Margeret stirred a little and looked up anxiously at her father. What was there so familiar in those last words?
“I had hopes at one time that he would live,” the priest went on, “and night and day I tended him with all the skill I knew. I have often thought of what pain it must have been to him to be nursed by a Jesuit, whose very presence he believed would bring corruption. How he raved of the sins of the world and the fearful punishments that were to overtake the wicked! Ah, could he have lived, as I have, in the peace of the forest, ministering to the simple-hearted Indians, he might have learned that, after all, men know not so much of God as to be able to say freely who is to be condemned and who rewarded. He died, just as Spring was flooding the forest with new life and beauty, but he died as he had lived, still deeming the world a dark, wicked, bitter place. My Indians helped me to bury him under the pines, it was they that brought the white stone upon which we made shift to carve the name he had told us—Jeremiah Macrae. Some day, so I had thought, I would lie there by his side when my own task was laid down forever. I believe that he would not have minded that we should so sleep together through the ages, for I think that he knows by now that salvation is not so narrow and lonely a thing as he had thought, and has learned that a Puritan minister and a Jesuit priest may labour in God’s work side by side.”
“I would that all the world could see as clearly as you,” said Master Simon, with a sigh.
“It will some day,” answered the priest cheerfully. “Not in our time, brother, but at last. Few of my faith and few of yours think as do you and I, but the seed is sowing and the world will grow wise in Heaven’s own good time.”
There was silence for a space before the thin, gentle voice of the priest went on again.
“Shall I tell you, my friends,” he said, “why it is not to be that I sleep beside Jeremiah Macrae in the forest and why I am at last laying the burden down and, if it be that I slip through the fingers of your Puritan brothers, will go back to die in my own dear country across the sea? It was but a little thing that in the end broke down my firmness, but when a man is old and weary it takes not much to call him home. I have never spoken before of what the true reason was, but I think that boy yonder knows.”
Roger smiled.
“I believe it was the Nascomi Indian,” he observed, “and the gift that he left you.”
The little father nodded.
“It was in the same year as the coming of Monsieur Macrae that an Indian from a strange tribe passed that way and lingered with us a little. He left, when he went forward on his journey again, a faded yellow tulip whose petals had once been like burnished gold, just such a flower as used to grow in the garden near my first parish church in France. So long have I dwelt in the fierce wilderness that it seems only a dream when I think of that fair bright country of mine. Yet it is a dream that stands often before my eyes, those close-built villages with their clustering red roofs and their smoke rising from a hundred neighbourly chimneys, those sun-bathed streets, narrow and crooked but, oh, so dear, and the great church towering over all as though to care for its children and protect them. Long, long I sat in the doorway the night after the Indian had gone, looking out into the moonlit forest, looking out toward France with tears in my foolish old eyes. The desires that I thought I had stilled forever awoke again and grew greater and greater until now I have but one thought, one longing, that fills my whole being. The Indians carried word of me back to my friends in Canada, through Roger Bardwell we arranged that the ship they would send was to take me on board near Hopewell. It was through my own impatience that the plan miscarried, for I would not wait for him in the place where he was to meet me in the forest, but pressed on, missed him in the dark and in my bewilderment sought his cottage and betrayed all to that crafty shoemaker who vowed he was my friend. For one thing only I can be thankful; it is that misgiving checked my foolish tongue in time and I did not tell of this boy’s share in bringing me here. And oh, it cannot, it cannot be that after all this danger and effort of those I love, I am to lose my heart’s desire and perish at the hands of the Puritans before I have seen France again!”