“Can not?”
“I will not. While God commands me I will do my duty.”
“Eh, but men are kittle cattle! I've often called you my ain son, but if I were your ain mother I ken fine what I'd do with you—I'd just slap you and mak' you. I'll leave the clothes, anyway. Maybe you'll be thinking better of it when I'm gone. Good-night to you. Your puir head's that hot and moidered—-But what's wrang with you, John, man? What's come over ye anyway?”
He seemed to be hardly conscious of her presence, and after standing a moment at the door, looking back at him with eyes of love and pity, she left the room.
He had been asking himself for the first time how he was to carry out his design. Sitting on the end of the bed with his head propped on his hand he felt as if he were in the hold of a great ship, listening to the plash and roar of the stormy sea outside. The excitement of the populace was now ungovernable and the air was filled with groans and cries. He would have to pass through the people, and they would see him and detain him, or perhaps follow him. His impatience was now feverish. The thing he had to do must be done to-night, it must be done immediately. But it was necessary in the first place to creep out unseen. How was he to do it?
When he came to himself he had a vague sense of some one wishing him good-night. “Oh, good-night, good-night!” he cried with an apologetic gesture. But he was alone in the room, and on turning about he saw the bag on the floor, and remembered everything. Then a strange thing happened. Two conflicting emotions took hold of him at once—the first an enthusiastic, religious ecstasy, the other a low, criminal cunning.
Everything was intended. He was only the instrument of a fixed purpose. These clothes were proof of it. They came to his hand at the very moment when they were wanted, when nothing else would have helped him. And Mrs. Callender had been the blind agent in a higher hand to carry out the divine commands. Fly away and hide himself? God did not intend it. A warrant? No matter if it sent him like Cranmer to the stake. But this was a different thing entirely, this was God's will and purpose, this——
Yet even while thinking so he laughed an evil laugh, tore the clothes out of the bag with trembling hands, and made ready to put them on. He had removed his cassock when some one opened the door.
“Who's there?” he cried in a husky growl.
“Only me,” said a timid voice, and Brother Andrew entered, looking pale and frightened.