The Shepherd of the North

by Richard Aumerle Maher

What had she seen? What was that thing written so clear in his eyes that she could read and tell him of it that day on the road from French Village?

He would go to her and ask her. She should tell him what was that thing she had seen. He would make her tell. He would have it from her!

But, no. Where was the use? It would only 326 bring them to that whole, impossible, bewildering business of the confessional. And he did not want to hear any more of that. His heart was sick of it. It had made him suffer enough. And he did not doubt now that Ruth had suffered equally, or maybe more, from it.

Where could he go? He must tell this thing. He must talk of it to some one! That resistless, irrepressible impulse for confession, that call of the lone human soul for confidence, was upon him. He must find some other soul to share with him the burden of this conviction. He must find some one who would understand and to whom he could speak.

Jeffrey Whiting was not subtle. He could not have analysed what this craving meant. He only knew that it was very real, that his soul was staggering alone and blind under the weight of this thing.

There was one man who would understand. The man who had looked upon the faces of life and death these many years, the man of strange comings and goings, the Bishop who had set him on the way of all this, and who from what he had said in his house in Alden, that day so long ago when all this began, may have foreseen this very thing, the man who had heard Rafe Gadbeau cry out his guilt; that man would understand. He would go to him.

He wrote a note which his mother would find in 327 the morning, and slipping quietly out of the house he saddled his horse for the ride to Lowville.

“I came because I had to come,” Jeffrey began, when the Bishop had seated him. “I don’t know why I should come to you. I know you cannot do anything. There is nothing for any one to do. But I had to tell some one. I had to say it to somebody.”

“I sat that day in the courtroom,” he went on as the Bishop waited, “and thought that the whole world was against me. It seemed that everybody was determined to make me guilty––even you, even Ruth. And I was innocent. I had done nothing. I was bitter and desperate with the idea that everybody was trying to make me out guilty, when I was innocent. I had done nothing. I had not killed a man. I told the men there on the mountain that I was innocent and they would not believe me. Ruth and you knew in your hearts that I had not done the thing, but you would not say a word for me, an innocent man.”

“It was that as much as anything, that feeling that the whole world wanted to condemn me knowing that I was innocent, that drove me on to the wild attack upon the railroad. I was fighting back, fighting back against everybody.