The
COMING

J. C. SNAITH

AUTHOR OF “THE SAILOR,” “ANNE FEVERSHAM,” ETC.

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK 1917

THE COMING

I

He came to his own and his own knew him not.

The vicar of the parish sat at his study table pen in hand, a sheet of paper before him. It was Saturday morning already and his weekly sermon was not yet begun. On Sundays, at the forenoon service, it was Mr. Perry-Hennington’s custom to read an old discourse, but in the evening the rigid practice of nearly forty years required that he should give to the world a new and original homily.

To a man of the vicar’s mold this was a fairly simple matter. His rustic flock was not in the least critical. To the villagers of Penfold, a hamlet on the borders of Sussex and Kent, every word of their pastor was gospel. And in their pastor’s own gravely deliberate words it was the gospel of Christ Crucified.

There had been a time in the vicar’s life when his task had sat lightly upon him. Given the family living of Penfold-with-Churley in October, 1879, the Reverend the Honorable Thomas Perry-Hennington had never really had any trouble in the matter until August, 1914. And then, all at once, trouble came so heavily upon a man no longer young, that from about the time of the retreat from Mons Saturday morning became a symbol of torment. It was then that a dark specter first appeared in the vicar’s mind. For thirty-five years he had been modestly content with a simple moral obligation in return for a stipend of eight hundred pounds a year. He had never presumed to question the fitness of a man with an Oxford pass degree for such a relatively humble office. A Christian of the old sort, with the habit of faith, and in his own phrase “without intellectual smear,” he had always been on terms with God. And though Mr. Perry-Hennington would have been the last to claim Him as a tribal deity, in the vicar’s ear He undoubtedly spoke with the accent of an English public school, and used the language of Dr. Pusey and Dr. Westcott. But somehow August, 1914, had seemed to change everything.

It was now June of the following year and Saturday morning had grown into a nightmare for the vicar. Doubt had arisen in the household of faith, a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, but only a firm will and a stout heart had been able to dispel it. Terrible wrong had been done to an easy and pleasant world and God had seemed to look on. Moreover it had been boldly claimed that not only was he a graduate of a foreign university, but that he had justified the ways of Antichrist.

After grave and bitter searchings of heart, Mr. Perry-Hennington had risen, not only in the pulpit but in the public press, to rebut the charge. But this morning, seated in a charming room, biting the end of a pen, a humbler, more personal doubt in his mind. Was it a man’s work to be devoting one’s energies to the duties of a parish priest? Was it a man’s work to be addressing a few yokels, for the most part women and old men? As far as Penfold-with-Churley was concerned Armageddon might have been ages away. In fact Mr. Perry-Hennington had recently written a letter to his favorite newspaper in very good English to say so.

For the tenth time that morning the vicar dipped his pen in the ink. For the tenth time it hung lifeless, a thing without words, above a page thirsting to receive them. For the tenth time the ink grew dry. With a faint sigh, which in one less strong of will would have been despair, he suddenly lifted his eyes to look through the window.

The room faced south. Sussex was spread before him like a carpet. Fold upon fold, hill beyond hill, it flowed in curves of inconceivable harmony to meet the distant sea. To the right a subtle thickening of sunlight marked the ancient forest of Ashdown; straight ahead was Crowborough Beacon; far away to the left were dark masses of gorse, masking the delicate verdure of the weald of Kent. There was not a cloud in the sky. The sun of June, a generous, living warmth, was everywhere. But as the vicar gazed solemnly out of the window he had not a thought for the enchantment of the scene.

Suddenly he rose a little impatiently and opened the window still wider. If he was to do his duty on the morrow he must have more light, more air. A grizzled head was flung forth to meet the strong, keen sun, to snuff the magic air. A clean wind racing by made his lips and eyelids tingle, and then, all at once, he remembered his boy on the Poseidon.

But he must put the Poseidon out of his mind if he was to do his pastoral duty on the morrow. Before he could draw in his head and buckle to his task, an odd whirr of sound, curiously sharp and loud, came on his ear. There was an airplane somewhere. Involuntarily he shaded his eyes to look. Yes, there she was! What speed, what grace, what incomparable power in the live, sentient thing! How feat she looked, how noble, as she rode the blue like some fabled roc of an eastern story.

“Off to France,” said the vicar. He took off his spectacles and wiped them, and then put them on again.

But the morrow’s sermon was again forgotten. He had remembered his boy in the air. The graceless lad whom he had flogged more than once in that very room, who had done little good at Marlborough, who had preferred a stool in a stockbroker’s office to the University, was now a superman, a veritable god in a machine. A week ago he had been to Buckingham Palace to be decorated by the King for an act of incredible daring. His name was great in the hearts of his countrymen. This lad not yet twenty, whom wild horses would not have dragged through the fourth Æneid, had made the name of Perry-Hennington ring throughout the empire.

From this amazing Charley in his biplane, it was only a step in the father’s mind to honest Dick and the wardroom of the Poseidon. The vicar recalled with a little thrill of pride how Dick’s grandfather, the admiral, had always said that the boy was “a thorough Hennington,” the highest compliment the stout old sea dog had it in his power to pay him or any other human being. And then from Dick with his wide blue eyes, his square, fighting face and his nerves of steel the thoughts of the father flew to Tom, his eldest boy, the high-strung, nervous fellow, the Trinity prize man with the first-class brain. Tom had left not only a lucrative practice and brilliant prospects at the Bar, but also a delicate wife and three young children in order to spend the winter in the trenches of the Ypres salient. Moreover, he had “stuck it” without a murmur of complaint, although he was far too exact a thinker ever to have had any illusions in regard to the nature of war, and although this particular war defied the human imagination to conceive its horror.

Yes, after all, Tom was the most wonderful of the three. Nature had not meant him for a soldier, the hypersensitive, overstrung lad who would faint over a cut finger, who had loathed cricket and football, or anything violent, who in years of manhood had had an almost fanatical distrust of the military mind. Some special grace had helped him to endure the bestiality of Flanders.

From the thought of the three splendid sons God had given him the mind of the vicar turned to their begetter. He was only just sixty, he enjoyed rude health except for a touch of rheumatism now and again, yet here he was in a Sussex village supervising parish matters and preaching to women and old men.

At last, with a jerk of impatience that was half despair, he suddenly withdrew his head from the intoxicating sun, the cool, scented wind of early June. “I’ll see the Bishop, that’s what I’ll do,” he muttered as he did so.

But as he sat down once more at his writing table before the accusing page, he remembered that he had seen the Bishop several times already. And the Bishop’s counsel had been ever the same. Let him do the duty next him. His place was with his flock. Let him labor in his vocation, the only work for which one of his sort was really qualified.

Bitterly this soldier of God regretted now that he had not chosen in his youth the other branch of his profession. Man of sixty as he was, there were times when he burned to be with his three boys in the fight. His own father, a fine old Crimean warrior, had once given him the choice of Sandhurst or Oxford, and the vicar was now constrained to believe that he had chosen the lesser part. By this time he might have been on the General Headquarters Staff, whereas he was not even permitted to wear the uniform of the true Church Militant.

At last with a groan of vexation the vicar dipped his pen again. And then something happened. Without conscious volition, or overt process of the mind, the pen began to move across the page. Slowly it traced a succession of words, whose purport he didn’t grasp until an eye had been passed over them. “Let us cast off the works of darkness, let us put on the armor of light.”

Sensible at once of high inspiration he took a vital force from the idea. It began to unseal faculties latent within him. His thoughts came to a point at last, they grew consecutive, he could see his way, his mind took wings. And then suddenly, alas, before he could lay pen to paper, there came a very unfortunate interruption.

II

There was a knock on the study door.

“Come in,” called the vicar rather sharply.

The whole household knew that on Sunday morning those precincts were inviolable.

His daughter Edith came hurriedly into the room. A tall, thin, eager-looking girl, her large features and hook nose were absurdly like her father’s. Nobody called her handsome, yet in bearing and movement was the lithe grace the world looks for in a clean-run strain. But lines of ill-health were in the sensitive face, and the honest, rather near-sighted eyes had a look of tension and perplexity. An only girl, in a country parsonage, thrown much upon herself, the war had begun to tell its tale. Intensely proud that her brothers were in it, she could think of nothing else. Their deeds, hazards, sacrifices were taken for granted as far as others could guess, but they filled her with secret disgust for her own limited activities. Limited they must remain for some little time to come. It had been Edith’s wish to go to Serbia with her cousin’s Red Cross unit. And in spite of the strong views of her doctor she would have done so but for a sharp attack of illness. That had been three months ago. She was not yet strong enough for regular work in a hospital or a munition factory, but as an active member of a woman’s volunteer training corps, she faithfully performed certain local and promiscuous duties.

There was one duty, however, which Edith in her zeal had lately imposed upon herself. Or it may have been imposed upon her by that section of the English press from which she took her opinions. For the past three Saturday mornings it had been carried out religiously. Known as “rounding up the shirkers,” it consisted in making a tour of the neighboring villages on a bicycle, and in presenting a white feather to male members of the population of military age who were not in khaki.

The girl had just returned from the fulfillment of the weekly task. She was in a state of excitement slightly tinged with hysteria, and that alone was her excuse for entering that room at such a time.

At first the vicar was more concerned by her actual presence than for the state of her feelings.

“Well, what is it?” he demanded impatiently, without looking up from his sermon.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you, father”—the high-pitched voice had a curious quiver in it—“but something rather disagreeable has happened. I felt that I must come and tell you.”

The vicar swung slowly round in his chair. He was an obtuse man, therefore the girl’s excitement was still lost upon him, but he had a fixed habit of duty. If the matter was really disagreeable he was prepared to deal with it at once; if it admitted of qualification it must wait until after luncheon.

There was no doubt, however, in Edith’s mind that it called for her father’s immediate attention. Moreover, the fact was at last made clear to him by a mounting color, and an air of growing agitation.

“Well, what’s the matter?” A certain rough kindness came into the vicar’s tone as soon as these facts were borne in upon him. “I hope you’ve not been overtaxing yourself. Joliffe said you would have to be very careful for some time.”

The attempt of a somewhat emotional voice to reassure him on that point was not altogether a success.

“Then what is the matter?” The vicar peered at her solemnly over his spectacles.

Edith hesitated.

The vicar mobilized an impatient eyebrow.

“It’s—it’s only that wretched man, John Smith.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington gave a little start of annoyance at the mention of the name.

“He’s quite upset me.”

“What’s he been doing now?” The vicar’s tone was an odd mingling of scorn and curiosity.

“It’s foolish to let a man of that kind upset one,” said Edith rather evasively.

“I agree. But tell me——?”

“It will only annoy you.” Filial regard and outraged feelings had begun a pitched battle. “It’s merely weak to be worried by that kind of creature.”

“My dear girl”—the tone was very stern—“tell me in just two words what has happened.” And the vicar laid down his pen and sat back in his chair.

“I have been insulted.” Edith made heroic fight but the sense of outrage was too much for her.

“How? In what way?” The county magistrate had begun to take a hand in the proceedings.

A little alarmed, Edith plunged into a narrative of events. “I had just one feather left on my return from Heathfield,” she said, “and as I came across the Common there was John Smith loafing about as he so often is. So I went up to him and said: ‘I should like to give you this.’”

A look of pained annoyance came into the vicar’s face. “It may be right in principle,” he said, “but the method doesn’t appeal to me. And I warned you that something of this kind might happen.”

“But he ought to be in the army. Or working at munitions.”

“Maybe. Well, you gave him the feather. And what happened?”

“First of all he kissed it. Then he put it in his buttonhole, and struck a sort of attitude and said—let me give you his exact words—‘And lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.’”

The vicar jumped up as if he had been stung. “The fellow said that! But that’s blasphemy!”

“Exactly what I thought, father,” said Edith in an extremely emotional voice. “I was simply horrified.”

“Atrocious blasphemy!” Seething with indignation the vicar began to stride about the room. “This must be carried further,” he said.

To the lay mind such an incident hardly called for serious notice, even on the part of the vicar of the parish whose function it was to notice all things seriously. But with a subtlety of malice that Mr. Perry-Hennington deeply resented it had searched out his weakness. For some little time now, John Smith had been a thorn in the pastoral cushion. Week by week this village wastrel was becoming a sorer problem. Although the man’s outrageous speech was of a piece with the rest of his conduct, the vicar immediately felt that it had brought matters to a head. He had already foreseen that the mere presence in his parish of this young man would sooner or later force certain issues upon him. Let them now be raised. Mr. Perry-Hennington felt that he must now face them frankly and fearlessly, once and for all, in a severely practical way.

His imperious stridings added to Edith’s alarm.

“Somehow, father,” she ventured, “I don’t quite think he meant it for blasphemy. After all he’s hardly that kind of person.”

“Then what do you suppose the fellow did mean?” barked the vicar.

“Well, you know that half crazy way of his. After all, he may not have meant anything in particular.”

“Whatever his intention he had no right to use such words in such a connection. I am going to follow this matter up.”

Edith made a second rather distressed attempt to clear John Smith; the look in her father’s face was quite alarming.

But Mr. Perry-Hennington was not to be appeased. “Sooner or later there’s bound to be serious trouble with the fellow. And this is an opportunity to come to grips with him. I will go now and hear what he has to say for himself and then I must very carefully consider the steps to be taken in a highly disagreeable matter.”

Thereupon, with the resolution of one proud of the fact that action is his true sphere the vicar strode boldly to the hatstand in the hall.

