Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/297

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THE WOMAN
285

must suffer to escape the kagige kotagitowin—the damnation forever.

There was much about this which the boy of course could not understand, but of that which he comprehended so much seemed unfair that, as soon as he could read the Enamiad Gegikimind, he searched the Scriptures for hope for himself. Yet it was sternness and austerity which the good fathers enjoined,—which they were obliged to enjoin particularly in those matters of morality with which the seventh commandment is concerned. So, although Barney left Azen Mabo's house early in his adolescence, yet he carried with him the effect of the Indian dreads and superstitions. When he thought of his mother as dead, he trembled at the fear of her having died perhaps without full kotagiidisowin,—penance for sins confessed; and reproach for his parent's evident sin was kept alive in Barney's soul. Many a time, when lonely and brooding, the little boy considered preparing for Holy Orders and subjecting himself to the disciplines and severities of the Franciscans; and, in certain moods of self-examination, this thought clung to him up to the year when the war called him.

When he had come through the war morally clean—for in spite of the women in France and England who gladly gave themselves to such as he, Barney came through clean—he had imagined himself as perhaps absolved at last from effects of that sin in which he had been born; and his meeting with Ethel had appeared to him as evidence of his absolution. Their encounter seemed arranged, not by themselves, but by souls in Heaven; at once, when he told her about himself, she had disregarded all thought of damnation of him; and he had loved,—loved with such passion as