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.

Sometimes Nora stopped at the church on her way from the library. She sat watching the queer observances of the Altar Guild until Cordelia was ready to go home with her. The women performed their work with covered heads, Cordelia wearing a lace cap which had belonged to her mother. Every time they passed the Cross, they dropped down quickly on one knee and crossed themselves. Nora learned that the water which had refreshed the altar flowers and that which had cleansed the communion linen and the priestly robes must be thrown upon the ground, to pass away according to nature’s formula.

She often went to high mass with Cordelia. Brought up in the unadorned Calvinistic faith, she was fascinated by the ceremonial of Saint Margaret’s. When the procession of choir boys passed down the central aisle, preceded by the Cross, she closed her eyes quickly to hide the tears.

II

Cordelia had invited the Altar Guild to have the refreshment of tea at her house after the hard Saturday labor, and Nora, now a girl of sixteen, was helping her pass the cups. All of Cordelia’s regular co-workers were on hand: Della Schuster, a red-cheeked woman of thirty from the south side of town; Amy Henderson, in high school with Nora, but soon to relinquish her church duties for mundane employment in the grocery department of Weyhausen’s store; and Edna Tillotson, tolerated because of her real gift for arranging flowers, and in spite of her unreliability and her coarse jokes.

Since the coming of the new rector, Father Stokesbury, another of the Bishop’s young English importations, tall, handsome, and unmarried, Cordelia had found the Guild burning with a new zeal. Saint Margaret’s, at least the feminine portion of it, was once more seeking salvation.

To-day Edna’s taste in humor displayed itself in a rapid census of the young worshippers at Saint Margaret’s who were beginning to come out in large numbers to the early service.

‘Poor young man!’ she began with the mimicry which her enemies found so distasteful. ‘It’s so sad him living all alone at the rectory.’ Then the real Edna emerged. ‘I wonder which one o’ them’ll catch him.’

‘I hope he won’t marry in the parish,’ Cordelia said.

‘He might be doin’ charity—makin’ one less old maid in Saint Margaret’s,’ Edna cackled. Edna always laughed at her own jokes so lustily that she covered any possible awkward pauses.

Before the echoes of her mirth had subsided, the bell rang, a loud, determined peal. Nora was dispatched to the door. When she opened it, the new rector stood facing her.

‘Miss Tait—does she live here?’ He looked down at Nora a little uncertainly.

Cordelia’s front hall was a place which few men had invaded. The corners of the rug showed no traces of having been kicked up by a rude masculine foot. There was an unsullied freshness to the stair carpet. The silver tray for visitors’ cards on the mahogany table, with a fine old mirror hanging above it, had a nicety that only a well-trained man would have respected. And, final proof of all, the hall-tree in the corner bore no confused burden of hats and coats which all men alike have an unreasonable prejudice against hiding away in a dark closet.

Father Stokesbury took several steps forward, twisted the light rug in front of the door, and covered the card-table with his broad-brimmed black hat.

In the sitting-room there was a clatter of china as the women rose, like a startled flock of pigeons, at the rector’s appearance.

‘I hoped I’d be in time for tea,’ he said, shaking hands with Cordelia.

‘I think you know every one here.’ Cordelia beamed on her little flock.

The rector looked in Nora’s direction. ‘Except this young lady.’

‘Nora Deming, who lives with me. Her father was a Presbyterian.’

‘A heretic in our midst.’

Nora blushed with the vivid memory of her apostasy these three years she had lived with Cordelia and attended Saint Margaret’s much oftener than the Presbyterian church across the street. Of late she had been a frequent visitor. The flicker of the candles, the chanting of the choir boys, the rhythm of the prayers, harmonized with the dreamy world in which she found herself at sixteen. And what made this flush of shame continue to burn in her pale face was the consciousness that she followed Cordelia to Saint Margaret’s to watch Stanley Morton, who carried the Cross in the procession of high mass. Something in his blue eyes raised to the holy burden he carried stirred her—like the colored reproductions of Raphael and Andrea del Sarto in the books she searched for in the library. When she met Stanley in everyday garments on the street, she lowered her eyes and passed quickly, so that she would not lose her vision.

‘We may get her confirmed yet,’ the new rector was saying hopefully, as he settled in the Sleepy Hollow chair Edna had vacated for him.

Nora, unaccustomed to the jocular fashion in men, responded with a slow smile. She felt a warm drawing power in this stranger with the dancing young eyes. When she passed him his cup of tea, she volunteered shyly, ‘That’s the Bishop’s seat you’re in.’

