BIOGRAPHICAL
THE lustre of the rain was over the grey lochs and green Hebrides.
The broad sound that stretched between the Island of Oig and the
mainland was crinkled in furrows, on whose torn edges the foam-spit
flickered like driving snowflakes. Whenever the indigo folds of the
rolling rain parted for a minute the white beaches of Kesteven gleamed
out like a picked bone. Away to the southward, where the fishing-boats
were slowly reaching round the Mull of Oig, their taut sails glistened
like new-washed tiles in the sunshine; then, as they twisted about
and came up into the wind, the light emptied out of their sails like
water being spilt, and each boat in turn became a murky phantom gliding
forward along leaden grooves.
When the rain-wreaths closed round again, the mainland was blotted out
with its hills and pine-forests, and the fishing-boats were no longer
anything but blurred hints of things behind a screen. The mist wrapped
the Island of Oig round with a great stillness, as though it had been
removed a thousand miles off into the midst of the sea.
When at last the heavy cloud phalanxes broke and drifted overhead, and
the lochs and isles lay in clear day, something new had crossed into
the magic ring of the horizon.
Down in the south-east, in the far-off corner of the landscape, where
the pale rose-purple of the hills melted into the dark slate-purple
of the waves, a low black smudge had come like a flake of soot on a
glorious stained-glass window. Seen at first as a mere speck on the
picture, it swiftly spread and grew till it became a great dingy smear
trailing across the heavens. And there was something about this new
presence in the landscape which made it seem strange and hostile to
the rest. It was as though a harsh, unexpected note had been struck in
the middle of a symphony. All the other things there--the clouds and
the sunlight, the hills and the sea--seemed to have grown used to one
another during the ages, and to keep up a stately accord together; but
this smoke giant forced himself in amongst them, like an upstart that
had not learnt their ways--an ugly gnome of the underworld breaking
into the haunts of the fairies and the nixies.
Beneath the inky banner a small black steamer lifted its hull above the
wave-line and came on obstinately, beating defiance with its paddles to
the mother elements. The fishing-boats that for thousands of years had
put in and out from the little haven of Oig had never done aught but
coax the elemental forces in order to turn them to service. For them
the winds and the tides had been instruments on which they searched,
as it were, for the right chords. But this masterful intruder snapped
the strings in careless discord; compared with the others, it seemed
to be a burglar breaking the locks of Nature with a crowbar instead of
opening them with a key.
Fussing and fretting as it came, the steamboat struck right through
the fleet of fishing-boats, and hurried on. It churned its way noisily
into the harbour, driving small rowing-boats to right and left like
frightened birds, and took up its berth against the pier with the air
of an invading column taking up its quarters in a surrendered town. At
the same time everything seemed to wake up to meet it: the old men who
leant all day against the harbour wall started out of their dreams to
handle the ropes flung to them from the steamer’s deck; the harbour
master and the factor of the company hastened along the quay, and all
the folk of the little town issued from their houses and swarmed down
to the water’s edge. The whole Island of Oig roused itself from its six
days’ peace, and began to bustle for its life.
Having taken fast hold of the pier with its rope tentacles, the
masterful black monster rapped out a wooden gangway, down which there
walked quickly a passenger who looked as much estranged from the
surroundings as the floating machine which had transported him from the
mainland.
The strangeness was not so much in his black clothes as in his gait and
bearing. He walked jerkily, with short, quick steps, casting glances
to right and left through his spectacles, as though he were moving
through a crowd, on the lookout for hindrances. His feet struck the
ground in the helpless, violent fashion of one who wore boots and used
his feet merely as the ferrules of his legs on the pavement, instead of
as claws to grasp the ground with. The muscles of his neck had suffered
a similar atrophy; a long course of high collars and top-heavy hats had
drilled his head into a fixed pose, and it moved on the socket of the
neck stiffly and jerkily within certain narrow limits. That his eyes
had also become cramped by gazing at books instead of fields and clouds
was shown plainly enough, for this man of the town wore glasses. He had
only to open his mouth to speak, and you saw that his very teeth were
no longer Nature’s handiwork.
The townsman’s speech was as outlandish in the Island of Oig as were
his dress and gait. He stopped half-way down the pier, before a group
of boys, who had left their play to come and see the steamer, and put a
question in English.
