Captains and The Kings

Read Online Captains and The Kings by Taylor Caldwell - Free Book Online Page A

Book: Captains and The Kings by Taylor Caldwell Read Free Book Online
Authors: Taylor Caldwell
Ads: Link
that he had his job on the river sawmills and never could regret that he had called himself a Scotsman in order to obtain work. A man must do as he must do, old Father O'Leary had once told him, but hardly in the context in which Joseph now found himself. However, it became the interior warrior cry of Joseph Armagh. He had not created the world in which he was forced to live, nor did he feel, or ever feel, that he was truly a part of it. He must survive. Self-pity was as repulsive to him as sentimentality, and a compassionate glance-which he received only from the nuns and the priest of St. Agnes's Church-filled him with a bitter rage as at a monstrous insult.

He passed the filthy little saloons with the shut doors and the dark windows, and knew that in the rear revelry "on the Sabbath" was in full voice. He hesitated. He was thirsty, and a mug of beer would be satisfying. But he had but fifty cents in one pocket, and payday was not until Tuesday, and in the meantime lie had to give his aching stomach some sustenance. In another pocket, pinned securely, was the two-dollar bill which he would give to the Sister Superior tonight for the weekly board of his brother and sister. So long as he supported Scan and Regina they could never be taken from him on the plea that they were indigent orphans. He was recovering from a cold. He coughed harshly and noisily once or twice, and then spat. The rain was now pelting. He began a half-run. Against a sky becoming steadily darker he could see the steeple of St. Agnes's Church, a miserable little building which had once been a barn, all gray walls and peeling paint and narrow plain glass windows and shingled roof which leaked during bad storms. It was open only for Sunday Mass, a single Mass, and for the morning Mass during the weekdays. Otherwise it was locked, for fear of vandals. An old watchman slept behind the sacristy armed with a club, a venerable and penniless old man whom a heavy winter gale could make stagger or fall. But he believed both in God and his club, and slept sweetly. Next to the church stood an equally miserable building, a little smaller, which had also been a big barn long ago, but which now housed five nuns and some forty children without homes or guardians. Somehow the nuns had gathered together enough money to enlarge the barn and make it a two-story and ramshackle affair of wood and odds and ends of curious lumber, and somehow they had furnished it cleanly if meagerly. It stood, with the church, on a small plot of land which the men of the parish kept green and neat in the summer. The women of the parish, almost as destitute as the Sisters, planted flower seeds against the sifting walls of both church and orphanage, and during the summer the desperate poverty of both buildings was partly alleviated by the living light of blossoms and green leaves. The people of the parish, to the rest of the inhabitants of Winfield, were pariah dogs, fit only for the dirtiest and most revolting work which not even the "river scum" would accept. They were also the poorest paid. Their women worked in the houses of their superiors for small rations of food and two or three dollars a month. They brought the food home nightly to their families. The only joy any of them possessed was an occasional mug of beer, and their Church, and their Faith. Joseph Armagh never entered that church. He never mingled with the people. He regarded them as dispassionately as he did the other people of Winfield, and with the same far indifference. They had nothing to do with him, and his life, and the thoughts he thought, and the stony determination that lived in him like a dark fire. Once Father Barton, accosting him deliberately as he left the orphanage, had tried to soften that taciturn and obdurate young man and had attempted to engage him in conversation beyond the few words Joseph would give him. He asked Joseph why he never attended Mass, and Joseph said nothing. "Ah, I know it is the Irish

Similar Books

Black Mountain

Greig Beck

The Child Garden

Catriona McPherson

Notwithstanding

Louis De Bernières

Manroot

Anne J. Steinberg