XLIII
Theblinds were down at the vicarage. Prince, whose stealthy grace of movement was that of the perfect parlor maid, walked with more than usual delicacy. Her master had not slept in his bed for two nights. Miss Edith was working in a Paris hospital, and news had come from France that Mr. Tom was gone.
In the absence of Miss Edith, Prince felt herself to be the most authoritative female in that diminished household; and she was much concerned for her master, whom she adored. It was the nature of Prince to adore. In her face was the look of stern beauty worn by nearly every Englishwoman of her generation. It seemed but yesterday that she had ordered a wedding dress she was never to wear, because “her boy,” a lusty towheaded young sergeant of the Sussex Regiment, had gone to sleep on the Somme.
Ever since the telegram had come from the War Office, the vicar had not been himself. But his first act had been to go up to town for the day, and comfort and advise the brave girl whose three bairns wouldnever see their father again. It had called for a great effort, for he was stunned by the sense of loss. To a father, the first-born is a symbol. And there is nothing to replace an eldest son in the heart of a lonely man who lives in the memory of a great happiness. He had only to look at gifted, rare-spirited Tom to see the mother, to watch the play of her features, to behold the light of her eyes.
Of his four children he had never disguised the fact that Tom was the fine flower. Like many men of rather abrupt mental limitation, the vicar had, at bottom, a reverence for a good brain. This boy had been given a talent, and many a time had the father amused himself with the pious fancy that the brilliant barrister, of whom much was predicted, would be the second Lord Chancellor of his name and blood.
On the third morning of the news, as the vicar sat at breakfast solitary and without appetite, Prince brought him a letter. It bore a service postmark. It was from Somewhere in France, and it said:
1st Metropolitan Regiment.Dear Sir:It is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you that Captain Perry-Hennington was killed on the 5th inst. His loss falls very heavily indeed upon his brother officers and the men of his Regiment. I will not attempt to say how much he meant to all ranks, for no mancould have been more looked up to, or more generally beloved. All knew him for what he was, a good soldier, a true Christian, a great gentleman. He was in the act of writing you a letter (which I inclose) when word was brought to him that a man of another battalion, mortally hit, had asked for Captain Perry-Hennington. He went out at once, across the danger zone to a communication trench, where the poor fellow lay, but half way he was caught by a shell and killed instantly. If it was his turn, it was the end he would have asked for, and the end those who loved him would have asked for him. Assuring you of the Regiment’s deepest sympathy in your great loss,I am, very sincerely yours,G. H. Arbuthnot,Lieutenant Colonel.
1st Metropolitan Regiment.
Dear Sir:
It is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you that Captain Perry-Hennington was killed on the 5th inst. His loss falls very heavily indeed upon his brother officers and the men of his Regiment. I will not attempt to say how much he meant to all ranks, for no mancould have been more looked up to, or more generally beloved. All knew him for what he was, a good soldier, a true Christian, a great gentleman. He was in the act of writing you a letter (which I inclose) when word was brought to him that a man of another battalion, mortally hit, had asked for Captain Perry-Hennington. He went out at once, across the danger zone to a communication trench, where the poor fellow lay, but half way he was caught by a shell and killed instantly. If it was his turn, it was the end he would have asked for, and the end those who loved him would have asked for him. Assuring you of the Regiment’s deepest sympathy in your great loss,
I am, very sincerely yours,
G. H. Arbuthnot,
Lieutenant Colonel.
Inclosed in the letter was a scrap of paper on which was written:
Dearest Dad:“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——”
Dearest Dad:
“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, intothe 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 saintBrought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
Methought I saw my late espousèd saintBrought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
Methought I saw my late espousèd saintBrought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
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 thenin 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 spotbare 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 directionmadness 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 saintBrought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
Methought I saw my late espousèd saintBrought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
Methought I saw my late espousèd saintBrought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
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.