On Sunday, at the little stone church in the valley of the river Pearl took her place among the worshippers. The attendance was unusually large. A new bond of interest was binding the neighborhood together, and they spoke of it as they congregated in the church-yard before the service. Pearl sat inside and watched them as they talked together excitedly. Snatches of their conversation came to her. "Well-behaved people should stay with well-behaved people, I say"—this was from Mrs. Switzer.
The men did not join in the conversation, but stood around, ill at ease in their stiff collars, and made an attempt to talk about summer fallowing and other harmless topics. Their attitude to the whole affair was one of aloofness. Let the women settle it among themselves.
From the window where she sat Pearl could see far down the valley. The river pursued its way, happily, unperturbed by the wrongs or sorrows of the people who lived beside it. Sometimes it had reached out and drowned a couple of them as it had done last year—but no one held it against the river at all.
The rejuvenation of nature was to be seen everywhere, in springing grass and leafing tree. Everything could begin life over again. Why were the people so hard on Annie Gray, even if all they believed about her were true? Pearl wondered about the religion of people like the group who were so busily talking just outside the window. Did it not teach them to be charitable? The Good Shepherd, in the picture above the altar, had gone out to find the wandering sheep, even leaving all the others, to bring back the lost one, sorry that it had been wayward, not angry—but only sorry—Pearl hoped that they would look at it when they came in. She hoped too, that they would look at the few scattered tombstones in the churchyard, over which the birds were darting and skimming, and be reminded of the shortness of life, and their own need of mercy—and she hoped that some of the dead, who lay there so peacefully now, might have been sinners who redeemed the past and died respected, and that they might plead now with these just persons who needed no repentance.
But when the service was over, and a brief sermon on Amos and his good deeds, the congregation separated, and Pearl went back to the brown house with a heavy heart, and the cry of her soul was that God would show her a way of making the people understand. "Plough a fire-guard, O Lord," she prayed, as she walked, "and let these deadly fires of gossip run their noses square into it and be smothered. Use me if you can—I am here—ready to help—but the big thing is to get it done."
Around the open grate-fire that night, after James had gone to bed, Pearl and Mrs. Gray sat long before the pleasant wood fire For the first time Annie Gray felt she had found some one to whom she could talk and tell what was in her heart, and the story of the last eleven years was revealed, from the time that pretty Annie Simmons, fresh from Scotland, arrived at the Hudson's Bay post at Fort Resolution, coming by dog-train the last two hundred miles to her cousin, the factor's wife—the thin-lipped daughter of the Covenanters—who kept the pretty young cousin closely at work in the kitchen with her pots and pans when the traders came in, for Mrs. McPherson had no intention of losing Annie and her capable help after bringing her all the way from the Isle of Skye.
After a year of hard work, and some lonesome times, too, in the long, dark winter, there came to the Post a young trapper and prospector, Jim Gray.
"When I saw him," said the woman, with the silver bands of gray encircling her shapely head, "I knew him for my own man. He was tall and dark, with a boyish laugh that I loved, and a way of suddenly becoming very serious in the middle of his fun—a sort of clouding over of his face as if the sun had gone under for a minute."
She spoke haltingly, but Pearl knew what was in her heart, and her quick imagination painted in the details of each picture. She could see the homesick Scotch girl, in the far Northern post, hungry for admiration and love, and trying to make herself as comely as she could. She could sense all the dreams and longings, the hopes and thrills.
"Tell me more about him," Pearl urged.