A STORY OF THE FAR WEST.
Gold City they had called it in its palmy days, though even then it was a city in name only. It was known as Gomorrah now; and its few inhabitants gloried in the title, for Edverson had struck a vein of gold there in the first flush of the mining fever, and a crowd of fortune-hunters flocked to the place, only to discover, when it was too late, that the first “lucky find” was the last. Then the tide of population ebbed away, leaving behind it the refuse—those who were too poor, too discouraged, too sunk in idleness or sin, to try for anything better. The houses were no more than shanties, which the women made no attempt to keep tidy; children lived and died there who never heard God’s holy name except in curses; to most of them even the day of the week was unknown.
Three men ruled the place, one by fear, one by kindness, one because he was tavern-keeper. They were familiarly known as the Lawyer, the Doctor, and the Parson. One day, worthy to be marked with red ink joyfully in the sad annals of Gomorrah, the Lawyer—most evil soul there, and most dreaded—announced his intention of going to England, and, when the next day dawned, he had departed with no more warning and with no word of farewell. Men, women, and children drew a long breath of relief, yet spoke of him for weeks afterwards in whispers and guarded words, as if they feared at any moment to see his hated presence among them once again, and feel his heel of iron on their necks.
One afternoon, early in November, his two associates sat together in the door-way of the tavern, the only decent dwelling within sight. He who was known as the Parson was a short, stout man, who boasted a collegiate and theological education of some sort, no one knew what, and a pastoral charge of five years, no one knew where. But it was a fact undisputed, either by himself or others, that he was now the very minister of Satan. Both he and the Lawyer knew how to sin as deeply as any one, but kept a kind of control over themselves. The man who was their boon companion, and yet hated them both with an impotent hatred, had no such power.
He was far superior to them in most respects. Gentle born, with wealthy surroundings, he had received a superior education, and gave promise of superior excellence in his profession, but had never been taught to curb a single passion. From one level to another he fell, till in Gomorrah he hid himself from all who had known him or his in his brighter days. Yet no man there was so liked and did so much to help as he. The love of his profession clung to him through everything, and it was impossible for him to see disease and accident without trying to alleviate the trouble. Boys and girls playing and quarrelling in the streets would stop the maddest sport, the bitterest fight, to help the Doctor home as he came reeling from the tavern, or to cover his face from the hot sun as he lay like a log by the roadside; would do it with a grateful remembrance of the time
when “he nursed me in the fever” or “he splintered my broken leg”; and often he was saved from a midnight carousal by a call to some forlorn bedside, where he waited on filthy wretches with as quick skill and attention as once he had served the finest ladies in his great city home. No one knew how he hated the place in which he lived, and above all the man with whom he sat that autumn afternoon; but he had lost all hope of better things.
Through their gloomy silence and the clouds of tobacco-smoke the Parson and the Doctor beheld a sight which had not been seen in Gomorrah for many a day—the white cover of an emigrant wagon.
“Tom Townsend, from High Bend,” exclaimed Syles, “the Lawyer’s old chum there. Who’s he got with him?”
The Doctor made no reply, but stepped forward to meet the strangers. Behind the driver sat a young man with a good, kindly face, but lacking in practicality and force. On his arm he supported a woman, whose broad forehead, square chin, and firm mouth bespoke strong character, if one was able to think of that in noticing the serene holiness of the eyes and expression. Her face was pale as death.
“You’re wanted here, Doctor,” called the driver. “Here’s a case of chills and fever that’s not a common one, and I’ve seen ’em by hundreds.”
“Are you the Doctor?” the young man asked with a look of relief, as if he had heard of him before; and together they carried into the tavern and laid upon the settle the powerless form of the woman.
“Not this place!” the man exclaimed, lifting his head when he had laid his precious burden down. “Where is Mr. Dalzell’s house?”
“Mr. Dalzell?” the Doctor repeated. “I do not know what you mean.”
“Why, surely—yes, we must be right. He came from here, he said.”
“Who? What?” his hearers asked, with a grim suspicion in their hearts. “Where are you from, sir?”
“I am Reuben Armstrong, from Suffolk, England. A Mr. Dalzell sold me his house and claim in Gold City. Where are they?”
The Doctor’s eyes fell, and Syles slunk into the shadow of the door. It was long before they could make him understand the truth; and when at last he comprehended it, Syles stole out of his presence with a sense of shame such as he had never felt before, leaving the Doctor to give the almost heart-broken fellow the only reason for courage that he knew how to give him—to bear up bravely for his wife’s sake.
It was but too easy to grasp the sad story. Armstrong had been a well-to-do gardener, with a pleasant little house and a snug sum of money in the bank; but, as the Doctor inferred even then, he had married a woman much his superior in character and station, whose friends looked down upon him, and thought he could never do anything worthy of her. When the Lawyer told his plausible story and showed his well-planned map—when he described his possessions, to be sold at a very low figure, because, as the evil owner dared to affirm, he must be with his aged parents in Nottinghamshire during their declining years—Reuben was only too ready to drop into the net.
