Free Captains and The Kings by Taylor Caldwell

and knives and harness and nails and a thousand other things, and not only one. The same experiences turn one man this way, and another the other way, and it is in their nature." The priest had marveled at this, for Joseph had been but fifteen then, and then he was frightened for he vaguely felt that he was confronting a phenomenon new to him, and terrifying, for it was like a natural force which no man dared refute or defy, but only accept. The thought filled the priest with sadness and fear. Then he remembered that one young nun had shyly told him, "Joseph loves his brother and his sister, Father, and he would die for them. I have seen it on his face, the poor lamb." But lately the priest had begun to believe that the nun was mistaken. Joseph reached the orphanage with its faint yellow lamps shining through the clean bare windows, and its whitened stone steps and its bare facade. Then he paused. Standing at the curb was a wonderful equipage which he had never seen before in America but only coming or going to the great houses of the landed gentry in Ireland. It was a sleek and blackly polished closed carriage, with a coachman on its high seat, and with glittering windows and varnished wheels. Two horses drew it, as black as the carriage itself, and as sleek, and their harness gleamed like silver in the faint lamplight nearby. Joseph stared, and the coachman, in his thick greatcoat and tall beaver hat, stared back at him. His gloved hands held a whip. Now, thought Joseph, what is such a carriage as this doing here, before this orphanage, and on this street? It is fit for the Queen, herself, or the President of the United States of America. "And what'll ye have?" said the coachman, in an unmistakably Irish brogue. "Get on with ye, boyo, and stop gowpin' like a fish. Or I'll fetch ye a clout." The first curiosity Joseph had felt for years stirred him, but he shrugged and went up the shallow steps of the orphanage and pulled the bell. A young nun, Sister Frances, opened the door and smiled at him, though he never smiled in answer. "And it's very late, Joseph," she said. "The children have supped and are at their prayers before bed." Joseph entered the damp hall without reply, though he wiped his feet on the bristled rug at the door very carefully. The nun closed the door after him. "Only five minutes, Joseph," she said. "You'll wait in the parlor, as usual, and then I'll see." The bare and splintered wood floor was painfully clean and polished, and so were the wooden walls. To the left was Sister Elizabeth's special "parlor" where she had mysterious and weighty discussions, and to the right was a small "reception room," as the young nuns called it, for such as Joseph. At the end of the hall was a long narrow room, hardly more than a corridor for indeed it once stabled a number of horses in their stalls. Now the nuns called it "our refectory," and here they ate their sparse meals and here, with them, ate the orphans. At the end of the "refectory" was the kitchen which, in winter, was the only really warm spot in the orphanage, and a favorite gathering place for the Sisters who sewed here and spent their recreation time and chatted, and even laughed and sang, and discussed their sad little charges and even, though this was sinful, Sister Elizabeth. Some kind and partially affluent soul had donated the three rocking chairs near the huge black iron stove which was set in the red brick wall, and the nuns' hands had cleaned and polished the brick floor. There was always an enormous iron pot of soup steaming away over the embers in the stove, and to nuns and children it had the most delightful scent in the world. On the second floor slept the children in their crowded cots, and beyond a door slept the nuns in similar community. Only Sister Elizabeth had privacy, her space hidden behind a heavy brown curtain. The schoolroom for the children was the church, itself, "while we wait," said the nuns, "for a real school to be built." Their