“Can one of you boys direct me to the house of Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”
Now, nearly everyone on the Island of Oig bore the name of Gilderoy;
and this was all the more noteworthy because Gilderoy was not their
real name, but one which the whole clan to which the islanders belonged
had taken to hide their own, in order to escape the enmity of other
and more powerful clans on the mainland, which had sworn to wipe them
out. This wholesale exchange had taken place more than three hundred
years before, and only a few of the very old islanders, living in the
most out-of-the-way corners of the isle, any longer remembered what
their real name was; and they were not believed by the rest, because
the story sounded so strange beside the sober narratives of events told
in the books written by people in Edinburgh, and called the “History of
Scotland.” Therefore, though the _Pax Britannica_ was now established
in Oig, the inhabitants still clung to their cloak-name, so that all
of them but those whose families had come into the island since the
sixteenth century called themselves Gilderoy. And of these Gilderoys
every third man had been baptized Duncan, because Duncan was the lucky
name of the island, and it was well known that if you were baptized
by that name you could not be drowned, unless the nixies made a
mistake;--though even that was not known to the present generation, who
had been brought up on the Edinburgh books, and who therefore thought
they had their children baptized Duncan because it was the custom.
So when the outlander put his question the boys stood dumb at first,
staring at him and wondering at his stupidity. The invader on his part
wondered at theirs.
“Don’t you speak English?” he demanded crossly, as though ignorance of
that tongue were wrong in itself, a sign of natural depravity which
even the benighted heathen must know in their hearts they ought to be
ashamed of.
The boys seemed to feel the force of the rebuke. They turned their eyes
to one who stood in the forefront of the little group, as if calling on
him to defend them. The leader answered instantly:
“What Duncan Gilderoy is that?”
He spoke the outlander’s tongue as easily as the outlander himself,
though each of them sounded his words in a way that seemed a little
strange in the other’s ears. The man from the mainland crowded his
words in that habit of hurried speech which towns beget. The boy
intoned his words with a slight shrillness caught from the winds and
waves that battle round the Hebrides. The boy had already learnt from
the stranger’s speech that he was an Englishman; the Englishman thought
he learnt from the boy’s that he was not a Scotchman. To the Englishman
a Scotchman was a person who spoke the dialect of old Northumbria. He
had expected to find the islanders of Oig speaking either Gaelic or the
speech of Burns.
“Are you English?” he exclaimed.
The boy flushed darkly.
“No,” he said, and held his tongue.
This time the invader looked at him closer. He was a handsome boy of
eleven or twelve years of age, tall, and rather slender, and although
he wore old, worn clothes, he did not look in the least humble or
ashamed of them, a thing which struck the Londoner’s mind as reckless
and a little bad. Below his kilt of dark green tartan, variegated with
stripes of black and white, the boy’s legs and feet were bare, like
those of his companions. Above the kilt he had on a shabby jacket of
black velvet with tarnished silver buttons, and a round bonnet set on
the back of his black curls made a frame for his face.
The man repeated his first question in another form.
“Do you know Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”
“Do you mean Duncan Gilderoy of the Old House? Or is it the minister?”
asked the boy.
“No, it’s not the minister. He is a farmer, and they told me his house
was just outside the town.”
He said “town,” because he had heard it called that on the steamer. But
his London eye called it “village.” Two rows of squat houses struggling
up from the harbour’s edge to a small kirk just under the ridge of the
hill--that was all he could see.
“Then that is Duncan Gilderoy of the Old House,” put in another of the
boys.
The man turned to him.
“Has he a young gentleman living with him, named Stuart?” he asked.
All eyes were turned to the boy who had been the first to speak. This
boy gave a distrustful, searching glance at the stranger.
“If that is the Duncan Gilderoy you want, I can take you to him,” he
said, rather unwillingly.
“Come on, then.”
The other boys fell back, staring hard, as their comrade walked
off beside the man in the English clothes. The man carried a small
travelling-bag in one hand, and before they had gone many yards he
offered it to his guide.
“Would you like to earn a sixpence?” he said pleasantly.
The boy flushed again and frowned angrily. Then he stopped dead, and,
turning round, shouted back to the group they had just left:
“Here, Jock, carry his bag, and he’ll give you sixpence.”
Jock proved to be the boy who had guessed which Duncan Gilderoy the
stranger wanted. He darted from the rest, and ran up to seize the bag,
and then, having taken possession of it, fell in on the other side of
its owner.
