By noon he had blistered his hands, but he kept manfully at work. In a few days he had developed skill and viewed the increase in his daily product with satisfaction. His bodily health had never been so good. At times he was almost happy and went whistling about his work. This was what Jean had told him to do: find labour with his hands. And all these days Jean was never out of his thoughts, never out of his heart.
So the weeks passed and Wayne lingered at the House of Peace, taking long walks over the hills; talking with the brothers, whose circle changed frequently; felling trees in the snowy wood, and performing such other manual labour as offered. He saw the earliest vanguard of spring steal into the hills, resisted, flung back, but camping at last on the summits, smiling conquerors. He watched the swelling buds and bore proudly home the first furtive arbutus. His blood was purified, his spirit lightened in the lustral air. He read much, sending away for books and periodicals; he wrote letters to Jean and tore them up; he brooded, pondered, wondered, and walked the ridges with the stars.
One evening, near the end of April, Stoddard, who had just returned after a long absence, came into his room.
“I’m sorry, Craighill, but your time is up. You must go home to-morrow.”
“But I’m not ready to leave yet! If you’ll let me go on chopping wood and carrying water I’d like to stay. I’m a failure down below there—I don’t want to go back; I can’t go back.”
“That is good; I’m glad you feel that way about it.”
“I can’t lie to you: I don’t believe in God. You’ve done a good deal for me and I see things better; but I’m likely to stumble and fall again the day I leave here.”
“That is quite likely, as you say,” said the priest. “There may be some further struggles and difficulties; your old friend the devil isn’t so easily shaken off; he has the pride of his craftsmanship, as I told you the night you came. There are some men who, if they asked to be allowed to remain here permanently to escape the dangers and temptations of the world, I should not refuse. I should feel that way in the case of weaklings, failures or cowards; but you are different, Craighill. You do not fall within these classifications. The House of Peace is not for you; you’ve got to go back into the world to wrestle with it, to get under the devil’s heels perhaps, but to find your feet finally and in time to become a man, honoured, respected and loved by men. I am not a prophet, and have no knowledge of your future that I don’t read in yourself; but I am not alone in my feeling about you. These members of the Brotherhood see and feel it and they are, you may say, experts in cases like yours. Without trying, you have made them like you. We are all your friends. You don’t believe in God—the God we preach—and I’m not going to discuss that with you. It is barely possible that you are incapable of belief; but those things are a good deal a matter of phrases and words. No two men of our brotherhood have exactly the same idea of the person of God. No two souls are just alike any more than the eyes of two persons respond to the same test. When I read I am obliged to use a pair of glasses which would probably blind you utterly and it would be absurd for me to force you to use them. And it is equally far from my intention to force my religious ideas upon you.”
Wayne was silent for what seemed a long time, for he was half-ashamed of the question he wished to ask.
“How did it happen that you found me that first night when I was actually at the point of tumbling over the cliff out yonder?”