Charred Wood. Bp. Francis Clement Kelley
was, after all, his only guarantee of independence.
Siberia suited Mark Griffin's present mood, which was to be alone. He had never married, never even been in love, at least, not since boyhood. Of course, that had been mere puppy love. Still, it was something to look back to and sigh over. He liked to think that he could still feel a sort of consoling sadness at the thought of it. He, a timid, dreaming boy, had loved a timid, dreaming girl. Her brother broke up the romance by taunting Mark who, with boyish bashfulness, avoided her after that. Then her parents moved to London and Mark was sent to school. After school he had traveled. For the last ten years England had been merely a place to think of as home. He had been in India, and South America, and Canada—up on the Yukon. He would have stayed there, but somebody suggested that he might be a remittance man. Ye gods! a remittance man with ten thousand pounds a year! And who could have had much more, for Mark Griffin was a master with his pen. His imagination glowed, and his travels had fanned it into flame. Every day he wrote, but burned the product next morning. What was the use? He had plenty to live on. Why write another man out of a job? And who could be a writer with an income of ten thousand pounds a year? But, just the same, it added to Mark Griffin's self-hatred to think that it was the income that made him useless. Yet he had only one real failure checked against him—the one at Oxford. But he knew—and he did not deceive himself—why there had been no others. He had never tried.
But there was one thing in Mark's favor, too. In spite of his wandering, in spite of the men and women of all kinds he had met, he was clean. There was a something in the memory of his mother—and in the memory, too, of that puppy love of his—that had made him a fighter against himself.
"The great courage that is worth while before God," his mother used to say, "is the courage to run away from the temptation to be unclean. It is the only time you have the right to be a coward. That sort of cowardice is true courage."
Besides her sweet face, that advice was the great shining memory he had of his mother, and when he began to wander and meet temptations, he found himself treasuring it as his best and dearest memory of her. True, he had missed her religion—had lost what little he had had of it—but he had kept her talisman to a clean life.
His lack of religion worried him, though he had really never known much about his family's form of it. For that his mother's death, early boarding school, and his father's worse than indifference, were responsible. But as he grew older he felt vaguely that he had missed something the quality of which he had but tasted through the one admonition of his mother that he had treasured. His nature was full of reverence. His soul burned to respond to the call of faith, but something rebelled. He had read everything, and was humble enough to acknowledge that he knew little. He had given up the struggle to believe. Nothing seemed satisfactory. It worried him to think that he had reached such a conclusion, but he was consoled by the thought that many men had been of his way of thinking. He hoped this would prove excuse enough, but found it was not excuse enough for him. Here he was, rich, noble, with the English scales of caste off his eyes, doing nothing, indolent, loving only a memory, indifferent but still seeing a saving something of his mother and his child love in every woman to whom he spoke.
Now something else, yet something not so very different, had suddenly stepped into his life, and he knew it. The something was dressed in white and had stepped out of a tree. It was almost laughable. This woman had come into his dreams. The very sight of her attracted him—or was it the manner of her coming? She was just like an ideal he had often made for himself. Few men meet even the one who looks like the ideal, but he had seen the reality—coming out of a tree. He kept on wondering how long she had been there. He himself had been dreaming in front of the tree an hour before he saw her. Had she seen him before she came out? She had given no sign; but if she had seen him, she had trusted him with a secret. Mark looked at the tree. It was half embedded in the wall. Then he understood. The tree masked a secret entrance to Killimaga.
He was still smiling over his discovery when he heard the voices of the agent and constable. They were coming back, so he dropped into his hiding place in the tall grass.
"Well, Brown," the agent was saying, "I am going to tackle her. I've got to see that face. It's the only way! If I saw it once, I'd know for sure from the photograph they sent me."
"Ye'd better not," advised the constable. "She might be a-scared before—"
"But I've got to be sure," interrupted the agent.
"Aw, ye're sure enough, ain't ye? There's the photygraft, and I seed her."
"But she slipped me in Boston, and I nearly lost the trail. I can't take chances on this job—it's too important—and I've got to report something pretty soon. That damn veil! She always has it on."
"Yep, she had it when she come down here, too, and when she tuk the house. All right, see her if ye can! Ye're the jedge. She's coming around the bend of the road now." The constable was peering out from his hiding place among the bushes.
"Is the priest with her?" asked the agent.
"He's gone back to the village. She didn't go that far—she seldom does. But he goes to see her; and she goes to his church on Sundays."
"I wonder if he knows anything?"
"Trust that gent to know most everything, I guess." The constable was very positive. "Father Murray's nobody's fool," he added, "and she won't talk to nobody else. I'll bet a yearlin' heifer he's on; but nobody could drag nothing out of him."
"I know that," said the agent. "I've been up there a dozen times, and I've talked with him by the hour—but always about books; I couldn't get him to talk about anything else. Here she is! Go on back."
The constable disappeared behind the bushes, and his companion stood out in the little clearing to wait.
The woman saw him; Mark, watching from the long grass, thought she hesitated. Then she dropped her veil and came on. The agent stepped forward, and the woman seemed distressed. What the agent intended to do Mark could not guess, but he made up his mind at once as to what he would do himself. He arose and, just as the agent met the lady, Mark's arm went through his and he—not of his own volition—turned to face the ocean.
"Hello, Saunders!" Mark said heartily. "Who'd expect to see you here, with no one near to buy rare editions?"
Saunders looked at him with annoyance, but Mark was friendly. He slipped his arm out of the agent's and slapped him on the shoulder.
"Look out at that sea, you old money-grabber. There's a sight for your soul. Did you ever think of the beauty of it? Such a day!—no wonder you're loafing. Oh! I beg your pardon, Madam. I am in your way."
Keeping Saunders' back to the lady, Mark stepped aside to let her pass. Saunders could not even look back, as she walked quickly behind them. The agent stammered a reply to Mark's unwelcome greeting before he turned. But it was too late, for Mark heard the click that told him that the tree had closed. He looked for the constable, to see if he had been watching her and had discovered the secret door; but the constable was leisurely walking toward the village.
CHAPTER II
MONSIGNORE
As the two men walked along, Mark Griffin, tall and of athletic build, offered a sharp contrast to the typical American beside him. With his gray tweeds, Mark, from his cap to shoes, seemed more English than Irish, and one instinctively looked for the monocle—but in vain, for the Irish-gray eyes, deep-set under the heavy straight brows, disdained artifice as they looked half-seriously, though also a bit roguishly, out upon the world. The brown hair clustered in curls above the tanned face with its clear-cut features, the mouth firm under the aquiline nose, the chin slightly squared—the face of