The Shepherd of the North

by Richard Aumerle Maher

The Bishop went with her to one of the counsel rooms in the courthouse and sent for Dardis.

“This girl,” he told the lawyer, “has a story to tell. I think you would do wisely to put her on the stand and let her tell it in her own way. She will make no mistakes. They will not be able to break her down.”

Then the Bishop went back to take up again his business with God.

As a last, and almost hopeless, resort, Jeffrey Whiting had been put upon the stand in his own defence. There was nothing he could tell which the jurors had not already heard in one form or another. Everybody had heard what he had said that morning on Bald Mountain. He had not been believed even then, by men who had never had a reason to doubt his simple word. There was little likelihood that he would be believed here now by these jurors, whose minds were already fixed by the facts and the half truths which they had been hearing. But there was some hope that his youth and the manly sincerity with which he 255 clung to his simple story might have some effect. It might be that a single man on that jury would be so struck with his single sturdy tale that he would refuse to disbelieve it altogether. You could never tell what might strike a man on a jury. So Dardis argued.

Jeffrey Whiting did not care. If his counsel wished him to tell his story he would do so. It would not matter. His own friends did not believe his story. Nobody believed it. Two people knew that it was true. And those two people had stood up there upon the stand and sworn that they did not know. One of them was a good man, a man of God, a man he would have trusted with every dear thing that life held. That man had stood up there and lied. The other was a girl whom he loved, and who, he was sure, loved him.

It had not been easy for Ruth to tell that lie––or maybe she did not consider it a lie: he had seen her suffer terribly in the telling of it. He was beginning to feel that he did not care much what was the outcome of the trial. Life was a good thing, it was true. And death, or a life of death, as a murderer, was worse than twenty common deaths. But that had all dropped into the background. Only one big thing stood before him. It laid hold upon him and shook him and took from him his interest in every other fact in the world.

Ruth Lansing, he thought he could say, had 256 never before in her life told a lie. Why should she have ever told a lie. She had never had reason to fear any one; and they only lie who fear. He would have said that the fear of death could not have made Ruth Lansing lie. Yet she had stood up there and lied.

For what? For a church. For a religion to which she had foolishly given herself. For that she had given up him. For that she had given up her conscience. For that she had given up her own truth!

It was unbelievable. But he had sat here and listened to it.

He had heard her lie simply and calmly in answer to a question which meant life or death to him. She had known that. She could not have escaped knowing it if she had tried. There was no way in which she could have fooled herself or been persuaded into believing that she was not lying or that she was not taking from him his last hope of life.