" His father never mentioned
his name.
Then he went into "The Church," sailed for Canada, idled about for
a few weeks, when one of the great colonial bishops, not knowing
what else to do with him, packed him off north as a missionary to
the Indians.
And, after four years of disheartening labor amongst a
semi-civilized people, came this girl Lydia into his life. This
girl of the mixed parentage, the English father, who had been swept
northward with the rush of lumber trading, the Chippewa mother, who
had been tossed to his arms by the tide of circumstances. The girl
was a strange composition of both, a type of mixed blood, pale,
dark, slender, with the slim hands, the marvellously beautiful
teeth of her mother's people, the ambition, the small tender
mouth, the utter fearlessness of the English race. But the
strange, laughless eyes, the silent step, the hard sense of honor,
proclaimed her far more the daughter of red blood than of white.
And, with the perversity of his kind, Cragstone loved her; he
meant to marry her because he knew that he should not. What a
monstrous thing it would be if he did! He, the shepherd of this
half-civilized flock, the modern John Baptist; he, the voice of the
great Anglican Church crying in this wilderness, how could he wed
with this Indian girl who had been a common serving-maid in a house
in Penetanguishene, and been dismissed therefrom with an accusation
of theft that she could never prove untrue? How could he bring
this reproach upon the Church? Why, the marriage would have no
precedent; and yet he loved her, loved her sweet, silent ways,
her listening attitudes, her clear, brown, consumptive-suggesting
skin.
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