They told his wife—his “poor Esther”—nothing that night. Indeed, she was too ill to notice that they moved her from the tavern to
the cabin next door, which was their home. In that tavern Reuben declared she should not stay one hour.
That night the first snows fell, shutting off Gomorrah for the winter from any intercourse with the outer world, and for weeks the Doctor strove against all odds to save Esther Armstrong’s life. But for her Reuben would soon have sunk to the level of his neighbors—not in sin, but in inertia. He seemed to have no courage left to begin life over again; he was sure that Esther must die, and then there would be no use of his living. He spent his time in watching beside her, doing everything about the house for her that was possible; refusing all help save the physician’s, and only accepting that because he could not avoid it.
When the Doctor came in to see Esther on the morning after her arrival, Reuben had made the room as comfortable as he could with the furniture which they had brought from home, and Esther was lying in her bed, everything white about her, and she herself looking more pure and white than even the falling snow without.
“Am I very ill?” she asked calmly; and before the grave eyes bent upon him the Doctor could return no answer but the truth.
“You are a very sick woman, Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, “but I hope we may see you pull through bravely yet.”
“Will you ask the priest to come to me?” she said.
The Doctor started to his feet and made a rapid stride across the room. It brought him face to face with a crucifix, a picture, and a rosary.
“Madam,” he said reverently—she seemed to him like a saint as
she lay there—“do you know what sort of a place you are in? We have no such beings as priests here.”
“Oh!” she replied serenely, “you must mistake. Mr. Lazell certainly told us that there was one. We would never have come else.”
The Doctor bit his lip to keep back the oath which rose. “Mr. Lazell, as you call him, lied, madam.”
She asked no questions, but her searching eyes drew the truth from him. Sooner or later she must know all. Before that holy calm a tempting desire came over him to try how deep her religious feeling really was.
“Madam,” he said, “you call this place Gold City, but we know it as Gomorrah. There is no priest within miles of us. God isn’t here at all.”
She pressed her hands hard against her heart. He felt that she shrank from him inwardly.
“Is there any woman who will come to me?” she asked.
“There is not one who is fit to touch you,” he replied—“not one. We do not know what goodness is. You have been deceived into coming here. Now, if you love your husband, live for him; for nothing else can keep him from being like the rest of us.”
“You are mistaken,” she said gravely. “You do not know my husband. But, Doctor, if I must die, will you promise me to send in time for a priest?”
The Doctor bit back an oath. If “Mr. Lazell” had been there at that moment, not even Esther’s presence could have saved him from the hatred of nine wretched years kindled that day into relentless fury. The Doctor had known enough of Catholics at home—God help him! but his had been Catholic
baptism in his babyhood—to fear the effect on her of what he had to say. Had it been of any use, he would have lied to her; but the next neighbor entering would have revealed all.
“There is no priest near us,” he replied, “and it is impossible to get one in the winter.”
She put her hand quickly to her heart again. “God’s will be done,” she said slowly; “God’s will be done” over and over and over again. They could not stop her. Reuben begged her to hear him, to rest, to grow calm, but it was of no avail. All day long, and far into the night, she tossed in fever, delirious always, but her holy self even in her delirium. Now she sang snatches of hymns; and now an exquisite strain of some old chant, which the Doctor had heard in great cathedrals, rose upon Gomorrah’s tainted air; but oftenest she called for a priest, or said: “God’s will be done.” Late that night the fever abated a little, and she opened her eyes calmly; but it was only to hear the clamor upon the night air of stamping feet, ringing sounds like tankards dashed on table or floor, the twang and clash of noisy instruments, scraps of vile song, brawls and oaths and blows.
“What is it?” she cried. “Where are we? Oh! I know”; and then sank into delirium again.
So for a week it lasted; then the fever died away, leaving her like a shadow. She made no complaint, never asked again for a priest, never spoke again of death; yet the Doctor knew, as well as if he had seen it, that hers was a broken heart. But another life was bound up with her life, and for its sake, as well as for Reuben’s, she tried and prayed to live. It was plain that
her affection for her husband was intense; no matter what his weakness and imprudence had made her suffer, no one ever knew her fail in her honor and her love, and he seldom saw her otherwise than outwardly cheerful for his dear sake. What she endured perhaps only the Doctor truly fathomed, and his sounding-line was far too short. Reuben was too engrossed in her to care much personally for what passed about them; but the Doctor judged by what the place had been and was to him, even in his degraded life. Fallen as he was, he loathed it from the very bottom of his heart; still, with every gentlemanly instinct that was left in him, he shrank from the outcasts whom he lived with daily, though knowing himself to be fallen yet lower than they. By his own suffering, from which he did not try to escape; by his own horror of the pit whose vileness sickened him while still he chose to sink even deeper in it, he knew something of what it must be to Esther’s pure heart to live in Gomorrah. Something—that was all.
