Involuntarily the vicar held up a finger.
“He’s there,” he whispered. And he pointed to the figure kneeling by the stone. He then added in a voice of deepening emotion, “I trust you will not use any kind of violence.”
There was no need to do so, for it proved an extremely simple matter. Yet one witness of it was never to forget the scene that followed. Very cautiously the two men crept across the grass, while the vicar, unwilling to be seen by the victim, concealed himself in a thicket near by. From his ambush he saw the man rise to his feet at the approach of his captors, he saw his calm, fixed look, and he heard the singular words proceed from his lips, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”
A feeling of indignant horror swept through Mr. Perry-Hennington. He could only interpret the speech as one more atrocious blasphemy, for he had caught the strange upward look, as if to the God in the sky, which had accompanied the words. Somehow the gesture had revolted him, yet in another in such circumstances it would have been sublime. And the almost beautiful humility of the man walking passively between his captors through the summer twilight to his doom, with such words on his lips, such thoughts in his heart, filled the vicar with an odd conflict of sensations.
The man entered the car with the same curious air of submission. From his ambush the vicar watched it turn and go swiftly away, past the widow’s cottage; and then faint of soul, but sustained by a sense of duty, he walked slowly down the road as far as Mrs. Bent’s. To that simple dame, who opened the door to his knock, he said: “Kindly tell your neighbor, Mrs. Smith, that John may be late for his supper, and that if he is not home by ten o’clock he may not return tonight.”
Anxiously pondering whether he had taken the wisest and gentlest means of breaking the news to an invalid woman, Mr. Perry-Hennington returned to the vicarage. He passed a wakeful and unhappy night, in which he was troubled by many things; and at luncheon next day, in the course of a scene with Edith they gained intensity.
“Did you know, father,” she said in a tone of acute distress, “that John Smith was removed last evening without the slightest warning?”
The vicar admitted that he was aware of the fact.
“And do you know,” said Edith, in a voice of growing emotion, “that the shock killed his mother?”
“Killed his mother!” Mr. Perry-Hennington heard that news for the first time. “The old lady is dead!”