His widow had caused to be erected to his memory the finest granite monolith obtainable for money, bearing the inscription, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends"; and Joan, after her first startled distaste for the grandiloquence passed, was able to appreciate how deeply the memorial must gratify the proud spirit of a Darcy, if it lingered near enough to know.
CHAPTER XLIII
Through the dim corridors, the silent halls
Of Yesterday, the nuns move, whispering
Their rosary. Without, a robin calls
A drowsy blessing to his little mate,
For it is late,
And chapel aisles are filled with peace and prayer.
And Christ is there.
Ah, dreams that haunt these keys of ivory—!
Et verbum caro factum est, they sing,
And lo! the years are as a day to me.
I kneel among the quiet ones again
To lay the pain,
The joy of life, where light and shadow meet
At Jesus' feet.
Some time earlier, during the period when girl-emotions translate themselves into verse as naturally as bird-emotions translate themselves into song, Joan had composed these lines, with the odd prescience that frequently came to her when she "took her pen in hand." She had stepped aside from a heated game of handball one day to jot them down; and her play-fellows, evincing no particular surprise, had murmured to each other, "Leave Joan alone. She's writing Poetry." For poetry is as much a part of convent school-life as is handball.
Now she was back among "the quiet ones" again, fulfilling her own prophecy, come to lay her burden of pain and joy, if not at Jesus' feet, at least in the safekeeping of his handmaidens. In her plain black frock, such as convent girls wear, with her hair down in a braid and a small apron tied about her waist, to protect her skirt from embroidery-floss, the nuns found it hard to believe it was Joan Blair who had come back to them out of the world, and not Joan Darcy. Only this was a Joan who played harder than her younger self had ever played, entering into the gaiety of the school, the basket-ball, the charades, the skating-matches, the fancy-dress impromptus, with a feverish eagerness which saddened the good ladies to see. Strange, vivid, restless young creature—what she had learned of life in the short while she had been away from them! Love, motherhood, and loss—the loss that is saddest of all losses to women, be they wives or maids or religieuses. While they in their silent corridors and hidden gardens had listened to month after quiet month rung away by the bells, praying, dreaming, working; tending the young life about them into blossom, sometimes carrying with candles one of their number back to a still place beyond the children's playground, sometimes—not often now—receiving into their ranks one who had done with the world's ways even before she came to know them. Truly "the quiet ones," blessed with the peace of those who resign their wills to the will of God.
Joan, gazing into their serene, pure, almost childlike faces, envied them from her heart; but, being Joan, she asked herself wonderingly how they could be so sure it was the will of God to which they resigned themselves. Intelligent, fine-natured women, deliberately turning their backs on life, deliberately closing eyes and ears to what went on in the street just outside their cloister, lest it distract them from contemplation of their immortal souls—Joan shook her head sharply; and putting a veil over her hair, slipped into the chapel, where a voice behind the cloister-screen was repeating the rosary of the Sacred Heart:
"Oh, sacred heart of Jesus, burning with love for us,
Inflame our hearts with love for Thee."
The beautiful voice rose and fell in almost passionate cadence, as if it were pleading. It ceased abruptly; and another, older voice took up the words, with mystic tenderness. There was a faint fragrance in the place—indeed throughout the old building—of incense and dying roses, which Joan always called to herself "the odor of sanctity." It came back to her sometimes poignantly in the most unexpected places.