The Londoner felt he had made a mistake of some kind. The boy who had
refused an offer of sixpence commanded his respect. Gazing at him
again, it began to dawn upon him that this bare-footed young Highlander
carried himself with dignity, and that he held up his head in a way
that is not taught in Board-schools. The next moment the boy, aware
that he was being studied, lowered his head with a defensive instinct,
and glanced at the man out of the corner of his dark eyes. The glance
was at once sly and naïve, like that of some bright, wicked bird.
“And what is your name, my boy?” the Englishman asked, with a touch of
middle-class patronage. He could not quite get the bare feet out of his
mind.
“I am Alistair Stuart.”
The stranger uttered a sound of surprise.
“The Stuart who lives with Mr. Duncan Gilderoy?”
“Yes.” The answer came unwillingly again.
“Then you are the boy I have come here for.”
“I knew that,” said Stuart. And a slightly cunning look came into his
eyes.
The man was baffled. He could not quite make up his mind whether the
boy had been playing a practical joke on him from the first, or had
been merely too dull to explain himself. Londoner-like, he leant a
little towards the second supposition, for he was managing clerk to a
firm of solicitors in Theobald’s Road, and firmly believed that human
nature contained no depths which he had not sounded to their very
bottom. He believed that all men were animated by one supreme motive,
the making of money, that they were distracted and impeded in their
progress towards the goal by the counter-attractions of woman and wine,
and that he was the wisest who best withstood these allurements, and
kept his gaze steadily fixed on that yellow bull’s-eye of endeavour. He
regarded the law as the rules of the game, and knew to a hair exactly
how far it was possible to go without breaking them. There was only one
irrational element in the man’s life: he was a Wesleyan, and holding it
for certain that the doctrine of that sect amounted to an immediate
communication to himself from his Maker, of whom he was a good deal
afraid, he paid in reluctantly but largely to the Church funds, which
he regarded as a species of blackmail levied by God on business men.
The three walked up through the narrow street together. The street was
paved with cobble-stones, and ascended in layers or great steps, with
one or more houses to a step. The houses themselves would have been
called hovels in London, and looking at them, the law-clerk considered
that he was walking through a slum. He wondered almost mournfully how
human creatures could submit to pass their lives in such miserable
conditions. The sight of the bare-footed lads and lasses with their
red cheeks and shapely legs woke actual pity in his breast; for he was
naturally kind, and his kindness could only find expression in the
benevolent wish to take control of all these lives which he understood
so little, and shape them into the image of his own.
Stuart had been looking forward to the coming of this man ever since
he could remember. He had always known that Duncan Gilderoy was only
his foster-father, and that his life would not be lived out on Oig.
They had told him that his father and mother lived in France, and
that his father was too ill to have his children with him. He could
not recollect these legendary parents, who were only known to him by
portraits which he religiously cherished, and by letters which came
to him regularly from his mother. His father, from whom he received
only occasional messages, was the object of a devotion that filled his
whole heart; his yearning for that unknown father’s love was one of
those passions of childhood which are never told, and which are never
forgotten. There was more of awe than love in his thoughts about his
mother; she was an Englishwoman, and the tenderness that her letters
expressed was overlaid with pious monitions and references to Bible
texts. He learned that he had an elder brother, James, who was being
educated at a school in England under the casual supervision of the
head of the family, who had never noticed Alistair. At some time or
other--he was doubtful when--the perception had come that the character
of his upbringing was at least partly due to lack of money. The islands
and moorlands, the castles and broad acres that made up the great
inheritance of Trent and Colonsay were all tributary to certain men of
law in London and in Edinburgh, whom the clansmen of Oig hated as a
conquered nation hates the invader encamped upon its soil.
Alistair knew also--for these things were the history and politics of
Oig--that his father stood next in succession to the dukedom, and that
his brother’s favour with the reigning Duke was in right of his exalted
destiny as heir.
Thus the boy, reared in the society of herdsmen and fishers, who were
to him as kinsmen of a lower rank, had had always before his eyes the
vision of the great world in which he was one day to play a part.