III

As Mr. Perry-Hennington surged through the vicarage gate in the direction of the village green, a rising tide of indignation swept the morrow’s discourse completely out of his mind. This was indeed a pity. Much was going on around and its inner meanings were in themselves a sermon. Every bush was afire with God. The sun of June was upon gorse and heather; bees, birds, hedgerows, flowers, all were touched with magic; larks were hovering, sap was flowing in the leaves, nature in myriad aspects filled with color, energy and music the enchanted air. But none of these things spoke to the vicar. He was a man of wrath. Anger flamed within him as, head high-flung, he marched along a steep, bracken-fringed path, in quest of one whom he could no longer tolerate in his parish.

For some little time now, John Smith had been a trial. To begin with this young man was an alien presence in a well-disciplined flock. Had he been native-born, had his status and position been defined by historical precedent, Mr. Perry-Hennington would have been better able to deal with him. But, as he had complained rather bitterly, “John Smith was neither fish, flesh nor well-boiled fowl.” There was no niche in the social hierarchy that he exactly fitted; there was no ground, except the insecure one of personal faith, upon which the vicar of the parish could engage him.

The cardinal fact in a most difficult case was that the young man’s mother was living in Penfold. Moreover, she was the widow of a noncommissioned officer in a line regiment, who in the year 1886 had been killed in action in the service of his country. John, the only and posthumous child of an obscure soldier who had died in the desert, had been brought to Penfold by his mother as a boy of ten. There he had lived with her ever since in a tiny cottage on the edge of the common; there he had grown up, and as the vicar was sadly constrained to believe, into a freethinker, a socialist and a generally undesirable person.

These were hard terms for Mr. Perry-Hennington to apply to anyone, but the conduct of the black sheep of the fold was now common talk, if not an open scandal. For one thing he was thought to be unsound on the war. He was known to hold cranky views on various subjects, and he had addressed meetings at Brombridge on the Universal Religion of Humanity or some kindred high-flown theme. Moreover, he talked freely with the young men of the neighborhood, among whom he was becoming a figure of influence. Indeed, it was said that the source of a kind of pacifist movement, faintly stirring up and down the district, could be traced to John Smith.

Far worse, however, than all this, he had lately acquired a reputation as a faith-healer. It was claimed for him by certain ignorant people at Grayfield and Oakshott that by means of Christian Science he had cured deafness, rheumatism and other minor ills to which the local flesh was heir. The vicar had been too impatient of the whole matter to investigate it. On the face of it the thing was quite absurd. In his eyes John Smith was hardly better than a yokel, although a man of superior education for his rank of life. Indeed, in Mr. Perry-Hennington’s opinion, that was where the real root of the mischief lay. The mother, who was very poor, had contrived, by means of the needle, and by denying herself almost the necessities of life, to send the lad for several years to the grammar school at the neighboring town of Brombridge, where he had undoubtedly gained the rudiments of an education far in advance of any the village school had to offer. John had proved a boy of almost abnormal ability; and the high master of the grammar school had been sadly disappointed that he did not find his way to Oxford with a scholarship. Unfortunately the boy’s health had always been delicate. He had suffered from epilepsy, and this fact, by forbidding a course of regular study, prevented a lad of great promise obtaining at an old university the mental discipline of which he was thought to stand in need.

The vicar considered it was this omission which had marred the boy’s life. None of the learned professions was open to him; his education was both inadequate and irregular; moreover, the precarious state of his health forbade any form of permanent employment. Situations of a clerical kind had been found for him from time to time which he had been compelled to give up. Physically slight, he had never been fit for hard manual labor. Indeed, the only work with his hands for which he had shown any aptitude was at the carpenter’s bench, and for some years now he had eked out his mother’s slender means by assisting the village joiner.

The unfortunate part of the matter was, however, that the end was not here. Mentally, there could be no doubt, John Smith, a man now approaching thirty, was far beyond the level of the carpenter’s bench. His mind, in the vicar’s opinion, was deplorably ill-regulated, but in certain of its aspects he was ready to admit that it had both originality and power. The mother was a daughter of a Baptist minister in Wales, a fact which tended to raise her son beyond the level of his immediate surroundings; but that apart, the village carpenter’s assistant had never yielded his boyish passion for books. He continued to read increasingly, books to test and search a vigorous mind. Moreover, he had an astonishing faculty of memory, and at times wrote poetry of a mystical, ultra-imaginative kind.

The case of John Smith was still further complicated for Mr. Perry-Hennington by the injudicious behavior of the local squire. Gervase Brandon, a cultivated, scholarly man, had encouraged this village ne’er-do-well in every possible way. There was reason to believe that he had helped the mother from time to time, and John, at any rate, had been given the freedom of the fine old library at Hart’s Ghyll. There he could spend as many hours as he wished; therefrom he could borrow any volume that he chose, no matter how precious it might be; and in many delicate ways the well-meaning if over-generous squire, had played the part of Mæcenas.

In the vicar’s opinion the inevitable sequel to Gervase Brandon’s unwisdom had already occurred. A common goose had come to regard himself as a full-fledged swan. It was within the vicar’s knowledge that from time to time John Smith had given expression to views which the ordinary layman could not hold with any sort of authority. Moreover, when remonstrated with, “this half-educated fellow” had always tried to stand his ground. And at the back of the vicar’s mind still rankled a certain mot of John Smith’s, duly reported by Samuel Veale the scandalized parish clerk. He had said that, as the world was constituted at present, the gospel according to the Reverend Thomas Perry-Hennington seemed of more importance than the gospel according to Jesus Christ.

When taxed with having made the statement to the village youth, John Smith did not deny the charge. He even showed a disposition to defend himself; and the vicar had felt obliged to end the interview by abruptly walking away. Some months had passed since that incident. But in his heart the vicar had not been able to forgive what he could only regard as a piece of effrontery. Henceforward all his dealings with John Smith were tainted by that recollection. The subject still rankled in his mind; indeed he would have been the first to own that it was impossible now for such a man as himself to consider the problem of John Smith without prejudice. Moreover, he was aware that an intense and growing personal resentment boded ill for the young man’s future life in the parish of Penfold-with-Churley.

Sore, unhappy, yet braced with the stern delight that warriors feel, the vicar reached the common at last. That open, furze-clad plateau which divided Sussex from Kent and rose so sharply to the sky that it formed a natural altar upon which the priests of old had raised a stone was the favorite tryst of this village wastrel. As soon as Mr. Perry-Hennington came to the end of the steep path from the vicarage which debouched to the common, he shaded his eyes from the sun’s glare. Straight before him, less than a hundred yards away, was the man he sought. John Smith was leaning against the stone.

The vicar took off his hat to cool his head a little, and then swung boldly across the turf. The young man, who was bareheaded and clad in common workaday clothes, looked clean and neat enough, but somehow strangely slight and frail. Gaunt of jaw and sunken-eyed, the face was of a very unusual kind, and from time to time was lit by a smile so vivid as to be unforgetable. But the outward aspect of John Smith had never had anything to say to the vicar, and this morning it had even less to say than usual.

For the vicar’s attention had been caught by something else. Upon the young man’s finger was perched a little, timid bird. He was cooing to it, in an odd, loving voice, and as the vicar came up he said: “Nay, nay, don’t go. This good man will do you no harm.”

But the bird appeared to feel otherwise. By the time the vicar was within ten yards it had flown away.

“Even the strong souls fear you, sir,” said the young man with his swift smile, looking him frankly in the eyes.

“It is the first time one has heard such a grandiloquent term applied to a yellow-hammer,” said the vicar coldly.

“Things are not always what they seem,” said the young man. “The wisdom of countless ages is in that frail casket.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” said the vicar sharply.

“Many a saint, many a hero, is borne on the wings of a dove.”

“Transcendental rubbish.” The vicar mopped his face with his handkerchief, and then he began: “Smith”—he was too angry to use the man’s Christian name—“my daughter tells me you have been blasphemous.”

The young man, who still wore the white feather in his coat, looked at the angry vicar with an air of gentle surprise.

“Please don’t deny it,” said the vicar, taking silence for a desire to rebut the charge. “She has repeated to me word for word your mocking speech when you put that symbol of cowardice in your buttonhole.”

John Smith looked at the vicar with his deep eyes and then he said slowly and softly: “If my words have hurt her I am very sorry.”

This speech, in spite of its curious gentleness, added fuel to the vicar’s anger.

“The humility you affect does not lessen their offense,” he said sharply.

“Where lies the offense you speak of?” The question was asked simply, with a grave smile.

“If it is not clear to you,” said the vicar with acid dignity, “it shall not be my part to explain it. I am not here to bandy words. Nor do I intend to chop logic. You consider yourself vastly clever, no doubt. But I have to warn you that the path you follow is full of peril.”

“Yes, the path we are following is full of peril.”

“Whom do you mean by ‘we’?” said the vicar sternly.

“Mankind. All of us.”

“That does not affect the question. Let us leave the general alone, let us keep to the particular.”

“But how can we leave the general alone, how can we keep to the particular, when we are all members of one another?”

The vicar checked him with an imperious hand.

“Blasphemer.” he said with growing passion, “how dare you parody the words of the Master?”

“No one can parody the words of the Master. Either they are or they are not.”

“I am not here to argue with you. Understand, John Smith, that in all circumstances I decline to chop logic with—with a person of your sort.”

It added to this young man’s offense in the eyes of the vicar that he had presumed to address him as an intellectual equal. It was true that in a way of delicate irony, which even Mr. Perry-Hennington was not too dense to perceive, this extraordinary person deferred continually to the social and mental status of his questioner. It was the manner of one engaged in rendering to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, but every word masked by the gentle voice was so subtly provocative that Mr. Perry-Hennington felt a secret humiliation in submitting to them. The implication made upon his mind was that the rôle of teacher and pupil had been reversed.

This unpleasant feeling was aggravated to the point of the unbearable by John Smith’s next words.

“Judge not,” he said softly. “Once priests judged Jesus Christ.”

The vicar recoiled.

“Abominable!” he said, and he clenched his fists as if he would strike him. “Blasphemer!”

The young man smiled sadly. “I only speak the truth,” he said. “If it wounds you, sir, the fault is not mine.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington made a stern effort to keep himself in hand. It was unseemly to bandy words with a man of this kind. Yet, as he belonged to the parish, the vicar in a sense was responsible for him; therefore it became his duty to find out what was at the back of his mind. Curbing as well as he could an indignation that threatened every moment to pass beyond control, he called upon John Smith to explain himself.

“You say you only speak the truth as it has been shown you. First I would ask whence it comes, and then I would ask how do you know it for the truth?”

“It has been communicated by the Father.”

“Don’t be so free with the name of God,” said the vicar sternly. “And I, at any rate, take leave to doubt it.”

“There is a voice I hear within me. And being divine it speaks only the truth.”

“How do you know it is divine?”

“How do I know the grass is green, the sky blue, the heather purple? How do I know the birds sing?”

“That is no answer,” said the vicar. “It is open to anyone to claim a divine voice within did not modesty forbid.”

The smile of John Smith was so sweetly simple that it could not have expressed an afterthought. “Had you a true vocation,” he said, “would you find such uses for your modesty?”

The vicar, torn between a desire to rebuke what he felt to be an intolerable impertinence and a wish to end an interview that boded ill to his dignity, could only stand irresolute. Yet this odd creature spoke so readily, with a precision so rare and curious that his every word seemed to acquire a kind of authority. Bitterly chagrined, half insulted as the vicar was, he determined to continue the argument if only for the sake of a further light upon the man’s state of mind.

“You claim to hear a divine voice. Is it for that reason, may one ask, that you feel licensed to utter such appalling blasphemies?”

John Smith smiled again in his odd way.

“You speak like the men of old time,” he said softly.

“I use the King’s English,” said the vicar. “And I use it as pointedly, as expressively, as sincerely as lies in my power. I mean every word I say. You claim the divine voice, yet all that it speaks is profanity and corruption.”

“As was said of the prophets of old?”

“You claim to be a prophet?”

“Yes, I claim to be a prophet.”

“That is interesting.” There was a sudden change of tone as the vicar realized the importance of the admission. He saw that it might have a very important bearing upon his future course of action. “You claim to be a prophet in order that you may blaspheme the Creator.”

“I claim to be a prophet of the good, the beautiful, and the true. I claim to hear the voice of the eternal. And if these things be blasphemous in your sight, I can only grieve for your election.”

“Leave me out of it, if you please.” The clean thrust had stung the vicar to fury. “I know perfectly well where and how I stand, and if there is the slightest doubt in the matter it will be the province of my bishop to resolve it. But with you, Smith, who, I am ashamed to say, are one of my parishioners, it is a very different matter. In your case I have my duty to perform. It is one that can only cause me the deepest pain and anxiety, but I am determined that nothing shall interfere with it. Forgive my plainness, but your mind is in a most disorderly state. I am afraid Mr. Brandon is partly to blame. I have told him more than once that it was folly to give you the run of his library. You have been encouraged to read books beyond your mental grasp, or at least beyond your power to assimilate becomingly, in the manner of a gentleman. You are a half-educated man—it is my duty to speak out—and like all such men you are wise in your own conceit. Now there is reason to believe that, in virtue of an old statute which is still operative, you have made yourself amenable to the law of the land. At all events I intend to find out. And then will arise the question as to how far it will be one’s duty to move in this matter.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington watched the young man narrowly as he uttered this final threat. He had the satisfaction of observing that John Smith changed color a little. If, however, he had hoped to frighten the man it was by no means clear that he had succeeded.

“You follow your conscience, sir,” he said with a sweet unconcern that added to the vicar’s inward fury. “And I try to follow mine. But it is right to say to you that you are entering upon a deep coil. The soul of man is abroad in a dark night, yet the door is still open, and I pray that you at least will not seek to close it.”

“The door—still open!” The vicar looked at him in amazement. “What door?”

“The door for all mankind.”

