Skinny Island Read Online Free PDF Page B

them expressly for you!"
    She was standing with her brother John in her dining room, on whose cleared table she had laid out the photographs of the fourteen stations of the cross that Gordon had sent her from Jerusalem.
    "But they're so beautiful, John. They should be hung in the parish house."
    "Well, of course, they're yours to give to anyone you want. But I think Mr. Muir would like you to keep them. After all, if you were inspired to send him on that trip, couldn't he have been inspired to take these pictures for you?"
    Was John smiling at her? She turned back to the pictures, so eerily moving in their blacks and pale whites. They showed the simplest of street scenes, empty of people: a doorway, an archway, a bit of wall, cobblestones, an ogee against the sky, a sidewalk, glassless gaping holes for windows. Why were they so powerful? She recalled the moving passage of Gordon's letter:
    I walked every day in the steps of our Lord until I could almost imagine that I felt the weight of the cross on my shoulders and the prick of the thorns on my brow. I wanted to give you something of that wonderful experience.
    And Jane indeed felt he had succeeded when the pictures had been framed and hung by the stairs from the hall to the third floor. She made it a habit, when she came down for breakfast, to pause each morning before a different station and say a prayer.
    The prayer was said for Gordon. She made her little daily plea to the Almighty that he would meet and marry a fine young woman who would be worthy of him. She was beginning to dare to hope that the trip to Jerusalem was accomplishing its real purpose and that her pilgrim would return cured of his insane infatuation, and hope waxed stronger on the afternoon when her brother John called to give her the great news that the Bullocks were to be transferred to a parish in Georgia.
    "It will be a great loss to us all, of course," he said, "but Mr. Bullock himself requested the transfer. He believes he has been stationed long enough in a rich community. He feels he must work now with the poor. I must confess, I find that an admirable sentiment."
    "But poor Mrs. Bullock, won't she miss New York?"
    "I don't suppose so. You know, she's from the South."
    "I must call on her right away."
    "You won't find her. Mr. Bullock told me she's gone south to make things ready in their new house."
    Jane now began to wonder if she had not been wrong from the beginning. And was it possible that the small flat feeling in her heart was disappointment? Shame on you, Jane Lyle! The next morning she paused before two stations of the cross and said two prayers. One was for Gordon's future bride. The other was to beg forgiveness for herself, a suspicious, meddling old fool.
    She found she had favorites among the stations. The seventh, where Jesus stumbled for the second time, particularly held her attention. Under the glazed white of a dead sky, the large rusticated stones that framed an arched doorway leading into blackness stood out so sharply that she seemed to touch their coarseness, feel their dankness. As in the other thirteen there was no living creature to be seen, not even an ass or a dove, and it was as if no living thing could have existed there. Yet there nonetheless emanated from the simple scene an aura of intense emotion; Jane felt her heart quicken. Did it come from the blackness that filled the archway? What was that darkness? What was in it or behind it? Although it seemed to throb with power, it did not inspire fear but simply awe. The stones on the street and in the walls gave out a thick sweet essence. Gordon must have been right. Jesus had passed there, stumbled there. Jesus was still there.
    Jane would now feel a weight in her heart that was not entirely unpleasurable when she was walking in the neighborhood and happened to think of the prints. She had always considered the brownstone façades with their curtained windows as stern, rather formidable walls whose function was to