Free Captains and The Kings by Taylor Caldwell Page A

hopes never faltered though Sister Elizabeth was less sanguine. "We will make do," she would say. The outside privies were sheltered from public gaze by being enclosed at the end of a rough wooden tunnel built by the nuns, themselves, and it led from the kitchen door. Bare and cold though the orphanage- convent was, the nuns, several of them from Ireland within the past few years, thought of it as the dearest and most contented home, and their faces, in the warm kitchen, were bright in the lamplight as they worked and innocently gossiped. Sometimes a sick and very young child would be brought here, wrapped in shawls, to be rocked by a nun, and soothed and petted even at night, until he slept against the immaculate but maternal breast and was carried upstairs to the murmur of a prayer. No hunger of the stomach was ever fully appeased in this building but the nuns counted themselves as blessed in this community of genuine hope, faith, and charity. Joseph went into the little reception room which was as chill as death and dank, and smelled of beeswax and generous amounts of soap. The walls were white-plastered, and nothing the nuns could do could remove the stains of damp permanently. The floor was polished to a dark brightness, and the room contained a table covered with a coarse linen cloth bordered with coarser lace, and held the convent's cherished Bible bound in moldering red leather, and nothing else except a lighted kerosene lamp. A tiny window near the ceiling let in the only daylight but never any sun, and there were four straight kitchen chairs ranged stiffly against the walls. But on a wall pedestal stood a small and badly executed statue of Our Lady Help of Christians, all cheap gilt and poisonous blue and glaring white, with a gilded halo. In the very center of the same wall hung a very large wooden crucifix of dark wood, and the Corpus upon it was miraculously executed in old ivory. This had belonged for generations to Sister Elizabeth's family in Ireland, and she had carried it to America when she was a very young nun and it was her treasure, and the treasure of the convent-orphanage. It had been suggested to her that the high altar jn the church was the most fitting place for it, but Sister Elizabeth sought out the dingiest room in the convent in which to place it. No one knew her reason and she never replied to questions, but almost all who entered the reception room were moved by it, some to sorrow, some to rebellion, some to peace, and some to absolute indifference, such as Joseph Armagh. Fie sat on one of the stiff chairs and shivered, and he wondered, with alarm, if he had got another chill in the rain. The only fear that he ever allowed himself was the fear of desperate illness and unemployment and beggary, for he believed that in that event he would never see his brother and sister again, and they would be given for adoption to strangers whose names he would never know. None in Winfield had ever mentioned or hinted it, but he was convinced of it, remembering old Father O'Leary who had brought the family to this place and then had died but a month later. Joseph waited for his family, and he shivered again and remembered that he had had but one small meal today-all he could afford-and that a poor one of bread and cold bacon and black coffee in his boardinghouse. He was also cramped by pangs of hunger, and he rubbed his cold hands together and tried not to think of food. He raised his eyes and they encountered the crucifix, and for the first time he was aware of it clearly and there was a sudden and darkly violent convulsion in him. "Sure, and You never helped anyone," he said aloud. "It is all lies, and that I am knowing and none can tell me anything else." His mother's face, young and dying and afflicted, shone sharply before him and he squeezed his dry eyes shut for a moment. He said in himself, "Mum, I've minded them and I always will, as I promised you." He had bitten down on the pain of grief for three