“You speak in riddles.”

“For the present let them so remain. But I will give you a piece of news. At two o’clock this morning a presence entered my room and said: ‘I am Goethe and I have come to pray for Germany.’”

The vicar could only gaze in silence at John Smith.

“And I said: ‘Certainly, I am very glad to pray for Germany,’ and we knelt and prayed together. And then he rose and showed me the little town with its quaint gables and turrets where he sleeps at night, and I asked him to have courage and then I embraced him and then he left me, saying he would return again.”

The vicar heard him to the end with a growing stupefaction. Such a speech in its complete detachment from the canons of reason could only mean that the man was unhinged. The words themselves would bear no other interpretation; but in spite of that the vicar’s amazement soon gave way to a powerful resentment. At that moment the sense of outrage was stronger in him than anything else.

A certain practical sagacity enabled him to see at once that an abyss had opened between this grotesquely undisciplined mind and his own. The man might be merely recounting a dream, indulging a fancy, weaving an allegory, but at whatever angle he was approached by an incumbent of the Established Church, only one explanation could cover such lawlessness. The man was not of sound mind. And after all that was the one truly charitable interpretation of his whole demeanor and attitude. An ill-regulated, morbidly sensitive organization had broken down in the stress of those events which had sorely tried an intellect as stable as Mr. Perry-Hennington’s own. Indeed it was only right to think so; otherwise, the vicar would have found it impossible to curb himself. Even as it was he dared not trust himself to say a word in reply. All at once he turned abruptly on his heel and walked away as on a former occasion.

IV

As the vicar made his way across the green toward the village he deliberated very gravely. It was clear that such a matter would have to be followed up. But he must not act precipitately. Fully determined now not to flinch from an onerous task, he must look before and after.

Two courses presented themselves to his sense of outrage. And he must choose without delay. Before committing himself to definite action he must either see Gervase Brandon, whom he felt bound in a measure to blame for John Smith’s state of mind, and take advice as to what should be done, or he must see the young man’s mother and ask her help. It chanced, however, that Mrs. Smith’s cottage was near by. Indeed it skirted the common, and he had raised the latch of her gate before he realized that the decision had somehow been made for him, apparently by a force outside himself.

It was a very humble abode, typical of that part of the world, but a trim hedge of briar in front, a growth of honeysuckle above the porch, and a low roof of thatch gave it a rustic charm. The door stone had been freshly whitened, and the window curtains, simple though they were, were so neat and clean that the outward aspect of Rose Cottage was almost one of refinement.

The vicar’s sharp knock was answered by a village girl, a timid creature of fourteen. At the sight of the awe-inspiring figure on the threshold, she bobbed a curtsey, and in reply to the question: “Is Mrs. Smith at home?” gurgled an inaudible “Yiss surr.”

“Is that the vicar?” said a faint voice.

Mr. Perry-Hennington said reassuringly that it was, and entered briskly, with that air of decision the old ladies of the parish greatly admired.

A puny, white-haired woman was seated in an armchair in the chimney corner, with a shawl over her shoulders. She had the pinched, wistful look of the permanent invalid, yet the peaked face and the vivid eyes had great intelligence. But they were also full of suffering, and the vicar, at heart genuinely kind, was struck by it at once.

“How are you today, Mrs. Smith?” he said.

“No better and no worse than I’ve been this last two years,” said the widow in a voice that had not a trace of complaint. “It is very kind of you to come and see me. I wish I could come to church.”

“I wish you could, Mrs. Smith.” The vicar took a chair by her side. “It would be a privilege to have you with us again.”

The widow smiled wanly. “It has been ordained otherwise,” she said. “And I know better than to question. God moves in a mysterious way.”

“Yes, indeed.” The vicar was a little moved to find John Smith’s mother in a state of grace. “There is strength and compensation in the thought.”

“If one has found the Kingdom it doesn’t matter how long one is tied to one’s chair.”

“It gratifies me to hear you say that.” The vicar spoke in a measured tone. And then suddenly, as he looked at the calm face of the sufferer, he grew hopeful. “Mrs. Smith,” he said, with the directness upon which he prided himself, “I have come to speak to you about your boy.”

“About John?” The widow, the name on her lips, lowered her voice to a rapt, hushed whisper.

The vicar drew his chair a little closer to the invalid. “I am very, very sorry to cause you any sort of trouble, but I want to ask you to use your influence with him; I want to ask you to give him something of your own state of mind.”

The widow looked at the vicar in surprise. “But,” she said softly, “it is my boy John who has made me as I am.”

The vicar was a little disconcerted. “Surely,” he said, “it is God who has made you what you are.”

“Yes, but it is through my boy John that He has wrought upon me.”

“Indeed! Tell me how that came to be.”

The widow shook her head and smiled to herself. “Don’t ask me to do that,” she said. “It is a long and wonderful story.”

But the vicar insisted.

“No, no, I can’t tell you. I don’t think anyone would believe me. And the time has not yet come for the story to be told.”

The vicar still insisted, but this feeble creature had a will as tenacious as his own. His curiosity had been fully aroused, but common sense told him that in all human probability he had to deal with the hallucinations of an old and bed-ridden woman. A simple intensity of manner and words oddly devout made it clear that she was in a state of grace, yet it would seem to be rooted in some illusion in which her worthless son was involved. Although the vicar was without subtlety, he somehow felt that it would hardly be right to shatter that illusion. At the same time the key to his character was duty. And his office asked that in this case it should be rigidly performed. Let all possible light be cast upon the mental history of this man, even if an old and poor woman be stricken in the process. A cruel dilemma was foreshadowed, but let it be faced manfully.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said after a trying pause, “I am very sorry, but there is bad news to give you of your son.”

The effect of the words was remarkable.

“Oh, what has happened to him?” The placid face changed in an instant; one hand clutched at the thin bosom.

The vicar hastened to quell her fears. “Nothing has happened to him,” he said in a grave, kind tone, “but I grieve to say that his conduct leaves much to be desired.”

The widow could only stare at the vicar incredulously.

“I am greatly troubled about him. For a long time now I have known him to be a disseminator of idle and mischievous opinions. I have long suspected him of being a corrupter of our village youth. This morning”—carried away by a sudden warmth of feeling the vicar forgot the mother’s frailty—“he insulted my daughter with a most blasphemous remark, and when I ventured to remonstrate with him he entered upon a farrago of light and meaningless talk. In a word, Mrs. Smith, much as it grieves me to say so, I find your son an atheist, a socialist and a freethinker and I am very deeply concerned for his future in this parish.”

In the stress of indignation the vicar did not temper the wind to the shorn lamb. But the widow was less disconcerted than he felt he had a right to expect her to be. It was true that she listened with amazement, but far from being distressed, she met him with frank skepticism. It deepened an intense annoyance to find that she simply could not believe him.

He gave her chapter and verse. But a categorical indictment called forth the remark that, “John was such a great scholar that ordinary people could not be expected to understand him.”

Such a statement added fuel to the flame. Mr. Perry-Hennington did not pretend to scholarship himself, but he had such a keen and just appreciation of that quality in other people that these ignorant words aroused a pitying contempt. The mother’s attitude could only be taken as a desire to shield and uphold her son.

“Well, Mrs. Smith,” said the vicar, rising from his chair, “I have to tell you that talk of this kind cannot be tolerated here. I very much hope you will speak to him on the matter.”

“But who am I, vicar, that I should presume to speak to him?”

“You are his mother.”

“Of late I have begun to doubt whether I can be his mother.”

The vicar looked at the widow in amazement. “Surely you know whether or not he is your son?” he said in stern surprise.

“Yes, he is the child of my body, but I grow afraid to claim him as mine.”

“For what reason?”

“He is not as other men.”

“I don’t understand you,” said the vicar with stern impatience.

The widow looked at the vicar with a sudden light of ecstasy in her eyes. “I can only tell you,” she said, “that my husband was killed in battle months before a son was born to me. I can only tell you that I prayed and prayed continually that there might be no more wars. I can only tell you that one night an angel came to me and said that my prayer had been heard and would shortly be answered. I was told that I should live to see a war that would end all wars. And then my boy was born and I called him John Emanuel.”

The vicar mustered all his patience as he listened, half-scandalized, to the widow’s statement. He had to fortify himself with the obvious fact that she was a feeble creature who had known many sorrows, whose mind had at last given way. Somehow he felt a shocked resentment, but she was so palpably sincere that it was impossible to visit it upon her. And then the thought came to him that this pitiful illusion was going to add immensely to his difficulties. Having always known her for a decent woman and, when in health, a regular churchgoer, he had counted confidently upon her help. It came as a further embarrassment to find her mind affected. For her sake he might have been inclined to temporize a little with the son, in the hope that she would bring the influence of a known good woman to bear upon him. But that hope was now vain. The widow’s own mind was in a state of almost equal disorder, and any steps the matter might demand must now be taken without her sanction.

Had the mother infected the son, or had the son infected the mother was now the vicar’s problem. Regarding the one as a natural complement to the other, and reading them together, he saw clearly that both were a little unhinged. Beyond all things a good and humane man, he could not help blaming himself a little that he had not realized sooner the true state of the case. Now that he had spoken with the mother, the son became more comprehensible. Without a doubt the one had reacted on the other. It simplified the task it would be his bounden duty to perform, even if it did not make it less repugnant. The fact that two persons shared such a fantastic illusion made it doubly imperative that immediate steps should be taken in a matter which Mr. Perry-Hennington was now viewing with a growing concern.

“Mrs. Smith,” he said very sternly, “there is one question I feel bound to ask. Am I right in the assumption that you regard your son as a—er—a messiah?”

The answer came at once.

“Yes, vicar, I do,” said the widow falteringly. “The angel of the Lord appeared to me, and my son John—if my son he is—has come to fulfill the Prophecy.”

V

The vicar left Rose Cottage in a state of the deepest perturbation he had ever known. He was not the kind of man who submits lightly to any such feeling, but again the sensation came upon him, which he had first felt half an hour ago in his amazing interview with John Smith, that an abyss had suddenly opened under his feet, into which he had already stumbled.

That such heresies should be current in his own little cure of Penfold-with-Churley, with which he had taken such infinite trouble for the past thirty-five years, that they should arise in his own personal epoch, and that of his favorite books and newspapers and friends and fellow workers and thinkers, was so remarkable that he hardly knew how to face the sore problem to which they gave rise. Unquestionably such ideas were a by-product of this terrible war which was tearing up civilization by the roots. In a sense there was consolation in the thought. Abnormal events give rise to abnormal mental processes. Half-developed, ill-regulated, morbidly impressionable minds were very likely to be overthrown by such a phase as the world was now passing through. But even that reflection did little to reduce Mr. Perry-Hennington’s half-indignant sense of horror, or to soften the fierce ordeal in which he was now involved.

What should he do? An old shirker of issues he did not look for help in the quarter where some might have sought it. He was therefore content to put his question to the bracken, to the yellow gorse, to the golden light of heaven which was now beginning to beat uncomfortably upon him.

“Why do anything?” answered the inner voice of the university graduate qua the county gentleman. “Edith is naturally a little upset, but the question to ask oneself is: Are these poor crackbrains really doing any harm?”

Mr. Perry-Hennington had been long accustomed to identify that particular voice with the highest part of himself. In many of the minor crises which had arisen in his life he had thankfully and gratefully followed it. There were times undoubtedly when it was the duty of a prudent person to turn the blind eye to the telescope. But a very little reflection convinced him that this occasion was not one of them.

Apart from the fact that it was quite impossible to allow such a fantastic heresy to arise in his parish, there was the public interest to consider. The country was living under martial law, and it had come to his knowledge that the King’s enemies were receiving open countenance. The man Smith was a poor sort of creature enough, however one might regard him, but he was thought to have influence among persons of his own standing, and it was said to be growing. Moreover, there was “his faith-healing tomfoolery” to be taken into account; at the best a trivial business, yet also a portent, which was having an effect upon the credulous and the ignorant. Therefore the man must be put in his place. And if possible he must be taught a lesson. The subject was beset with thorns of the prickliest kind, but the vicar had never lacked moral courage of an objective sort, and he felt he would be unworthy of his cloth if for a moment he allowed himself to shirk his obvious duty.

While a rather hide-bound intellect set squarely to the problem before it, Mr. Perry-Hennington marched slowly along the only attempt at a street that the village of Penfold could boast. At the far end was a massive pair of iron gates picked out with gold, surmounted by a medieval arch of stone, upon which a coat of arms was emblazoned. Beyond these portals was a short avenue of glorious trees which led to the beautiful old house known as Hart’s Ghyll, the seat for many generations of the squires of Penfold.

The symbol above the gates brought the vicar up short with a shock of surprise. Unconscious of the direction in which the supraliminal self had been leading him, he was inclined to accept it as the clear direction of a force beyond himself. It seemed, therefore, right to go at once and lay this difficult matter before Gervase Brandon, the man whom he felt bound to blame more than anyone else for John Smith’s unhappy state of mind.

The owner of Hart’s Ghyll, having married Mr. Perry-Hennington’s niece, could claim to be his relation by marriage. Brandon, a man of forty-two, born to the purple of assured social position, rich, cultivated, happily wed, the father of two delightful children, had seemed to possess everything that the heart of man could desire. Moreover, he had a reputation not merely local as a humane and liberal thinker—a too liberal thinker in the opinion of the vicar, who was proud to belong to a sturdier school. A model landlord who housed his laborers in absurdly modern and hygienic dwellings, who, somewhat to the scandal of less enlightened neighbors, allowed his smaller tenants to farm his land at purely nominal rents, he did his best to foster a spirit of thrift, independence and true communal feeling.