He and Reuben strove to keep sight and sound of evil from her; yet all their care could not banish at times strange visitors from her bedside—haggard women, flaunting women, all of them with evil tongues; no care could keep the children always from door or window, and often she saw, by frosty dawn or at high noon or in the early twilight, wild, wolfish eyes staring at her, gaunt fingers pointing, and heard children’s voices speak of her in terms wherewith oaths and low epithets were mixed—not through malice, but because they knew no other way.
No one knew what hours she lay awake by day and night in one
agony of intercession; and she herself, praying often and hoping against hope for the sacraments to prepare her soul for death, never knew here into what union with her Lord that passion of prayer for souls was bringing her, as hour by hour the awful days wore on.
The Doctor saw her face, as it grew more sharp and thin, grow more holy, till he often felt unworthy to look upon it, and wondered how Reuben Armstrong had ever won a treasure of which it seemed to him no mortal man was worthy.
A poor, weak soul was Reuben’s, truly, in man’s sight. But God and the angels must have loved it with a special love. God knew how earnestly that sorrowful heart implored that the light of its eyes might be taken from it, if so Esther might escape from suffering and enter into peace; and when night shut him in with her alone, the angels heard how he strove to drown the riot next door by prayers and litanies beside her, till often he slept exhausted on the hard floor by her bed.
But the children most of all weighed heavily upon Esther’s soul. Even when she could not see them she heard their voices; even when she could not hear them, she fancied how their lives were spent, though even her keen fancy did not reach the whole of the painful truth; and as the birthday of the Holy Child drew nearer, she felt more keenly their ignorance of all sacred things, shuddered to think of her own child being born in such an atmosphere, then came to love those little ones as if they were her very own, and to plead for them with a mother’s insatiable pleading.
Eight days before Christmas they laid her baby in her arms and saw her smile a happy mother’s smile.
Eight days they lived in trembling hope. On Christmas morning the Doctor saw the dreaded, unmistakable sign of fever. She had wakened very bright, Reuben said, and very early, with words of Christmas joy, as if she had forgotten where they were, and fancied it was home. Then some sound from the tavern had brought back the truth; there had come the quick pain at her heart, and then delirium. All day long she talked—there was no possibility of silencing her. She, so tender of others, now with no control over herself, laid her whole heart bare; and they, who thought they had known and prized her well, knew as if for the first time what a saint of God had been among them—prayers for her husband and for her baby, but not for them alone: prayers for every soul in that place of death; people named by name of whom they would have supposed she had never heard, but for whom she pleaded as if for her own flesh and blood; eager, loving, most frequent supplication for the little children; prayers for the very man who had lured them from their happy home; intensest pleading for pity and pardon for his and all these souls.
“Didst thou not die for them, Jesus, my Jesus—for them as well as for me? Save them with me, save them with me—with me, my Jesus! By thy Sacred Heart that broke for us, save us, have mercy on us!” And then, over and over, as if with some peculiar, long-sustained intention or compact, “Remember, O most pious Virgin Mary! Remember, remember!”
And there was one frequent supplication in which no name was mentioned, as if it were borne so constantly from her heart to the Sacred Heart that she had ceased
to need to speak the name: “Gain thyself that soul, my Jesus. By thy Cross, thy Heart, thy Mother, gain thyself that soul.”
They heard only one petition for herself, but that so anguished, so desperate, that the strong man broke into sobs to hear it: one hungry cry for God’s holy sacraments, for God’s anointed priest, to come to her before her death, yet never uttered without a more intense prayer still—“My God, my God, thy will be done, thy will be done”; and even that was entirely merged at last in her prayers for those who had made her life one long agony at its close.
Suddenly she sat straight up in her bed, her eyes blazing as if with an unearthly, reflected light, her cheeks brilliant with more than the fever flush.
“Hark, hark, hark!” she said, with a ring of ecstatic joy through every word. “Do you not hear the sacring-bell? Kneel, all of you. The priest comes—comes with my Lord at last.”
Her eyes were fixed upon the door that no hand opened, yet she seemed to watch some one enter, and to see some one draw nearer, nearer to her, and she folded her hands reverently, and bent her head as if in adoration. They understood: she believed a priest was there; and they, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, of what she evidently was sure she saw and heard—they who watched her fell down upon their knees and hid their faces as in some divine presence. The next words that broke the stillness were the words of a dying penitent alone with a priest of God: “I confess to Almighty God and to you, my father.”
Steadily, as if for weeks she had prepared her soul for this in faith
and penance, Esther Armstrong made her dying confession, with a contrition sore as if she were the lowest sinner in Gomorrah’s depths of sin, and then craved absolution humbly and in tears. When there was silence, and they dared to look at her, she was lying back among her pillows, whispering, “Forgiven, forgiven!”