Civilization shone for him afar off, as it shines for the native of
some colonial wilderness, in all the hues of hope and wonder. How often
had he climbed to the top of the cliff that overlooked the Sound of
Oig, and laid himself down on the wind-mown grass, looking and longing
for the first peep of that sooty feather which he had taken for the
signal of emancipation. No instinct had ever warned him that the little
noisy packet was a slaveship, the galley of the great Anglo-Roman Raj,
coming to make him captive, and carry him off to be tamed and trained
into a citizen of the Raj, to speak its tongue and wear its dress,
and learn its manners, and its laws, till the innermost pulse of his
being should be timed to the Anglo-Roman time, and the ancient Pictish
blood in his veins should forget its source, and run as if through
Anglo-Roman ducts.
Looking back across his life to this point of departure, it seemed to
Alistair that he had found the clue of his tangled skein, and that he
might in time achieve a complete answer to the riddle of his fate. For
a moment the longing of his heart returned to that green islet in its
grey sea, and he bitterly regretted that he had not been left to live
out his life there among the clansmen whom he loved, and by whom he was
beloved, who esteemed him as a prince among them, and would have still
esteemed and shielded him had he become the outlaw of the Raj. He was
an exile--surely it was this, he told himself--he was an outlander
adrift amongst a race to which he did not belong; which he never could
understand, and by which he never could be understood.
* * * * *
The first great misunderstanding with his captors had come when he was
a boy. There was a Velasquez-looking portrait on the walls of Colonsay
House of a lad of fifteen, long-legged and slim, with eyes like the
night--a night haunted by the slumber of wild beasts that the first
footfall will disturb. The dress of this boy was touched with the
girlish delicacy that betrays a mother’s darling: the collar was of
lace, the jacket was of velvet, the straw hat, thrust back from his
forehead, was costlier than lace or velvet. At night he slept in silk,
in a tapestried chamber. His days were passed within the stately walls,
or in roaming through the glorious demesne, of one of the historic
homes of England, watched over with all the care that love and wealth
could afford.
He had lived with his mother ever since his father’s death. It was not
until she had clasped him in her arms that she had told him of his
loss, and she had never suspected the bitterness of the boy’s grief.
The father whom he had never known remained a sacred memory still, all
the more sacred because his mother never talked to him about the dead.
By this time the old Duke was dead as well, and James had succeeded
him, so that the days of hardship were over, and the inheritance was
being nursed back into something like its former splendour.
A fond yearning to regain some of the lost years of their childhood had
caused their mother to keep both her boys beside her, giving them a
tutor instead of a school. But she had another motive which she tried
to believe was paramount--the desire to bring them early into her own
religious fold.
During four years Alistair had had his mind steeped day after day
in the emotional atmosphere of primitive Christianity. This was his
mother’s native air, and she could not have been brought to believe
that it might be drawn with difficulty and pain by any human creature.
If the knowledge had been forced upon her that such a training was
unwholesome for either of her sons, her universe would have become a
maze without a plan; her God would have been shattered like Dagon.
To both the boys this training came as part of the yoke which age
imposes on youth. Boyhood is always surrendering its secret convictions
at the bidding of authority; the process called education is one long
defeat of the barbarians by the legions. Their mother heard them repeat
the phrases which she had taught them, and believed in her work.
A cold temper and unimaginative mind enabled the elder boy to take this
religion in the formal spirit in which it has been taken by a great
part of mankind for two thousand years. As a theory of the universe
it received his unquestioning assent; as a life-motive it left him
practically untouched. He became the unconscious hypocrite whom the
Gospel was written to make us loathe, and who has governed the Church
ever since the Gospel was written.
On Alistair his mother’s teaching had another effect. A poet’s
sensitiveness on the score of words made him shrink at times from
the familiar language of his mother’s creed. But his temperament
responded readily to the exciting influence of religious emotion, and
the cunning which usually accompanies hysteria taught him to use this
faculty for his own protection. When he had been naughty during the
day--and Alistair was already marked out as the naughty one of the
two brothers--it was his mother’s habit to come into his room after
he had gone to bed, and try to soften him. She knelt beside the bed,
and talked and prayed with him till the boy melted in a confession of
wrongdoing, and the two made it up with kisses and tears.
These scenes had endeared Alistair to his mother, whose tenderness for
her younger son aroused the elder’s secret jealousy. They had been
ruinous to the boy himself, whom they made an emotional debauchee. He
spent his sincerity in spasms of repentance which left him worse than
before. There were yet other consequences: the nervous organization is
a sensitive instrument, which ignorant fingers do not touch for nothing.
