A Complete Story

New Zealand Tablet, Volume LII, Issue 24, 1 July 1925, Page 9

A Complete Story

H happened in the growing time, that time, when, if one stood in the scarcely perceptible night air, one could almost feel the gently rustling grass creeping upward and the leafy branches spreading outward. When the swaying corn shot and stretched almost before one’s eyes; when all around the air .-eemed full of God’s vast, creative power; when one felt awed into standing still and breathless, so powerful the Presence 1 of the mighty, unseen force felt in the air around one. B Sncii a time it beganone glorious twilight in July, if twilight it can then be called. She stood, a perfect picture in the slanting afterlight of the setting sun, leaning on a great tree-trunk, upward gazing, a huge overhanging branch half-hiding her -face and form. That which was, not bid was lovely enough. Young,'fresh, fair and glowing, and just at that time when girlhood was meeting with, growing womanhood. And perhaps because of this, she felt around her all the strange stirrings of growing nature with a marvellous, sympathetic instinct.’ Put' she turned smiling to the man beside her, a young man, full of persuasion and force. • " “Don’t spoil this lovely evening, Dan,” ■she pleaded. “Hush! Listen! hear the corn ■growing!” "She held up her hand and she ■stood tensely, her eyes roaming over the swaying corn bathed in sunlight before her. Ho listened a moment, then laughed and caught her hand eagerly. “But I cannot listen, Anne.., I can only listen to you and look at you. I want you to speak. You must answer me to-night. You must say yes, you’ll come?’’ . j Xow she grew rosy and full of trouble. “But —hut—I —am —a Catholic,” she pleaded. ■ ". d; “Andl—am —not —is that it?” he said flushing. d ' “And you—are not,” she repeated sadly. ' Then he began to persuade,;' In the deepen-. ,ing shadows—in the growing, time—with na-

THE QROWiNu TIME

a • ■ ture rustling all around them — pleaded. And she consented. And that night in her mother’s cottage on the rocks above the sea, in wild, Atlanticwashed Donegal, there was deep grief and trouble. For Anne —their one, precious girl —was going away to marry, one quite outside their treasured Faith! . And Anne would neither .wait nor listen to persuasion. In spite of mother’s tears and father’s scoldings she went out from tire sheltered ; humble home of her childhood. And only God and the mother knew what the mother suffered that morning, in the grow- : * ftA ' -V * . ing time, when the lilt' of her child’s voice left her ageing ears. “Only God knows what may come of it. v Only He knows what is good at all. May it some day bring Him glory!” she whispered to herself. “Grannie, grannie, do- you . not feel it? Come here and I know you will." A girl’s voice, young, rich, and eager, calling back to the shadowed cottage, where the turf fire burned brightly on the hearth. “There!”—as an old - woman came out to the doorstep; leaving a brown-smoked spinning wheel —“don’t you feel it now?” the eager voice went on.. “Stay still —quite still. Oh, I hear it!” —more eagerly still, her fair face flushing“ Growing, Grannie, everything growing. I can feel God’s breath this evening, putting new life into everything. I can feel His hands gently touching all!” “Aye, dearie, aye.” There is a tired, drawn-out patience in the old voice. A beautiful picture they make standing there in the humble doorway,, the bright young, form and the stooping older one• there in the sunset of a mid-July day.. Then , as the girl talks eagerly on. the old form shivers slightly and, drawing back into the ’shadows, ’ she whispered somewhat brokenly./;/. . ./ ; • ' “Listen, Alanna, an’ I’ll tell ye ; ye have made me lonely now, love. I’ll tell ye what - happened once long ago,' when the world

