“And who could those two have been?” inquired Master Simon.
“One was this dear, good lad here, Roger Bardwell, who strayed thither half dead with hunger and weariness and has been my helper and benefactor ever since. And the other—ah, what a strange fellow he was! The Indians brought him to me after that fearful winter storm some years since; they had found him wandering in the forest nearly crazed from starvation and exposure. He lay there in my hut for many weeks, always crying out that I should not come nigh him, that he would take no favours from an infidel Papist’s hands and that Heaven’s vengeance would fall upon me did I not change my faith before it was too late.”
Margeret stirred a little and looked up anxiously at her father. What was there so familiar in those last words?
“I had hopes at one time that he would live,” the priest went on, “and night and day I tended him with all the skill I knew. I have often thought of what pain it must have been to him to be nursed by a Jesuit, whose very presence he believed would bring corruption. How he raved of the sins of the world and the fearful punishments that were to overtake the wicked! Ah, could he have lived, as I have, in the peace of the forest, ministering to the simple-hearted Indians, he might have learned that, after all, men know not so much of God as to be able to say freely who is to be condemned and who rewarded. He died, just as Spring was flooding the forest with new life and beauty, but he died as he had lived, still deeming the world a dark, wicked, bitter place. My Indians helped me to bury him under the pines, it was they that brought the white stone upon which we made shift to carve the name he had told us—Jeremiah Macrae. Some day, so I had thought, I would lie there by his side when my own task was laid down forever. I believe that he would not have minded that we should so sleep together through the ages, for I think that he knows by now that salvation is not so narrow and lonely a thing as he had thought, and has learned that a Puritan minister and a Jesuit priest may labour in God’s work side by side.”
“I would that all the world could see as clearly as you,” said Master Simon, with a sigh.