PART I. The Neophyte
CHAPTER I
I
Cordelia Tait was thirty-one years old when she read in ‘The Diocesan News’ that the sisterhood of Saint Agnes had been established in connection with the cathedral at Kewaukee. She had a thrill of spiritual exaltation. When mamma died—and every day mamma seemed nearer to that Place of Preparation which, as nearly as Cordelia could understand her rector, was somewhat akin to Purgatory—Cordelia would join the sisterhood. In cases of extreme piety, so she read, the usual age limit of thirty for novices was stretched to forty. Mamma died six months before Cordelia’s fortieth birthday. Less than two weeks after her death, with the ironic clash of events which had characterized all of Cordelia’s life, she received a letter from the friend of her boarding-school days, the only real friend she had ever had, a widow with one child, who had passed the seven years of her widowhood in a pilgrimage from one health cure to another. Helen Deming, now that the climate of Colorado could do nothing for her, begged Cordelia to take care of her little girl. Cordelia read over the letter she had written to the Bishop during her mother’s last illness, tore it into bits, and took upon her maidenly shoulders the matronly responsibility of rearing a child.
When the thirteen-year-old daughter of her old friend arrived, Cordelia did not know what to do with her. Nora was a spindly, pale girl, with hair and eyes of a brownish red. Just like a cow, Nora confided in one of her rare bursts of talkativeness. She wasn’t a common-looking child, and she didn’t appear difficult to manage.
On the first day, Nora was taken up to Cordelia’s bedroom to inspect her bureau drawers and closet, which were to serve as models for her own. Cordelia had decided that the foundation of her young charge’s training must be neatness. Nora examined the folded bits of ribbon and lace, the rows of handkerchief boxes, the glove boxes, with encouraging attention. The perfection of detail, which with women like Cordelia so easily becomes a passion, was amazing. Nora followed Cordelia to the closet. On a shelf near the floor were assembled the battalions of Cordelia’s shoes. Her beautiful feet were her only vanity. She wore number twos, triple A, made to order by a Maronac bootmaker, who took great pride in his work. Since they were expensive, they were patched and repatched, with an infinity of patches, and the oldest dated back before Nora’s birth.
‘Now,’ concluded Cordelia impressively, ‘if you arrange your belongings in the same way, you can get up in the dead of night and find any article you want.’
‘But I never want to find anything in the dead of night,’ Nora commented, with the flicker of a smile lighting up her solemn young face.
Cordelia, undaunted, went on delivering her homily on the orderly care of places hidden from the common eye as a necessity of decent living. She had great veneration for the unseen corners of the world. She confessed that after she went to bed at night, if she remembered that she had neglected to place her shoes neatly side by side, she couldn’t go to sleep without getting up to arrange them in the proper order.
All the time she was talking, Nora reflected on the possibility of a fairy prince’s finding one of Cordelia’s shoes on the streets of Maronac and thinking Cinderella had come to life again. But after several rigid days under Cordelia’s régime, she decided that her guardian would never follow Cinderella’s careless fashion of dropping her slipper.
A few more days in Maronac made her doubt the existence of fairy princes there—or even ordinary men. At least none came near Cordelia. Every one who visited her was a woman, old like her, generally unmarried or long widowed. Young wives walking arm in arm with their husbands, happy mothers with rosy-cheeked little boys and girls skipping beside them, passed by the brown dwelling standing close to the street, its row of front windows neatly shuttered, the shades lowered to the nicety of an inch below the upper sash, the white curtains looped back in a geometric curve. And yet Cordelia seemed to love children. When Nora accompanied her to the shops on Main Street, Cordelia always stopped to examine the babies left outside in their carriages. Both Cordelia and Nora, as only children, had been denied all intimate experience with that most clamorously egoistic creation of our planet, the young of the human species, so that they saw none of the prose characterizing the chubby infants over whom both of them cooed rapturous endearments.