• was- growing his way — just this time of the Near — • 7 . -vA. And back at the spinning-wheel, while 5? she gently, carded wool, she told the fair <’.•! ivl»il rt-f o - urnAiti it of lon nr non B xxx '-' X ***•'* v ~VVi“ b :J “ ’Tis in you to feel it, machree!” she endgd, ‘‘Since the night you came to me y growing time, I have watched your delight, year after year, in God’s great season, when, as you say, His hand rests on earth and He blesses the fruits of His sow- : 7 ; ing.” The girl seated at her feet, looked up a little wistfully. i “Aye, deariethey were married accord--7 . ring to his own way, but not as a Catholic 777 should have it. But theresure, when my Anne died under this roof, with the priest •of God beside her, sure I’m bound to be conly: tent. And then dearie,” gently caressing ■ the girl’s soft hair, “she left me you, and ' . you have so filled ray lonely years, dear!” “I suppose so, poor, dear Grannie; but I’d love to know about. ray father. After 7 all, my mother loved him and hehe had a soul, too.” There was a wonderful yearn'•■■>7 ing in the rich young voice. “Aye, dear, aye. I never heard what came •of him, Just all we can do is pray. I don’t :- ’ knaow why I’ve told you —but there it is—it came to my heart and my lips to--7' —and ’tis better you’d know it anyway.” 7. They fell silent after that, and later, when the dusk was drawing down in the lush pad--7.7 -dock, below the white cottage, a fair girl |7 gave up a great love and sent a lad out into ’.the loneliness, because, like her mother’s 7 •wooer of old, be was not of her Faith, and |7, - because God had given to her to make a supreme sacrifice for His own great cause. Before the next crop went down the weak- ,> ness that since that night held the old woman ■'* took her off. And with the care gone from her hands, the fair-haired girl, now grown 77 very silent and earnest, bade farewell to the ■beautiful hills of Donegal, the cottage and "the bayf> and faced the Atlantic and the 77 :strangers in the grand cause of souls for |7 (God. , •*v•• • . • • ’ ’ 777 The dull, overpowering heat of a day in •irad-July, in one of the throbbing cities of 7Vi. j America’s great States. A shadowed, cooled, '7>7 but still intensely close atmosphere of a hos--777-7' pital ward, with white beds and silent sick, 7 : 777 : and gentle-faced Sisters moving quietly 7; about. Stooping over one bed is a fair-faced Sis7v. -ter, listening anxiously to the wanderings of a patient, a man well on in years, who 77;- "has not been long in — one of the many acci-7777'dent-cases of this great city. He had been j rir'K injured on the quays as he was hurrying to catch a liner bound for Irelandhis home—obut0 but that, as yet, is not known. Presently the Sister straightens herself and ’’7 - J looks to the great open window in vain search lT .for air. This she is thinking of: A time — a time, years ago—when one could stand 7 ■oft Donegal’s wind-swept mountains and hear "V the rustling com growing and the sycamore ( leaves spreading and swaying , and could feel, s| |M/ in the night wind, the Breath of God and see

the vast sweep of His vaulted heavens glowing with the stars amid the free; wind-swept clouds.

Oh ! , for even one moment’s breath of it now! Then she stoops again and peril sips she brushes away a tear. Then suddenly she flushes and pales again; forlisten sick man is wandering. Has he caught her thoughts

He is rambling of a day in mid-July when all the world was full of pulsing, stirring life, and a girl—in the growing time—trusted him entirely and fled with him from her happy mountain home. Now he is full of a terrible remorse and he grows wild as the gentle Sister tries to soothe him. He raves of the young wasted life, of his desertion, and— here the Sister trembles — calls on his child, and repents the day he lured his love from her religion and prays he may yet be a. Catholicthat it was that which caused all the sorrow. His lack of the Great Faith. And it is great, for he has watched all these lonely years and has found it so.'

After much, the wandering ceases the Sister has him soothed to sleep. And then, in the dimness of the chapel, when her hours are over, the fair, young Sister prays that before the end God will accept the completing of her sacrifice, for she knows He has led to her that soil! she has lived and suffered to save.

It came—and strangelythe answer to her prayer.

Early next day came a visitor to the sick manno less than the young man who had saved him from the worst consequences of his accident the day before. And while he was there, consciousness returned and recognition of one from the wildness of beloved Donegal.

She turned, and sent quickly for a priest and then she came back, and, kneeling by the bedside, whispered to the dying man assurance of God’s mercy, telling him all the story of how God’s Providence, working ever, arranged all.

How her mother gave her her Faith ; how her Grannie’s story set her yearning for his soul; how-she gave herself to God; how God had now used him to bring him, her father, to her. And here she wept and fell to thanking God for the miracle of his conversion.

Soon it was all over, and, safe in the Faith she had brought him, his soul sped back to its Creator. s ■ .

But that was not all, for a timid touch on her sleeve startled her later and the voice of her friend, earnest and full of sympathy:

“Sister, put , two souls down to your account; so great a faith I cannot pass by. I’ll become a Catholic.”

Her beautiful smile of perfect gratitude 1 was his reward in this world. For herself — as later she knelt before the still red lamp in her Creator’s presenceshe was content with a great' thankfulness and hope, that when they all met again they would be all able to understand together—in the vast halls of eternity, where the “growing-time” is always, and where God’s great creation goes on for ever. The Gross. . , .