He looked under him with a great show of concern. ‘Does that mean I shall be bishop some day?’ he asked her, spreading out his hands over his shoulders, where a bishop’s locks might one day be resting.

‘Nora calls it the Bishop’s seat because Bishop Welling always picks out that old chair when he comes here,’ Cordelia explained.

Father Stokesbury made a rapid survey of the room, his gaze passing from the picture of Queen Victoria and all her grandchildren on to the view of Warwick Castle and then to the corner cupboard with its precious Lowestoft china of a lovely blue, which Nora was never trusted to dust.

‘This room makes me feel perfectly at home,’ he said.

‘My parents were born in England,’ Cordelia stated proudly. ‘Yes, near Warwick. Both of them.’ Cordelia was now launched upon her favorite topic. ‘I’ve always felt as if I came from there too. I use my mother’s old English cook book. I’ve never had another.’

‘Some say the English are the most abominable cooks in the world,’ he declared solemnly. Cordelia could only look incredulous surprise. ‘We have a national prejudice in favor of cabbage and its more aristocratic cousin. Candidly, I loathe the whole cabbage tribe. I came to America to get fed properly. Now your ices—I anticipate a whole summer of ices. And tomatoes—a great delicacy—I’m told they’re cheap here. And peaches all summer. Cheaper than potatoes. Fancy it. In London I’ve seen hot-house peaches sold for two shillings each.’

Nora leaned forward in her chair. Were all men—that part of the world so mysterious, so compelling and strange to her—like Father Stokesbury? The gleam of fun on the surface, so akin to the smothered amusement at life she buried under layer after layer of shyness and fear—it was a rare joy to find it in Maronac—to find it anywhere. Sitting in the room cluttered with the tea-drinking Altar Guild, Nora saw only Father Stokesbury, her brown eyes deep red, then black with this novel discovery of kinship, like a timid young bird exulting in the first consciousness of wings that flew. Father Stokesbury turned toward her, their eyes met, and she looked quickly away.

Again the doorbell broke upon the tea-drinking; the alien Plant girls were introduced into the sanctities of Saint Margaret’s. They were, like Nora, Presbyterians. Julia Plant, a large, almost fierce-looking woman, was so shy that she never visited any one but Cordelia. At the sight of the new rector, she assumed an expression even more severe, to conceal her terror of strangers.

Father Stokesbury examined the visitors critically. ‘I can’t understand why the heretics gather at your house, Miss Tait.’

Once more Nora raised her frightened eyes. Yes, he belonged to her world. There was no doubt of it.

The Plant girls looked mystified. But Esther, disciplined to face masses of human beings as a teacher of music and director of the Presbyterian choir, had no awe of even an Episcopal clergyman. She began to tell them about the return to town of Willy Blodgett.

‘I remember how fat he was,’ Cordelia said. ‘Always eating during school hours. He brought a huge lunch to eat at recess every day—liver sausage sandwiches, pie, bananas, and I don’t know what all. He was sticking his head in his desk to pick at it.’

‘He’s still fat. He came out to choir practice this week.’ Esther directed her remarks to the minister, a properly adjusted company smile on her face. ‘Do you know his voice never changed? It’s a beautiful soprano—high and clear. Just like a woman.’

‘Really,’ commented Father Stokesbury.

‘There’s Mrs. Bates. She sings just like a man—an octave lower,’ Cordelia said.

‘He wants to sing in the chorus, and when he starts singing, the row of sopranos just shakes.’

‘We need a good soprano at Saint Margaret’s,’ the rector said. ‘But every useful person in Maronac seems to be Presbyterian.’

Amy Henderson, who was a militant Episcopalian, shook her head disapprovingly. ‘He’s too big and fat for a choir boy,’ she asserted with emphatic conviction. ‘And he’d sound queer with the men. It wouldn’t do.’

‘Do you remember that concert we went to years ago?’ Cordelia asked Julia. ‘Willy sang a solo. I got to laughing so——’ Cordelia pulled off her glasses and began to wipe her eyes at the memory. ‘That big fat man and then that high voice coming out—it was too much for me. And then I looked over at you, Julia, and you were just shaking. When you saw me, you went right off.’

‘Willy can’t even shave,’ Edna Tillotson whispered to Della so loud that every one in the room heard her.

‘Poor man,’ Julia remarked. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. Not like some men. Those stabbers——’ Julia emerged from her silence with a trumpet blast.