They moved to give her nourishment, and the movement roused her, though not to recognition. She started up once more, lifting her hand.
“Hark, hark!” she said again. “Do you not hear him? He is saying Mass, and they sing sweetly as angels.”
All round the world, that Christmas day, one song of praise was rising, one pure offering was offered up to Him who was born and given for us on that day. Grand cathedrals were ablaze with lights and rich with bloom; far down the choir the altar tapers shone like stars through clouds of incense waving upward to the fretted roof, and the full tide of chant swelled high to join the chant of angels; in lowly chapel as in great cathedral the priest of God and the people of God adored the Holy Babe upon his Mother’s breast. In Gomorrah, in a decaying chapel, while oath and brawl sounded without, one soul heard seraphic music which no other ear could hear; one soul beheld a Priest whom no other eye could see—joined in his offering of the tremendous Sacrifice. For an hour, upheld by superhuman strength, she knelt upright, rapt in an ecstasy of spiritual communion that grew too deep for prayer. When the clock struck twelve, she said slowly, “Ite missa est; Deo gratias”; then, with a long-drawn, rapturous sigh, lay down again, but not as if
she knew or remembered husband or child or friend.
The Doctor left her then, but at the close of the day he was summoned hastily, to see now without mistake that the battle of her life was almost ended.
“Stay with her, Doctor,” Reuben pleaded. “It’s a sore struggle. Try something more.”
“I can’t stay, man,” he answered. “There is no more to do. I’d give my right hand to save her; but I can’t see her suffer and be unable to help her. She’s the only white soul here, and now she is going.”
He turned to the bedside, and stood silently looking at the face with the dread shadow on it. Suddenly opening her eyes, her gaze fell first on him, and, startled out of her usual composure, she gave an irrepressible shudder. He understood what it meant. She had treated him always with perfect courtesy and confidence as her physician and true friend; he knew—for there had not been wanting those to tell him of it—that she had silenced with dignified rebuke the evil tales that more than one had tried to tell her of him, not because they disliked him, but because they loved to talk. But he knew also, what they did not, that in her pure heart she shrank from him, that his very presence was loathsome to her; and there had been times when, in her bodily weakness, she had been unable to control her aversion to his slightest touch. He had borne it quietly, humbling as it was, but it was doubly bitter to bear at the very last.
“I will bid you good-night, Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, trying hard to steady his voice. “You will not want me any more this evening, I think.”
“Good-by, Doctor,” she said, and he saw that she knew all.
“You will not want me,” he repeated mechanically.
“I want you—there,” she answered with a great effort. “Promise me that you will be there.”
He did not speak.
“Promise,” she repeated, and the tone brought back the memory of her prayers that morning. “I am dying—dying; and yet I cannot die. Night and day I prayed it: ‘Gain thyself that soul, my Jesus. By thy Cross, thy Mother, thy broken Heart, gain thyself that soul.’ I prayed and prayed it; I am worn out with the praying, and yet I cannot die. Promise me to be there.”
The sweat stood on his forehead in great drops. “You do not know what you ask,” he cried. “There are sins enough upon me without adding that of a broken vow to you, and here. There is no saving a soul like mine.”
She did not answer him. She lifted up her eyes, away from him, away from earth, to God.
“Sacred Heart of my Jesus,” she prayed in agony, “win this soul, and let me die.”
For weeks he had kept himself sober and decent for her sake; now he had thought to rush out from her presence, to drown his grief in viler sin than ever; and, lo! she was still holding him, was binding eternal chains upon him, to draw him away from corruption unto God. As a physician he knew that it was a case where a mighty will alone was keeping life in a body nearly dead; it would have been an awful sight to see, even had he had no interest in it. She was living only to win him unto immortal life. Angels and devils may well have stood still before that struggle, where one
dauntless soul at the point of death held Satan’s power at bay.
“I promise,” he said at last, as if the words were wrung from him. “But pray for me always.”
“The Mother of God prays for you,” she said with strange emphasis. “Call upon Jesus and Mary night and day. You will not need me.”
And then he saw that she needed him no longer, thought of him no longer, and he went away.
Reuben Armstrong shut and locked the door behind him. There was no more that science or skill could do. Now, for one brief hour, Esther was his alone. The eyes which the Doctor had seen grow dim to him lit up with untired affection as Reuben drew near the bed; a look of rest came over her, and she signed to him to lay her baby on her arm.
“My baby, my little Christmas baby,” she murmured tenderly. “Did the priest baptize her this morning, Reuben? Oh! how could you overlook it, dear? Then you must do it. Now—now!”
There was an excited ring in her voice, and Reuben hastened to do at once what he had felt from the first must soon be done; for the baby’s life evidently hung upon a thread. A few drops of water, a few divine words, and Esther’s eyes shone exultingly upon her child.
