A great light of joy woke upon Reuben’s face. “Then he will save the rest,” he exclaimed triumphantly.
“But you,” the priest asked—“do you forgive him?”
“I?” repeated Reuben with a puzzled look. “O father! it was very wrong of me; I was angry with him at first. But it was my fault, really, though Esther never blamed me; I was a poor fool, father, or I never should have brought her here.”
And so Reuben Armstrong took to himself his lifelong title humbly—so poor a fool, indeed, that he had forgotten that he had anything to forgive his fellow-men.
The next day Reuben saw his
whole flock of little ones gathered into the Good Shepherd’s fold; and then the Holy Sacrifice was offered up, and Reuben’s soul was strengthened by the Divine Food.
The Doctor had sullenly refused to be present. Reuben found him, on his return, lying face downwards on the cabin floor, the picture of despair.
“There is no hope,” he said when Reuben knelt by him, and begged him to have recourse to confession. “I want drink—nothing but drink. I must have it. I cannot save myself.”
“That’s true enough,” said Reuben. “You can’t, and I can’t, but God can. You keep saying that I don’t know everything about you, and that nobody does, and that God will never forgive you. But he has sent his priest at last, and you need not be afraid to say anything to him. You must not hide anything, and he has the power to hear it and tell you what God says.”
Like one driven to a last resort, the Doctor turned to the waiting priest, and Reuben in the next room gave thanks and prayed, while, in the place where a saint had made her last confession, this man, who was indeed of “the scum of sinners,” made his first.