The St. Mary banner. (Franklin, Parish of St. Mary, La.) 1889-1931, 1903-05-09

warm red tiles, and wondered why.
Lingering among the walnut trunks,
she had fallen uncOnsciOusly to ewes
dropping, and quivered with far grayer
excitement than the poets over the
tale OF the haunting doves.
It was the fairy turn in the tale. the
stroke of 5nchantment, the master
stroke of metamcrphosis that alluring-
ly caught both poet and girl. Else it
had been an ordinary, respectable, very
commonplace ghost story.
That a monk whose Office it was to
! feed the monastery doves in their shell
ter at sundown should meet a maid
there in the walnut grove. should come
again to seek love lettering In the aro-
matte shade, should find love irresisti-
/ Bile and his VOWS as ropes of dust while
maid was to meet at the dovecote,
should begin to keep vigil by his doves
in the dark, and become suspect of
4 prior and brOtherhOod should finally
be caugnt-he with his maid-by a
cat-like prior one November night,
when the great doyecote stood silent
over its own shadow in moonlight, like
some Judge over cringinG criminal;
all this though ever pitiful, was too
usual a basis for the ghost haunt to
make that unusually attractive. But
| there was more. Fantasucally
| astray from beaten ghost-tracks it was
| that, when the dramatic moment Of dis
81 r1o Il
| be proven a Merlin of his kind, should
| shelter from one sin in the bosom Of
another. should recall to memory in
his exigence a concealed lore OF magic
culled in Druidic tracks, should safe
guard himself and his beloved in the
frantic shout of a strange liturgy which
fell SO shudderingly upon the ears of
the rosy prior that his fingers stopped
them, while his wild eyes saw sight
stranger than the hearing of the litur-
gic charm.
For before his eyes and out of his
reach the monk and the maid flew high
to the red-roofed eyrie-a white dove
and dark before the eyes of the holy
maid. Their feathers lustered in the
moonlight as they passed, cooling con-
tent out of the incarnation, each with
in little doorway.
But at that same moment the lifted
hands of the prior were clapped to his
dazed head in self-defense, for out flew
the monastery doves in a fustered
crowd, their soft voices shrilling to
pitch of terror, their domestic peace in
vaded, their respectable habits rudely
fractured by these foreign midnight
callers. They tore a passage past the
shaken prior through the walnut-grove,
paiting the sward with rattle of for
lorn and shriyelled leaves, and so on
to the standpoint and out across the
naked sea. After that night there were
no more doves to the brotherhood, who
tried to install in their vote. family af-
ter family, but in vain, for at the first
nightfall each new flock few like the
rest, with cries of terror to the sea,
to come back no more. Only the white
dove and the grey nestled by night in
=
were never seen by day. The sound
of their cooling was heard in November
clear against any shrek Of wind or
whistle of wave, and for years the
shuddering brotherhood crossed them
selves throughout wakeful nights, say
ing how the grey monk nightly shouted
his incarnation over the white maid;
how both faced nightly the weird hor-
ror of metamorphosis and flew to the
deserted doyecote, cooling whilst the
brethren crossed.
Nor did the story die out with the
monks, as the old man bore witness.
The poet sighed that such things had
ceased to happen and passed by the
girl who was wondering if they had.
Il will find out tonight" said she,
thrilling with deternlinate adventure.
THE place will be under enchant-
nent enough in the moonlight" muir
INJURED he. Il must come though the
Goye-ghosts do not. But there are yet
many November nights, many leaves
to fall many opportunities"
I1ONtTc Uc WtHI elloI NSly AiSht,
smiling as he passed the darkened win
dow of the peasant.
Whimsically since poet and young
enough to think of things as toys, he
went cowled and cloaked and stood by
the devotee wooing the spirit of the re-
negade monk out Of the air, the place,
and his very clothes. Lifting in moist
air, heavy exhalations from the leaves
that had been love-language to the
monk, an incense swung from invisible
censers-became the same to him until
he stood there expectant in his fancy,
eager almost as the monk himself,
looking, listening for a footstep, with
head turned fxedly to the left, there
where white figure should come along
the gnarled avenue of thorn, carpeted
now with weird and knotty shadows,
as if goblins slept along its length.
The monk thus lived again in the
poet.
Yet the poet started-renembering
that he was not the monk-when soft
ly, cautiously, there drifted down the
goblin path in very truth a hooded
girl in white.
The DOet caught his breath, but the