"Sho—how I know anybody wan' see yo, hangin' 'roun' de back do'? He ain' say nuthin', jes' set dar." She continued muttering her crusty dislike of tramps, as the bishop led his caller through her kitchen and sent his little daughter to look after her puppy.
He took Frale into his private study, and presently returned and himself carried him food, placing it before him on a small table where many a hungry caller had been fed before. Then he occupied himself at his desk while he quietly observed the boy. He saw that the youth was too worn and weak to be dealt with rationally at first, and he felt it difficult to affix the thought of a desperate crime upon one so gentle of mien and innocent of face; but he knew his people well, and what masterful passions often slept beneath a mild and harmless exterior.
Nor was it the first time he had been called upon to adjust a conflict between his own conscience and the law. Often in his office of priest he had been the recipient of confidences which no human pressure of law could ever wrest from him. So now he proceeded to draw from Frale his full and free confession.
Very carefully and lovingly he trespassed in the secret chambers of this troubled soul, until at last the boy laid bare his heart.
He told of the cause of his anger and his drunken quarrel, of his evasion of his pursuers and his vow with Cassandra before God, of his rejection of Doctor Thryng's help and his flight by night, of his suffering and hunger. All was told without fervor,—a simple passive narration of events. No one could believe, while listening to him, that storms of passion and hatred and fear had torn him, or the overwhelming longing he had suffered at the thought of Cassandra.
But when the bishop touched on the subject of repentance, the hidden force was revealed. It was as if the tormenting spirit within him had cried out loudly, instead of the low, monotonous tone in which he said:—
"Yas, I kin repent now he's dade, but ef he war livin' an' riled me agin that-a-way like he done—I reckon—I reckon God don't want no repentin' like I repents."
It was steel against flint, the spark in the narrow blue line of his eyes as he said the words, and the bishop understood.
But what to do with this man of the mountains—this force of nature in the wild; how guard him from a far more pernicious element in the civilized town life than any he would find in his rugged solitudes?
And Cassandra! The bishop bowed his head and sat with the tips of his fingers pressed together. The thought of Cassandra weighed heavily upon him. She had given her promise, with the devotion of her kind, to save; had truly offered herself a living sacrifice. All hopes for her growth into the gracious womanhood her inheritance impelled her toward,—her sweet ambitions for study, gone to the winds—scattered like the fragrant wild rose petals on her own hillside—doomed by that promise to live as her mother had lived, and like other women of her kin, to age before her time with the bearing of children in the midst of toil too heavy for her—dispirited by privation and the sorrow of relinquished hopes. Oh, well the bishop knew! He dreaded most to see the beautiful light of aspiration die out of her eyes, and her spirit grow sordid in the life to which this untamed savage would inevitably bring her. "What a waste!"