“I fear the will is going. For nearly three years it has been my
continual prayer to Our Father in Heaven that the mind be not taken
before the soul is released, but if----”
As soon as the vicar had read these strange words he rose unsteadily
from the table, went into the study and locked the door. Then kneeling
under a favorite portrait of the boy’s mother, he offered a humble
prayer of thanks. A little afterward, unable to bear the restraint of
four walls, he went out, hatless, into the sunlight of a very perfect
day. Very slowly, yet hardly knowing what he did, he passed through the
vicarage gate, and turned into the steep and narrow path leading to the
village green. Half way up some familiar lines of Milton began to ring
oddly in his ears:
Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
And they were accompanied by an odd phrase he had once heard on the
lips of Gervase Brandon. In the height of a forgotten controversy,
Brandon had said that “for him the image of the spectrum had altered.”
As the phrase now came to the vicar he caught a glimpse of its meaning.
Somehow he perceived a change of mental vision. At that moment he
seemed to walk closer with God than he had ever walked; at that moment
he was in more intimate communion with an adored wife, a beloved son.
Even the sweet upland air and the flow of the sun through the leaves
had a new quality. The feeling of personal loss was yielding to praise
and thanksgiving; never had the vicar been so sure of that loving mercy
upon which his boy had implicitly relied.
Filled with a new, a greater life, he found himself, without knowing
it, on the village green. And then in a flash, as he came to the
priest’s stone, the angle of the spectrum shifted again. He was pierced
by the recognition of a great presence. A voice, faint, far off, yet
clear as the sound of flowing water, touched his ear with such ecstasy
that he looked around to see whence it came. A sky gloriously burnished
with the presence of God alone could have winged it; and as he looked
up, came the words: “And, lo, the heavens opened unto him, and he saw
the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting upon him.”
Thrilled by a joy which was half fear, the vicar leaned against the
stone. And as he did so a rush of wild thoughts swept his mind like a
tide. His eyes grew dark as he saw again a summer twilight and a frail
figure of fantasy kneeling upon the spot to which he was now rooted.
In a series of pictures, a terrible and strange scene was reënacted.
A motor car glided stealthily past the door of the widow’s cottage;
it came round the bend of the road; as it stopped by the edge of the
green, two heavy somber men descended from it, and from his own base
ambush, but a few yards off, he saw them cautiously approach the
kneeling figure.
Again he was the witness of the acts and the words that passed. He saw
the figure rise as they came up; he heard the greeting of the calm,
expecting voice: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they
do.” Again he saw the grim procession move across the grass, he saw the
upward gesture to the God in the sky, which at the moment had revolted
him; and then he saw the car stealthily turn the bend in the track and
fade among the dark-glowing gorse.
A nausea came upon the vicar. Sick with sudden terror, he realized
what he had done. To the fate which his own boy could not face and had
been allowed, as a crowning mercy, to escape, he had himself condemned
a fellow creature without a hearing, and perhaps against the weight
of evidence. By what authority had he immured a fellow citizen in a
living tomb? By what authority had he denied the first and highest of
all sanctions to a human soul? The doom that his own poor lad, with all
his heroism, had not the superhuman courage to meet, this defenseless
villager had embraced in the spirit of a martyr and a saint.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
Again the vicar saw him rise from his knees, and with a wan but happy
smile go forth to a fate by comparison with which the grave was very
kind. Overborne by a sudden passion of illogical remorse, the vicar
sank to his own knees by the stone, on a spot bare of grass, the
fruit, perhaps, of John Smith’s many kneelings in many bygone years.
Broken and bereaved, a lone animal wounded and terrified, he humbly
asked that he might be allowed to meet his wife and his boy in Heaven.
The vicar rose from his knees. Faint and chill of heart, he hardly
cared to look up for a visible answer to his prayer. He was now in
outer darkness. For Thomas Perry-Hennington there was no descent of
the Spirit from the hard sky, glowing with strange beauty. He listened
wildly, yet he could only hear the water flowing by Burkett’s mill.
“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
The living words were spurring him to frenzy. But the soul of man,
naked and shuddering, helpless and lonely, recoiled upon itself with
the fear that there was none of whom to seek forgiveness. For one,
Thomas Perry-Hennington, there was no means of access to the Father. By
an idolatrous act, setting the state above the Highest, he had severed
all communication. In bigotry, arrogance, imperfect faith he had
betrayed the Master; in pharisaic blindness he had crucified the Son of
Man.
Thoughts like these, coming at this moment, were too much for human
endurance; in that direction madness lay. A little while he stood by
the stone, trying to hold on to the thing he called “himself.” And then
a strange desire came upon him to crave the light of one whom he had
traduced. He dare not set his act higher, he dare not state his treason
in other terms; at that moment the will itself forbade his so doing. An
issue was now upon him which reason could not accept. To the inner eye
within the mind itself all was darkness, but looking now with the ear
alone he thought he heard a far, faint voice in the infinite stellar
spaces, a voice telling him to go at once to Wellwood.
Suddenly he turned and trailed off back to the vicarage, like some
hapless, hunted thing of the fields, that flees too madly for hope of
escape. As he half ran down the steep path, his white face gleaming in
the sun, he began to repeat mechanically, in order still to keep in
touch with the central forces:
Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
By the time he had reached the middle of the lane, it came to him that
he was obeying his wife’s voice.
Turning in at the vicarage gate he called across the privet to the
ancient Hobson to leave his roots, and go and put the harness on old
Alice.