"Our faithful service, while the circles swallow the suns, shall lift us too! You, who sent me here to help this little, dying Race, oh, help me to remember——!"
His passion was a moving sight; the words, broken through with fragments of his chanting, singing, had the blood of some infinite, intolerable yearning in them.
Devonham, meanwhile, having heard outbursts of this strange kind before with others, had recovered something of his equanimity. He felt more sure of himself again. The touch of fear had left him. He went over to the window. The attack, as he deemed it, was passing. A thick cloud hid the sun again. "There, there," he said soothingly, laying both hands upon the other's shoulders, then taking the arms to help him rise. "I told you His teachings were very beautiful—that the world would become a kind of heaven if people lived them." His voice seemed not his own; beside the volume and music of the other's it had a thin, rasping, ugly sound.
"N. H." was on his feet, gazing down into his face; to Devonham's amazement there were tears in the eyes that met his own.
"And many people do live them—try to, rather," he added gently. "There are thousands who really worship this lesser God to-day. You can't go far wrong yourself if you take Him as your model an——"
"How He must have suffered!" came the astonishing interruption, the voice quiet and more natural again. "There was no way of telling what he knew. He had no words, of course. You are all so difficult, so caged, so—dead!"
Devonham smiled. "He used parables." He paused a moment, then went on "Men have existed on the planet, science tells us, for at least 400,000 years, whereas He came here only 2,000 years ago——"
"Came here," interrupted the pupil, as though the earth were but one of a thousand places visited, a hint of contempt and pity somewhere in his tone and gesture. "We made His way ready then! We prepared, we built! It was for that our work went on and on so faithfully."
He broke off....
Devonham experienced a curious sensation as he heard. In that instant it seemed to him that he was conscious of the movement of the earth through space. He was aware that the planet on which he stood was rushing forward at eighteen miles a second through the sky. He felt himself carried forward with it.