“She will never be anything but God’s child,” she said. “Oh! I am glad she cannot live. It is the other children, that are not his, that you must care for, Reuben.”
“No, no!” he cried. “No, Esther, I cannot live without you.”
“Listen, Reuben,” she said. Lying there with her child upon her arm, she looked like a vision of the Holy Mother herself, and when she spoke her voice had a tone in
it which seemed divinely sweet. “Listen, Reuben. This place is God’s. He wants it. You must live and not die—for him.”
“O Esther!” he sobbed, “not without you—not without you.”
“Yes, Reuben, without me—all alone. My darling, my darling, save these little children’s souls for God.”
One greater than she spoke, on that holy night, through Esther’s lips, and touched and won her husband’s wounded heart.
“I will, Esther,” he sobbed. “I will try hard”; and even then, upon that solemn parting, as if to stamp the promise with an awful seal, the tavern clamor broke shrill and vile upon the Christmas air.
How long it was that she spoke no word—wrapped for the last time in her passion of intercession—Reuben did not notice; he only knelt on beside her, living upon every breath she drew. But, at the turn of the night, she looked full at him, clasped both his hands in hers, spoke so that the voice and the words rang in his heart through all his after-life—spoke not to him, but for him, and her words were those of the Memorare. Then, like one who has laid down for ever in most safe and tender keeping a heavy burden borne long and painfully, she crossed her hands upon her heart, but not now as if in pain; a look of glad surprise came upon her face.
“Hark!” she said. “He is coming again. My Lord and my God!”
When the Doctor entered Reuben’s cabin next morning, he found it in perfect order—the baby asleep in its cradle beside the hearth; Esther lying in a sort of funeral state, all done for her that could be done; and beside her knelt Reuben, whom the Doctor scarcely recognized at
first for the change upon him. In that night he had become an old man, and his friend believed that but for the baby’s sake he would have died; yet, two days later, the baby died, and still Reuben lived.
* * * * *
“A poor fool!” people called him. He had lost all interest in temporal matters, seemed hardly to know the use of money, and barely supported himself by the odd bits of work which he did for the idle women from house to house. Soon, however, they discovered that he had one talent, and that was for managing children. A woman one day suggested to him that he should “bide at home, and mind some babies for ’em, to keep ’em out of harm’s way; and he might teach the five-year-olds their letters, too—being fit for naught else,” she added in a tone as clear as that she used for the other words; but Reuben did not mind.
The proposal met with general favor; the women promised to supply him with meals from their own poor tables, “better than he’d get hisself, anyhow,” they said; and that was all he needed to keep him through the winter.
It seemed at first sight a very forlorn life. Where others less careless and simple could have lived in comfort, he lived in cold and hunger; one by one everything which he had brought from his distant home disappeared—given away to people in distress, or yielded without question to exorbitant and unfounded demands. Yet that bare, poverty-stricken room grew to be the one fair place in Gomorrah. There, for long hours of the winter days, might be seen a cluster of children gathered about a man who seemed in some respects as much a child as any of them, and who
taught them to be tidy and affectionate and good. A few learned their letters, but many learned their prayers, and the babies often said for their first word the name of Jesus, and all came to gaze lovingly upon the crucifix, and touch with pitying reverence the wounded hands and feet. Often the parents heard from childish lips the story of the Infant Saviour. No home now with a child in it where Sunday was not known. Men and women, large boys and girls, swore and fought in the streets still, but it soon became a rare sight to see a little child so forget itself; it would make Master Reuben sorry, and he said that it made the Heart of Jesus bleed. No one stopped him at such work; he was too poor a fool for them to mind him.
But he had another work with which they meddled much. The promise which the Doctor had made by Esther’s death-bed was not forgotten by him who made it, but it was broken again and again. His own lower nature which had ruled him all his life would have been enough, and more than enough, for such a man to struggle against; but, besides that, the fiends in human shape who peopled Gomorrah seemed leagued with invisible evil ones to work his utter ruin. They scoffed at his feeble efforts to do right; they lured him or they maddened him—it was all one to them—into the old haunts of temptation; and the very efforts which he made to escape, the very memory of Esther’s words and holy looks, the very thought of purity and self-control, seemed to make the evil deadlier and grosser, when, after sore struggle, he gave way.
And he did struggle, he did pray, poor soul! There were hours when he lay upon the earth in some cold
hut or in the open air, fighting, it seemed to him, with no less than Satan’s self. But he had been a slave to self too long and too deliberately to be able to gain freedom easily. Scenes of the past rose before him; he knew himself in his true degradation. Sins about which a kind of lurid fascination can be thrown in books or real life for a time he saw more and more plainly in their actual shape and color, and it drove him mad with disgust and shame. Few were daring enough that winter to trust their sick folk to his skill. For days together he would join in riot and carousal, till delirium tremens followed, and then strong men fled in fear before him.
