“Mercy,” cried the soldier uplifting his hand.

“What mercy did you show her?”

The priest could not see but he could feel.  His hand seized the other’s throat.

“My father,” interposed the nun.  “He has confessed.  God will forgive, even as I.”

“Who are you?” asked the blind priest, fearfully.

“The woman!” cried the dying man shaking off the other’s hand and lifting himself up.

The sight came back to the priest on the instant.  The fierce agony that filled his blinded eyes seemed to give place to the gentle touch of a hand upon them.  He seemed to hear a mighty word—­Ephphatha—­that meant “be opened.”  Light flooded his soul.  Looking up he was aware of two figures.  One of the twain, an old man, gray bearded, was appealing to the other, clad in white raiment and youthful.  And the priest suddenly recalled an old and well-known story of a fellow servant who would not have mercy.

“Father, forgive—­” whispered the man before him.

As the voice of the dying sinner died away in the silence all was dark again.  The priest saw no more, but the horrible pain in his eyes did not return.  Over his torn features came a look of calm.  He lifted his arm.  His wavering hand cut the air in the sign of the cross.

“Absolvo te,” he murmured as he pitched forward dead upon the breast of the dying.

And the woman tenderly covered them over.

[Illustration:  Absolvo te.]

X

The Giver of Life

“He that EATETH of this bread shall live forever”

X

The Giver of Life

Of the five specters in the boat three were without life.  Those whose faint breathing indicated that they had not yet reached the point of death were too weak and indifferent to rid the boat of the bodies of the others.  Ever since the homeward-bound whaler had struck a derelict in a gale of wind north of the Falklands and foundered, this little boat, surviving the shipwreck as by a miracle, had drifted on.

For three weeks in vain they had scanned the horizon for a sail.  Their scanty supply of bread and water had been consumed in ten days.  Thereafter they had nothing.  The baby had died first, next a man whose arm had been broken by a falling spar in the disaster, and then the ship’s cabin boy.  The survivors were a man and a woman.  They were both far gone.  The woman was plainly dying.  The man kept himself up by sheer exercise of will.

Their drifting had been northward toward warmer seas.  It was winter in their home land and, though they knew it not, Christmas day.  There the tropic sun blazed overhead from an absolutely cloudless sky.  There was no vestige of breeze to stir the canvas of the solitary sail or ripple the glassy surface of the smoothed out ocean.  The boat lay still.  Not even the iron man at the helm could have lifted an oar.  It had been dead calm for days.  Speech there was none except in the gravest necessity.  To talk connectedly was impossible.