As a consequence there were those who held the squire of Penfold to be a mirror of all the virtues. There was also a smaller but vastly more influential class which could not bear to hear his name mentioned. He was mad, said the county Guys of the district. The vicar of Penfold did not go quite to that length, but he sympathized with the point of view. When he lunched and dined, as he often did, with the neighboring magnates, he was wont to sigh sadly over “that fellow Brandon,” and at the same time gravely lament, but not without an air of plaintive humor, that niece Millicent had yet to teach him sense. And this statement always involved the corollary that niece Millicent’s failure was the more surprising since the Perry-Henningtons were a sound old Tory stock.

The opinion current in old-port-drinking circles was that Gervase Brandon was as charming a fellow as you would meet in a day’s march, but that he was overeducated—he had been a don at Oxford before he came into the property—and that he had more money to spend than was good for him. For some years he had been “queering the pitch” for less happily placed neighbors and contemporaries, and these found it hard to forgive him. They had prophesied that the day would come when his vagaries would cause trouble, and at the moment the famous Brandon coat of arms of the lion and the dove, and its motto: “Let the weak help the strong, let the strong help the weak,” came within the vicar’s purview, he felt that the prophecy had been most oddly, not to say dramatically, fulfilled.

If blame there was for the appearance of a Mad Mullah in the parish, without a doubt it must be laid to the door of Gervase Brandon. In the most absurd way he had long encouraged one whom the vicar could only regard as a wastrel. He had allowed this incorrigible fellow the run of the Hart’s Ghyll library, and the vicar recalled meeting John Smith in the village street with a priceless Elzevir copy of Plato’s Theætetus under his arm, the Brandon crest stamped on the leather, the Brandon bookplate inside. The vicar understood that the man had been a frequent visitor at the house, that money had been given him from time to time, and that the mother had been allowed to occupy the cottage on the common rent free. Was it to be wondered at that a weak, half-developed brain had been thrown off its balance?

In these circumstances it was right that Gervase Brandon should be made to understand the mischief he had wrought; it was right that he should be called upon to take a hand in the adjustment of the coil. But as Mr. Perry-Hennington passed through the gate of Hart’s Ghyll and walked slowly up the avenue toward the house there was still a reservation in his mind. As matters were with Brandon now he might not be able to grapple with a problem of a nature to make heavy demands upon the mental and moral faculties.

The vicar had scarcely entered upon this aspect of the case, when the sight of a spinal carriage in the care of two nurses forbade any more speculation upon the subject. He was suddenly brought face to face with reality in a grimly practical shape.

“How are you this morning, Gervase?” said the vicar, stopping the little procession with a hearty voice. The question was addressed to a gaunt, hollow-eyed man in a green dressing gown, who was propped up on pillows.

“I’ve nothing to complain of,” said Gervase Brandon. He spoke in a calm, gentle way. “Another capital night.”

“Do you still have pain?”

“None for a week, I’m thankful to say. But I touch wood!”

The optimistic, almost gay tone did not deceive the vicar. The tragic part of the matter was that the cessation of pain was not a hopeful sign. Brandon might not have known that. This morning, at any rate, he had the half-defiant cheerfulness of one who did not intend to admit physical calamity. Yet he must have well understood the nature of the thing that had come upon him. For three long, terrible months he had lain on his back, paralyzed from the waist down, the result of shell shock sustained on the beaches of Gallipoli. There was every reason to fear a lesion of certain ganglia, and little hope was now held out that he would ever walk again.

To a man in meridian pride of body such a prospect hardly bore thinking about. But the blow had been borne with a fortitude at which even a man so unimaginative as the vicar could only marvel. Not again would the owner of Hart’s Ghyll prune his roses, or drive a golf ball, or cast a fly, or take a pot shot at a rabbit; not again would he take his children on his knee.

Brandon had always been the least militant of men. His instincts were liberal and humane, and in the happy position of being able to live as he chose he had gratified them to the full. He had had everything to attach him to existence; if ever fortune had had a favorite it was undoubtedly he. It had given him everything, with a great zest in life as a crowning boon. But in August, 1914, in common with so many of his countrymen, he had cast every personal consideration to the wind and embraced a life which he loathed with every fiber of his being.

He had only allowed himself one reason for the voluntary undertaking of a bestial task, and it was the one many others of his kind had given: “So that that chap won’t have to do it”—the chap in question being an engaging, curly-headed urchin still in the care of a governess. Well, the father had “done his bit,” but as far as the small son was concerned there was no guaranty that it had not been done in vain. And none knew that better than the shattered man propped up in the spinal carriage.

The sight of Gervase Brandon had done something to weaken the vicar’s resolve. It hardly seemed right to torment the poor fellow with this extremely disagreeable matter. Yet a moment’s reflection convinced Mr. Perry-Hennington that it would be most unwise to take any decisive step without discussing it with the man best able to throw light upon it. Moreover, as the vicar recognized, Brandon’s mental powers did not seem to have shared his body’s eclipse. He appeared to enjoy them to the full; in fact it might be said that complete physical prostration had added to their perceptiveness. Whenever the vicar talked with him now he was much impressed by the range and quality of his mind.

“Gervase,” said the vicar after a brief mental survey of the position, “I wonder if I might venture to speak to you about something that is troubling me a good deal?”

“Certainly, certainly,” said the occupant of the spinal carriage, with an alert, almost eager smile. “If there’s any way in which I can be of the slightest use, or any way in which you think I can I shall be only too delighted.”

“I hate having to bother you with a matter of this kind. But it is likely that you know something about it. And I am greatly in need of advice, which I hope you may be able to give.”

“I hope I may.” The vicar’s gravity was not lost upon Brandon. “Perhaps you would like to discuss it in the library?”

“If you don’t mind.”

VI

To the library the spinal carriage was taken. When it had been wheeled into the sunny embrasure of that wonderful room, which even the vicar never entered without a slight pang of envy, the nurses retired, leaving the two men together.

The library of Hart’s Ghyll was richly symbolical of the aristocracy of an old country. It had once been part of a monastery which had been set, as happened invariably when religion had a monopoly of learning and taste, in the fairest spot the countryside could offer for the purpose. From the large mullioned window the view of Hart’s Ghyll and its enchanted vistas of hill, stream and woodland beyond was a miracle of beauty. And the walls of the room displayed treasures above price, such a collection of first editions and old masters as even a man so insensitive as the vicar sometimes recalled in his dreams. Their present owner, who in the vicar’s opinion had imbibed the modern spirit far too freely, had often said that he could not defend possession in such abundance by one who had done nothing to earn it. In an ideal state, had declared this advanced thinker, these things would be part of the commonweal—a theory which Mr. Perry-Hennington considered fantastic. To his mind, as he had informed niece Millicent, it was perilously like an affront to the order of divine providence.

The spirit of place seemed to descend upon the vicar, as in a hushed, rather solemn tone, he asked Brandon whether the sun would be too much for him.

“Not for a man who has been grilled in Gallipoli,” answered Brandon with a stoic’s smile. “But if you will open that window a little wider and roll me back a bit, I shall have my own piece of earth to look at. Give me this and you may take the rest of Christendom. It’s been soaked into my bones, into my brain. One ought to be a Virgil or a Wordsworth.”

“Which I hope you may presently prove, my dear fellow,” said the vicar, touched by a sense of the man’s heroism.

“Alas, they are born.”

“In spirit at any rate you are with them.” The vicar was moved to an infrequent compliment.

But he had suddenly grown nervous. Now that he was face to face with his task he didn’t know how to enter upon it. The wave of indignation which had borne him as far as the library of Hart’s Ghyll had been dissipated by the presence of a suffering it was surely inhuman to embarrass. The younger man, his rare faculty of perception strung to a high pitch, saw at once the vicar’s hesitation. Like an intensely sympathetic woman, Brandon began unconsciously to help him disburden his mind of that which was trying it so sorely.

At last Mr. Perry-Hennington found himself at the point where it became possible to break the ice.

“My dear Gervase,” he said, “there is nothing I dislike more than having to ask you to share my troubles, but a most vexing matter has arisen, and you are the only person whose advice I feel I can take.”

“I only hope I can be of use.”

“Well—it’s John Smith.” The vicar took the plunge. And as he did so, he was sufficiently master of himself to watch narrowly the face of the stricken man.

Brandon fixed deep eyes upon the vicar.

“But he’s such a harmless fellow.” The light tone, the placid smile, told nothing.

“I admit, of course, that one oughtn’t to be worried by a village wastrel.”

“I challenge the term,” said Brandon with the note of airy banter which always charmed. “Not for the first time, you know. I’m afraid we shall never agree about the dear chap.”

“No, I’m afraid we shall not.” The vicar could not quite keep resentment out of his voice. But in deference to a graceful and perhaps merited rebuke, the controversialist lowered his tone a little. “But let me give you the facts.”

Thereupon, with a naïveté not lost upon the man in the spinal carriage, Mr. Perry-Hennington very solemnly related the incident of the white feather.

Brandon said nothing, but looked at the vicar fixedly.

“I hate having to worry you in this way.” Mr. Perry-Hennington watched narrowly the drawn face. “Of course it had to be followed up. At first, I’ll confess, I took it to be a mere piece of blasphemous bravado in execrable taste, but now I’ve seen the man, now I’ve talked with him, I have come to another conclusion.”

The vicar saw that Brandon’s eyes were full of an intense, eager interest.

“Well?” said the sufferer softly.

“The conclusion I have come to is that it’s a case of paranoia.”

“That is to say, you think he intended the statement to be taken literally?”

“I do. But I didn’t realize that all at once. When I accused him of blasphemy he defended himself with a farrago of quasi mystical gibberish which amounted to nothing, and he ended with a perfectly fantastic statement. Let me give it you word for word. ‘At two o’clock this morning a presence entered my room and said, “I am Goethe and I have come to pray for Germany.” And I said, “Certainly, I shall be very glad to pray for Germany,” and we knelt and prayed together. And then he rose and showed me the little town with its quaint gables and turrets where he sleeps at night, and I asked him to have courage and then I embraced him and then he left me, saying he would return again.’”

Brandon’s face had an ever-deepening interest, but he did not venture upon a remark.

“Of course,” said the vicar, “one’s answer should have been, ‘My friend, he who aids, abets and harbors an unregistered alien enemy becomes amenable to the Defense of the Realm Regulations.’”

“What was your answer?” The look of bewilderment was growing upon Brandon’s face.

“I made none. I was completely bowled out. But I went at once to see the mother. And this is where the oddest part of all comes in. After a little conversation with the mother, I discovered that she most sincerely believes that her son is—is a messiah.”

Again the stricken man closed his eyes.

“There we have the clue. In a very exalted way she told me how her son was born six months after her husband had been killed in action. She told me how she had prayed that all wars might cease, how an angel appeared to her with a promise that she would live to see the war which would end all wars; she told me how a son was born to her in fulfillment of the prophecy, and how she christened him John Emanuel. I was astounded. But now I have had time to think about the matter much is explained. The man is clearly suffering from illusions prenatally induced. There is no doubt a doctor would tell us that it explains his fits. It also accounts for his faith-healing nonsense. And there is no doubt that mother and son have reacted upon one another in such a way that they are now stark crazy.”

“And that is your deliberate opinion?”

“With the facts before me I can come to no other. It is the only charitable explanation. Otherwise I should have felt it to be my duty to institute a prosecution under the blasphemy laws. Only the other day there was a man—a tailor, I believe—imprisoned under the statute of Henry VII. But if, as there is now every reason to think, it is a simple case of insanity, one will be relieved from that disagreeable necessity.”

Brandon concurred.

“But as you will readily see, my dear Gervase, the alternative is almost equally distressing. To clear him of the charge of blasphemy it will be necessary to prove him insane; and in that event, of course, he cannot remain at large.”

“Surely the poor chap is quite harmless?”

“Harmless!” Mr. Perry-Hennington had difficulty in keeping his voice under control. “A man who goes about the parish proclaiming himself a god!”

“He has Plotinus with him at any rate.” Again the stricken man closed his eyes. “How says the sage? ‘Surely before this descent into generation we existed in the intelligible world; being other men than now we are, and some of us Gods; clear souls and minds immixed with all existence; parts of the Intelligible, nor severed thence; nor are we severed even now.’”[1]

“Really, my dear Gervase,” said the vicar, trying very hard to curb a growing resentment, “one should hesitate to quote the pagan philosophers in a matter of this kind.”

“I can’t agree. They are far wiser than us in the only thing that matters after all. They have more windows open in the soul.”

“No, no.” Mr. Perry-Hennington strove against vehemence. “Still, we won’t go into that.” He was on perilous ground. Of late years Brandon himself had been a thorn in the sacerdotal cushion. The modern spirit had led him to skepticism, so that, in the vicar’s phrase, “he had become an alien in the household of faith.” Now was not the moment to open an old wound or to revive the embers of controversy. But the vicar felt the old spiritual enmity, which Brandon’s stoic heroism had lulled to sleep, again stirring his blood. Therefore, he must not allow himself to be involved in a false issue. Let him keep rigidly to the business in hand. And the business in hand was: What shall be done with John Smith?

It was clear at once that in Brandon’s opinion there was no need to do anything. The vicar felt ruefully that he should have foreseen this attitude. But he had a right to hope that Brandon’s recent experiences, even if they had not changed him fundamentally, would have done something to modify the central heresies. Nothing was further from the vicar’s desire than to bear hardly upon one who had carried himself so nobly, but Brandon’s air of tolerance was a laxity not to be borne. Mr. Perry-Hennington’s soul was on fire. It was as much as he could do to hold himself in hand.

“You see, my dear fellow,” he said, “as the case presents itself to me, I must do one of two things. Either I must institute a prosecution for blasphemy, so that the law may deal with him, or, as I think would be the wiser and more humane course, I must take steps to have him removed to an asylum.”

