The Sacrificial Altar

He had written the confession in French and English. He addressed one manuscript to the leading morning newspaper of San Francisco, the other to the literary critic of a great journal in Paris. Then he took a large key from a drawer of his desk and left the house. He dropped the two packages in a mail-box at the foot of the hill, and waited long and wearily for a car. They were infrequent at this hour, but he felt too tired to walk to the outskirts of the city. The night was chill and the fog was dense, but when the car finally came along he took a seat on the front of the dummy, for he dreaded the lights within, of meeting some one, perhaps, who would recognize and speak to him.

When he reached the end of the line he was shivering, and involuntarily he pulled his coat-collar about his ears and thrust his hands into his pockets as he walked rapidly up the hill to the Catholic cemetery.

He knew all the cemeteries on Lone Mountain well, for he often walked there, reading the names on the shafts and mausoleums and reconstructing the history of early San Francisco, of which the dust below had been so fiery an impulse. Henri Bac I. had built a mausoleum here, too, for he felt that as a pioneer he should have a permanent resting-place among the dead who had made history. He had, indeed, been a member of the two great Vigilance Committees, had played his part on more than one occasion as an active citizen who could do somewhat more for the swaddling city than teach its adventurous spirits how to distinguish between stomach and palate.

Louis, who had always been a dutiful son, had come out here every Sunday in all weathers and placed a wreath on the little altar in the dim interior of the vault, knelt automatically for a moment beneath the shelves behind which his parents were sealed.

He unlocked the heavy door; then, as it swung slowly inward, he turned and glanced down over the sleeping city he had loved in his own impersonal fashion. The fog moved like the tides of the sea whose boom came faintly to him. Here and there a shaft from an arc-light shone faintly through, but for the most part San Francisco was the black depths of a ghostly inland sea.

Above him the night was clear. The cross on Calvary stood out like ebony against the glittering sky, a gay and spangled sky as if all the great planets and all the little courtesan stars up there were ready for a night of carnival and laughing at gloomy old Earth.

For a moment Louis hesitated. He was a Catholic by training, and to certain crimes the Church is merciless. But he reasoned that he no more had the right to call himself a Catholic than to persist as a mortal. He went into the vault and swung the heavy door behind him. It clanged faintly, but there was no one to hear.

Thank you for reading this short story. We invite you to buy this book.