Barry and Julie stepped softly into the room where the priest’s emaciated form lay stretched upon a bed. They bent down, and watched tremulously for his fluttering breath. The stern, make-shift surroundings, the absence of any one near to him, brought the tears to Julie’s eyes. While she had been giving all her thoughts to herself and her own vicissitudes, the priest had hung on his cross suffering. His outstretched wasted arms seemed to be offering the final oblation of life. He was going out after a hard march. The camp fires were dying, and he who had urged the souls of men along rough trails was being extinguished with them.
His eyes opened feebly and rested on the door. Some yet living sense that stood on guard over his earthly mission must have affected this flickering return. His lips moved urgently. Julie understood that before he slipped out there was some token his spirit wished to pass to his colonist children. She tiptoed to the door and summoned them in.
As they entered, the priest turned upon them the helpless solicitude of a dying father. He was leaving in their faltering hands their unguarded destinies. The old Judge grasped his inert hand in helpless sadness, murmuring under his breath something about “giving it up for good.” The Blackstones, shabby and broken, held up a thin frightened baby before his glazing eyes. Jerome’s somber, worn, dissipated face worked with emotion. Mrs. Abernathy wept softly at the foot of the bed.
But it was to the shining serenity of the Ashbys that the priest turned for his last vision of life. He kept his eyes fixed upon them, as if, in this final extremity, they helped.
Julie glanced curiously at Mrs. Ashby, who now stood beside Father Hull holding one of his hands. Her lids, drooped downward, appeared closed. By her blank outer aspect the girl knew that she was withdrawn into some mammoth struggle. It seemed to vibrate about her in excitations of the atmosphere, as if an atom sought to stir all space. “She is trying to save him,” Julie thought.
There should of course be a way to do it. Death was a mistake that had crept into creation. That was shown by the fact that never yet in all the eons had man accepted it naturally. Life itself, in its sundering battles, had perhaps evolved this malevolence, which darkened the whole universe. Never had she looked on this irremediable mystery without experiencing an insensate revolt and an unaccountable conviction of its unnecessariness. She looked around at this circle of wretched human helplessness, at the supreme helplessness on the bed, and felt unreasonably that they had still not turned the last stone.
She turned to Mrs. Ashby to see if she might unaccountably have demonstrated an answer to the struggling things within her mind. But she too had clearly only grazed the great secret—for the priest suddenly was dead. Over the city that he had left forever, the sunset gun boomed.
In a silence that weighed like lead, Julie and Barry rode home. Julie broke it at last. “He should not have gone!” Then to the dusk she murmured absently and fragmentarily: “The things I do—ye shall do also!”
“What are you saying, Julie?”
“One Person solved the mystery, you see.”