“But why do anything?”

“I feel it to be my duty.”

“But he’s so harmless. And a dear fellow.”

“I wish I could share your opinion. I can only regard him as a plague spot in the parish. Insanity is his only defense and it has taken such a noxious form that it may infect others.”

“Hardly likely, one would think.”

“We live in abnormal times. I am very sorry, but I can only regard this man as a moral danger to the community. Edith was greatly shocked. I was greatly shocked. You must excuse my saying so, Gervase, but I cannot help feeling that in the circumstances the vast majority of right-thinking people would be.”

“But who are the people who think rightly?”

Mr. Perry-Hennington raised a deprecating hand. Yet Brandon, having acted in the way he had, was entitled to put the question. He had given more than life for an idea, and that fact made it immensely difficult for the vicar to deal with him as faithfully as he could have wished. He was face to face with a skeptic, but the skeptic was intrenched in a special position where neither contempt nor active reproach of any kind must visit him.

But in spite of himself the old slumbering antagonisms were now awake in the vicar. Brandon, too, was a dangerous paradoxical man. Notwithstanding the honor and the love he bore him, Mr. Perry-Hennington felt his pulses quicken, his fibers stiffen. If ever man did, he saw his duty straight and clear. The only real problem was how to do it with the least affront to others, with the least harm to the community.

“By the way,” said Brandon, his gentle voice filling an awkward pause that had suddenly ensued, “have you ever really talked with John Smith?”

“Oh, yes, many times.”

“I mean have you ever really tried—if I may put it that way—to get at the back of his mind?”

“As far as one can. But to me he seems to have precious little in the way of mind to get at the back of. As far as one’s own limited intelligence will allow one to judge, the mind of John Smith seems a half-baked morass, a mere hotch-potch of moonstruck transcendentalisms, overlaid with a kind of Swedenborgian mysticism, if one may so express oneself. To me it seems a case where a little regular training at a university and the clear thinking it induces would have been of enormous value.”

Brandon smiled. “Have you seen his poem?” he asked.

“No.” The answer was short; and then the vicar asked in a tone which had a tinge of disgust, “Written a poem, has he?”

“He brought it to me the other day.” Again Brandon closed his eyes. “To my mind it is very remarkable,” he said half to himself.

“It would be, no doubt,” said the vicar, half to himself also.

“I should like you to read it.”

“I prefer not to do so,” said the vicar after a pause. “My mind is quite made up about him. It would only vex me further to read anything he may have written. We live by deeds, not by words, and never more so than in this stern time.”

“To my mind, it is a very wonderful poem,” said the stricken man. “I don’t think I am morbidly impressionable—I hope I’m not—but that poem haunts me. It is even changing my outlook. It is an extravagant thing to say, but the feeling it leaves on one’s mind is that if a spectator of all time and all existence, a sort of Cosmostheorus, were to visit the planet at this moment, it is the way in which he might be expected to deliver himself.”

“Neoplatonism of the usual brand, I presume.” There was a slight curl of a thin lip.

“Of a very unusual brand, I assure you. It may be neoplatonism, and yet—no—one cannot give it a label. There is the Something Else behind it.” Once more the stricken man closed his eyes. “Yes, there is the Something Else. The thing infolds me like a dream, a passion. I feel it changing me.”

“What is it called?” the vicar permitted himself to ask.

“It is called ‘The Door.’”

“Why ‘The Door’?”

“Is there a Door still open for the human race?—that is the question the poem asks.”

“A kind of mysticism, I presume?”

“I wish I could persuade you to read the poem. To my mind it has exquisite beauty, and a profundity beyond anything I have ever read. It asks a question which at this moment admits of no answer. Everything hangs in the balance. But the theme of the poem is the future’s vital need, the keeping open, at all costs, of the Door.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington shook his head sadly, but the gesture was not without indulgence. He was ready to make allowance for Brandon’s present state. The importance he attached to such lucubrations was quite unworthy of an ex-Fellow of Gamaliel, at any rate in the eyes of a former Fellow of All Saints, which under an old but convenient dispensation Mr. Perry-Hennington could claim to be. This morbid sensibility was a fruit of Brandon’s disease no doubt. But for his own part the vicar had neither time nor inclination for what could only be an ill-digested farrago of mystical moonshine. Unhappily nothing was left to poor Brandon now except to ease his mind as best he could. Such a mental condition was to be deplored. Yet the vicar fervently hoped that the canker would not bite too deep.

“Do let me get the poem for you to read.” Brandon’s eyes were full of entreaty.

“No, no, my dear fellow,” said the vicar gently. “I really haven’t time to give to such things just now. All one’s energies are absorbed in dealing with things as they are. I am quite prepared to take your word that the poem has literary merit—after all, you are a better judge of such matters than I am. But for those of us who have still our work to do, this is not a moment for poetic fancies or any other form of self-indulgence. Moreover, I must reserve my right to full liberty of action in a matter which is causing me grave concern.”

With these words the vicar took a chastened leave. It was clear that nothing was to be hoped for in this quarter. Bitterly disappointed, but more than ever determined to do his duty in a matter which promised to become increasingly difficult, the vicar shook Brandon gently by the hand and left the room. In the large Tudor hall, with its stone flags, old oak and rare tapestry, he came suddenly upon his niece.

Millicent Brandon looked too girlish to be the mother of the two lusty creatures whom she was helping to fit together a picture puzzle which had been spread out on a table. Tall, slight, a picture of vivid health, she had a charming prettiness of an unusual kind. And in the clear, long-lashed eyes was an eagerness, an intensity of life which the elf-like Babs and the sturdy, yellow-headed Joskin shared with her. Even the vicar, who noticed so little, was struck by the force of the contrast between this rich vitality and the broken man whom he had left a moment ago.

It was clear, however, that above Millicent Brandon’s high spirit hovered the dark shadow which continually haunted her. Behind the surface gayety was an anxiety which never slept, a gnawing fear that no preoccupation could allay. The solid, sensible vicar was liked and respected by women, and he now received the affectionate greeting of his niece, who was genuinely pleased to see him. But her tone had much solicitude.

“Well, Uncle Tom,” was her eager question, “what do you think of Gervase?”

The vicar did not answer at once, but drew in his lips a little, in the manner of a cautious physician with a reputation for absolute and fearless honesty.

“He seems cheerful,” he said.

“Everybody thinks he keeps up in the most wonderful way. And do you know, he has begun to read again? A fortnight ago he seemed hardly able to bear the thought of a book; he couldn’t be got to look at a newspaper or even to listen to one. But that is now a thing of the past. All the old interest is coming back. Last night I read Pascal to him for nearly an hour, and he followed it the whole time with the closest attention.”

“I hope you had the doctor’s permission,” said the vicar with a frown.

“Oh, yes. Both Dr. Shrubb and Dr. Joliffe are very pleased. Dr. Shrubb was here yesterday. He thinks it is the most hopeful sign we have yet had.”

“I am very glad indeed to hear it,” said the vicar with a puzzled face.

“Of course he can promise nothing—absolutely nothing, but he thinks it is a great thing for the mind to be aroused. A fortnight ago Gervase couldn’t be induced to take an interest in anything. And now he listens to Pascal and reads the Times.”

The vicar’s frown grew more perplexed. “And the doctors are pleased?”

“Oh, yes.”

“How do they account for the change?”

“They give no explanation, but I have a theory that in a sort of way the person who is really responsible for it—I know you’ll laugh at me—is that dear fellow, John Smith.”

“Oh, indeed,” said the vicar in a hard, dry voice.

“I know you don’t altogether approve of him, Uncle Tom, but he’s such a charming, whimsical, gentle creature, just a little mad they seem to think in the village, but Gervase has always made a friend of him.”

“So I understand.” The voice was that of a statesman; the frown was growing portentous.

“Well, every day since Gervase came home the dear fellow has picked a bunch of flowers on the common and brought them here. And every day he has begged to see Gervase. A fortnight ago, when Gervase had been out of his room twice, I decided that he might. I felt sure no harm could come of it. So he came and it seems he talked to Gervase of a poem he had written—I didn’t hear the conversation so I can’t throw much light on it—but the next day he returned with the poem. And the amazing part is that Gervase read it, and dating from then he seems to have found a new interest in everything.”

“And you are inclined to attribute the change in the first place to the effect of this man’s verses?”

“Yes. It seems a little absurd. But in my own mind I can’t help thinking that the improvement is entirely due to John Smith.”

“Have you read these verses, by the way?”

“No. It’s quite a long poem, I believe, stanza upon stanza, but Gervase returned it at once. Since its effect has been so remarkable I am thinking of trying to get hold of it.”

“Doesn’t this strike you as very odd, that is, assuming your theory of the poem’s effect upon a man like Gervase to be correct?”

“Yes, quite extraordinary. He was always so fastidious, a man to whom only the best and highest appealed.”

“Quite so.” The vicar pursed his lips. “And it is a fact to look in the face, my dear Millicent. As you know, I am a great believer in looking facts in the face.”

“You think, Uncle Tom, it implies mental deterioration?”

“One hardly likes to say that,” said the vicar cautiously. “But that is what we have to fear.”

A deepening anxiety crept into the eyes of the wife. “It does seem a reasonable explanation. But please don’t forget that Gervase took no interest in any subject until John Smith came, and that now he has begun to read the Bible.”

“It is certainly remarkable if such is the case. By the way, do the doctors allow him to read the Bible?”

“He may read anything.”

“And they consider him quite rational?”

“Perfectly rational.” Millicent looked at the vicar in some surprise. “Don’t you, Uncle Tom?”

The vicar would have evaded the question had he been able to do so. But with those candid eyes upon him that was impossible. Moreover, the old habit of fearless honesty in all things did not permit a deliberate lie.

Millicent declined to accept his silence. “You don’t!” She pinned him down to a reply.

“If the doctors are satisfied,” said the vicar slowly, “that is the important thing. One doesn’t set up one’s opinion against theirs, you know.”

But he was not to escape in that way.

“Evidently you don’t agree with them, Uncle Tom. Now I want you to be perfectly frank and tell me just how you feel about Gervase.”

“Well, I will.” The vicar spoke slowly and weightily. “Since you press the question, his whole outlook appears to me to be changing.”

“But not for the worse, surely?”

“That I cannot say. It is only my opinion and I give it for what it is worth, but I don’t quite approve this change which is coming over Gervase.”

“Didn’t you find him happy and cheerful?”

“I did. But that is not the point. My feeling is that if Gervase were perfectly rational he would not attach so much importance to the—er—lucubrations of this fellow, John Smith.”

“But Gervase has always been a great lover of poetry,” said the surprised Millicent. “He took prizes for it at Eton, and at Oxford he won a medal. His love of poetry is really nothing new; in fact he passes for an expert on the subject.”

“That is my point. I have always shared that view of Gervase. In common with the rest of the world, I have greatly admired his translations from the Greek. But that being the case, the question one must now ask oneself is, why does a man of sure taste, of real scholarship, suddenly surrender his mind to the fantastic trivialities of a half-baked, half-educated village loafer?”

“But you’ve not read the poem,” said Millicent with a little air of triumph, in which, however, relief was uppermost.

“No good thing can come out of Babylon. It isn’t reasonable to expect it. Why, I’ve known that fellow Smith nearly twenty years. I know exactly what education he has had, I know his record.”

“I won’t venture to argue with you, Uncle Tom. Your opinion is worth so much more than mine, but isn’t there such a thing as genius?”

“There may be. Although it is a thing I am rather skeptical about myself; that is to say I regard it primarily as an infinite capacity for taking pains, a natural fruit of learning and study. That is why to my mind it is more wholesome to believe that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. Nay, it must have been so, for it is surely a rational canon that the most highly trained mind of the age wrote Hamlet, Othello and King Lear, rather than an inspired clodhopper who began life as a butcher’s apprentice.”

“Well, Uncle Tom,” said his niece demurely, “of course I mustn’t argue with you, but aren’t your views rather like those of a character in a most amusing play I saw in London the other day? When a dramatic critic was asked to criticize a play, he said, ‘How can one begin to criticize a play until one knows the name of the author?’”

“Quite so, quite so,” said Mr. Perry-Hennington triumphantly. “A very apt illustration of my point.”

“But it is also an illustration of mine. At least I hope it is.”

“Then I’m afraid we are arguing about entirely different things.”

“Well, Uncle Tom,” said the tenacious Millicent, “I am arguing about what Gervase would call the peril of a priori judgments. It seems to me that the Christian religion itself is a proof of it. How does your theory account for the fact that Jesus was a village carpenter?”

The vicar drew up his long, thin, rather ascetic frame to the topmost of its seventy-two inches. “My dear child,” he said solemnly, “my theory accounts for that fact by simply assuming that Jesus was God Himself. It is the only reasonable hypothesis. Without it there is no such thing as the Christian religion.”

“But, Uncle Tom, to quote Gervase again, isn’t that the greatest of all assumptions for a rational mind to make?”

“Undoubtedly, my dear. And it is only permitted to us to make it by the implicit eye of faith.”

“Do you mean that the Incarnation is the only matter in which we are to exercise faith?”

“Ah, now we are getting into theology.” Mr. Perry-Hennington took up his niece with a little air of bland condescension. “You mustn’t bother your pretty head about that. I must go now.” A pang shot through him as he suddenly remembered the morrow’s sermon. “I must leave you, my dear, to help the children put together their picture puzzle. Good-by. Gervase is really quite as well as I had hoped to find him. Let us continue to have faith.”

