St. Cuthbert's Part 18

"'Loved!' he answered, 'her pure heart knew no other pa.s.sion. My own is but an echo. Behold! I was shapen in love.'

"'Then,' said I, 'let her that is without love cast the first stone at her. If any sinning woman love, she has an advocate with the Father. Oh, Angus! Come to me!' I cried, for I was fainting."

Her story was finished now and my daughter added not a word. But she arose and stood before me, her eyes searching my pallid face for a verdict, if haply it might be like her own. I noticed the woman's tactics in her move, for woman's genius makes its home within her soul; she had left my arms that I might, if I would, hold them out to her again and take her back forever. But the arms have their hinges in the heart and mine was tight locked like a vise.

"Margaret," I said at last, and my voice was like the voice of age, "you do not mean that you suffered this man's caresses after he told you what you have just told me?"

Sorrow looked from Margaret's eyes.

"Suffered!" she replied, "suffered! I have learned what suffering is, G.o.d knows, but He knows it was not there I learned it. 'This man.' Oh, father, I love him--am I all alone?"

How strong is the weakness of love! There is no panoply like that which love provides, and she who bears it has the whole armour of G.o.d.

"Margaret," I pleaded, "you surely will not ruin your life and break your mother's heart and mine by any madness such as this."

"'Ruin my life,' father! what ruin can there be to the life that loves and is loved? I have no life at all apart from him. It seems so simple.

I can't take back my heart!"

"Perhaps so, my daughter," I replied, "perhaps so. I know your love is no fickle thing. But Margaret, you do not propose to link your life with his, shadowed as you yourself declare it to have been from his birth?"

"Father, it is already linked. It was not I who linked our lives, nor was it he; nor was it both together--it was G.o.d. Surely He wouldn't have let me love and trust, if it was wrong. I want you to help me; I am all alone."

"But you do not mean," I cried with growing warmth, "that I, the minister of St. Cuthbert's Kirk, New Jedboro, am to be called upon to take into my family and to acknowledge as my son, a man who cannot speak his father's name, who cannot," for I was maddening fast, "speak it even to himself, forsooth, because he knows not what it is?"

"Oh, father, do not press me so; I love you--and I love him too, and----"

"But about our family?" I asked hotly.

"I forgot about families," she sobbed. "Oh, father, teach this poor heart of mine to love no more and I will obey your every wish--but it is hard for love to serve two masters."

My heart was wrung by her plaintive voice; but love dwells hard by cruelty, and my self-control was going fast. Let those defend me who have known my agony.

"You know, I suppose, the result that will issue from your madness? You know what it will mean to your future relations here?" I asked hoa.r.s.ely, explaining my threat by a glance about the room.

"Don't call it madness, father," she replied, pleadingly. "There is no madness in love. I cannot help it, father. Why should I? Surely Angus is the same as he was when first I loved him. I haven't learned anything new about the soul of him, father."

"But his origin?" I interrupted.

"But he is good, father,--and kind--and true--and he loves me."

It was but a moment till I was past the bounds of reason.

Disappointment, pride, shame, anger--all these had their cruel way with me. I am covered with confusion as with a garment while I try to record what followed, though I could not tell it all, even if I would. There is no cruelty like the cruelty of love. For the anguished soul pours out the vials of its remorse and self-reproach upon the well loved head, and fury waxes with its shame.

"I want none of your preaching," and my voice was coa.r.s.e with anger; "you are a willful and disobedient child and you may as well learn first as last who is the master of this house. Do you hear?"

"Yes, I hear,--and my heart is broken. You want me to go away and not to see me any more. And I don't know where to go."

She was kneeling now and the tears were dropping hot upon my hand, which she had taken in both of hers. "Oh, father, when birdlings leave the nest, surely G.o.d wants them to go, because He gives them wings. Father, dear, oh, do not push me out in this cruel way. I want to keep you and Angus both--and mother. Am I really wrong?

"Father, you are a preacher of the Everlasting Gospel, and doesn't that say we were all born wrong and need to be born again? You said only last Sunday that if we're once on the Rock, G.o.d forgets all about the pit and the miry clay. And you said G.o.d makes the past new--all new, and that all the redeemed ones are just the same in His sight--all good, and with the past away behind them. I thought it was beautiful, because I thought about Angus--and it seemed just like the Saviour's way."

