop.

Now she remembered those things and tried to tell them.

"That strange man that said he was the Bishop of Alden told my father that he would see that I got a chance. My father called him the White Horse Chaplain and said that he had been sent here just on purpose to look after me. I didn't know there were bishops in this country. I thought it was only in books about Europe."

"What did they say?"

"My father said that I would want to go out and see things and know things; that I mustn't be married to a--a lumber jack. He said it was no place for me in the hills."

"And this man, this bishop, is going to send you away somewhere, to school?" he guessed shrewdly.

"I don't know, I suppose that was it," said the girl slowly. "Yesterday I wanted to go so much. It was just as father said. He had taught me all he knew. And I thought the world outside the hills was full of just the most wonderful things, all ready for me to go and see and pick up. And to-day I don't care."

She looked down at the cap in her hands, at the dog at her feet, and down the hillside to the little cabin in the hemlocks. They were all she had in the world.

The boy, watching her eagerly, saw the look and read it rightly.

He got up and stood before her, saying pleadingly:

"Don't forget to count me, Ruth. You've got me, you know."

Perhaps it was because he had so answered her unspoken thought. Perhaps it was because she was afraid of the bare world. Perhaps it was just the eternal surrender of woman.

When she looked up at him her eyes were full of great, shining tears, the first that they had known since she had kissed Daddy Tom and run out into the night.

He lifted her into his arms, and, together, they faced the white, desolate world all below them and plighted to each other their untried troth.

When Tom Lansing had been laid in the white bosom of the hillside, and the people were dispersing from the house, young Jeffrey Whiting came and stood before the Bishop. The Bishop's sharp old eyes had told him to expect something of what was coming. He liked the look of the boy's clean, stubborn jaw and the steady, level glance of his eyes. They told of dependableness and plenty of undeveloped strength. Here was not a boy, but a man ready to fight for what should be his.

"Ruth told me that you were going to take her away from the hills," he began. "To a school, I suppose."

"I made a promise to her father," said the Bishop, "that I would try to see that she got the chance that she will want in the world."

"But I love her. She's going to marry me in the Spring."

The Bishop was surprised. He had not thought matters had gone so far.

"How old are you?" he asked thoughtfully.

"Twenty in April."

"You have some education?" the Bishop suggested. "You have been at school?"

"Just what Tom Lansing taught me and Ruth. And last Winter at the Academy in Lowville. I was going to Albany to law school next week."

"And you are giving it all up for Ruth," said the Bishop incisively. "Does it hurt?"

The boy winced, but caught himself at once.

"It don't make any difference about that. I want Ruth."

"And Ruth? What does she want?" the Bishop asked. "You are offering to make a sacrifice for her. You are willing to give up your hopes and work yourself to the bone here on these hills for her. And you would be man enough never to let her see that you regretted it. I believe that. But what of her? You find it hard enough to give up your chance, for her, for love.

"Do you know that you are asking her to give up her chance, for nothing, for less than nothing; because in giving up her chance she would know that she had taken away yours, too. She would be a good and loving companion to you through all of a hard life. But, for both your sakes, she would never forgive you. Never."

"You're asking me to give her up. If she went out and got a start, she'd go faster than I could. I know it," said the boy bitterly. "She'd go away above me. I'd lose her."

"I am not asking you to give her up," the Bishop returned steadily. "If you are the man I think you are, you will never give her up. But are you afraid to let her have her chance in the sun? Are you afraid to let her have what you want for yourself? Are you afraid?"

The boy looked steadily into the Bishop's eyes for a moment. Then he turned quickly and walked across the room to where Ruth sat.

"I can't give it up, Ruth," he said gruffly. "I'm going to Albany to school. I can't give it up."

The girl looked up at him, and said quietly:

"You needn't have tried to lie, Jeff; though it's just like you to put the blame on yourself. I know what he said. I must think."

The boy stood watching her eyes closely. He saw them suddenly light up. He knew what that meant. She was seeing the great world with all its wonderful mysteries beckoning her. So he himself had seen it. Now he knew that he had lost.

The Bishop had put on his coat and was ready to go. The day was slipping away and before him there were thirty miles and a train to be caught.

"We must not be hurried, my children," he said, standing by the boy and girl. "The Sacred Heart Academy at Athens is the best school this side of Albany. The Mother Superior will write you in a few days, telling you when and how to come. If you are ready to go, you will go as she directs.

"You have been a good, brave little girl. A soldier's daughter could be no more, nor less. God bless you now, and you, too, my boy," he added.

When he was settled on the sled with Arsene and they were rounding the shoulder of Lansing Mountain, where the pony had broken the trace, he turned to look back at the cabin in the hemlocks.

"To-day," he said to himself, "I have set two ambitious, eager souls upon the high and stony paths of the great world. Should I have left them where they were?

"I shall never know whether I did right or not. Even time will mix things up so that I'll never be able to tell. Maybe some day God will let me see. But why should he? One can only aim right, and trust in Him."

II

THE CHOIR UNSEEN

Ruth Lansing sat in one of the music rooms of the Sacred Heart convent in Athens thrumming out a finger exercise that a child of six would have been able to do as well as she.

It was a strange, little, closely-crowded world, this, into which she had been suddenly transplanted. It was as different from the great world that she had come out to see as it was from the wild, sweet life of the hills where she had ruled and managed everything within reach. Mainly it was full of girls of her own age whose talk and thoughts were of a range entirely new to her.

She compared herself with them and knew that they were really children in the comparison. Their talk was of dress and manners and society and the thousand little and big things that growing girls look forward to. She knew that in any real test, anything that demanded common sense and action, she was years older than they. But they had things that she did not have.