Thereupon the vicar tore himself away from a controversy in which he felt he was showing, as usual, to singular advantage. He was so sure of the ground on which he stood, that even poor Gervase’s highly trained intellect, of which the callow, fluffy-headed Millicent was the merest echo, was hardly able to meet him upon it. Moreover the vicar was a born fighter, and the trend of the discussion with his niece had had the effect of stirring in his mind the embers of a latent antagonism. The truth was, Brandon had never been quite forgiven a mot he had once permitted himself. He had said that the Established Church was determined to eat his cake and to have it: that is, it was reared on the basis of two and two makes five, but ordered its conduct on the basis of two and two makes four.

As the vicar left the inner hall he heard the voice of the curly-headed Joskin uplifted in a wail: “Oh, mummy, do come and help us! We can’t fit it in. There’s a piece missing.”

VII

The vicar remembered his sermon and looked at his watch. It was within twenty minutes of luncheon; the most valuable morning of the week was gone. The spirit of vexation rose in him again. It was all the fault of this miserable fellow, John Smith. Two priceless hours had been lavished on this wastrel, this dead charge on the community. Moreover he would not be able to make up for lost time in the course of the afternoon. At three o’clock he was due at Brombridge to attend the War Economy Committee; at seven he had to take the chair at a recruiting meeting at Grayfield, and dine afterward with his old Magdalen friend, Whymper.

It cut him to the heart to forego the morrow’s sermon. He was the soul of conscientiousness, and not since his attack of rheumatoid arthritis nine years ago had he failed to come up to time on Sunday evening with a brand new discourse. And if ever one was needed it was now. The time cried aloud for pulpit direction. The government was conducting the war in half-hearted fashion. It had not yet dared to bring in a Conscription Bill, yet in Mr. Perry-Hennington’s opinion every man and every woman in the country up to the age of sixty-five ought to have been forcibly enlisted months ago. Several times already he had made that proposal in the newspapers over his own signature, and it had been greatly applauded by the only sort of people who counted in war time.

The hour was certainly ripe for a rasper in the way of a sermon. The nation wanted “gingering up.” He must find time somehow to put his ideas together against Sunday evening. As he strode with his long legs down the glorious avenue of Hart’s Ghyll he felt braced and reënforced with energy. Once more his thought began to flow. He had his text at any rate, and it ought not to be difficult to strike something compelling out of it. By the time the porter’s lodge was reached, he had grown quite hopeful. Phrases, ideas, were filling his mind; perhaps his morning had not been wholly wasted after all; it seemed to have stirred him to something. “Let us put on the armor of light.” For the vicar those words were a bugle call to the old Adam within. The spirit of conflict, like a sleeping giant, sprang to new life.

Hardly had Mr. Perry-Hennington passed beyond the iron gates into the village street, when a rather perspiring, decidedly genial-looking man on a bicycle immediately recalled his pastoral duty to his mind. Nay, it was more than that. The matter of John Smith had as much to do with the state as the recruiting question, the economy question, the supineness of the government, and the morrow’s sermon.

“Good-morning, Joliffe,” said the vicar in a hearty, detaining voice. “The very man I want to see.”

“Nothing wrong at home I hope,” said the man on the bicycle, who was the village doctor. He spoke in a simple, direct, unaffectedly practical way, which all the same was not without a faint note of deference, ever grateful to Mr. Perry-Hennington’s ear.

Dr. Joliffe slowed up and hopped from his bicycle.

“No, nothing of that kind I’m glad to say.” The vicar’s reply was equally precise and to the point. “But I want to have a little talk with you privately about a matter that is worrying me a good deal.”

“Very glad any time.” Dr. Joliffe looked at his watch. “Why not come and take potluck with me now—if you are not afraid of Mrs. Small in war time. She’s not up to your form at any time, but you are very welcome to what we have.”

The vicar hesitated. He was expected at home, but John Smith was burning a hole in his mind. He felt there must be no delay in taking a man whom he could trust into his confidence, and if he lost this present opportunity no other chance might arise for several days.

“You will?” said the practical Joliffe. “Although you’ll not expect much. I’ll send my boy along to the vicarage to tell them not to wait for you.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington allowed himself to be persuaded. Joliffe was the only person in the place to whom he might turn for help; moreover he was a discreet, unaffectedly honest man whom the vicar had always instinctively trusted. And disconcerted as he was by Brandon’s attitude in the matter, it was imperative that no time should be lost in taking competent advice.

The doctor’s abode was a rather fine, small Georgian specimen, standing back from the center of the village street. A widower and childless in a house too large for his needs, a man of taste in furniture and bric-a-brac, with a capital cellar and a good cigar for his friends, he was also a man of private means to whom the neighboring villages owed a great deal. He was such an excellent fellow, so widely and so justly respected, that it was a little odd to find him tinged with the national vice of servility. But with all his great merits he sometimes found it rather hard to forget that he belonged to the middle class and that the vicar belonged to the aristocracy. It may have been for that reason that Mr. Perry-Hennington felt so much confidence in his judgment. At any rate, the satisfying sense that Joliffe was aware of the deference due to a peer’s brother oiled the wheels of their intercourse, and enabled the vicar to treat him with a bonhomie which he knew would not be abused.

Mrs. Small had only a cottage pie and a pancake to offer the august visitor, but in spite of the King’s edict, to which the host apologetically referred, this fare was eked out by a very honest glass of brown sherry, a cup of coffee that did Mrs. Small great credit, and a really excellent cigar.

Both gentlemen were due at Brombridge at three, to which center of activity the doctor proposed to drive the vicar in his runabout. This suited the vicar very well. He would be there and back in half the time required by his gig. And old Alice, who was rising twenty-four, would be able to save herself for the evening journey to Grayfield, which old Alice’s master, fully conscious that “the old girl was not what she had been,” and a humane man to boot, had been inclined to view with some little concern. Things were turning out for the best in the mundane sphere at any rate, and the vicar was not unpleasantly aware of this fact as, after-luncheon cigar alight, he entered upon the incidental cause of a modest but agreeable meal to which he had done perhaps rather better justice than the state of his emotions justified.

“Joliffe,” said the vicar, taking a long and impressive pull at his cigar, “what I really want to talk to you about is that fellow John Smith. I am sorry to say I’ve come to the conclusion that he can no longer be allowed to stay in the parish.”

“Indeed,” said the doctor casually. “A harmless sort of creature I’ve always thought. Doesn’t quite know himself perhaps. A little too free with his opinions may be, but strictly between ourselves”—Dr. Joliffe’s voice grew respectfully confidential—“I think we may lay that to the door of someone else.”

“Brandon, eh? I agree.” The vicar grew magisterial. “Always an injudicious fellow. That’s the worst of your radical. Gives these intermediate sort of people ideas.”

“Quite so. I wish you’d try the brandy.” The host pushed it across.

“No. Really. War time, you know.”

“I should value your opinion. Just half a glass.”

“Well, half a glass. To return to John Smith. Excellent brandy. My girl, Edith, presented this fellow Smith with a white feather this morning. Of course he’s a poor half-begotten sort of creature, but as far as one can see there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be working at munitions instead of loafing about the common.”

“Exactly. Sure you won’t have a leetle more?”

“Quite. Well, if you please, he kissed the feather, stuck it in his buttonhole, and said, ‘And lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him.’”

The doctor shook a grave, gray head. “Sounds decidedly cracked, I must say. At any rate a most improper speech to make to a clergyman’s daughter.”

“I should think so! Outrageous blasphemy!”

“Do you suppose the chap meant to insult her?”

“If he didn’t, and it’s charitable to give him the benefit of the doubt, his behavior only admits of one other explanation.”

Dr. Joliffe sat, a picture of perplexity. To a severely literal mind the speech was meaningless. He had known for some time that the man claimed to see visions, that he was a poet and a dreamer; and the doctor had lately heard rumors, to which he had paid little attention, that the man was dabbling in Christian Science in neighboring villages; but this was the first time it had occurred to him that the fellow was insane. But now the doctor agreed with the vicar that such behavior strongly suggested that condition.

“Mind you, that is not all.” And the vicar gave an account of his own visit to the common, his conversation with the man, his subsequent visit to the mother and the remarkable statement she had made to him.

“She has always been very religious,” said the doctor, “but up till now I have not questioned her sanity.”

“Nor I,” said the vicar. “But she is not important. She is practically bed-ridden. It is this son of hers we have to think about. I have already made up my mind that he must go. And that being the case, the problem arises as to what is the best means of getting rid of him.”

Dr. Joliffe, a worldly-wise man within his sphere, stroked his chin solemnly but offered no advice.

“Of course,” said the vicar, “it is in the public interest that whatever steps we may take should not excite attention. It is sufficiently disagreeable to have that sort of lunatic in one’s parish, without having busybodies and maliciously inclined people making a fuss. The readiest and simplest means, no doubt, would be to institute a prosecution for blasphemy. He would most certainly be detained during his Majesty’s pleasure. But such a proceeding might play into the hands of the enemies of the Established Church, in which, unfortunately, the country seems to abound. We might have Voltaires arising in the Cocoa Press or something equally revolting.”

“Quite so, vicar.” Dr. Joliffe compressed his lips. “You’ll be wise to go slow in a matter of this kind, believe me, or you might easily find public opinion against you.”

“As though one cared that for public opinion.” The vicar snapped heroic fingers. “Still, I see your point. And broadly speaking, I agree with it. Now to pass to the second alternative. The man said to me—let me give his precise words if I can—‘At two o’clock this morning a presence entered my room and said, ”I am Goethe and I have come to pray for Germany.” And I answered him, “Certainly I shall be very glad to pray for Germany,” and we knelt and prayed together; and then he arose and I embraced him and he showed me the little town with its gables and turrets where he sleeps at night and then he left me, promising to return.’”

“Perfectly preposterous,” said the doctor. “I quite agree that the man ought to be locked up. But of course he doesn’t intend to be taken literally. Obviously it is his idea of a poetic fancy.”

“No doubt. But a man must be taught to curb such poetic fancies in a time like the present. Now the point which arises”—the vicar raised a dogmatic forefinger—“is that a person who makes such statements in public renders himself amenable to the Defense of the Realm Regulations. And there is no doubt that any bench of magistrates that knew its business would know how to deal with him.”

“Personally, I’m not altogether clear that they would,” said Dr. Joliffe cautiously. “I agree with you, of course, that a man who talks in that way needs a strait waistcoat—one wonders what would happen to a man in Germany who went about saying he was praying for England! At the same time one ought not to forget that nowadays even the county bench is not composed exclusively of people as clear-sighted as you and I.”

“That is so, I am afraid. Even the county bench is getting fearfully mixed. Timson, the Brombridge grocer, is the latest addition, by the way. But I see your point. In such an absurd country as this one couldn’t depend on the man being dealt with in the way that he deserves. That’s where the enemy with its wonderful internal administration has such an advantage. Their system has much to recommend it in war time—or in any other if it comes to that.”

Dr. Joliffe agreed. “We have much to learn from them in the handling of the masses.”

“Ah, well, Joliffe,” said the vicar hopefully, “we shall learn many things if this war goes on long enough.”

“I am convinced that the only way to down Prussia is to adopt Prussia’s methods.”

“However,” said the vicar briskly, “we have not come to them yet. Therefore we can’t rely on the county bench doing its duty in the matter, although I hate having to say so. And that brings us to alternative the third, which is, Joliffe, that this man, John Smith, must be put away privately—for the good of the community.”

This taking of the bull by the horns was followed by a pause on the part of the doctor. He was an admirer of the vicar’s thorough-goingness, he was in full sympathy with the main premises of his argument, but he was a conscientious man. And he had a clear perception of the difficulties inherent in the process of confining a lunatic.

At last Dr. Joliffe broke a dubious silence. “To begin with, vicar, you will have to get two doctors to certify the chap insane, and then you will have to get two magistrates to sign a warrant for his removal.”

“I know that,” said the vicar. “And I am fully prepared to do it. But to begin with, Joliffe, I must have your help in the matter.”

“I am willing to give it of course. It’s one’s duty.”

“Then I shall ask you to certify him at once.”

Dr. Joliffe hesitated. A cloud of indecision came on his face. “Before I do that,” he said very slowly, “I should like the opinion of someone who has more knowledge of mental disease than I pretend to.”

“But, my dear fellow,” said the vicar rather surprisedly, “after what I have told you aren’t you already convinced that the fellow is insane?”

“Insanity is a complicated subject,” said the cautious Joliffe. “A very much more complicated subject than the layman appreciates.”

The vicar, at heart an autocrat, began to bristle at once. Scenting contradiction in the quarter where he had least expected to find it, he grew suddenly impatient. “But even a layman knows,” he said in a tone of authority, “that insanity on one point is insanity on all.”

“Just so.”

“Well, that is already proved.”

“I shall not gainsay it. But a general practitioner is naturally cautious—it is his duty to be so—in a matter of this kind. Let me suggest that we have the opinion of a mental specialist before we commit ourselves to any line of action.”

In the opinion of Mr. Perry-Hennington this was perilously like a display of moral cowardice, but from a purely professional standpoint it might not be unreasonable. All the mental specialists of Harley Street would not alter the fact that the man was insane—it was the only charitable assumption. At the same time, Joliffe’s request was quite easy to understand.

“By all means.” The vicar’s tone of assent implied that he had to deal with a timid fellow. “We’ll consult anyone you please. Of course, only one opinion is possible, but if you feel it will help and strengthen you in your duty don’t let us hesitate. By all means let us have someone down at once.”

“I am sure it is the proper course to take.”

