CHAPTER XVIII
Save for the moving of the trees in the early winter air, there was only silence on the hill, where stood the little mission house, but a ghostly moon pushed its rays through the boughs of the trees, glistened on the panes of the church and silvered the interior.
The rows of dark pews shone up stiffly in the moonlit church, and a great white beam glimmered across the pulpit, shaped as a cross.
Azalea crawled on her hands and knees up one of the aisles of the church. She was moaning to herself as she made her painful journey along.
“—to touch his God!” she said, “for even the evil are forgiven.”
Now she was before the little pulpit, her weak hands upon it. She sighed at its contact, and a feeling of intense calm and rest seemed to flood her being, but she could not support herself against the pulpit structure, even upon her knees, so weak was she and so nauseating the pain in her head. Gradually she sank downward, lower and lower, till her face touched the floor. Then she spread out her arms, and lay very still, face downward.
It was past midnight when Richard Verley came back to the door of the little mission house. His old-time beggar protegeeGonji accompanied him. From the boy the minister had learned much—all, indeed—concerning his wife. He knew now what had befallen her so soon after the birth of her child: her homeless condition, her vain efforts to obtain work, her wanderings and terrible privations, and then the gossip of the town. People whispered that as a wraith she had returned to Sanyo and had passed as a shadow into the house of Matsuda Isami. The feelings of the husband can be imagined. Such was the temperament of Richard Verley that, even with the knowledge in his mind of her probable relations to the man Isami, there was no thought of blame for her in hisheart. Indeed, the strongest emotion that swayed him was remorse of the deepest and bitterest. He should never have left her. He should have either forced her to accompany him or have remained in Japan with her.
His first impulse now was that of the man-brute, the desire to kill with his own hands the one who had injured him and his so terribly. But a calmer, higher instinct triumphed—the instinct of the man of strong spirituality to turn to that One who had never failed him in time of stress. Something seemed to force his footsteps toward his little house of prayer. So dazed and numb was the condition of his mindat this time, however, that he did not even notice when he came to the door of the church that it was no longer nailed to and boarded up.
Richard Verley entered the church alone. The boy was afraid to enter. He did not know what evil spirit might be lurking in the night within the white priest’s temple. He stretched himself out on the doorstep of the church and went to sleep there.
It was very dark within now, for the moon was gone. For a moment the minister paused irresolute. Then his hand touched the side of a seat. He sat down mechanically. Suddenly he covered his face with his hands, and tried to pray, buthis prayer was wordless. For how long he sat thus he could not have told. It might have been the length of half the night, for when he uncovered his eyes again things seemed changed about him. The faint glimmer of the dawn lent its first grey light. He looked about him—at the melancholy church interior, his eyes traveling slowly and painfully over the dusty pews and then upward toward the little pulpit cross where he had spoken so often. A patch of color caught his eyes and held them. He thought he dreamed and turned his glance away, but, fascinated, his eyes came back to that bit of color there at the foot of the pulpit.
He started up with a loud cry. A moment only, and he was beside her, his trembling hands touching her. Something stirred upon her back and he saw the round head of the baby. Its eyes were wide open now and looking at him with interest. Like most Japanese babies, it was a grave, mute little mite, but its eyes were large and, like his own mother’s, blue in color. He knew it for his own child, though he could not see the face of the mother who lay so very still. Some blessed instinct guided his staggering feet to the door. He aroused the sleeping Gonji, and put into his arms the child. Then he went back into the church.
She had told him in those other days, so many times, that his voice would waken her from the very sleep of death. When her eyes looked up into his face she would not close them though they ached with weariness. She even smiled at his broken repetitions of her name.
“I do not know how it is you are here,” he said, “but here you are—in my arms, my wife, and it is enough.”
Her voice was weak, but inexpressibly sweet.
“It is enough,” she said.
Transcriber’s Notes:Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.Typographical errors were silently corrected.Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only when a predominant form was found in this book.