Watching the tempest-swept valley, the tortured forest, where wild life was in panic, there came upon him the old impulse to put his thoughts into words, "and so be rid of them," as he was wont to say in other days. Taking from his pocket some slips of paper, he laid them on the table before him. Three or four times he leaned over the paper to write, but the noise of the storm again and again drew his look to the window. The tempest ceased almost as suddenly as it had come, and, as the first sunlight broke through the flying clouds, he mechanically lifted a sheet of the paper and held it up to the light. It brought to his eyes the large water-mark, Kathleen!
A sombre look passed over his face, he shifted in his chair, then bent over the paper and began to write. Words flowed from his pen. The lines of his face relaxed, his eyes lightened; he was lost in a dream. He thought of the present, and he wrote:
"Wave walls to seaward,
Storm-clouds to leeward,
Beaten and blown by the winds of the West;
Sail we encumbered
Past isles unnumbered,
But never to greet the green island of Rest."
He thought of Father Loisel. He had seen the good man's lips tremble at some materialistic words he had once used in their many talks, and he wrote:
"Lips that now tremble,
Do you dissemble
When you deny that the human is best?—
Love, the evangel,
Finds the Archangel?
Is that a truth when this may be a jest?
"Star-drifts that glimmer
Dimmer and dimmer,
What do ye know of my weal or my woe?
Was I born under
The sun or the thunder?
What do I come from? and where do I go?
"Rest, shall it ever
Come? Is endeavour
But a vain twining and twisting of cords?
Is faith but treason;
Reason, unreason,
But a mechanical weaving of words?"
He thought of Louis Trudel, in his grave, and his own questioning: "Show me a sign from Heaven, tailorman!" and he wrote:
"What is the token,
Ever unbroken,
Swept down the spaces of querulous years,
Weeping or singing
That the Beginning
Of all things is with us, and sees us, and hears?"
He made an involuntary motion of his hand to his breast, where old Louis Trudel had set a sign. So long as he lived, it must be there to read: a shining smooth scar of excoriation, a sacred sign of the faith he had never been able to accept; of which he had never, indeed, been able to think, so distant had been his soul, until, against his will, his heart had answered to the revealing call in a woman's eyes. He felt her fingers touch his breast as they did that night the iron seared him; and out of this first intimacy of his soul he wrote: