The pastor put his arm around Floyd.
“My son, you have been through more than your share of trouble; don’t burden yourself with morbid self accusations. He was your friend; he betrayed you. He made the only reparation—death. Try to think kindly of him. Under natural conditions he would have been a brave son of the soil. He was robbed of his birthright....”
Julie shed no tears. The old fear was upon her; the Punishment had come again in the shape of Death, and he had paid. The priest worked upon this superstitious dread; it was the only way to subdue her. “God had punished her for her crime against her husband. He would punish her further; she must go home, she must go back to her religion, God had struck Martin with the whip of retribution. He would bring it down upon her shoulders if she did not repent. A great calamity would happen to her child.”
She was cowed, humble, on her knees before him begging for mercy. He confessed her, and gave her absolution.
Mr. and Mrs. Garrison left by the afternoon train; they were a pitiable sight, these two unhappy children wondering why the world was so dark, the pain so hard to bear. The priest spoke the last words.
“My children, you are going home. You will be happy again, if you do not nourish your misfortune. God has given us the magic of memory, and a still greater blessing, the gift of forgetting.”
They bowed their heads to his blessing. The train left the station, wending its way in and out of the tunnels.
“When I watch those undulations,” said the pastor to Father Cabello, “I think of a serpent crawling into the great centers of vice, carrying with him the modern Adams, the curious Eves, who will eat copiously of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.”
The priest smiled. The simile appealed to his mind trained in Biblical metaphors.
“I have no fears for our young couple; the New World moulds its people. The practical life of which they are an integral part will make their road clear to them. I have lived long in America. It is a land of proof, not belief; of practical results and a kind of idealism which is expressed in action. There is no time for dreams; inspiration feeds only on quick realization. A land of no secrets, where publicity methods are applied alike to business, science, literature, religion. That which cannot be exploited is called ‘high-brow’—but there is a saving humor in it all. America is a great country.”