“But, on Sunday?” Father Damon asked, still further.
“Vell, it be so tired, and goed up by de Park with Dick Loosing and dem oder girls.”
“Don't you think it better, Father Damon,” Dr. Leigh interposed, “that Gretchen should have fresh air and some recreation on Sunday?”
“Und such bootiful tings by de Museum,” added the mother.
“Perhaps,” said he, with something like a frown on his face, and then changed the subject to the sick child. He did not care to argue the matter when Dr. Leigh was present, but he resolved to come again and explain to the mother that her daughter needed some restraining power other than her own impulse, and that without religious guidance she was pretty certain to drift into frivolous and vulgar if not positively bad ways. The father was a free-thinker; but Father Damon thought he had some hold on the mother, who was of the Lutheran communion, but had followed her husband so far as to become indifferent to anything but their daily struggle for life. Yet she had a mother's instinct about the danger to her daughter, and had been pleased to have her go to Father Damon's chapel.
And, besides, he could not bring himself in that presence to seem to rebuke Ruth Leigh. Was she not practically doing what his Lord did—going about healing the sick, sympathizing with the poor and the discouraged, taking upon herself the burden of the disconsolate, literally, without thought of self, sharing, as it were, the misery and sin of this awful city? And today, for the first time, he seemed to have seen the woman in her—or was it the saint? and he recalled that wonderful illumination of her plain face that made her actually beautiful as she looked up from the little waif of humanity she held in her arms. It had startled him, and struck a new chord in his heart, and planted a new pang there that she had no belief in a future life.
It did not occur to him that the sudden joy in her face might have been evoked by seeing him, for it was a long time since she had seen him. Nor did he think that the pang at his heart had another cause than religious anxiety. Ah, priest and worldly saint, how subtle and enduring are the primal instincts of human nature!
“Yes,” he said, as they walked away, in reply to her inquiry as to his absence, “I have been in retreat a couple of weeks.”
“I suppose,” she said, softly, “you needed the rest; though,” and she looked at him professionally, “if you will allow me to say it, it seems to me that you have not rested enough.”
“I needed strength”—and it was the priest that spoke—“in meditation and prayer to draw upon resources not my own.”