On one subject they never spoke—the great barrier reef of dogma that lay between them. Once only was it in any way alluded to—once after a memorable night when Wesley had opened his heart to the old priest. In saying farewell the latter had raised his hands, and was deeply chagrined when his companion leaped back with a look of consternation.
“Oh, my son,” said Zosimus, “the blessing of an old and not unworthy man cannot harm thee. Do we not each serve God according to our lights?”
But if Father Zosimus had succeeded in winning the young minister’s confidence and friendship, with Mrs. Cook he had not fared so well. In the bottom of his heart he felt that the woman’s ill will was the rock on which the precious friendship might founder, and he accordingly left no stone unturned to ingratiate himself in her favour. But the lonely, wilful, moody woman, with her health impaired by her recent confinement, and her spirit warped by disappointment and the consciousness of dimming beauty, was in no state of mind to receive his advances. Unhappy herself, she was in the tigerish humour when one must rend, if one can, the happiness of others. She had nothing in common with the frowsy old priest who wore blue jeans under his snuffy cassock and smelled of garden mould. Moreover, her pride was wounded by her tacit exclusion from the nightly company on the porch. Her presence brought constraint and what seemed to her disordered nerves a scarcely veiled resentment. Though she yawned in her husband’s face when they were alone together, and did nothing to seek his confidence, she detested his intimacy with the old priest, and the thought of it rankled perpetually within her. At first she had ignored Father Zosimus’s very existence, repelling his overtures with an indifference quite unaffected, and treating him with the frank rudeness that springs from unconcern. But as time passed, and every fibre of her being revolted at the narrowness and hopelessness of her imprisoned life; as her spirit beat against the bars and her heart seemed to burst within her breast; she began to perceive in the priest the means of striking at her husband. Not that she did not love Wesley, after a fashion; if things had so fallen out, she could have felt the most poignant jealousy; but she resented the easy, contented nature that blossomed in that hot hole where they lived, among those greasy, fawning savages with whom their lot was so inexorably cast. His prattle about the school, the progress of the “Peep o’ Day,” his zeal for unearthing legends and old Samoan songs, his whole innocent enjoyment in his daily tasks and duties, all fanned the flame of her revolt. If he, too, had risen against the dreary confinement of their life; if he, too, had faced each succeeding day with ineffable disgust, and had lain weary and heartsick in her arms at night; she would have comforted him, encouraged him, strengthened him for the task he had so rashly undertaken. What she could not bear, what she could not forgive or condone, was his mild acceptance of his fate; his zest in the pitiful drudgery of his every-day existence; the petty nature that could thus expand in the close air of a prison. With a malignity that was crazed in its intensity, the outcome of hysteria and the first gnawings of disease, she sought to shatter the placidity which had grown as intolerable to her as the Samoan sun at noon. In Father Zosimus she perceived the dagger with which she could stab her husband through and through; and in the maturing of her plot she enjoyed the nearest approach to happiness that had ever come her way in Fangaloa.
One evening, when Father Zosimus arrived as usual, he was met on the verandah by Mrs. Cook, and informed that the minister had been detained in the village by some trifling errand. He felt a tone of menace in her voice, and foreboded no good from her high colour and quivering lips. He would have excused himself had a lie come easily to his lips, but he was not quick in such things, and took the offered seat with a sinking heart. He searched nervously here and there for some topic of conversation that might be interesting and yet free from the slightest possibility of offence, his ear, meanwhile, alert for the sound of the minister’s footsteps. But Mrs. Cook was too adroit for the old man, and, to his inexpressible chagrin, he soon found himself stumbling into an argument, and the target for humiliating and derisive questions. He now thought only of escape, for his hands were trembling, and he felt his cheeks flushing with indignation. Every word he said seemed only to land him deeper in the mire. When, at last, Mrs. Cook began to taunt him with a recent scandal in Upolu involving the good name of a nun, Father Zosimus cried out inarticulately, and flung himself past her into the darkness. Even as he did so, Wesley Cook came swinging up the path, and instinctively stepped aside to allow the flying figure to pass. He looked back at it irresolutely, and then continued on his way with a premonition of evil to come. His wife received him with vehement caresses, clinging to him in an hysterical frenzy. Between her choking sobs she overflowed with foolish, disjointed, and often incoherent accusations against the old priest. “That horrible old Jesuit!” she cried; “that sly, slinking, wicked creature; never, never must he be permitted to cross the threshold again.” Her cheeks flamed as she continued her tirade; as she described the shame, the humiliation she had secretly undergone; as she affected, with passionated outbursts of indignation, to keep back things that were too black even for utterance. All the time she searched Wesley’s eyes for an answering fire, and could read nothing but incredulity and dismay. Then her wrath turned full upon him, and with a hundred quotations from his own lips she denounced his intimacy with a Jesuit, and bade him choose between the priest and her.