“Very well. Who shall it be? Not necessarily a man in the first flight who will want a large fee, which I’m afraid will have to come out of my pocket instead of out of the Treasury. Not that I shall grudge it, whatever it may be. Still, the case is so clear that somebody local, such a man as Parker of Brombridge, will not have the slightest difficulty in certifying him.” The vicar gazed fixedly at Joliffe. “Yes—shall we say Parker? He’ll be at the meeting this afternoon. I’ll speak to him. We ought to move without delay. The fellow ought not to be at large a day longer than we can help. Yes—Dr. Parker—this afternoon. Get him over on Monday. And this evening I’m dining with Whymper and Lady Jane—I’ll mention it to Whymper. All to the good to get the local bench interested without delay.”

Dr. Joliffe nodded. But somehow he looked a little dubious.

“I think, Mr. Perry-Hennington,” he said rather uneasily, “we ought to be very careful to satisfy ourselves that it is a bona fide case of paranoia.”

“Certainly, certainly. I fully agree.”

“I’ve no objection to meeting Parker, of course, but I should welcome a London opinion if it is possible to arrange for one. You see, this is rather a serious matter.”

The vicar thought so too. “But personally, I have every confidence in Parker’s judgment. I remember some years ago when my eldest boy George had a murrain, Parker diagnosed it at once as a case of measles. I’ve always found him quite sound personally.”

“I’ve not a word to say against him, I cast no doubt upon his competence, but this is one of those delicate things which it hardly seems right, if you’ll excuse my saying so, to leave entirely to local practitioners whose experience must necessarily be limited.”

“Joliffe, I hope you are not hedging,” said the vicar sternly.

“No, I am not hedging. But, as I say, this is a ticklish matter.”

The vicar shook a pontifical head. “For the life of me,” he said, “I can’t see that it is more ticklish than any other matter. Had there been a doubt in the case one might have thought so. But the man is as mad as a hatter. A child could tell that who heard him talk as he talked to me this morning on the common.”

“No doubt you are right. But he has not yet aired these particular views to me, you know.”

“Then you’ve evidently not talked to him on his particular subject.”

“Evidently not.”

“Wait till you do, my friend! In the meantime I’ll mention the matter to Parker at the meeting and get him over on Monday to see him.”

Further conversation on the thorny subject was forbidden for the time being by the reappearance of Mrs. Small, who had to inform her master that the boy was round with the car. Thereupon Dr. Joliffe looked at his watch and declared that they must start at once if they were to be at Brombridge by three.

VIII

The timed journey to Brombridge in the doctor’s runabout was forty minutes with reasonable driving. On the way both gentlemen were rather silent. By tacit consent John Smith was dismissed for the time being, and they were able to confine themselves to the prospect for potatoes, war in its relation to agriculture, the loss of tonnage, and hearty abuse of the government. For the true Briton, that unfortunate institution vies with that equally unfortunate institution, the weather, in supplying the theme of a never-ending jeremiad. All worthy of their salt, irrespective of creed or party, damn these miserable makeshifts impartially. At the moment the vicar and the doctor drove up to the Assembly Rooms, Brombridge, they were in cordial agreement that only one thing under divine providence could hope to make the British people lose the war, and that thing was the British Government.

By a graceful little act on the part of coincidence—most charming of the minor goddesses!—Dr. Parker was about to ascend the steps of the building just as the car of Dr. Joliffe drew up by the curb. The vicar hailed the leading physician of Brombridge promptly and heartily.

“The very man we want to see.” Mr. Perry-Hennington was one of the fortunate people who act first and do their thinking afterward.

Dr. Parker, an elderly, florid, bewhiskered, important-looking personage, stopped at once, turned about and gave the reverend gentleman the full benefit of his politest smile and his best bow. He then let his eyes pass to the second occupant of the car, fully prepared to let them infold a county magnate. Somehow Mr. Perry-Hennington always contrived to dispense an atmosphere of county magnates, or at least to live in the odor of their sanctity. But as soon as Dr. Parker saw who it was who had had the honor of conveying the vicar of Penfold to the meeting the polite smile and the ceremonious bow were merged almost magically in a brief nod and a gesture bearing a perilous resemblance to a scowl.

The truth was, Dr. Parker had a poor opinion of Dr. Joliffe, and Dr. Joliffe had a poor opinion of Dr. Parker. If pressed upon the point, Dr. Parker would solemnly confess that Dr. Joliffe was the biggest tufthunter in Kent, and Dr. Joliffe, also under duress, would return that singularly comprehensive compliment.

This was perhaps a pity. Both were good men, both were honest men, but like so many people, otherwise quite admirable, their sense of vision was not acute. Nodosities of character in their neighbors were apt to overshadow the central merit. In this case it was not so much a question of professional jealousy as a matter of social rivalry. The root of the trouble was that Dr. Joliffe and Dr. Parker were a little too much alike.

Dr. Parker was clearly gratified at being the very man whom the vicar of Penfold wanted to see, but carefully dissembled his feelings while Mr. Perry-Hennington stepped out of the car and buttonholed him rather ostentatiously on the steps of the council chamber. The vicar had to suggest that they should hold a little conference after the meeting in regard to a matter of importance. Certainly they were not in a position to hold it at the moment. Fellow members of the War Economy Committee were rolling up in surprising numbers; weird old landowners in wonderful vehicles, local J. P.’s, retired stockbrokers, civil servants, city men, and very affairé ladies.

For all of these the parson of Penfold had a greeting. With his tall, thin, aristocratic figure, his distinguished air, his large, fleshy, important nose, he was the kind of man who dominates every company he enters. And it was so entirely natural to him to do so that no one ever thought of resenting it. He was not a clever man, a witty man, nor was tact his long suit, moreover he was apt to give himself airs, but for some reason or combination of reasons, he was greatly respected, generally looked up to and almost universally popular. He seemed to carry equal weight at Gleave Castle, the Mount Olympus of the local cosmos, and at the board of guardians. The acid people who dissect our naïve and charming human nature might have said that it was for no better reason than that the vicar of Penfold was a born busybody, doubly blessed with a loud voice, and a total absence of humor, but the good and the credulous who take things on trust and form a working majority in every republic always declared “it was because he was such a gentleman.”

By sheer pressure of human character, Mr. Perry-Hennington took a seat next the chairman of the meeting in the council chamber. And when that almost incredibly distinguished personage, a rather pathetic and extremely inaudible old thing in red mittens, got on to his legs, the vicar of Penfold could be heard rendering him very audible assistance in the course of his opening remarks. But it seemed entirely right and proper that it should be so. And nobody resented it, not even the old boy in the red mittens, who had retired from county business years ago, but who, as the master of Gleave, was fully determined to do his bit toward winning the war like everybody else.

The Clerk of the Committee, a rising Brombridge solicitor, had to submit to correction from the parson of Penfold, once when the Clerk was entirely in the right, once when he may have been wrong, but on a point so delicate that ordinary people would never have noticed it, and even if they had would hardly have thought it worth while to hold up the tide of human affairs in order to discuss it. Still, it was Mr. Perry-Hennington’s way and ordinary people admired it. Even Lady Jane Whymper, who was very far from being an ordinary person, and who was seated at the other side of the Chairman, admired it. The vicar of Penfold was such a dear man and he got things done.

This afternoon, however, the War Economy Committee would have transacted the same amount of business in at least twenty minutes less time had the vicar of Penfold been in the seclusion of his study grappling with his sermon. Still, that didn’t occur to anybody; and it would have been ungenerous to harbor the thought. The vicar of Penfold was an acknowledged ornament of any assembly he chose to enter and no gathering of this kind could have been complete without him. Everybody was amazingly in earnest, but Mr. Perry-Hennington was the most earnest of all. He made a number of suggestions, not one of which, after discussion, the Committee felt able to adopt, but the general effect of his presence was to give an air of life and virility to the proceedings.

After the meeting, the vicar staved off Lady Jane, with whom he had promised to dine that evening, and tactfully withdrew from the distinguished circle around the chairman in order to confer with Dr. Parker at the other end of the long table.

Dr. Parker, if rather flattered by this attention, was also a little perplexed by it. For one thing, Dr. Joliffe was scowling at him from the other end of the room. So little love was lost between these warriors that they never met in consultation if they could possibly help it. The vicar, however, had quite made up his mind that they should meet on Monday. He declined to give details, but maintained an air of reticence and mystery; yet he dropped a final hint that the matter was of immense importance, not merely to individuals but to the state.

Dr. Parker, having mounted gold eyeglasses and consulted his diary, consented in his dignified way to lunch at the vicarage on Monday. Thereupon Mr. Perry-Hennington thanked him with equal dignity and returned to Penfold in Dr. Joliffe’s car.

IX

Not altogether pleased with the turn of events, Dr. Joliffe drove the vicar home. He was a conscientious man, and he had no more confidence in “that fool Parker,” than Dr. Parker had in “that fool Joliffe.” Still, the vicar could not be expected to know that. On the way back to Penfold he was inclined to congratulate himself. Machinery had been set in motion which could hardly fail to deal effectively with John Smith.

Dr. Joliffe was gloomy. All the way home he confined himself to polite monosyllables, and kept his eyes glued to the steering wheel of the car. Hitherto he had not had occasion to question the sanity of John Smith, whom he had always regarded as a particularly harmless creature. And even if the vicar had reported the man correctly, Dr. Joliffe was by no means clear that Mr. Perry-Hennington was not taking an extreme view of his duty.

The vicar, however, had not a doubt in the matter. A sermon unprepared still cast its shadow over him, but a cloud had lifted from his mind. A sanguine man endowed with great animal energy, he never questioned the logic of his own views, the soundness of his judgment, or the absolute rectitude of his conduct. It was in the interests of the community that John Smith should be taken care of. It even gave the vicar a certain satisfaction that his duty in a most disagreeable matter should now stand out so clearly before him.

Mr. Perry-Hennington had only just time to drink a cup of tea at the vicarage before he was off on his travels again. This time his objective was Grayfield, a feudal sort of hamlet over on the Sussex side. He had to speak at a recruiting meeting, arranged by his old Magdalen friend Whymper, with whom a distinguished member of parliament was spending the weekend.

Edith accompanied her father in the gig; and they had been invited to dine at the manor after the meeting. Grayfield was a good hour for old Alice, upon whom Anno Domini had set an unmistakable seal. But it was a rare evening for a drive. The sweet, clean air of the Sussex uplands was like a mellow wine; the road was straight and firm; the sun of June still lingered over Ashdown; trees and hedges wore a sheen of glory, with a trim farm or a cowled oasthouse nestling here and there. This calm and quiet land with its mathematically parceled acres, its placid cows and horses looking over five-barred gates to watch the stately progress of old Alice, its occasional forelock-pulling rustic, was like a “set” in a theater. The whole scene was so snug, so perfect, so ordained, that nature appeared to have very little part to play in it.

“Odd to think that Armageddon is here,” said the vicar.

Edith thought it was, very.

The vicar gave a shake of the reins to encourage old Alice. And then he said: “It’s my firm belief that there are people on this countryside who don’t realize it even yet.”

“I’m sure there are,” said Edith.

“It will be brought home to every man, every woman, every child in the land before we are through with it.”

“You think so?” said Edith, in the curious, precise voice she had inherited from the Henningtons. “Personally I am not so sure. We are much too secure here. I sometimes think that an invasion would be the best thing that could happen to us.”

“I am inclined to agree with you,” said her father, with another shake for old Alice. “But it’s gradually coming home to the nation. Rather than give in we shall fight to the last man and the last shilling, and unless they have altered since the days of Frederick the Great they will do the same.”

“But it can’t go on indefinitely. It means extermination.”

“The end of civilization at any rate,” said the vicar mournfully. “The clock has already been put back a century.”

“Sooner or later something must surely happen.”

“But what can happen? We don’t begin to look like downing them, and it’s unthinkable that they can down us.”

“There’s God,” said Edith, in a voice of sudden, throbbing softness. “I’m convinced that He must put an end to it soon.”

Before the vicar continued the conversation he gave Alice a little touch of the whip.

“Have you ever thought, my dear girl, what an awful weight of sin there is upon the human race? Instead of expecting God to put an end to it soon, it will be little short of miraculous if He ever puts an end to it at all.”

“But think of the awful suffering which falls for the most part on those who are the least to blame.”

“There is Biblical precedent for all that has happened, nay for far more than has happened. It is a judgment on the world, and the innocent have to suffer with the guilty.”

Edith was silent a little while.

“It all seems so horribly unfair,” she said at last, in a deep, palpitating tone which the vicar had not heard her use before. “It is not the people who have made the war who are really suffering by it.”

“They who question!” and the vicar shook up old Alice yet again.

A long silence followed, through which old Alice jogged in her placid way. Hardly a ripple stirred the evening air. It was very difficult to realize what was happening within a hundred miles.

“I can’t help thinking of that man,” Edith suddenly remarked.

“What man?” said her father. For the moment his thoughts were far away. An unwritten sermon was looming up at the back of his brain.

“John Smith. I can’t tell you what a curious impression he has left upon me. Somehow I have done nothing but think of him ever since the thing happened.”

It was a wrench for the vicar to quit the sequence of ideas which was being formed so painfully in his mind. And for the time he had had quite enough of the subject of John Smith, nay, was in process of suffering a reaction from it. Besides it was such a vexatiously disagreeable matter that he had no wish to discuss it more than was absolutely necessary.

“I should forget the man if I were you,” was his counsel to Edith.

“Somehow I can’t. He’s made a most curious impression upon me. I begin to feel now that I had no right to take for granted that what he said was meant for blasphemy.”

The vicar dissented forcibly. “There can be no possible excuse for him. It was a most improper remark for any man to make in such circumstances, and you were quite right to feel as you did about it. But if you are wise you will now put it out of your mind; at the same time I should like you to give up the practice of distributing feathers.”

“Yes, father, I will,” said Edith with a quick flush.

