THE interview with Dr. Joliffe ruffled the vicar. The repetition of
Brandon’s words was ill-timed, nor was it easy to forgive Brandon
for uttering them. Action had been taken in the public interest and
Mr. Perry-Hennington could not endure a breath of criticism. One way
and another it had cost him a good deal. It was only the inspiration
of a high and pure motive and the fact that he had no personal ax to
grind which had enabled him to carry out the most difficult, the most
delicate, and quite the most thankless task in which he had ever been
involved.
In the vicar’s opinion he had reason to be satisfied with the finesse
he had used; moreover, he had not the slightest doubt that the body
politic, of which Brandon and Joliffe were members, had been laid under
a deep obligation. Certainly he had no need to reproach himself in the
matter. Without exciting remark of any kind, a very undesirable person,
capable of doing infinite mischief, had been placed out of harm’s way.
Officious villagers had been referred to the police; and the vicar
hoped to soften any stab his conscience might sustain in regard to the
widow by defraying the expenses of her funeral out of his own pocket.
In the meantime Brandon had a severe relapse. Any hope of mental
serenity had for a time been destroyed. The cause of his friend weighed
upon him so heavily that at first it seemed he might not recover from
the blow. He mourned him constantly and presently arose the fear that
he was about to die.
In this perilous phase only one thing stood between the sufferer and
the death which in many ways would have been welcome. The will to
live was not evoked in him by wife or children or a sense of duty to
society; in the last resort it was simply that he felt a sacred task
had been laid upon him. His poor friend had been put out of life by the
kind of stupidity against which the world has always been defenseless,
and from which history is the only court of appeal. But the sense of
a great wrong, which henceforward it must be his life’s business to
redress, somehow gave Brandon the motive power to continue an existence
which had become almost unendurable.
He must find the means to vindicate his friend. Lying _in extremis_,
with the life of the senses slipping out of his grasp, the idea
produced a miraculous rebirth. It contained a germ of the central
energy, faint and discreet, yet with the power to imbue a shattered
existence with the will to be.
As soon as the new purpose took shape in his mind, he grew visibly
stronger, in outward mental life at least. By now he had small hope or
none that he would ever recover the use of his legs, but the sense of
utter, futile weariness which had fastened upon him began to pass. And
the new power came from a source deep down in the soul, of which for
the first time he gained apperception.
For several weeks after the mischief had been wrought, Brandon declined
to see the vicar. He did not impugn his sincerity. Too well he knew
the nature of the man to believe that he had acted from a trivial or
unworthy motive. But it seemed impossible for one of Brandon’s liberal
mind to forgive crass wrongheadedness raised to the nth power.
Now that the will to live had been evoked, Brandon clung with pathetic
tenacity to any frail straw of hope of physical recovery. He felt
within himself how slight they were, but as the weeks of slow torment
passed he never quite gave up. All the resources of modern science
were at his service and they were used to the full. No known means was
neglected of restoring the vital current to the outraged organism.
Massage and radiant heat were applied, electricity was shot through
his skin, he submitted to the newest serums, the latest treatments, but
the unhappy weeks went by and the sufferer remained dead from the waist
down.
Indeed, the sole effect was that at last he was tempted to ask himself
whether he had been wise in the first instance to drive the will to
its almost superhuman effort to retain physical life. Time and again
in these weeks of darkness that doubt recurred to him. The act of
despotism of which he had been the witness, against which he had
struggled with all the power he still possessed, weighed upon him
increasingly. Somehow the whole miserable affair seemed to involve all
the sources of his faith.
What was that faith? He had gone to the wars of his country in the
spirit of a modern Crusader, of one not expecting too much from the
world or his fellow men, of one who was inclined to regard almost
the whole of the Bible as a legend, but yet a staunch believer in
the essential decency of his own nation, his own people, and imbued
with the idea that somewhere in the universe there was a God of
Righteousness who was striving to create Himself.
But now a wound had been dealt him in the house of his friends.