Many a night in the fetid air of a bedroom whose window could not be persuaded to open, he lay on a broken-backed mattress trying to relate this divine friend with the humanity through whose travail he had found expression. Who and what was this portent? Was he akin to the August Founder of Christianity? Was he a madman hugging a crazy but pathetic and terrible delusion? Or was he the superman of which the World Spirit had long been dreaming, a great clairvoyant able to summon representative souls from the astral plane?
It must be left to the future to decide. At the best these were fantastic speculations, but they were now the clou of a forward-looking soul. Only these could sustain it in the path of duty. Week by week, it was being borne in upon Brandon that the sword could never hope to achieve anything worth achieving. Humanity was too complex and it was poisoned at the roots. Prussia after all was only a question of degree. Unless a change took place in the heart of man, these splendid, simple chaps with their debased forms of speech, their crudeness and their ignorance, would hurl their bombs in vain.
How he loved these bandy-legged warriors who never opened their mouths without defiling his ears. Deeper even than the spirit of race was the sense of human brotherhood. It resolved every difficulty, it unlocked every door. And the key had come to him by means of the inmate of Wellwood who had received it in turn from the divine mystic of the hills of Galilee.
The weeks went by in their weariness, yet nothing happened to the world. Months ago Urban Meyer had returned to America and the play had gone with him. The shrewd Pomfret had been made an agent for the author, in order to protect the interests of John Smith, but he received no word from New York beyond an intimation that the play had been mysteriously “hung up.” The news was not unexpected, yet he never doubted that sooner or later Urban Meyer would carry out his fixed intention of producing it.
In the meantime, Brandon wrote several letters to the inmate of Wellwood. The new turn of events was revealed, and great stress laid upon the supreme good fortune which so far had attended the play. To have convinced such a man as Urban Meyer of its almost plenary inspiration meant that its destiny was on the way to fulfillment.
The letters Brandon received in answer must have puzzled him greatly, had they not squared so exactly with the theory he had formed. Full as they were of warm and deep feeling, they yet seemed remote from the conditions of practical life. Even their note of sure faith was open to misinterpretation. There was no recognition of the singular providence which had set Urban Meyer on the track of the play, or if there was, it took for granted that the little man was the chosen instrument of God. Like Brandon himself, he was only a medium, through which Heaven was to resolve a high and awful issue.
Brandon received no second command to Wellwood, and he had not the courage to make pilgrimage without it. But as the long months passed and he grew more secure in physical power, the impression of the dreamlike December journey remained ineffaceably vivid. Time strengthened a fervent belief in the sublime genius of John Smith, but the wild speculations to which that belief gave rise led to one inescapable conclusion which in the last resort he could not quite find the courage to embrace openly. The disciple was thrilled by the tone of each letter he received, but nineteen centuries had passed since the Master had walked among men; and Brandon, with his own work in the world yet to do, could only feel that Faith itself besought him not to go too far beyond the poor, limited, human ken.
In order to fulfill the common daily round, he felt bound to hold aloof from John Smith, yet the man himself was never out of his thoughts. And not for a moment did he forget a sacred task. Months went by, the brief occasional letters ceased, and then Brandon sent an emissary to Wellwood, so that he might gain first-hand knowledge without incurring the terrible risk his every instinct warned him must attend a personal visit.
Mr. Perry-Hennington was the chosen vehicle. Between the two men there had been a reconciliation. The return of health had enabled Brandon to shed much of his animosity; besides, he saw that if John Smith’s view of his mission was the true one, such a man as the vicar of Penfold could hardly be more than a humble catspaw of destiny. That good, but narrow and obtuse man, was perhaps only the unconscious means by which a second world-drama was to unfold itself.
In the autumn Brandon was granted a few days’ leave. After weary months of servitude in the arid north, a week at Hart’s Ghyll, among his own people, was like a breath of heaven. And it synchronized with a tide of greater events.