"I found him stretched out on the bank-ice, awaiting me as I paddled up-stream toward the bend."
"Then he was coming back. God must have met him down there on the Forbidden River and have spoken with him face to face; he could not endure His voice, so he fled. Oh, to come back at such a season, when the river was in flood, he must have been terribly afraid. He must have clambered his way up-stream, all those hundred miles, running by the bank. Père Antoine, you know many things, what kind of words were those, do you suppose, that God spoke to Spurling?"
"The kind of words which God always speaks to men; He told him the truth about himself."
"The truth about himself? There are few who could endure to hear that."
"Yes, He would accuse him with a question, I think."
"Because that is the way in which God usually speaks to men. He asked Adam a question, and Adam hid himself; he asked Cain a question, and Cain became a vagabond in the earth."
They sat in silence awhile, and then Granger said, "And if God were to speak to me, what question would He ask?"
"I think he would say, 'John Granger, by how much are you better than Spurling, whom you condemn?'"
"You are right; yes, I think He would say that. Even I have asked myself that question before to-day."
"You did not ask yourself; it was God's voice."
"And I could give no answer to what He said. Père Antoine, before we met, I had often wondered what I would say to Spurling should we meet again. I had planned all manner of kindly phrases to make him again my friend; but I had thought of him as coming to me prosperous, with the approval of the world. When he came to me in poverty, asking help, in peril of his life for a sin which had been almost mine, I turned him away. He had chosen me out from among all men between Winnipeg and the Klondike, as the only one to whom he could safely go for help; and I turned him away. I see it clearly now; God sent to me this man whom I had wished to murder, when he had performed my crime, that, by endangering my life for his, I might cleanse myself. When all men had failed him, he and God expected that I, at least, would understand. But for Mordaunt, I might have had to flee as he fled, changed by the raising of a gun and hasty pulling of a trigger into a Judas to all that is best; I might have had to support within me his utter solitariness and agony of mind, and have been compelled to see myself as debased throughout and forever by a single, momentary act. How he must have suffered! I shall fear to die now; till now I have been afraid only of life."