In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the old man would have gone by dreaming, but he was alert enough at odd moments, and this chanced to be one of them. He saw Paul arm-in-arm with a bandaged drunken woman, and as he recognised his son the pair reeled together.
‘Paul!’ he cried. ‘Good God!’
‘I’m glad it’s you, father,’ said Paul. ‘This poor creature fell at the corner yonder and cut her head terribly. I fetched young Marley to her from Dr. Hervey’s, and he has seen to her. She wants to get home.’
‘I’ll take the other side,’ said Armstrong, and the three lurched slowly along in the dimness.
‘Ye’re good people,’ Norah MacMulty said when they had brought her to her door.
A slattern woman answered Armstrong’s knock, heard the news with no discernible emotion, and helped the arrival in as if she had been a sack of coals. Armstrong and Paul went home with few words. ‘Don’t be startled when you see me,’ Paul said at the door. ‘I helped to carry her to the doctor’s, and she bled horribly.’
It was not meant for an exaggeration, but he was unused to such scenes, and the woman’s language more than anything else had helped to scare him from his self-possession. The hour was late already, reckoning by his custom. He washed, and went upstairs, but not to bed. He threw the window open and let in the soft, heavy night-air. Strange thoughts made a jumble in his mind. From his attic he could see, over the roofs of the houses opposite, the outlines of the Quarrymore Hills, clearly defined in the light of the rising moon. Half way between him and them the air was dimly red with the glow of the unseen furnaces in the valley. He heard the loud roar of the invisible fires, and now and then the clank of iron. His thoughts were not on these things, but he was vaguely conscious of them.
He had taken his earliest look at the real tragedy of life. The peril of the woman’s soul was the first thing to emerge clearly from the chaos of his thoughts. Her flippant, reckless acceptance of the certainty of her own damnation horrified him. Out of the streets, out of the bestial degradation of that life of shame and drink, into sheer hell? No chance? No hope? Surely Christ had died! But only for those who owned Him, and called upon Him! No, no, and a thousand times no! It was not to be believed, not to be borne. It was hateful, horrible, monstrous. The poor degraded thing had punishment enough already. She was in hell already.
The bruised reed, the smoking flax! He fell upon his knees, and his soul seemed to melt in a flood of anguished pity. He wept passionately, with an incoherent clamour in his heart of ‘God—God—God!’
The storm wore itself out, but he knelt there long, with his hands on the window-sill, and his face buried in them. He had been too agitated to find words, and now he was too tired and empty even to wish for them. His eyes were dry, and his lips were harsh and salt with his tears.