"He will believe you," the missionary said quietly. He would not speak of his own influence for a double reason—it would be boastful, and it might be dangerous. "Your story bears all the impress of truth, and you can prove it in a hundred ways."
"Then my course is plain," Jack said. "And the first step," he added with a sigh, "is to say farewell to the dear friends here." He rose to go, but turned back to ask, with a little hesitation, "Dr. Sandeman, have you seen the Cathedral?"
"Yes" said the missionary with a shudder. "After all this time, it is still the most sickening sight I have ever beheld. Not sight alone; every sense is outraged. Do not go near it, Mr. Grayson."
"And yet," Jack answered, "Christ's martyrs went to Him from thence."
John Grayson's journey, in the company of Dr. Sandeman, proved as little eventful as any journey at that time and in those regions could possibly be. One sad episode indeed there was. As usual, they halted at Biridjik. They found the town a wreck and the houses in ruins, many of them burned, others plundered and defaced. The streets were almost impassable with rubbish, broken glass, fragments of furniture, and other far more ghastly memorials of the massacre.
The remaining inhabitants had been forced to become Moslems to save their lives. They kept themselves shut up in their houses, or moved about—pale, attenuated shadows, with fear and horror stamped upon their countenances. No intercourse was permitted between them and the missionary's party; only a few of them dared to look at the travellers with eyes of piteous appeal and recognition, and to make furtively, with rapid fingers, the sign of the cross. Jack longed to give them Gabriel's word of comfort, "Christ will forgive you; only you have lost a grand opportunity." He said this to Dr. Sandeman, who answered, "You have a right to say that; so had he; but it seems to me that no man who has not been tried thus can estimate the trial, the opportunity, or the loss."
"But oh, the sadness of it all!" Jack said. And then these two brave, strong men of Anglo-Saxon race did just what the exiles of Israel did so many ages ago, "By the waters of Babylon they sat down and wept."
Before they quitted Biridjik John Grayson went, in the early morning, to visit his father's grave. He was greatly relieved to find it had been left undisturbed, for he knew that horrible outrages had been committed elsewhere upon the graves of the Christians. Kneeling on the hallowed spot, he thanked God for his father's noble life and bright example, and for sustaining and preserving himself through so many perils.