But when that time came, and houses were locked tight and no one else dared face him as he went raging about the town, falling on the uneven streets, bruising and wounding himself, there was one who did go out to meet him. A tottering, feeble creature went meekly forth, stood in his path, took blows and curses without resistance, and presently—no one knew by what magic spell—led him to his own poor cabin and locked himself in with him alone.
That was the reason why Master Reuben never did what his tender and lonely heart yearned to do—to make a home for the orphan children of Gomorrah. No one but himself must be allowed to see what passed in his cabin while the Doctor was there; no one else must be exposed to the dangers he had to meet. But the room where they had watched the mysterious joy of Esther’s Christmas feast saw far other sights and echoed to far other sounds than angel music as the winter wore away. There were mornings when no children came to Reuben’s house, when some
woman more pitiful, some man more brave than the others, crept near and laid food on the threshold, then fled away to tell in trembling of the cries they had heard as of some wild beast mad with fury, or some lost soul shrieking in the torment of despair. Sometimes, too, they told of blows or noises like a heavy fall; and often, when Reuben came among them again, he bore marks that proved the stories true, but they never learned the cause from him.
And he—as the winter passed, the only truly happy faces that Gomorrah saw were Reuben Armstrong’s and little children’s. By and by they heard him sing sweet carols and hymns and chants; he taught the children to sing with him, and used to lead them down the streets, and into the snowy fields, and to visit Esther’s grave, to the sound of holy song. People stopped in many an evil deed or word to listen; then left the word unsaid, the deed undone. It came to be a fashion in Gomorrah to stroll to Reuben’s cabin of a Sunday to see how joyfully the children kept the day. Nay, it was even known that once a whole party at the tavern had left their drinking-cups, to stand for an hour at the next door, listening to the music. Truly, good and evil were in strange contrast that winter in the almost forgotten place which had no intercourse with the outer world. There was a world, unseen, in which it was remembered night and day.
At length they asked Reuben why he looked so happy, and he answered: “It is almost spring. Then the priest will come.” And when they laughed and asked him how he knew, he answered simply: “God will send him.”
When the snow began to melt
and the streams ran gayly down the hillside, and grass was green, one week, remembered for years after in that region, the whole place rang with the story of a carousal which even Gomorrah wondered at; the whole place waited to see whether the Doctor or Reuben would ever come forth alive from their self-imposed prison. When Reuben opened his door again, and gathered his children round him, there was a look of peculiar expectation on his face. He greeted each child with special gladness, and told one of the mothers that he was quite sure the priest was coming very soon, “for we need him a good deal now,” he said.
That afternoon there came into Gomorrah a man wearing the religious habit, and asked at the tavern if a Mrs. Armstrong was living in that place.
Syles stared at him blankly. “What do you know of her?” he said.
“I met some one,” the priest answered, “while on my way to the States, who begged me, if I ever came this way, to find such a woman and give her a message from him. Is she here?”
“Dead,” said Syles briefly.
“She had a husband. Where is he?”
“Next door with a madman. We leave him alone such times.”
“No, no, Parson,” said a lounger near by. “Where’ve ye been that ye haven’t heard? Doctor’s out of his fit to-day, and Reuben’s got his school again. I’ll take ye there, stranger. It’s a sight we’re proud of in Gomorrah.”
Out of the tavern into the filthy street, followed by a dozen or more wretches, the priest went sadly with a load upon his heart. The horrors he had seen already were enough
to sicken him; he wondered what new evils he would meet with now of which Gomorrah was proud.
“They’re used to spectators,” said his guide. “We watch ’em as we like. Door or window—’tan’t no difference to them; we an’t particular here.”
It was a bare, small room, with a table and some benches, an empty fireplace, beside it a powerfully-built man trembling and crying by himself, like one unnerved by some long illness; on one wall was a print of the Blessed Babe and the Holy Mother, and below this was a crucifix. Facing these was a band of twenty little children in soiled and ragged garments, but with clean hands and faces, too absorbed by what was being said to them to heed what passed without. All eyes were fixed on a small man with a great fresh cut across his forehead and a bruised and very simple face.
“Yes, children,” he was saying, “it was the blessed child Jesus who was born on Christmas night. He loves us all very much indeed, and of course we all want to love him. Some time he is going to send his priest here to baptize you; then what will you all be?”
“God’s little children.” The answer rose sweetly and with a kind of merriment from every lip, and Reuben’s face shone.
“Surely, surely,” he said. “Now we will sing, because we love him and want to thank him. Yes, I know the song you want—‘The Three Poor Shepherds.’”
“We were but three poor shepherds,
All keeping our flocks by night,
When Monseigneur the blessed angel
Came suddenly into sight—
“Came suddenly through the darkness,
While a glory round him fell;
I wot not if it were Michael
Or the Angel Gabriel.