‘Stabbers?’ All eyes were fastened upon poor, frightened Julia.

‘I was coming home from the concert the other night.’ Julia directed her narrative exclusively to Cordelia, almost turning her back upon Father Stokesbury. Julia feared men even more than women. ‘Over at Turner Hall. Esther was staying afterward, so I went on alone. You know how dark it is there on Sixth Street close to the bridge.’ In the excitement of her tale, her threatening eyes included Father Stokesbury, who was polite attention. ‘A man was behind me.’

Amy Henderson, who was very timid about going out alone at night, gave a little shriek.

‘One of those stabbers,’ Julia pronounced in her most sepulchral tones.

‘What?’

‘Stabbers. It’s like a dagger, I guess. They stick it into people.’

Father Stokesbury, sunk into the comfortable folds of the Sleepy Hollow chair, sat up suddenly.

‘They stab women,’ Julia explained. ‘This man—I heard him walking faster and faster. Then he came right up. I felt I was going to scream. He had one arm doubled up.’

‘What did he do?’ the Altar Guild demanded in a single voice.

‘I had my door key in my hand. I always carry it that way. I was all ready to punch it in his eye. I swung out my fist——’

‘Julia Plant!’ breathed Cordelia in an outburst of admiration.

‘Just then two women turned sudden at the corner of Jefferson Street. He saw them an’ just made off for the docks. An’ they said to me, “We three’d better stick together. That man was one o’ those stabbers.”’

‘Have they stabbed any one?’ Father Stokesbury inquired politely.

At his question Nora was seized with hysterical giggles, but Julia’s audience was too intent upon her reply to notice.

‘Not on this side o’ town. But over on the south side. Not far from you, Della. An’ they’ll be here next. If that man hadn’t got scared off——’

‘Did you see his dagger?’ Father Stokesbury inquired again.

Nora, partially recovered from her paroxysm, looked toward him. His mouth was very grave, but his eyes had a twitching uncertainty.

‘Of course not. They keep ’em hidden. The first thing you know it’s sticking into you.’

The rector’s face disappeared behind a large handkerchief with the swift eclipse of the moon by a stormy cloud. From behind it Nora detected sounds suspiciously similar to a series of gurgling gasps.

‘They stab young girls, generally,’ Julia concluded.

‘Of course,’ Edna Tillotson sniffed. ‘Who wouldn’t know that?’ The ignorance of her feminine circle at times was more than Edna could stand. ‘You don’t think a stabber would bother an old bird like me, do you, Julia? I don’t believe that man near the bridge was a stabber.’

Father Stokesbury rose abruptly and made a swift departure. Nora observed that his face and his ears were very red. Cordelia followed him to the front door, replaced the card tray, and bent down to straighten the rug before she rejoined her visitors. A twinge of pain shot through her knees. At forty-three she was lame and stiff after a day spent working at the church.

‘He don’t seem like a clergyman,’ Edna was saying when she returned. ‘Not enough dignity. I saw him snickerin’ away when Julia was talking about that stabber. Of course a man with his collar buttoned behind—he ain’t any different from the rest o’ them.’ Edna, who had no particular esteem for mankind, never lost an opportunity to state her opinion about the latest erring representative.

An angry flush rose in Cordelia’s dark cheeks. ‘I hope you aren’t like some folks, Edna, and begin criticizing a young man before he’s had a fair trial.’

Nora, uncomfortably aware of the storm raging in Cordelia, began to gather up the tea-cups. In a moment the Guild and the Plant girls hurried away. Nora stood in the middle of the sitting-room, once more seized with helpless laughter.

‘What does _ail_ you, Nora?’

‘They’re so funny. I——’

‘Well, I don’t see anything to laugh at. You wash the tea-things while I’m getting supper, Nora. It’s late. Most six o’clock.’

Nora, in the little wash-room adjoining the kitchen, went through the mechanical process of washing the tea-cups, her mind rioting over the comedy of the last moments. Father Stokesbury had laughed too—laughed as hard as she. He was probably laughing now. She could imagine him walking home along the quiet street leading to the rectory in zigzag steps of overpowering mirth. Nora bent over the dishpan laughing all over.

‘Supper,’ called Cordelia. ‘Come, Nora.’

III

Old Mrs. Hill, the wife of a retired captain on one of the lake boats, came to Cordelia whenever the consciousness of her burdens was too intolerable to be borne at home.

