"Which he will do—have no fear of that," answered Walter Agg.
At an early hour they despatched their telegram and Prout received it. Half guessing the truth, he waited in fearful anxiety; but Brendon did not come.
CHAPTER XIII
ANOTHER EFFIGY
From the pandemonium of the mock burial Daniel Brendon took himself unseen. The advice of Jarratt Weekes appeared to be reasonable, and he decided to follow it. He was told to ask Prout, and he determined to do so. He roamed through darkness, and the past turned back like a scroll, and he read into the recent years far more than Prout could tell him. It was not possible to reach Dawlish until the following day, and long before the summer dawn returned Brendon had passed beyond thought of Prout to that of his master.
Under deep and silent woods, by waste places and along lonely roads he went. The voices of night whispered round him, and sleeping trees sighed, shivered, and slept again as he passed them by. Nocturnal creatures were his companions; the solitary hare limped along before him; the owl and the night-jar cried from the wood; once he passed a colony of glow-worms, where they twinkled in the dewy grass, like a tiny constellation.
His mind suffered the gigantic convulsion proper to this blow. Within one hour of leaving Lydford, he believed. His inherent instincts, smothered through five years by kindness, hushed by gentle words, lulled by immense generosity, tore their way through these artifices and saw all that had been hidden, and far more. The goodness of Woodrow rotted as Daniel thought of it; and even his conversion stank. Brendon saw himself hoodwinked, laughed at, deceived—seduced, like a child, with sugar-plums, rendered harmless with gifts, muzzled and deluded with fields and beasts and great possessions. He had worshipped and obeyed his God for this; he had sung praises to the Almighty, and toiled in the ways of righteousness for this. The Everlasting had watched it all, had listened to his prayers, had marked his mighty efforts, had waited until the cup was full before striking it from the lip of His servant. Brendon turned from God to man, thought upon his enemy, and considered the plot that had robbed him of his honour. Not until the light of dawn awoke upon a world of young green and silver dew, did Sarah Jane enter into his mind; and then he determined with himself that she must stand beside her paramour. He could not remotely guess at the truth of the past five years; it was natural that he should conceive a web of heartless and cruel deception woven from their united cunning and daily wrapped closer about himself. They knew him so well: his weak spots were so familiar to them, that the rest was easy. They had laughed at his complacent and devout trust in God a thousand times; doubtless they had grown accustomed to their sin and finally become careless. It was natural that all the world should know before it fell upon his ears. He read the whole story; he saw Woodrow handing over the farm in exchange for what he wanted more; he imagined Sarah Jane making the bargain. Anon Woodrow pretended to Christianity and Sarah Jane also affected an attitude of increased prayer and devotion. All was dust—dust flung by cruel hands and hard hearts to blind him.
His life crashed down, like a tree thrown in March. So had he seen a great elm fall. One moment it stood in full and glorious dignity of adult growth, the sun upon its crown and rosy inflorescence of flowers meshed within a grey mist of the young twigs; then the saw gnawed to its heart, the axe rang, the mallet drove the wedge, and the whole mighty edifice, falling in thunder, lay crushed fiat by its own weight, maimed, wrecked, shattered, and utterly destroyed. Only a raw disc in the hedge marked the place whence it had sprung upward, to be a theatre for the loveliness of spring and autumn, a home for the storm-thrush, a harp for the winter wind.
Now the fabric of his fortunes similarly collapsed, and he found all that had looked so healthy was flourishing upon foundations of putrescence and decay. No canker had eaten into his life and ruined it; no sudden misfortune had grown and turned what was fair to what was foul; but, in ignorance, with immense labour, he had built upon stark fraud and filth and his own dishonour; he had founded his life on falsehoods and sins; he had worshipped his God in unconsciousness of the truth; he had been drawn to closer and deeper intercourse with Christ through the cold-blooded villainy of a man. His ambitions, aims and future schemes were all rooted and flourishing in his own betrayal; and his God had suffered this appalling thing to come to pass, and denied him one dim hint or whisper of the truth. At the crucial moment, when Woodrow made him his heir, the Almighty had blinded Daniel's native instinct and not permitted even a suspicion of reality to be associated with the gift. All had combined against him; all had cozened his understanding: his wife, his master, his God. Man and Heaven had united to deceive him; and man, knowing the truth, had watched his sustained devotion and faith; and Heaven, knowing the truth, had accepted his worship and thanksgiving, had suffered his delusion to continue, had planned the horror of the end.
Every wind of the night came to him with a new grief; every scent of the night brought a new agony; every voice of the night drove home the truth with an added torment. He looked up at the stars and asked them what he should do. From force of habit he knelt and called upon God. But he remembered that, in this matter, God was on the side of the enemy. Therefore he rose and went forward without prayer.