Page:Weird Tales volume 31 number 03.djvu/22

 altar. By such things she had cut herself adrift, she had put herself beyond communion with the righteous which is the blessed company of all the faithful. There was no priest to shrive her sin-encumbered soul, no one to read words of forgiveness and redemption above her lifeless clay. Until some one of her companions in iniquity will perform the service of contrition for her, until the office for the burial of Christian dead is read above her grave, she lies excommunicate and earthbound. She cannot even expiate her faults in Purgatory till forgiveness of sins has been formally pronounced. Sincerely repentant, hell is not for her; unshrived, and with no formal statement of conditional forgiveness, she cannot quit the earth, but must wander here among the scenes of her brief and sadly misspent life. Do we dare withhold our hands to save her from a fate like that?"

Doctor Bentley sipped thoughtfully at his hot Scotch. "There may be something in your theory," he admitted. "I'm not especially strong on doctrine, but I can't believe the fathers of the early church were the crude nincompoops some of our modern theologians call them. They preached posthumous absolution, and there are instances recorded where excommunicated persons who had hovered round the scenes they'd known in life were given rest and peace when absolution was pronounced above their graves. Tell me, is this Balderson sincerely sorry for his misdeeds?"

"I could swear it, mon père."

"Then bring him to the chapel in the morning. If he will make confession and declare sincere repentance, then submit himself to holy baptism, I'll do what you request. It's rather mediæval, but—I'd hate to think that I'm so modern that I would not take a chance to save two souls."

penitential service in the Chapel of the Intercession was a brief but most impressive one. Only Balderson, I and de Grandin occupied the pews, with Doctor Bentley in his stole and cassock, but without his surplice, at the little altar:

" we have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, we have offended against Thy holy laws remember not, Lord, our offenses nor the offenses of our forefathers, neither take Thou vengeance of our sins  we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickednesses; the memory of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable "

After absolution followed the short service ordered for the baptism of adults; then we set out for Shadow Lawns.

Now Doctor Bentley wore his full canonicals, and his surplice glinted almost whiter than the snow that wrapped the mounded graves as he paused beside an unmarked hillock in the Nurmi family plot.

Slowly he began in that low, full voice with which he fills a great church to its farthest corner: "I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. "

It was one of those still winter days, quieter than an afternoon in August, for no chirp of bird or whir of insect sounded. no breath of breeze disturbed the evergreens; yet as he read the opening sentence of the office for the burial of the dead a low wail sounded in the copse of yew and hemlock on the hill, as though a sudden wind moaned in the branches, and I stiffened as a scent was borne across the snow-capped grave mounds. Incense! Yet not exactly incense, either. There was an undertone of fetor in it, a faint, distinctly charnel smell. Balderson was trembling, and despite myself I flinched,