The narrow road grew darker and darker as it wound under the heavy, rain-pattered canopy of the wood. Earth and sky were without form, and void. He lost touch with time and place; he began to lose touch with his own identity. He only knew that Thomas Perry-Hennington was his name and that his destination was Wellwood Asylum.
The rain grew heavier, but there was no comfort in it now. He was already far beyond any kind of physical aid. A grisly demon was in him, urging him onward to his doom. His soul’s reaction to it was beyond pity and terror. Quite suddenly, and long before he expected to see them, the heavy iron gates of the asylum were before him. At the sound of wheels an old man, very bent and grim, whom in the wet half-light he almost took for Charon, came slowly out of his lodge and fitted a key to the lock.
XLV
The vicar and his trap passed through the gates of Wellwood and along a short drive, flanked by wet bushes of rhododendron to the main entrance. In a voice not at all like his own he said to a heavy, rather brutal-looking man who opened one of the doors, “Mr. Perry-Hennington to see Dr. Thorp.”
He was admitted at once to a dim, somber interior, and shown into a small, stuffy waiting room in which he could hardly breathe. It was perhaps a relief to find himself quite alone, but in a very short time the doctor came to him.
The two men were known to each other. It was not Mr. Perry-Hennington’s first visit to Wellwood; and from time to time they had sat together on various committees affecting the social welfare of the county.
The vicar’s state of mind did not allow him to give much attention to Dr. Thorp, otherwise he could hardly have failed to notice that the chief medical officer of the establishment was in a state of suppressed excitement.
“I am particularly glad to see you, Mr. Perry-Hennington,” he said. “I am afraid we are about to lose one of our patients under remarkable and tragic circumstances. He has not asked for the sacrament to be administered, but now you are so providentially here, I have no doubt he will welcome it if he is still able to receive it.”
Dr. Thorp paused, but the vicar did not speak.
“It is our poor dear friend, John Smith. For months he has been slowly dying. But the end is now at hand. And it comes in very singular circumstances.”