They talked of things that she knew nothing about. They could walk across waxed floors as though waxed floors were meant to be walked on. They could rise to recite lessons without stammering or choking as she did. They could take reproof jauntily, where she, who had never in her life received a scolding, would have been driven into hysterics. They could wear new dresses just as though all dresses were supposed to be new. She knew that these were not things that they had learned by studying. They just grew up to them, just as she knew how to throw a fishing line and hold a rifle.

But she wanted all those things that they had; wanted them all passionately. She had the sense to know that those were not great things. But they were the things that would make her like these other girls. And she wanted to be like them.

Because she had not grown up with other girls, because she had never even had a girl playmate, she wanted not to miss any of the things that they had and were.

They baffled her, these girls. Her own quick, eager mind sprang at books and fairly tore the lessons from them. She ran away from the girls in anything that could be learned in that way. But when she found herself with two or three of them they talked a language that she did not know. She could not keep up with them. And she was stupid and awkward, and felt it. It was not easy to break into their world and be one of them.

Then there was that other world, touching the world of the girls but infinitely removed from it--the world of the sisters.

That mysterious cloister from which the sisters came and gave their hours of teaching or duty and to which they retreated back again was a world all by itself.

What was there in there behind those doors that never banged? What was there in there that made the sisters all so very much alike? They must once have been as different as every girl is different from every other girl.

How was it that they could carry with them all day long that air of never being tired or fretted or worried? What wonderful presence was there behind the doors of that cloistered house that seemed to come out with them and stay with them all the time? What was the light that shone in their faces?

Was it just because they were always contented and happy? What did they have to be happy about?

Ruth had tried to question the other girls about this. They were Catholics. They ought to know. But Bessie Donnelly had brushed her question aside with a stare:

"Sisters always look like that."

So Ruth did not ask any more. But her mind kept prying at that world of the sisters behind those walls. What did they do in there? Did they laugh and talk and scold each other, like people? Or did they just pray all the time? Or did they see wonderful, starry visions of God and Heaven that they were always talking about? They seemed so familiar with God. They knew just when He was pleased and especially when He was displeased.

She had come down out of her hills where everything was so open, where there were no mysteries, where everything from the bark on the trees to the snow clouds on Marcy, fifty miles away, was as clear as a printed book. Everything up there told its plain lesson. She could read the storm signs and the squirrel tracks. Nothing had been hidden. Nothing in nature or life up there had ever shut itself away from her.

Here were worlds inside of worlds, every one of them closing its door in the face of her sharp, hungry mind.

And there was that other world, enveloping all the other lesser worlds about her--the world of the Catholic Church.

Three weeks ago those two words had meant to her a little green building in French Village where the "Canucks" went to church.

Now her day began and ended with it. It was on all sides of her. The pictures and the images on every wall, the signs on every classroom door. The books she read, the talk she heard was all filled with it. It came and went through every door of life.

All the inherited prejudices of her line of New England fathers were alive and stirring in her against this religion that demanded so much. The untrammelled spirit that the hills had given her fought against it. It was so absolute. It was so sure of everything. She wanted to argue with it, to quarrel with it. She was sure that it must be wrong sometimes.

But just when she was sure that she had found something false, something that she knew was not right in the things they taught her, she was always told that she had not understood. Some one was always ready to tell her, in an easy, patient, amused way, that she had gotten the thing wrong. How could they always be so sure? And what was wrong with her that she could not understand? She could learn everything else faster and more easily than the other girls could.

Suddenly her fingers slipped off the keys and her hands fell nervelessly to her sides. Her eyes were blinded with great, burning tears. A wave of intolerable longing and loneliness swept over her.

The wonderful, enchanting world that she had come out of her hills to conquer was cut down to the four little grey walls that enclosed her. Everything was shut away from her. She did not understand these strange women about her. Would never understand them.

Why? Why had she ever left her hills, where Daddy Tom was near her, where there was love for her, where the people and even the snow and the wild winds were her friends?

She threw herself forward on her arms and gave way utterly, crying in great, heart-breaking, breathless sobs for her Daddy Tom, for her home, for her hills.

At five o'clock Sister Rose, coming to see that the music rooms were aired for the evening use, found Ruth an inert, shapeless little bundle of broken nerves lying across the piano.

She took the girl to her room and sent for the sister infirmarian.

But Ruth was not sick. She begged them only to leave her alone.

The sisters, thinking that it was the fit of homesickness that every new pupil in a boarding school is liable to, sent some of the other girls in during the evening, to cheer Ruth out of it. But she drove them away. She was not cross nor pettish. But her soul was sick for the sweeping freedom of her hills and for people who could understand her.

She rose and dragged her little couch over to the window, where she could look out and up to the friendly stars, the same ones that peeped down upon her in the hills.

She did not know the names that they had in books, but she had framed little pet names for them all out of her baby fancies and the names had clung to them all the years.

She recognised them, although they did not stand in the places where they belonged when she looked at them from the hills.

Out among them somewhere was Heaven. Daddy Tom was there, and her mother whom she had never seen.

Suddenly, out of the night, from Heaven it seemed, there came stealing into her sense a sound. Or was it a sound? It was so delicate, so illusive. It did not stop knocking at the portals of the ear as other sounds must do. It seemed, rather, to steal past the clumsy senses directly into the spirit and the heart.

It was music. Yes. But it was as though the Soul of Music had freed itself of the bondage and the body of sound and notes and came carrying its unutterable message straight to the soul of the world.

It was only the sisters in their chapel gently hymning the _Salve_ of the Compline to their Queen in Heaven.