“But his voice was like a trumpet,
So full, and glad, and true;
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘my children:
There is good news for you—’
“‘Good news for men and maidens,
A great, glad gift for them;
For the faire Sire Christ, the blessed,
Is born in Bethlehem.’
“Then a Gloria in Excelsis
They sang with glad accord;
Peace and good-will to all mankind
From the Sire Christ the Lord.
“And unto a lowly stable
Silently went we three,
And there the kine, each in its stall,
Was on a bended knee.
“And there was Messire St. Joseph;
And Mary the mother lay,
With the Holy Child in swaddling bands,
All on a cushion of hay.
“Each dumb beast looked in our faces,
But never unbent the knee;
Our sweet Ladye she raised her eyes
And smiled full tenderly.
“‘Ah! faire Sire Christ,’ all humbly
We cried with urgent plea,
‘Anneal us now of thy great mercie,
For that we are so glad of thee.’
“‘For that we are glad and joyful
That good days are begun,
That the great God for a blessing
Hath sent us his faire Childe Son.’
“Then Our Ladye the Holy Mary
Took some wood in her hand,
And crossed the pieces, and gave them,
That we all might understand.
“And we kissed the token humbly,
And bowed before the Childe;
For we knew, like Monseigneurs the angels,
That God had been reconciled.
“So joyfully and with gladness
All softly we went our way,
And with many an old Te Deum
We tell the tale to-day.”
Then once more, like a chorus which even the children just beginning to talk seemed to know in part:
“For that we are glad and joyful
That good days are begun,
That the great God for a blessing
Hath sent us his faire Childe Son.”
The door opened slowly and a voice which all ears could hear said reverently, “Pax vobiscum.” The good days were begun.
Strange how calmly they all received
him! Reuben never asked him how he came there; he had looked for him and prayed for him a long while, and he was there at last. God, of course, had sent him. One by one he brought the children to speak with him, and to have him pronounce on their fitness to be made God’s children; and the tears stood in the priest’s eyes as he listened to their simple, fearless answers, that witnessed to what Reuben’s work of faith had been. When they were gone away to their homes, which were far less homes to them than Reuben’s cabin was, Reuben came to the priest as simply as any one of them had come, and asked to be allowed to make confession.
“You’ll stay here and be good, Doctor,” he said soothingly. “I shall only be in the other room, and I’ve locked the door hard.”
The Doctor made a sort of moaning assent.
“He’s just had a very sad time,” explained Reuben, “and he needs you very much, father. By and by please let him speak to you.”
How wonderful to listen, in that place of revenge and murder, to Reuben’s quiet, brief confession—no complaints, no bitterness, no anger, except that for one day he had felt hatred toward some one, against whom, however, he brought no accusation, and for this sin he felt especial contrition.
“I met lately,” the priest said slowly, when the confession was finished, and marking with care the effect his words would have, “a man known sometimes as Lazell.”
Reuben gave a start as of joyful surprise, and would have spoken, but the priest continued:
“I saw him die a felon’s death upon the gallows.”
“No, no!” cried Reuben in distress—one might have supposed he
had been told of a brother’s shameful death. “Oh! no, father.”
“It was a just punishment,” the priest replied.
“No, no!” cried Reuben. “You do not know this place. They do not have helps here like other people, or like me. Oh! but God saved his poor soul at the last?”
“He spoke to me,” said the priest, “of a woman named Esther Armstrong, to whom he had done a great injury. Was not that true?”
“He did not understand,” said Reuben with sorrowful compassion—“I am sure he did not understand what harm he did, because, you know, he couldn’t have hurt her. And he did not see good women here; they have such hard times here, poor things.”
“He said he could not forget her—that something always reminded him of her. He begged me to find her out and ask her to forgive him.”
“She died,” said Reuben softly. “She forgave him. She prayed for him a great deal, I think.”
“God answered her, then,” the priest said. “I trust that he repented truly.”
A great light of joy woke upon Reuben’s face. “Then he will save the rest,” he exclaimed triumphantly.
“But you,” the priest asked—“do you forgive him?”
“I?” repeated Reuben with a puzzled look. “O father! it was very wrong of me; I was angry with him at first. But it was my fault, really, though Esther never blamed me; I was a poor fool, father, or I never should have brought her here.”
And so Reuben Armstrong took to himself his lifelong title humbly—so poor a fool, indeed, that he had forgotten that he had anything to forgive his fellow-men.
The next day Reuben saw his
whole flock of little ones gathered into the Good Shepherd’s fold; and then the Holy Sacrifice was offered up, and Reuben’s soul was strengthened by the Divine Food.
The Doctor had sullenly refused to be present. Reuben found him, on his return, lying face downwards on the cabin floor, the picture of despair.
“There is no hope,” he said when Reuben knelt by him, and begged him to have recourse to confession. “I want drink—nothing but drink. I must have it. I cannot save myself.”
