The Sin That Was His

by Frank L. Packard

He tied the lantern in front of the dash-board, and climbed into the seat. Madame Lafleur was still standing in the doorway. He hesitated an instant, as he picked up the reins. The sweet, motherly old face smiled at him. A pang came and found lodgment in his heart. It was like that, standing there in the lamp-lit doorway of the presbytère, that he had seen her for the first time—as he saw her now for the last. He had grown to love the silver-haired little old lady with her heart of gold—and so he looked—and a mist came before his eyes, for this was his good-bye.

“You will be back in an hour?” she called out. “You forget, Madame Lafleur”—he forced himself to laugh in the old playful, teasing way—“that the train is sometimes more than an hour late itself!”

“Yes, that is true!” she said. “Au revoir, then, Monsieur le Curé!”

He answered quietly.

“Good-night, Madame Lafleur!”

He drove out across the green, and past the church, and, a short distance down the road, where he could no longer be seen from the windows of the presbytère, he leaned forward and extinguished the lantern. He smiled curiously to himself. It was the only act that appeared at all in consonance with escape! He was a fugitive now, a fugitive for life—and a fugitive running for his life. It seemed as though he should be standing up in the buckboard, and lashing at the horse until the animal was flecked with foam, and the buckboard rocked and swayed with a mad speed along the road. Instead—he had turned off and was on the station road now—the horse was labouring slowly up the steep hill. It seemed as though there should be haste, furious haste, a wild abandon in his flight—that there should be no time to mark, or see, or note, as he was noting now, the twinkling lights of the quiet village nestling below him there along the river's shore. It seemed that his blood should be whipping madly through his veins—instead he was contained, composed, playing his last hand with the old-time gambler's nerve that precluded a false lead, that calculated deliberately, methodically, and with deadly coolness, the value of every card. And yet, beneath this nerve-imposed veneer, he was conscious of a thousand emotions that battered and seethed and raged at their barriers, and sought to fling themselves upon him and have him for their prey.

He laughed coldly out into the night. It was not the fool who tore like a madman, boisterously, blindly, into the open that would escape! He had ample time. He had seen to that, even if he had appeared to accept Madame Lafleur's injunction to hurry. He need reach the station but a minute or so ahead of the train. Meanwhile, the minor details—were there any that he had overlooked? What about the soutane and the clerical hat, for instance, after he had exchanged them for the sacristan's things? Should he hide them where he left the horse and buckboard in the woods? He shook his head after a moment. No; they would probably find the horse before morning, and they might find the soutane. There must be no trace of Father Aubert—the longer they searched the better. And then, more important still, when finally the alarm was spread, the description that would be sent out would be that of a man dressed as a priest. No; he would take them with him, wrap them up in a bundle around a stone, and somewhere miles away, say, throw them from the car into the water as the train crossed a bridge. So much for that! Was there anything else, anything that he——

A lighted window glowed yellow in the darkness from a little distance away. He had come to the top of the rise. It was old Mother Blondin's cottage. He had meant to urge the horse into a trot once the level was gained—but instead the horse was forgotten, and the animal plodded slowly forward at the same pace at which it had ascended the hill.

Raymond's eyes were fixed upon the light. Old Mother Blondin's cottage—and in that room, beyond that light, old Mother Blondin, the old woman on the hill, the excommuniée, lay dying. And there was a shadow on the window shade—the shadow of one sitting in a chair—a woman's shadow—Valerie!

He stopped the horse, and, sitting there in the buck-board opposite the cottage, he raised his hand slowly and took his hat from his head.