My heart was wrung with a great desire to take the bended form unto myself. I half moved forward to kiss the lips of this kneeling priestess unto love. But as I did so the memory of other lips that had been pressed to them rolled in upon me and swept away the better impulse. I faltered into compromise.

"Margaret, you are still my daughter and I am touched by what you say.

Let us find common ground. Promise me that you will suspend judgment in this matter for a year, your promise meantime to be revoked and at the end of that time, we will take it up afresh. This will give time for sober judgment."

But her blanched face turned to mine, and the white lips spoke again.

"Oh, spare me, father, for I cannot--you know I cannot--oh, father, pity me!"

My soul flamed with ungovernable anger. I did pity her and this it was that stirred my cruelty. For my soul relapsed to barbarous coa.r.s.eness and I said: "Then choose between us--you can have your ----," and I called him an awful word, the foulest of all words, whose very sound speaks the shame it means to tell, the curse of humanity hissed in its nauseous syllables.

And more--but how can I write it down! I did not strike her--but I thrust her from me; I laid my coward hand upon her shoulder--not in violence nor heavily, but eternal menace was in it. For I pushed her from me, crying brutally: "Quote me another Scripture. Have you not chosen the better part? There is the door which his shadow first accursed--you see the door?" and I hurled the poisoned word at her again.

She looked at me but once--as one, suddenly awakening, looks at her a.s.sa.s.sin. Then she went out, a lover as white as snow.

XXI

_The OLD PRECENTOR'S NEW SONG_

As a stream emerges from its forest tunnel, eluding the embrace of tangled shadows, swiftly gliding from sombre swamps and hurrying towards the sunlit plain, its phantom weeds of widowhood exchanged for its bridal robe of light; so doth this tale of mine glide forth from the sable shadows which garrison the chapter it has left behind.

No man loves to linger by his scaffold, though it be cheated of its last adornment, and though no eye behold its grinning outline but its own.

For there are shadowy scaffolds, and invisible executioners, sitting at our own boards and eating of our own bread, discernible only in a gla.s.s.

Our own Sheriffs and Executioners are we all.

Swift in the wake of sorrow came the unromantic form of toil. Thank G.o.d!

Work is sorrow's cure, its hands like the hands of an enemy, but its voice the voice of an Eternal friend. For duty is G.o.d's midwife, sent to deliver the soul that travails in its anguish.

It was but the day after Margaret had pa.s.sed from out my door, girding it as she went with c.r.a.pe, invisible to other eyes, that I was called to Archie McCormack's house. The day was bright and clear, but I knew it not--for in this doth sorrow make us like to G.o.d, that then the darkness and the light are both alike.

For some months past, my old precentor had been failing fast. The doctor said it was his heart, but none of us believed it; for his heart had grown larger, stronger, happier with every pa.s.sing year. Its outer life might perish if it would, but its inner life was renewed day by day.

Indeed, his soul's second harvest seemed to take the form of cheerfulness, the scantiest crop of all in the stern seasons of his earlier life. Even merriment sought to bloom before the frost should come.

The very day before Margaret and I began our life's Lenten season, I had been to see him, little thinking that my next visit was to be the last.

My own heart was full of that joy whose overflow Margaret had entrusted to its care--which is a great gift to a minister, this gift of gladness, seeking as he does to irrigate the thirsty plains of life about him.

"How is my precentor to-day?" I asked as I sat down at the blazing hearth. He was lying on the couch, the fourth gradation--the field, the veranda, the room, the couch, the bed, the grave--thus the promotion runs!

"I'm by or'nar glad to see ye," he replied, evasively. "The auld freens are the best."

"That's good, Archie, the old friends are glad to hear it. They hear it seldom from Scottish lips, however hopefully they suspect it."

"We're nae muckle given to compliments--I'll grant ye that. But whiles we think; an' whiles we speak--an' whiles we wunna. But I'm no backward in tellin' a man gin I care for him. Noo, I was sayin' to the wife this verra day that yon man ye brocht frae Montreal last simmer was like eneuch a graun preacher--I'm no disputin' that, mind ye. But I was sayin' to the wife as hoo I likit yirsel' fully mair nor him."