“That’s true enough,” said Reuben. “You can’t, and I can’t, but God can. You keep saying that I don’t know everything about you, and that nobody does, and that God will never forgive you. But he has sent his priest at last, and you need not be afraid to say anything to him. You must not hide anything, and he has the power to hear it and tell you what God says.”
Like one driven to a last resort, the Doctor turned to the waiting priest, and Reuben in the next room gave thanks and prayed, while, in the place where a saint had made her last confession, this man, who was indeed of “the scum of sinners,” made his first.
Truly, the Sacrament of Penance is a divine and awful thing. God grant that they who vilify and reject and misrepresent it know not what they do! The burden of souls which a missionary priest in the far West has to bear in the confessional is a tremendous one; this priest had been in prison-hulks of Australia, and through all the mining regions of California and Arizona, yet had never met a case so desperate as that before him now, where hope
seemed so hopeless, the power for better things so nearly overcome. But the poor penitent, as one by one without reserve he revealed the sins so long kept secret, as well as those that were known of men and noised abroad, felt keen relief through all the degradation, tasted somewhat of the sweetness hid in this sacrament of blessed bitterness, won from it that strength which is a better thing to have than joy or consolation, met there and knew there Him “at whose feet Mary Magdalene came to kneel in the house of Simon the leper.”
“I am going away, Reuben,” the Doctor said that night, abruptly and sadly. “Yes,” seeing the other’s look of surprise, “there is hope for me, perhaps, but not here.”
“Away?” Reuben repeated. “Away from me? I thought I’d have you always, Doctor.”
“To be the hurt and the trouble I have been to you?” said the Doctor, deeply touched. “No, no, Reuben, I cannot keep my promise here. I must leave the past entirely, and the old associates, and go where I can repent—if I ever can. There is no such thing as an easy repentance for me.” And Reuben felt in his tender heart, once more to be bereaved, that the words were true.
When the priest left Gomorrah the next day, promising that it should not be forgotten, one went with him for whom no other hope remained but the total surrender of will and liberty, the total crucifixion of the flesh. Reuben heard from him once, in the course of his journey, then all tidings ceased; but he was too simple and too busy to wonder at it, too full of faith to doubt the final triumph. His character was not like Esther’s; the burden of souls could never be to
him what it had been to her; God led him by a different path from that she trod in pain.
But in a lonely monastery, high up among frowning rocks and perpetual snows, a man who had come to it from far across the seas lived, for a few sad years, a life of deepest penance. Never by day or night did the battle with evil cease, yet over him there seemed to be by day and night a special heavenly care. That lonely cell was haunted constantly by visions of the past, by temptations that were maddening, by thoughts and words of evil import, which an increasing approach to holiness made flesh and heart shrink to recall. No sign of the cross, no prayer, no penance, could banish them. Pursued, haunted, tempted to the very end, yet to the very end he called on Jesus, Mary, and to the very end the answer came.
None but those whose lives were one of close union with the Sacred Heart of Jesus dared minister at that death-bed, learning there, in fear and trembling, new lessons of the hideousness of sin, and of the power which an evil life can give to Satan in the hour of death. But again and again they heard the poor lips whisper, “I deserve it, I deserve it; I thank God”; they saw the weak hands cling to the crucifix, the glaring eyes gaze in their anguish upon the Word made flesh; and he who endured to hear the last confession brought to him afterward, with awed and pitying reverence, the Body of the Lord. It was no saint, no life-long, scarred, victorious warrior of the Cross, whom they laid to rest at last, his hard fight done; yet over that body—which, even in their snow-clad region, they had to hurry to its burial—they dared to give God thanks
in humble faith for another sinner ransomed.
Humbly and faithfully, in far-away Gomorrah, Reuben Armstrong lived to a good old age his poor fool’s life; and men and women came to look with gentle reverence upon the feeble form which went in and out among them on errands of daily mercy, never tiring. By and by the neighbors learned to know the place by a better name than the evil one which it grew to hate rather than glory in. “It cannot be so very bad,” they said, “when there are such good children in it.” And as from time to time a priest came there, he always found one more soul desirous for confession, or one more child or grown person ready for holy baptism, and Reuben never again knelt alone to receive holy Communion.
When the Doctor went away, Reuben opened his heart and home to the vagrant orphans, and
there, some years after, he welcomed gladly the miserable Parson, more pitiably needy than any of them. “Master Reuben’s baby” they called him, and Reuben often told exultingly how good and obedient he was. No one envied him his charge—unless it was the angels, who share in such blessed work.
A railroad runs through the town now, and it is becoming a place of some importance—poor enough and bad enough, alas! but stamped outwardly and openly with the sign of the Cross. For over Esther’s grave loving hands have reared a little chapel—a constant token that the offering of her broken heart has been accepted, that her dying prayer has been remembered.
And there, troubled by no doubts and haunted by no fears, weak in body and weaker still in intellect, but very strong in his immortal soul, Reuben waits patiently and happily till his work is done.