The coming

by J. C. Snaith

Thrilled by a joy which was half fear, the vicar leaned against the stone. And as he did so a rush of wild thoughts swept his mind like a tide. His eyes grew dark as he saw again a summer twilight and a frail figure of fantasy kneeling upon the spot to which he was now rooted. In a series of pictures, a terrible and strange scene was reënacted. A motor car glided stealthily past the door of the widow’s cottage; it came round the bend of the road; as it stopped by the edge of the green, two heavy somber men descended from it, and from his own base ambush, but a few yards off, he saw them cautiously approach the kneeling figure.

Again he was the witness of the acts and the words that passed. He saw the figure rise as they came up; he heard the greeting of the calm, expecting voice: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Again he saw the grim procession move across the grass, he saw the upward gesture to the God in the sky, which at the moment had revolted him; and then he saw the car stealthily turn the bend in the track and fade among the dark-glowing gorse.

A nausea came upon the vicar. Sick with sudden terror, he realized what he had done. To the fate which his own boy could not face and had been allowed, as a crowning mercy, to escape, he had himself condemned a fellow creature without a hearing, and perhaps against the weight of evidence. By what authority had he immured a fellow citizen in a living tomb? By what authority had he denied the first and highest of all sanctions to a human soul? The doom that his own poor lad, with all his heroism, had not the superhuman courage to meet, this defenseless villager had embraced in the spirit of a martyr and a saint.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Again the vicar saw him rise from his knees, and with a wan but happy smile go forth to a fate by comparison with which the grave was very kind. Overborne by a sudden passion of illogical remorse, the vicar sank to his own knees by the stone, on a spot bare of grass, the fruit, perhaps, of John Smith’s many kneelings in many bygone years. Broken and bereaved, a lone animal wounded and terrified, he humbly asked that he might be allowed to meet his wife and his boy in Heaven.

The vicar rose from his knees. Faint and chill of heart, he hardly cared to look up for a visible answer to his prayer. He was now in outer darkness. For Thomas Perry-Hennington there was no descent of the Spirit from the hard sky, glowing with strange beauty. He listened wildly, yet he could only hear the water flowing by Burkett’s mill.

“Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

The living words were spurring him to frenzy. But the soul of man, naked and shuddering, helpless and lonely, recoiled upon itself with the fear that there was none of whom to seek forgiveness. For one, Thomas Perry-Hennington, there was no means of access to the Father. By an idolatrous act, setting the state above the Highest, he had severed all communication. In bigotry, arrogance, imperfect faith he had betrayed the Master; in pharisaic blindness he had crucified the Son of Man.

Thoughts like these, coming at this moment, were too much for human endurance; in that direction madness lay. A little while he stood by the stone, trying to hold on to the thing he called “himself.” And then a strange desire came upon him to crave the light of one whom he had traduced. He dare not set his act higher, he dare not state his treason in other terms; at that moment the will itself forbade his so doing. An issue was now upon him which reason could not accept. To the inner eye within the mind itself all was darkness, but looking now with the ear alone he thought he heard a far, faint voice in the infinite stellar spaces, a voice telling him to go at once to Wellwood.

Suddenly he turned and trailed off back to the vicarage, like some hapless, hunted thing of the fields, that flees too madly for hope of escape. As he half ran down the steep path, his white face gleaming in the sun, he began to repeat mechanically, in order still to keep in touch with the central forces: