| CRAGSTONE
had committed what his world called a crime—an
inexcusable offence that caused him to be shunned by
society and estranged from his father’s house.
He had proved a failure.
Not one of his whole family
connections could say unto the others, “I told
you so,” when he turned out badly.
They had all predicted that
he was born for great things, then to discover that
they had overestimated him was irritating, it told against
their discernment, it was unflattering, and they though
him inconsiderate.
So, in addition to his failure,
Cragstone had to face the fact that he had made himself
unpopular among his kin.
As a boy he had been the pride
of his family, as a youth, its hope of fame and fortune;
he was clever, handsome, inventive, original, everything
that society and his kind admired, but he criminally
fooled them and their expectations, and they never forgave
him for it.
He had dabbled in music, literature,
law, everything—always with semi-success and brilliant
[Page 239] promise; he had even tried
the stage, playing the Provinces for an entire season;
then, ultimately sinking into mediocrity in all these
occupations, he returned to London, a hopelessly useless,
a pitiably gifted man. His chilly little aristocratic
mother always spoke of him as “poor, dear Charles.”
His brothers, clubmen all, graciously alluded to him
with, “deuced hard luck, poor Charlie.”
His father never mentioned his name.
Then he went into “The
Church,” sailed for Canada, idled about for a
few weeks, when one of the great colonial bishops, not
knowing what else to do with him, packed him off north
as a missionary to the Indians.
And, after four years of disheartening
labor amongst a semi-civilized people, came this girl
Lydia into his life. This girl of the mixed parentage,
the English father, who had been swept northward with
the rush of lumber trading, the Chippewa mother, who
had been tossed to his arms by the tide of circumstances.
The girl was a strange composition of both, a type of
mixed blood, pale, dark, slender, with the slim hands,
the marvellously beautiful teeth of her mother’s
people, the ambition, the small tender mouth, the utter
fearlessness of the English race. But the strange, laughless
eyes, the silent step, the hard sense of honor, proclaimed
her far more the daughter of red blood than of white.
And, with the perversity of
his kind, Cragstone loved her; he meant to marry her
because he [Page 240] knew that he
should not. What a monstrous thing it would be if he
did! He, the shepherd of this half-civilized flock,
the modern John Baptist; he, the voice of the great
Anglican Church crying in this wilderness, how could
he wed with this Indian girl who had been a common serving-maid
in a house in Penetanguishene, and been dismissed therefrom
with an accusation of theft that she could never prove
untrue? How could he bring this reproach upon the Church?
Why, the marriage would have no precedent; and yet he
loved her, loved her sweet, silent ways, her listening
attitudes, her clear, brown, consumptive-suggesting
skin. She was the only thing in all the irksome mission
life that had responded to him, had encouraged him to
struggle anew for the spiritual welfare of this poor
red race. Of course, in Penetanguishene they had told
him she was irreclaimable, a thief, with ready lies
to cover her crimes; for that very reason he felt tender
towards her, she was so sinful, so pathetically human.
He could have mastered himself,
perhaps, had she not responded, had he not seen the
laughless eyes laugh alone for him, had she not once
when a momentary insanity possessed them both confessed
in words her love for him as he had done to her. But
now? Well, now only this horrible tale of theft and
untruth hung between them like a veil; now even with
his arms locked about her, his eyes drowned in hers,
his ears caught the whispers of calumny, his thoughts
were perforated [Page 241] with the
horror of his Bishop’s censure, and these things
rushed between his soul and hers, like some bridgeless
deep he might not cross, and so his lonely life went
on.
And then one night his sweet
humanity, his grand, strong love rose up, battled with
him, and conquered. He cast his pharisaical ideas, and
the Church’s “I am better than thou,”
aside forever; he would go now, to-night, he would ask
her to be his wife, to have and to hold from this day
forward, for better, for worse, for—
A shadow fell across the doorway
of his simple home; it was August Beaver, the trapper,
with the urgent request that he would come across to
French Island at once, for old “Medicine”
Joe was there, dying, and wished to see the minister.