For a year past Alistair had inspired his mother with hopes that he was
ripening for the change of mind which she called conversion. He had
become more serious; his gaiety was sometimes dashed with melancholy;
he wrote verses which she treasured up as evidences of the direction
his intelligence was taking. The verses were echoes of the poets whom
she had placed in his hands, and her favourite poets were Miss Havergal
and Dr. Bonar. He had taken to wandering much by himself in the park;
sometimes on returning from these rambles he posed her with strange
questions about the nature of the Deity and the contradictions that
abound in every positive system of the universe.
The mother drew happy auguries. Like Hannah, she dedicated her son
to the Lord, and wrote to the Archbishop who was his godfather, to
interest him in the boy.
All this time one half of life had been carefully hidden from Alistair.
Of the great mystery of life he knew less than an animal knows.
For him, as for all his generation, the divine lore which was once
communicated in solemn temples and amid consecrated groves, which
is still given the character of a revelation among the worshipping
millions beneath the Himalayas, lay under the blight of the great
ascetic frenzy which spread round the Mediterranean zone two thousand
years ago. The temple had long been a stew, the revelation a vulgar
jest bandied about on furtive lips; the groves were cut down, the
torches were blown out, the musical instruments were broken, and the
rite of initiation had passed from the holy places into the sewers. The
road of darkness was esteemed the road of safety; and Alistair walked
upon it in ignorance alike of the law of Heaven and of the taboo of
man.
The Garden of Eden is like that flying island of Arabian geography
which descends unawares in front of the adventurer, and tempts him
to tread its enamelled turf, surrendering his senses to the hymeneal
music of its birds, and the perfume of its myriad flowers. The earth
was changed for Alistair by a keeper’s daughter, a girl of his own
age, with a face fair as an apple-blossom, in whose heart the seed of
ambition had been early sown by a vain mother’s hand. All through one
summer-tide they met by stealth among the woods of Trent; while she,
intoxicated by the young lord’s notice, listened with uncomprehending
ears to that passionate romance which youth pours out at the first
touch of love: and for him the sunshine sprinkled all the air with
orange-blossoms through the green network overhead, the silver
birch-stems rose like rejoicing fountains in the glimmering shade,
the hum of insects lapped his enamoured ear like the vague music of a
shell, the very ground distilled a rapturous scent, and all his pulses
sang within him as his life swept into the great throb of the universal
world.
The retribution which followed on discovery tortured him still in
the remembrance. What such a discovery must have cost a mother like
his, he could not gauge. He only knew that every sacred feeling in
his own breast had been outraged, the innermost sanctuary had been
profaned, the delicate blossoms had been uprooted and trampled in the
mire. He had a recollection of hideous scenes, of questions that were
intolerable insults, of a visit from the Archbishop, who came too late
to mediate, and, finally, of a term of penal servitude passed in an
institution abroad, from which Alistair returned a Roman Catholic.
In his mother’s eyes this was a moral bankruptcy. Fresh influences were
brought to bear on the perverted one; the rest of his youth was passed
in drifting from one guardianship to another, under a perpetual cloud,
and manhood found him without faith and without a career.
That his mother had loved him throughout Alistair knew well, though
even he did not know how much she loved him. Perhaps the love between
them had been strengthened by the tragedy of the past. It seemed to
Alistair now to have been the old story of the hen that has hatched
out a duckling from the shell. He thought of his mother with a painful
mingling of wrath and tenderness, believing her to have been cruel to
him, and knowing that she had been cruel to herself for his sake. The
mother whom his instinct taught him to demand was one of those mothers
of the passionate races, who live only to be the slaves of their sons,
to hear their confessions, to soothe their remorse, to abet them in
their worst crimes. His grievance against his own mother was that she
had not taken him for what he was. The changeling had been tormented
in the hope of giving it a human soul.
When he came of age he took the problem out of her hands. “You do not
understand me,” he told her one day; “I must live my own life.”
His brother, Trent, had granted him an allowance of a thousand a year,
which his tradesmen raised to five thousand. The contents of every shop
in London were at the command of the brother of the Duke of Trent and
Colonsay, on condition that the brother of the Duke paid double for
them. The shopkeepers began by cheating him, as though they foresaw
that he would end by cheating them.
