The severe young priest carried out his intentions so zealously that the chief and his friends were offended. He commanded them to put away all their wives but one.
They had marvelled at his celibacy; but they felt, with the rigid justice of the savage, that, if absolutely sincere, he was entitled to their respect.
However, they doubted his sincerity, and plotted to satisfy their curiosity upon this point. A young Iliamna girl was bribed to conceal herself in his room. Awaking in the middle of the night and finding himself in her arms, the young priest was unable to overcome temptation.
In the morning he was overwhelmed with remorse and a sense of his disgrace. He remembered how haughtily he had spurned Shakmut's offer of peculiar hospitality, and how mercilessly he had criticised Baranoff for his immoral carousals. Remembering these things, as well as the ease with which his own downfall had been accomplished, he was overcome with shame.
"What a terrible blow this is to all my recent hopes!" he wrote, in his pathetic account of the affair in his journal. "As soon as I regained my senses, I drove the woman out, but I felt too guilty to be very harsh with her. How can I hold up my head among the people, who, of course, will hear of this affair?... God is my witness that I have set down the truth here in the face of anything that may be said about it hereafter. I have kept myself secluded to-day from everybody. I have not yet the strength to face the world."
When Juvenal did face the small world of Iliamna, it was to be openly ridiculed and insulted by all. Young girls tittered when he went by; his own boys, whom he had taught and baptized, mocked him; a girl put her head into his room when he was engaged in fastening a heavy bar upon his door, and laughed in his face. Shakmut came and insisted that Juvenal should baptize his several wives the following Sunday. This he had been steadily refusing to do, so long as they lived in daily sin; but now, disgraced, broken in spirit, and no longer able to say, "I am holier than thou," he wearily consented.
"I shall not shrink from my duty to make him relinquish all but one wife, however," he wrote, with a last flash of his old spirit, "when the proper time arrives. If I wink at polygamy now, I shall be forever unable to combat it. Perhaps it is only my imagination, but I think I can discover a lack of respect in Nikita's behavior toward me since yesterday.... My disgrace has become public already, and I am laughed at wherever I go, especially by the women. Of course, they do not understand the sin, but rather look upon it as a good joke. It will require great firmness on my part to regain the respect I have lost for myself, as well as on behalf of the Church. I have vowed to burn no fuel in my bedroom during the entire winter, in order to chastise my body—a mild punishment, indeed, compared to the blackness of my sin."
The following day was the Sabbath. It was with a heavy heart that he baptized Katlewah, the brother of the chief, and his family, the three wives of the chief, seven children, and one aged couple.
The same evening he called on the chief and surprised him in a wild carousal with his wives, in which he was jeeringly invited to join.
Forgetting his disgrace and his loss of the right to condemn for sins not so black as his own, the enraged young priest vigorously denounced them, and told the chief that he must marry one of the women according to the rites of the Church and put away the others, or be forever damned. The chief, equally enraged, ordered him out of the house. On his way home he met Katlewah, who reproached him because his religious teachings had not benefited Shakmut, who was as immoral as ever.