At the top of Badger's Street he paused. The street was still; the sky was pale green on the horizon, purple overhead. The light was still strong, but, to the left beyond the sloping fields, the woods were banked black and sombre. From the meadow in front of the woods came the sounds of an encampment--women shouting, horses neighing, dogs barking. A few lights gleamed like red eyes. The dusky forms of caravans with their thick-set chimneys, ebony-coloured against the green sky, crouched like animals barking. A woman was singing, men's voices took her up, and the song came rippling across the little valley.
All the stir of an invading world was there.
Chapter II
Friday, June 18: Shadow Meets Shadow
On that Friday evening, about half-past six o'clock, Archdeacon Brandon, just as he reached the top of the High Street, saw God.
There was nothing either strange or unusual about this. Having had all his life the conviction that he and God were on the most intimate of terms, that God knew and understood himself and his wants better than any other friend that he had, that just as God had definitely deputed him to work out certain plans on this earth, so, at times, He needed his own help and advice, having never wavered for an instant in the very simplest tenets of his creed, and believing in every word of the New Testament as though the events there recorded had only a week ago happened in his own town under his own eyes--all this being so, it was not strange that he should sometimes come into close and actual contact with his Master.
It may be said that it was this very sense of contact, continued through long years of labour and success, that was the original foundation of the Archdeacon's pride. If of late years that pride had grown from the seeds of the Archdeacon's own self-confidence and appreciation, who can blame him?
We translate more easily than we know our gratitude to God into our admiration of ourselves.
Over and over again in the past, when he had been labouring with especial fervour, he was aware that, in the simplest sense of the word, God was "walking with him." He was conscious of a new light and heat, of a fresh companionship; he could almost translate into physical form that comradeship of which he was so tenderly aware. How could it be but that after such an hour he should look down from those glorious heights upon his other less favoured fellow-companions? No merit of his own that he had been chosen, but the choice had been made.
On this evening he was in sad need of comfort. Never in all his past years had life gone so hardly with him as it was going now. It was as though, about three or four months back, he had, without knowing it, stepped into some new and terrible country. One feature after another had changed, old familiar faces wore new unfamiliar disguises, every step that he took now seemed to be dangerous, misfortune after misfortune had come to him, at first slight and even ludicrous, at last with Falk's escape, serious and bewildering. Bewildering! That was the true word to describe his case! He was like a man moving through familiar country and overtaken suddenly by a dense fog. Through it all, examine it as minutely as he might, he could not see that he had committed the slightest fault.