Close upon supper she arrived, as usual. ‘I just had to get away,’ she began; ‘Mr. Hill’s been under foot all day, and I got that nervous——’

Mrs. Hill had the sagged face and mournful expression of one who has no doubts concerning her own oppression. ‘No one comes to see me,’ she complained. ‘Even you, Cordelia. I wonder what your poor dead mother would say if she knew how you were neglecting old friends.’

‘Sometimes I get tired of people,’ Cordelia admitted when she had closed the front door upon Mrs. Hill’s grumblings.

‘I feel sorry for old Captain Hill,’ Nora retorted. ‘He’s lonesome too. After being a boat captain—and now sitting at home. The next time she comes, I’m going over to talk with him.’

The weary Cordelia was beginning to close the house for the night. In a feminine household this is an elaborate ceremony of precaution. First, all the windows downstairs were fastened. Then, Cordelia bolted the cellar door which led into the back hall, next the front and the back doors, and then in succession the kitchen, the sitting-room, and the dining-room doors which opened into the back hall. At last she and Nora started upstairs for bed.

Nora followed Cordelia into her room. She didn’t want to go to bed. She wanted to talk to some one. She stood staring vacantly at the photographs of Cordelia’s parents, the bearded man and the very cross-looking woman, which had never changed their position on the bureau. Then her glance passed to the crucifix of black and silver over the table beside the bed and the photograph of Bishop Welling in his silken robes and apron with the beautiful lace.

Cordelia, with the evening service to be read before she could close her eyes, began to turn the pages of her prayer-book. ‘Don’t forget to bolt your door, Nora,’ she said, looking up over her thick spectacles. ‘With two lone women in the house, we can’t be too careful.’

‘Yes, I’ll remember,’ Nora promised, shaking hands according to a stiff little ceremony she had inaugurated when she first came. Somehow it wasn’t easy to kiss Cordelia.

She obediently locked herself into her room and slowly prepared for bed. From across the hall came the murmur of Cordelia’s prayers. In bed at last, she reached for the book which that morning she had hidden under her pillow. It was ‘Tom Jones,’ and she had been repeating the trite experience of bold maidens who have fallen in love with that sprightly and adventurous hero.

She had excused her late vigils over the book—it was dreadfully long—by the necessity of finding escape from the life she led at Cordelia’s. All those women—their gossip and maliciousness—nothing happening. In ‘Tom Jones’ something was always happening.

Cordelia had given her ‘Cranford’ to read, but a few chapters smothered her. She got boys’ books from the library—‘The Count of Monte Cristo’ and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘Treasure Island.’ Scott, if you skipped a lot, wasn’t bad. But ‘Cranford’—worse than Louisa Alcott. The open fields of Fielding brought refreshment, the inns, the highwaymen, Tom’s fights, the dens of wickedness in London. Nora, sitting propped up in bed, forgot her smarting, sleep-laden eyes, her cramped arms and legs. How unmoral and unchurchly and unfeminine! Few women. And those not the women found in the parish of Saint Margaret’s.

But to-night Tom and his adventures seemed less satisfactory—a little low. Her thoughts—Nora dropped her book.

When you were old like Cordelia, you thought about being good, you did piles of church work, and maybe dreamed about the joys of heaven. But if you were young—it was shameful, but young people—at least some of them—how did she know? Did the other girls at school, Nora pondered, think about—about love and about boys who never even looked at them? Like Nora gazing wistfully after Stanley every Sunday. But it wasn’t Stanley. What was it then? And boys at school—Tom Baldwin who played football and wore a bright crimson sweater—Nora had prayed he would speak to her some day—actually prayed. Then she had put herself in his way. But he was always with a crowd of boys. He didn’t even see her. And the boys she had danced with at the church parties Cordelia took her to in the Guild Hall—they weren’t exactly—not what one dreamed of—but——

Now, suddenly, a tall blond man with a lilting voice which went up and down displaced Stanley and Tom Baldwin and all the other clumsy boys. Father Stokesbury had none of the uncouthness of Maronac Harbor—the way he had helped her pass the cups—he was a gentleman. Somehow he revived in her the faint memories of her father, about whom her mother had talked ceaselessly until the end. Her mother had wanted her to marry a man just like her father. The careless ease and assurance the new rector had shown. Mere boys—how she despised them! Her dreams were concrete, swift, charming the uneventfulness of Maronac Harbor with new colors and a fresh breath. Nora fell asleep, with ‘Tom Jones’ lying spread out on the floor beside her.