Everything at Cordelia’s house was strange. Cordelia herself was totally unlike Nora’s mother, only three years younger, who had kept the bright ways of her youth until the end, in spite of widowhood and shattered health. Cordelia, dressed in deep mourning, which increased the sallowness of her face and the deep circles under eyes which were a greyish brown behind thick-rimmed spectacles, following an endless line of what she called duty from one day to the next, correct, reserved, made no appeal to the riotous emotions which leaped underneath Nora’s shy and quiet exterior. Nora’s childhood home—of which she had a vivid memory although it had been broken up when she was only six—with its erratic ways, the uncertain comings and goings, the disorder, processions of friends and family visitings which had belonged to a happy, shadowy past, would have driven Cordelia to distraction.
But the girls at school soon became Nora’s friends, and the strangeness of her transplanted existence passed away. With the adaptability of the young, she settled down in her new home. From the first she had loved Maronac, lying close to the blue stretches of Lake Michigan, with the sprawling car-ferries and passenger boats plying in and out of the river, and whistles, bells, foghorns, the cries of seagulls, the gentle dashing of the waves or beating storms so intimate a part of the life of the town. She especially enjoyed the walk to her school across the river, reached by passing through Main Street and over the bridge. She read the German signs which hung below those in English on the various business houses. Maronac, like so many towns in Wisconsin, had a large Teutonic population. When she heard the bell warning pedestrians that the drawbridge would open for one of the lake boats, she ran and leaped across before the third bell sounded. Then she stood on the other side watching the big boat slide past her, the men waving their hats to the crowds on the bridge. Often she stopped to talk to the fat old German bridge-tender. After she informed him that she was beginning to study his language, he greeted her, ‘Guten Morgen, schöne Mädchen’; to which she responded, ‘Guten Morgen, mein Freund.’
The chief advantage of Cordelia’s house was that it was only a block from the public library. Every Saturday, while Cordelia worked at Saint Margaret’s, Nora read in the library, returning late in the afternoon with volumes tucked under her arm to read that night and on Sunday during Cordelia’s succession of devotions.
Cordelia, busy with her church work, left Nora much to herself. Although her ambition to serve in Saint Agnes’ had been snatched from her, the Bishop’s High-Church reforms in the Kewaukee diocese had given her plenty to do in her own parish.
After a visit to England in the year 1900, Bishop Welling had returned to his see in knee breeches, gaiters, and a tall silk hat with a broad brim turned up elaborately at the sides and laced with silk cords. He was, in Scriptural phrase, like a man born again. And before all his innovations of genuflections, holy water, the reserved sacrament, and the ceremonial of the true Holy Catholic Church had been established, his locks, already touched with grey, spread over his shoulders in a fashion resembling the later portraits of the poet Milton. He had now advanced beyond even an English model. The Bishop was a good man, much beloved by both the clergy and the lay members of his diocese. He was young enough to retain the necessary physical vigor for conflict, and old enough to realize that, if he kept his temper and steadily imported a succession of earnest young English clergymen with the correct views, he would live to see his hitherto barren Low Church pastures blossom with the beauty of the true faith.
At Saint Margaret’s a sisterhood had developed, bound by no vows, but in its informal and voluntary way humbly following the Bishop’s new light. As senior member of the Altar Guild, Cordelia had the responsibility every week-day of preparing the altar for early communion. For the Sunday services she was assisted by women, all of them unmarried, who were not kept sufficiently busy at home. Every Saturday they scoured the brass candlesticks and the flower vases, preserved the spotless purity of the white marble altar, spread out the linen cloths, arranged the flowers, set the holy vessels in the proper array, laid out the vestments. They stopped in their labors for a lunch in the Guild Room downstairs, and sometimes did not finish until late in the afternoon. So has religion provided, since the beginning, an occupation for its vestal virgins, who might otherwise grow weary in a world which has steadily pushed them aside.