And who the dickens was the Ass? He looked ahead wherever he saw Ass and Lion figuring together; and the obscurities and perversities of the prophecy became more confounding. The Lion was clearly not doing the right thing; it was following the Ass into a course of action which was leading to no good, which was, in fact, morally wrong; and so far as he could place the prophecies in their chronological sequence, these misdoings must some of them be quite recent, and some actually taking place now. Unedified, he began turning the pages in haste, to find something better; and so doing—it was a pity!—managed to miss this, which caught my quicker eye:
‘And the Ass said to the Lion, “Let us drive the scapegoat into the wilderness and there skin it; and from the skin of the scapegoat let us make coats for ourselves and for our children.” And the Lion said, “Will it be enough?” And the Ass answered, “It shall be enough; for we will stretch it this way and that and make it enough; or if so it be not enough, then we will wait till a second skin be grown, and will take that also; and after that another, and another, till we be satisfied.” Then said the Lion, “But if he die of it, how shall we be satisfied?” And the Ass answered, “We will not let him die, till we be satisfied.” So together they drove the scapegoat into the wilderness, and there they lost him. And the Lion reproached the Ass saying, “Where is the skin of the scapegoat that you promised me?” And the Ass answered, “A proposal is not a promise, neither is a promise a performance. Let it suffice that we have driven the scapegoat into the wilderness, and that he will presently die there. What matter how he dies, so long as he does die?” But the Lion said, “I have no coats for my children, and I am not satisfied.”’
Had Mr. Trimblerigg read that, I wonder what he would have made of it? Had he done so his attitude toward prophecy might have altered. He might have given the box back to Isabel Sparling ‘unopened,’ without having found what followed.
This was a separate enclosure of folded tissue paper, spotted and yellow with age, broken at the folds, and very frail to the touch. It was sealed with the seal of the prophetess; but a single seal on paper presented little difficulty to Mr. Trimblerigg. With great circumspection and delicacy of handling he applied the hot blade of a knife, lifted the seal away, and laid open the contents. A wash-drawing in sepia on mildewed paper was what met his eye. From the artistic point of view it was very poor and amateurish; but to say that it interested him were to put the matter very mildly indeed. It represented a man with rather short legs, middle-aged, somewhat full in the body, and clad in a full-skirted coat. As a forecast of present-day fashions it was not very good; but the legs were in trousers, not knee-breeches, and the head did not wear a wig.
It was the head that most interested him; a large spot of mildew had partly obliterated the features, but not enough to obscure the type. The face was broad, the cheeks were smooth-shaven, the forehead was noble, the hair rather long, and curled up at the ends like the hair of the knave of hearts in a pack of cards; a large bow-tie sat under the chin,—the black tie of a Free Church minister. Underneath were the words, ‘Behold the Fore-runner!’ And again, underneath that, were these words of Scripture: ‘Arise, shine, for thy light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee!’ Around the head was an indubitable halo; and faint, very faint, upon the blank space of it to right and left, the initials ‘J’ and ‘T.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Procession of a Flea
MR. TRIMBLERIGG stopped to breathe; and while he did so I made a psychological examination of that poor work of art which was yet, in its way, so perfect a masterpiece. Had Mr. Trimblerigg been more of an expert in old wash-drawings and brushwork, had he been gifted with a more sceptical turn of mind than that which had fitted his views to such differing situations, he might have examined those initials, and that spot of mildew defacing the supposititious features, more minutely, analytically and chemically than he actually did. That the wash-drawing as a whole was well over a hundred years old any expert would probably have agreed; whether he would have given the same date to the initials, and a few other salient touches I had my doubt, and the doubt remains unresolved; no expert has ever been called in to decide the matter. If Miss Sparling herself limed that snare, she certainly did it well; the obliteration of the face, with just the suggestion of a likeness left, was finely controlled; and yet the control may have only been Father Time’s; and whether it was luck, or whether Susannah Walcot was in truth a prophetess of penetrating power, who is now to say? The lengths to which the human faculties can go have often filled me with astonishment; Mr. Trimblerigg was only one instance among many. On this occasion, however, he did not astonish me in the least; he did what I expected him to do.
Before that culminating piece of evidence—that silent but resounding call—he sank upon his knees, and remained on them for a long time.
I watched the motions of his mind; they were very interesting; but they had not really to go far. That he was called to be a shining light to the whole civilized world did not at this stage of things surprise him. As a probability he had thought so ever since he could remember; recently he had been made sure of it. It was only the strange manner of this final call, and its clearly miraculous accompaniments that did a little stagger him. It also caused a definite shift—a shift to the right—in his always adjustable theology. It drew him definitely from modernism back toward True Belief. For this was something with which modernism could not be reconciled; it was primitive, apocalyptic, ultra-evangelical, it made, amongst other things, for the literal interpretation of Scripture: if this was true, the other was not.
And so it became clear that in accepting the call from such a source, his own cast of faith must be simplified once and for all,—that he must revert to the earlier faith of his Uncle Phineas.