Stuart hardly knew that he was extravagant. Most of the ways in which
he spent money were ways in which he heard other men praised for
spending it. He collected miniatures; he bought old cabinets, which
were repaired for him by skilful workmen; he published tiny volumes
with his own poems, in which a strain of southern passion mingled with
the dreamy melancholy of the northern seas. His pleasures were those
of a poet, not a man about town. He lent money to those about him, to
the poets whose names were unknown to the readers of magazines, to the
painters whose pictures were abhorred by the Royal Academy, to the
musicians who could not make bright tunes. Such men have no right to
live; but Stuart fed them at his table, and rejoiced in the incense of
their praise.
It was the difference between Lord Alistair Stuart and the men who
surrounded him which had first fascinated Molly Finucane. He had been
for her a mystery which she was bent on exploring. When after a time
she found that this intellectual side of her lover’s character was out
of her reach, she became jealous, and sought to choke it. It was of
such as she that a certain acquaintance of Stuart’s in those days wrote
that all men kill the thing they love.
In her own way, and with what truth was left to her, Molly Finucane did
love Alistair Stuart. That was the part of it which others could not
be expected to allow for. The life in the house in Chelsea had been
as regular as that of any married pair. The only visitors received
were Stuart’s friends. Molly had discarded all her old associates
as completely as though she had been really married--always with
the exception of Mendes, whom Alistair sometimes asked to dinner.
She had practised what in her eyes was economy, playing the novel
part of housekeeper, enjoying the strange experience of giving
orders to tradesmen, and calculating the prices of household stuff.
Unfortunately, she could not shake off at once the habits of reckless
expense which she had been taught. Her nature had come to crave for
excitement as an opium-eater’s craves for the drug, and the only
amusements she knew were costly ones. The play, for Molly, meant a
brougham, a little dinner at a smart restaurant, a private box, and
a supper at some Bohemian night-club--in short, the spending of five
or ten pounds. She went to the theatres and music-halls very often.
On the nights when she did not go she felt disastrously bored, and
wished herself dead. Then she had to have flowers every day, and a new
bracelet or some such trifle every week, or she felt herself neglected.
She had acquired the fatal idea that the love of men was only to be
gauged by the money they spent on her. An unbroken stream of these
offerings was necessary to convince her that Stuart had not tired of
her.
In reality, it was the attempt to live within his means which destroyed
Lord Alistair’s credit. As soon as his tradesmen heard of the house
in Chelsea they began to send in their bills, and as soon as the
money-lenders heard that he was paying his debts they refused to help
him. It was the Duke of Trent whom they had trusted to, and now they
recollected that the Duke’s estates had come to him heavily mortgaged.
They told Lord Alistair to apply to his brother, and his brother told
him to leave Molly Finucane. Like the rest of the world, he believed
that it was the house in Chelsea which had brought his brother down.
Alistair had retorted by filing his petition. It was to be open war at
last, he told himself. If the head of his house would not heed him,
neither would he heed the honour of the house.
And now, as he stood on the bridge and gazed at the spectacle of the
night, it was borne in upon him more fully and more clearly that he was
not without companions; that his case was not a solitary case, but
that other houses besides the house of Trent and Colonsay had their
younger sons and their failures; that other lands besides Oig had given
their children to be devoured by the minotaur called Civilization; that
his was only one of those broken lives which underlie the pageantry of
empire, like the rubble underneath rich palace walls.
* * * * *
He turned once more to regard the spectacle of the night, and his eye
swept over the two edifices that confronted each other immediately
above the bridge, the palace, and the hospital; the chosen of the race
gathered in the one, its victims in the other, as if civilization were
an army whose headquarters and whose ambulance stood side by side. His
eye rested long where the road leading down into the dark purlieus of
poverty and crime flared and roared like the mouth of sheol; then it
returned to the northern side, where the roof of a great mansion was
just visible above the trees.
What he saw there was the form of a grey-haired woman seated alone,
thinking of her prodigal son, perhaps praying for him, perhaps
expecting him. He threw one last backward glance towards the city of
Ahriman, and then, with a shudder, he set his face towards the gates of
Ormuzd, and walked swiftly off the bridge.
All the time he had been standing there a prayer had been going up to
Heaven: “Give me back my son, O Lord! Give me back my son!”