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 protegee Gonji 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 his heart.
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 mind at 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, but his 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.
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● 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.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).