“‘You’ll hear the wild birds singin’ beneath a brighter sky,’The roof-tree of your home, dear, it will be grand and high;But you’ll hunger for the hearthstone where a child you used to lie,You’ll be comin’ back, my darlin’.”’
During these words Shon’s face ran white, then red; and now he stepped inside the door like one in a dream, and the girl’s face was lifted to his as though he had called her. “Mary—Mary Callen!” he cried. His arms spread out, then dropped to his side, and he fell on his knees by the table facing her, and looked at her with love and horror warring in his face; for the remembrance that she had been with Pierre was like the hand of the grave upon him. Moving not at all, she looked at him, a numb despondency in her face. Suddenly Shon’s look grew stern, and he was about to rise; but Father Corraine put a hand on his shoulder, and said: “Stay where you are, man—on your knees. There is your place just now. Be not so quick to judge, and remember your own sins before you charge others without knowledge. Listen now to me.”
And he spoke Mary Callen’s tale as he knew it, and as she had given it to him, not forgetting to mention that she had been told the thing which had occurred in Pipi Valley.
The heroic devotion of this woman, and Pretty Pierre’s act of friendship to her, together with the swift panorama of his past across the seas, awoke the whole man in Shon, as the staunch life that he had lately led rendered it possible. There was a grave, kind look upon his face when he rose at the ending of the tale, and came to her, saying:
“Mary, it is I who need forgiveness. Will you come now to the home you wanted”? and he stretched his arms to her....
An hour after, as the three sat there, the door of the other room opened, and Pretty Pierre came out silently, and was about to pass from the hut; but the priest put a hand on his arm, and said:
“‘Where do you go, Pierre?”
Pierre shrugged his shoulder slightly:
“I do not know. ‘Mon Dieu!’—that I have put this upon you!—you that never spoke but the truth.”
“You have made my sin of no avail,” the priest replied; and he motioned towards Shon McGann, who was now risen to his feet, Mary clinging to his arm. “Father Corraine,” said Shon, “it is my duty to arrest this man; but I cannot do it, would not do it, if he came and offered his arms for the steel. I’ll take the wrong of this now, sir, and such shame as there is in that falsehood on my shoulders. And she here and I, and this man too, I doubt not, will carry your sin—as you call it—to our graves, without shame.”
Father Corraine shook his head sadly, and made no reply, for his soul was heavy. He motioned them all to sit down. And they sat there by the light of a flickering candle, with the door bolted and a cassock hung across the window, lest by any chance this uncommon thing should be seen. But the priest remained in a shadowed corner, with a little book in his hand, and he was long on his knees. And when morning came they had neither slept nor changed the fashion of their watch, save for a moment now and then, when Pierre suffered from the pain of his wound, and silently passed up and down the little room.
The morning was half gone when Shon McGann and Mary Callen stood beside their horses, ready to mount and go; for Mary had persisted that she could travel—joy makes such marvellous healing. When the moment of parting came, Pierre was not there. Mary whispered to her lover concerning this. The priest went to the door of the but and called him. He came out slowly.
“Pierre,” said Shon, “there’s a word to be said between us that had best be spoken now, though it’s not aisy. It’s little you or I will care to meet again in this world. There’s been credit given and debts paid by both of us since the hour when we first met; and it needs thinking to tell which is the debtor now, for deeds are hard to reckon; but, before God, I believe it’s meself;” and he turned and looked fondly at Mary Callen.
And Pierre replied: “Shon McGann, I make no reckoning close; but we will square all accounts here, as you say, and for the last time; for never again shall we meet, if it’s within my will or doing. But I say I am the debtor; and if I pay not here, there will come a time!” and he caught his shoulder as it shrunk in pain of his wound. He tapped the wound lightly, and said with irony: “This is my note of hand for my debt, Shon McGann. Eh, bien!”
Then he tossed his fingers indolently towards Shon, and turning his eyes slowly to Mary Callen, raised his hat in good-bye. She put out her hand impulsively to him, but Pierre, shaking his head, looked away. Shon put his hand gently on her arm. “No, no,” he said in a whisper, “there can be no touch of hands between us.”
And Pierre, looking up, added: “C’est vrai. That is the truth. You go—home. I got to hide. So—so.” And he turned and went into the hut.
The others set their faces northward, and Father Corraine walked beside Mary Callen’s horse, talking quietly of their future life, and speaking, as he would never speak again, of days in that green land of their birth. At length, upon a dividing swell of the prairie, he paused to say farewell.
Many times the two turned to see, and he was there, looking after them; his forehead bared to the clear inspiring wind, his grey hair blown back, his hands clasped. Before descending the trough of a great landwave, they turned for the last time, and saw him standing motionless, the one solitary being in all their wide horizon.
But outside the line of vision there sat a man in a prairie hut, whose eyes travelled over the valley of blue sky stretching away beyond the morning, whose face was pale and cold. For hours he sat unmoving, and when, at last, someone gently touched him on the shoulder, he only shook his head, and went on thinking. He was busy with the grim ledger of his life.
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