“I deserve it!” St. Peter grunted, “but think what it must mean for Judas.”
He shouldered into the thick of the confusion where the pickets coaxed, threatened, implored, and in extreme cases bodily shoved the wearied men and women past the voluble and insinuating spirits who strove to draw them aside.
A Shropshire Yeoman had just accepted, together with a forged pass, the assurance of a genial runner of the Lower Establishment that Heaven lay round the corner, and was being stealthily steered thither, when a large hand jerked him back, another took the runner in the chest, and some one thundered: “Get out, you crimp!” The situation was then vividly explained to the soldier in the language of the barrack-room.
“Don’t blame me, Guv’nor,” the man expostulated. “I ’aven’t seen a woman, let alone angels, for umpteen months. I’m from Joppa. Where ’you from?”
“Northampton,” was the answer. “Rein back and keep by me.”
“What? You ain’t ever Charley B. that my dad used to tell about? I thought you always said——”
“I shall say a deal more soon. Your Sergeant’s talking to that woman in red. Fetch him in—quick!”
Meantime, a sunken-eyed Scots officer, utterly lost to the riot around, was being buttonholed by a person of reverend aspect who explained to him, that, by the logic of his own ancestral creed, not only was the Highlander irrevocably damned, but that his damnation had been predetermined before Earth was made.
“It’s unanswerable—just unanswerable,” said the young man sorrowfully. “I’ll be with ye.” He was moving off, when a smallish figure interposed, not without dignity.
“Monsieur,” it said, “would it be of any comfort to you to know that I am—I was—John Calvin?” At this the reverend one cursed and swore like the lost Soul he was, while the Highlander turned to discuss with Calvin, pacing towards The Gate, some alterations in the fabric of a work of fiction called the Institutio.