She threatened to seek old Tuisunga’s protection were he to persist in this unworthy friendship, and drew in no uncertain colours the effect of the letter she would write to the missionary authorities at Malua. Wesley was frightened to the core, and quaked under the lash of her denunciation. He saw himself disgraced; dismissed from the Society; turned out into the world, that most forlorn and helpless of human beings, the discarded missionary. Abjectly he begged for mercy, simulated an indignation against Father Zosimus he could in no wise feel, and was in due course forgiven on promising to break for ever with the old priest.
He passed a troubled night; he felt he had made a mean capitulation, and, try as he would, he was unable to gloss the matter to his conscience. He was stung by the conviction of his cowardice and disloyalty, and yet his common sense told him that he was powerless in his wife’s hands. He could never outlive the scandal of her desertion, or explain away those letters which would write him down a pervert. In the morning Wesley timidly expostulated with his wife, quoting all the texts he could remember that bore on charity and forgiveness. This was a course little calculated to allay Mrs. Cook’s wrath. She burst out upon him with a fury that completely crushed his last effort at intercession. She stood over him as he wrote the letter in which, with smooth and nicely balanced sentences, interspersed with religious commonplaces and trite expressions of regret, he raised a wall of words between himself and the old man he had called his friend. He knew, he said, that Father Zosimus could have had no intention to offend, but Mrs. Cook had taken the matter of overnight in such a way that he felt unable to resume an intimacy which had been very precious to him. No apologies or explanations could avail, and he begged that none be offered; but he trusted, he need not say how earnestly, that in some future time (D. V.) the dark clouds would roll away, and with them all memories of this unhappy misunderstanding.
The letter was brought to Father Zosimus in the garden, where he was digging furiously to drive away the devils that beset him. He tore it open with his grimy hands, and read it with a feeling of despair. The few kindly allusions brought tears to his eyes, and his first resentment against Tutumanaia passed away as he re-read them; but against Mrs. Cook, the author of his humiliation, his whole nature rose in arms. Disciplined though he was by seven and forty years of abnegation, the old Adam in him lay still fiery and untamed. He was consumed with bitterness towards the woman who had so cruelly wronged him. What had he to hope “in some future time (D. V.),” old and broken man that he was? In the fierceness of his indignation he called down the vengeance of God upon her until contrition overpowered him, and he threw himself on his knees.
“Oh, Zosimus,” he said, “so old and still so foolish!”
After such a blow it was hard to pick up the threads of life once more, and interest himself in the recurring tasks which rounded out each day. But in Father Zosimus there was the stuff of which martyrs are made. Sore of heart though he was, and spent of body, his unremitting energy and indomitable faith drove him to work and pray as he had never worked or prayed before. His lacerated feelings found an outlet in dazzling garden-beds, trellises of bamboo, and in the stone wall he had so often planned and as often given up, which was to inclose the seaward side of his little plantation. And in these tranquil and unexciting occupations, which kept the hands busy while the mind was free to rove, a certain scheme unfolded itself which found increasing favour in his eyes; the means, in fact, by which he might score a triumph over Mrs. Cook, and restore himself once again in her good graces. Not that he had forgiven her for the part she had taken against him; his anger still smouldered beneath the blanket of Christian charity with which he had sought to smother it; but were he to gain again his footing in that household on the hill; were he to renew the intimacy that was the very salt of his life; he must needs pay toll to the woman who held the key of his happiness. As he dug, or weeded, or carried stones to his wall, or climbed the ladder beside the shining trellis-work, the old priest was never far from a sheet of paper and a pencil. Sometimes it was a hammer that kept these things in place, sometimes it was the well-worn shovel-hat that guarded them from the puffs of the trade or chance cat’s-paws from the mountains, while Zosimus, his head economically wrapped in banana-leaves, seized many an occasion during the course of his labours to scribble another word on the anchored sheet, or erase something already written. It was a list of such delicacies as the limited markets of Apia afforded, for which the old man was intending to lay out the savings of a year.
It must not be supposed that the Rev. Wesley Cook was having a particularly pleasant time of it during the days that followed the breaking off with Father Zosimus. For half a week, indeed, his wife exerted herself to supply the old man’s place, and had never before shown herself so agreeable or so helpful. She interested herself in Wesley’s legends, listened patiently to the story of Sopo’s misdoings, of the brilliant possibilities that lay in Popo would he only apply himself in earnest, or lamented with her husband the bad influences which were undermining the character of a gentleman named O; she wrote to his dictation a little essay on the “King-names of Samoa,” which Cook intended sending to the Polynesian Society of New Zealand; and, in fact, proved herself a zealous, clever, and indefatigable comrade. All thought of Father Zosimus would soon have slipped from Wesley’s memory had this new-found companionship been destined to endure; but it was nothing more than a flash in the pan, due half to remorse, half to policy, a means to gain time for the breach to widen irrevocably between her husband and the priest.