“According to the Bible He was to come again, but as far as I can make out there doesn’t seem much sign of Him yet.”
Mr. Perry-Hennington was silent a moment and then he took one of the landlord’s large hands in both of his own and said in an abrupt, half grotesque, wholly illogical way, “My dear friend, we are all members one of another. It is our duty to hope for the best—our duty to believe that the best will happen.” And as he turned aside, he added with another curious change of voice, which he could not have recognized as belonging to himself, “You see, we are all in the same boat.”
Saying these words, the vicar climbed into his trap with almost the stagger of a drunken man. He hardly knew what he said or what he did, but as soon as the mare was out of the inn yard it came upon him that he had to go to Wellwood, and that the way to get there was through Easing and Chettleford.
Why at that particular moment that particular place should be his destination he didn’t quite know, unless it was in obedience to a voice he had heard in the sky. A modern man, whose supreme desire was to take reason for his guide in all things, even if the vows of his faith forced him to accept the supernatural in form and sum, he feared in this hour to apply it too rigidly.
As the publican’s mare went steadily forward along the winding, humid lanes of a woodland country, a feeling of hopelessness came upon him. What did he expect to do when he got to the end of his journey? Such a question simply admitted of no answer. It was not to be faced by Thomas Perry-Hennington on his present plane of being. The logic of the matter could not be met.
That was the case, no doubt, but a compromise was equally impossible. Something would have to happen. Either he must go forward or he must go back. A soul in strange, terrible torment passed unseen and unseeing through the tiny hamlet of Easing and on and on up a steep hill and then down through a long valley of trees and a gloom of massively beautiful furze country. There was not a ripple of wind in the tense air, and in the early afternoon it grew very dark, with an occasional growl of thunder over the far hills. On the outskirts of Chettleford it began to rain in large slow drops; and as his sweating face perceived the soft, cool splash he half dared to take it as the explicit kindness of Heaven. Upon the wings of that thought came the automatic intrusion into his mind of the words:
Methought I saw my late espousèd saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave.
And with them came the strange fancy that these tears out of Heaven were those of his wife and his boy.
A mile beyond Chettleford, at the dark edge of a wood, the sudden fear struck him that the soul of Thomas Perry-Hennington was about to enter unending night. A recollection dread and spectral, which might have been Dante or the far distant ages of the past, engulfed him swiftly and completely. It was impossible to turn back now or he would have done so.