At another time Cragstone would have felt sympathetic,
now he was only irritated; he wanted to find Lydia,
to look in her laughless eyes, to feel her fingers in
his hair, to tell her he did not care if she were a
hundred times a thief, that he loved her, loved her,
loved her, and he would marry her despite the Church,
despite—
“Joe, he’s near
dead, you come now?” broke in August’s voice.
Cragstone turned impatiently, got his prayer-book, followed
the trapper, took his place in the canoe, and paddled
in silence up the bay.
The moon arose, large, limpid,
flooding the cabin with a wondrous light, and making
more [Page 242] wan the features of
a dying man, whose fever-wasted form lay on some lynx
skins on the floor.
Cragstone was reading from the
Book of Common Prayer the exquisite service of the Visitation
of the Sick. Outside, the loons clanged up the waterways,
the herons called across the islands, but no human things
ventured up the wilds. Inside, the sick man lay, beside
him August Beaver holding a rude lantern, while Cragstone’s
matchless voice repeated the Anglican formula. A spasm,
an uplifted hand, and Cragstone paused. Was the end
coming even before a benediction? But the dying man
was addressing Beaver in Chippewa, whispering and choking
out the words in his death struggle.
“He says he’s bad
man,” spoke Beaver. A horrible, humorous sensation
swept over Cragstone; he hated himself for it, but at
college he had always ridiculed death-bed confessions;
but in a second that feeling had vanished, he bent his
handsome, fair face above the copper-colored countenance
of the dying man. “Joe,” he said, with that
ineffable tenderness that had always drawn human hearts
to him; “Joe, tell me before I pronounce the Absolution,
how you have been ‘bad’?”
“I steal three times,”
came the answer. “Oncet horses, two of them from
farmer near Barrie. Oncet twenty fox-skins at North
Bay; station man he in jail for those fox-skins now.
Oncet gold watch from doctor at Penetanguishene.”
[Page 243]
The prayer-book rattled from
Cragstone’s hands and fell to the floor.
“Tell me about this watch,”
he mumbled. “How did you come to do it?”
“I liffe at the doctor’s;
I take care his horse, long time; old River’s
girl, Lydia, she work there too; they say she steal
it; I sell to trader, the doctor he nefer know, he think
Lydia.”
Cragstone was white to the lips.
“Joe,” he faltered, “you are dying;
do you regret this sin, are you sorry?”
An indistinct “yes”
was all; death was claiming him rapidly.
But a great, white, purified
love had swept over the young clergyman. The girl he
worshipped could never now be a reproach to his calling,
she was proved blameless as a baby, and out of his great
human love arose the divine calling, the Christ-like
sense of forgiveness, the God-like forgetfulness of
injury and suffering done to his and to him, and once
more his soft, rich voice broke the stillness of the
Northern night, as the Anglican absolution of the dying
fell from his lips in merciful tenderness:
“O Lord Jesus Christ,
who hath left power to His Church to absolve all sinners
who truly repent and believe in Him, of His great mercy
forgive thee thine offences, and by His authority committed
to me I absolve thee from all thy sins in the name of
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.”
[Page 244]
Beaver was holding the lantern
close to the penitent’s face; Cragstone, kneeling
beside him, saw that the end had come already, and,
after making the sign of the Cross on the dead Indian’s
forehead, the young priest arose and went silently out
into the night.
*
*
* *
*
*
The
sun was slipping down into the far horizon, fretted
by the inimitable wonder of islands that throng the
Georgian Bay; the blood-colored skies, the purpling
clouds, the extravagant beauty of a Northern sunset
hung in the west like the trailing robes of royalty,
soundless in their flaring, their fading; soundless
as the unbroken wilds which lay bathed in the loneliness
of a dying day.
But on the color-flooded shore
stood two, blind to the purple, the scarlet, the gold,
blind to all else save the tense straining of the other’s
eyes; deaf to nature’s unsung anthem, hearing
only the other’s voice. Cragstone stood transfixed
with consternation. The memory of the past week of unutterable
joy lay blasted with the awfulness of this moment, the
memory of even that first day—when he had stood
with his arms about her, had told her how he had declared
her reclaimed name far and wide, how even Penetanguishene
knew now that she had suffered blamelessly, how his
own heart throbbed suffocatingly with the honor, the
delight of being the poor means through which she had
been righted in the accusing [Page 245]
eyes of their little world, and that now she would be
his wife, his sweet, helping wife, and she had been
great enough not to remind him that he had not asked
her to be his wife until her name was proved blameless,
and he was great enough not to make excuse of the resolve
he had set out upon just when August Beaver came to
turn the current of his life.
But he had other eyes to face
to-night, eyes that blurred the past, that burned themselves
into his being—the condemning, justly and righteously
indignant eyes of his Bishop—while his numb heart,
rather than his ears, listened to the words that fell
from the prelate’s lips like curses on his soul,
like the door that would shut him forever outside the
holy place.
“What have you done, you
pretended servant of the living God? What use is this
you have made of your Holy Orders? You hear the confessions
of a dying man, you absolve and you bless him, and come
away from the poor dead thief to shout his crimes in
the ears of the world, to dishonor him, to be a discredit
to your calling. Who could trust again such a man as
you have proved to be—faithless to himself, faithless
to his Church, faithless to his God?”
But Cragstone was on the sands
at his accuser’s feet. “Oh! my Lord,”
he cried, “I meant only to save the name of a
poor, mistrusted girl, selfishly, perhaps, but I would
have done the same thing just for humanity’s sake
had it been another to whom injustice was done.”
[Page 246]
“Your plea of justice
is worse than weak; to save the good name of the living
is it just to rob the dead?”
The Bishop’s voice was
like iron.
“I did not realize I was
a priest, I only knew I was a man,” and
with these words Cragstone arose and looked fearlessly,
even proudly, at the one who stood his judge.
“Is it not better, my
Lord, to serve the living than the dead?”
“And bring reproach upon
your Church?” said the Bishop, sternly.
It was the first thought Cragstone
ever had of his official crime; he staggered under the
horror of it, and the little, dark, silent figure, that
had followed unseen, realized in her hiding amid the
shadows that the man who had lifted her into the light
was himself being thrust down into irremediable darkness.
But Cragstone only saw the Bishop looking at him as
from a supreme height, he only felt the final stinging
lash in the words: “When a man disregards the
most sacred offices of his God, he will hardly reverence
the claims of justice of a simple woman who knows not
his world, and if he so easily flings his God away for
a woman, just so easily will he fling her away for other
gods.”
And Lydia, with eyes that blazed
like flame, watched the Bishop turn and walk frigidly
up the sands, his indignation against this outrager
of the Church declaring itself in every footfall. [Page
247]
Cragstone flung himself down,
burying his face in his hands. What a wreck he had made
of life! He saw his future, loveless, for no woman would
trust him now; even the one whose name he had saved
would probably be more unforgiving than the Church;
it was the way with women when a man abandoned God and
honor for them; and this nameless but blackest of sins,
this falsity to one poor dying sinner, would stand between
him and heaven forever, though through that very crime
he had saved a fellow being. Where was the justice of
it?
The purple had died from out
the western sky, the waters of the Georgian Bay lay
colorless at his feet, night was covering the world
and stealing with inky blackness into his soul.
She crept out of her hiding-place,
and, coming, gently touched his tumbled fair hair; but
he shrank from her, crying: “Lydia, my girl, my
girl, I am not for a good woman now! I, who thought
you an outcast, a thief, not worthy to be my wife, to-night
I am not an outcast of man alone, but of God.”
But what cared she for his official
crimes? She was a woman. Her arms were about him, her
lips on his; and he who had, until now, been a portless
derelict, who had vainly sought a haven in art, an anchorage
in the service of God, had drifted at last into the
world’s most sheltered harbor—a woman’s
love.
But, of course, the Bishop took
away his gown. [Page 248]
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