“You will be wise. I am arranging for an inquiry to be made into the man’s mental condition.”

“Is that absolutely necessary?” The flush grew deeper.

“The public interest calls for it. This incident is a climax of many.”

“Yet somehow he doesn’t seem exactly insane.”

“Not even when he talks in that way?” said the vicar surprisedly. “My dear girl, it is the only charitable explanation.”

“Do you really think so?” said the reluctant Edith.

“Demonstrably.”

“And yet somehow, when one really thinks about him, he seems so sweetly reasonable.”

“Sweetly reasonable!” The vicar pinned down the unfortunate phrase. “How can you say that? A mild and harmless creature, perhaps—apart from his opinions—but reasonable!—surely that is the very last word to apply to him.”

Perplexity deepened upon Edith’s face. “Somehow, I can’t throw off the curious impression he has left upon me.”

“Try to forget the man.” The vicar spoke sternly.

“Dismiss him from your thoughts, at any rate while the case is sub judice. You have done your duty by reporting the matter to me, and I am doing mine by putting in motion proper machinery to deal with it.”

“I sincerely hope that nothing is going to happen to him.”

“He will be sent to an asylum.”

Edith shivered. “Oh, I hope not,” she said, drawing in her breath sharply. “To my mind that is the cruellest fate that can overtake any human being.”

“One doesn’t altogether agree,” said the vicar. “He will be taken care of as he ought to be, and treated, of course, with the greatest humanity. You must remember that asylums are very different places from what they were sixty years ago, when Dickens—I think it was Dickens—wrote about them.”

“But it must mean dreadful suffering to be held for the rest of one’s life within four walls among lunatics without hope of escape.”

“Why should it, if the mind is really unsound? You must remember that such people don’t suffer in the way that rational people do.”

“But suppose he doesn’t happen to be insane?”

“If he doesn’t happen to be insane the law cannot confine him as a lunatic.”

“Who will decide?”

“He will be certified by two doctors.”

Again came silence, only broken by the peaceful plodding of old Alice. And then said Edith suddenly: “Father, whoever certifies John Smith will take an awful responsibility upon himself.”

“No doubt,” said the vicar. “Yet hardly so grave a one as you might think. It is the only right, reasonable and charitable view to take of him. And if the medical profession cannot be brought to do its clear and obvious duty, the man will have to be dealt with in some other and less gentle way.”

“I am beginning to wish I hadn’t spoken of the matter,” said Edith, in an anxious tone.

“My dear,” said the vicar, shaking up old Alice, “in mentioning it, disagreeable and distressing as it may be, you did no more than your duty. You must now leave other people to do theirs, and at the same time you must have the good sense to dismiss the matter entirely from your thoughts.”

Again Edith shivered. But further discussion was forbidden by their journey’s end. They had now reached the outskirts of Grayfield, and the gates of the manor were before them.

X

There was a very stimulating meeting in the parish room. The squire of Grayfield, the vicar’s Magdalen friend, Whymper, was by divine right in the chair. He was a dry, melancholy, exanimate sort of creature; a man of few words and very pronounced dislikes, not without force in a narrow way, but locally of more account as the husband of Lady Jane than from any native quality. Still, he made an excellent chairman. Brief, concise, self-effacing, he loathed his job; anything in the nature of speechifying bored him extremely, and he had a rooted objection “to making an ass of himself in public,” but natural grit and a high sense of duty pulled him through. In fact he did his job so well that it would have been hard for any man to improve on his performance.

There were only two speakers. One was the vicar of Penfold, but he was not the person who had filled the parish room to overflowing. A famous member of Parliament, a reputed master of the forensic arts, was spending a week-end at the manor house, and he had kindly consented to rouse the young men of the district.

This paladin, who spoke before the vicar, was a tall thin-faced man of forty-five, who hardly looked his age. George Speke by name, he was the kind of man no British government is ever without, and he discoursed the commonest of common sense with an air of ease and authenticity. He put the case for Britain and her allies with a force and a cogency that none could gainsay. And in that room at any rate, there was not the slightest wish to gainsay it. Even the group of young men at the back of the room, upon whom the local constable and two specials kept a vigilant eye, and to whom Mr. Speke’s remarks were addressed officially, showed no inclination to traverse his clear statement of historical fact. It was a very finished effort, and somehow it moved his audience.

Mr. Perry-Hennington came rather in the nature of an anticlimax. He had no pretensions to be considered an orator, as he was careful to warn his hearers at the outset; he had nothing to say that had not already been said far better in print, yet he felt it to be his duty to stand on a public platform and declaim obvious truths which the newspapers of the realm had weeks ago made banal and threadbare. But somehow there was a driving force, a contained ferocity about Mr. Perry-Hennington’s sincerity, trite and ill-phrased as it was, which, with the aid of copious “hear, hear’s” from Mr. Speke and his old Magdalen friend, Whymper, first staved off an epidemic of coughing and then of feet-shuffling, and then of coughing again. At last he got fairly into his stride, a strong, unmusical voice increasing in violence as he did so. And as the more violent he grew the more his audience approved, they soon began to march together toward a thrilling climax. Finally he swung into his fine peroration: “We shall not lay down the sword, etc.,” which belonged to another, and ended stronger than he began amidst quite a storm of cheering.

It was a mediocre performance, well within the range of any member of the educated classes, yet all who heard it seemed greatly impressed. Even Mr. Whymper and Mr. Speke seemed greatly impressed, and what was of still more importance it went home to a number of young men at the back of the room. When the meeting was over these came forward to the table at the side of the platform, at which a recruiting officer sat, and gave in their names. Nowhere else could such a scene have been enacted. To the ordinary intelligence, it was almost unbelievable that magnificent fellows in the pride of manhood could be moved to the supreme sacrifice by the jejune lucidities of Mr. Speke, and the brand of spirituality that the vicar of Penfold had to offer. Something must have been in the air of that overheated room. Behind the trite phrases, behind the rather otiose pomposities of the one, the deliberately quiet, over-varnished style of the other, must have been that spirit which, by hardly more than the breadth of a single hair, had temporarily saved civilization for mankind.

XI

After the meeting, eight people sat down to dinner at the manor house. These were Mr. Speke, Mr. Perry-Hennington and his daughter, the host, the redoubtable hostess, and three rather crushed and colorless Miss Whympers, who were evidently in great awe of their mother.

Lady Jane Whymper was a large, humorless woman, a local terror, whom most people found it very hard to like. For one thing her connections were so high, and her family so good, that she never had to please or conciliate anyone, and there was nothing in her nature to lead her to do so. She gave so little thought to the feelings of others, that she always made a point of saying just what came into her head, without regard to time or place or company; moreover it was always said in a voice of an exasperatingly penetrative quality. In her little corner of the world there was no one to stand against her, therefore she could hector, trample and dogmatize to her heart’s content. And being a person with many social strings to pull, in London also she was able to order the world pretty much to her own liking.

Still even she, if as a general rule she was insufferable, kept a reserve of tact for special occasions. By no means a fool, she could sometimes rise to graciousness; and the knowledge that violence was thereby done to the order of her nature seemed to invest her hours of charm with greater significance. And this evening at dinner, she happened to be in her most winning mood. For one thing George Speke was a favorite of hers; she had also a regard for the vicar of Penfold; thus the augurs had doubly blessed the meal. It was true that Lady Jane reserved her unbendings for the other sex, certainly never for her own, unless she had some very portentous ax to grind; but on the present occasion the three Miss Whympers and their rather mournful and ineffectual sire found the evening much more agreeable than usual.

Speke was a favorite of Lady Jane’s for several reasons. To begin with, like herself he was highly connected. It may seem an anachronism that in the year 1915 a woman of the world should attach the slightest importance to such a fortuitous matter, but even at that time a type of mind still survived in the island to which degrees of birth were of vast consequence. Lady Jane owned a mind of that sort. Dear George was “next in” for a dukedom, and Lady Jane was a duke’s daughter.

Ducal aspect apart, Speke was an able and likable fellow. He had once been described by one who knew the world as a member of a first-rate second-rate family. The Spekes had always been “in it” ever since they had been a family; they ran to prime ministers, field marshals, ambassadors, archbishops, all down the scroll of history. George’s particular blend of Speke was an immensely distinguished clan; yet somehow when Clio, the muse, cast her searchlight upon their achievements they loomed far less in the eyes of posterity than in those of their own generation. Ten years before, Mr. Speke’s own little world of friends, relations and sconce bearers, had seen in him a future prime minister. But 1914 had modified their views. All the same a place had been found for him in the Coalition. As Lady Jane said, “We cannot hope to win the war without him.”

Speke had no such estimate of his own abilities, or at least, if he had, he knew how to conceal it. He talked modestly and well at the dinner table; his conversation was full of inside knowledge, and it had a grace of manner which Edith and the three Miss Whympers admired. He had met the vicar of Penfold before, and rather liked and respected him as most people did; also he claimed him as a distant kinsman, as the Perrys of Molesworth appeared in the Speke family tree.

“By the way, Mr. Perry-Hennington,” he said, “I was trespassing in your parish this afternoon. I went to see Gervase Brandon.”

“Poor fellow,” said the vicar. “But don’t you think he is bearing up remarkably?”

“Quite wonderfully. But he’s a pathetic figure. Six months ago when I saw him last, he was at the apex of mental and bodily power. And now he lies helpless, never expecting to walk again.”

“And yet not a word of complaint,” said the vicar. “This morning when I went to see him I was greatly struck by his splendid courage and cheerfulness.”

“Truly a hero—and so pathetic as he lies in that room—a wonderful room it is—among his books.”

“Can nothing be done for him?” said Lady Jane.

“The doctors are beginning to despair,” said the vicar. “Everything that medical science can do has been done already, and there’s no sign of an improvement.”

“The higher nerve centers, I suppose?”

“So I understand. The mere concussion of this modern artillery is appalling.”

“It is amazing to me that the human frame ever succeeds in adapting itself to war under modern conditions,” said Speke.

“And the awful thing is,” the host interposed in his melancholy tones, “that there appears to be no limit to what can be done in the way of self-immolation. The chemist and the inventor have only to go on long enough applying their arts to war to evolve conditions which will destroy the whole human race. We live in a time of horrors, but let us ask ourselves what the world will be twenty years hence?”

“Don’t, I implore you, Edward,” reproved his wife. “Spare us the thought.”

“No, it won’t bear speaking about,” said Speke. “We are already past the point where science destroys organic life faster than nature can replace.”

“Not a doubt of it,” said the vicar. “And if we cannot find a means of bridging permanently the chasm that has opened in the life of civilization, the globe will cease to be habitable for the human race.”

“Really! really!” said the hostess.

“Only too true,” said the host. “There’s hardly a limit to what modern devilry can do. Take aviation to begin with. We are merely on the threshold of the subject.”

“I agree,” said George Speke. “The other day, Bellman, the air minister, told me it is quite within the bounds of possibility to drop a poison from the clouds that will exterminate whole cities.”

“Which merely goes to prove what I have always contended,” said the hostess. “Sooner or later all nations will be forced into an agreement for the abolition of war.”

“My dear Lady Jane,” said the vicar, shaking a mournful head, “such a contingency is against all experience. It is not to be thought of unless a fundamental change takes place in the heart of man.”

“A change must take place,” said Lady Jane, “if the human race is to go on. Besides, doesn’t the Bible tell us that there will be a second coming of Christ, and that all wars will cease?”

“It does,” said the vicar; “but that is the millennium, you know. And I am bound to say there’s no sign of it at present. I am convinced that only one thing now can save the human race and that is a second advent. Only that can bridge the chasm which has opened in the life of the nations.”

“In the meantime,” said George Speke, “the watchers scan the heavens in vain. The miserable, childish futility of our present phase of evolution! So many little groups of brown grubs slaving night and day to make human life a worse hell than nature has made of it already. People talk of the exhilaration of war. Good God! they can’t have seen it. They can’t have seen colonies of organized hatreds, profaning all art and all science, poisoning the very air God gave us to breathe. It makes one loathe one’s species. We are little, hideous, two-legged ants, flying around in foul contraptions of our own invention. And to what end? Simply to destroy.”

“In order to recreate,” said the vicar robustly.

“I don’t believe it. The pendulum of progress—blessed word!—has swung too far. Unless we can contrive a means of holding back the clock, the doom of the world is upon us.”

“It all comes of denying God, of banishing him from the planet,” said the host.

“But is he banished from the planet? Take a man like Gervase Brandon. Life gave him everything. No man had a greater love of peace, yet when the call came he threw to the wind all his most cherished convictions, went to the war in the knightly spirit of a crusader, and for the rest of his days on earth is condemned to a state of existence from which death is a merciful release.”

“By sacrifice ye shall enter,” said the vicar.

“I am not competent to speak upon that. But one’s private conception of God is not banished from this corner of the planet as long as England teems with Gervase Brandons.”

“There I am fully with you,” said the vicar. “To me Gervase Brandon will always be a symbol of what man can rise to in the way of deliberate heroism, just as the beaches of Gallipoli will be enshrined forever in the history of the race to which he belongs. I have only to think of Gervase Brandon to affirm that God is more potent in the world than he ever was—and that is the awful paradox.”

“I don’t presume to question that,” said the host. “But the problem now for the world is, how shall his power be made supreme? That is what a ruined civilization has now to ask itself. All civilized people agree that war itself must cease, yet before it can do so there will have to be a conversion of the heart of man.”

“You are right,” said Speke, in his dry, cool voice. “And to my mind, as the world is constituted, the problem admits of no solution.”

“In other words,” said the host, “there must always be wars and rumors of wars until God has created Himself.”

“Or rather let us say,” the vicar rejoined, “until God has affirmed Himself. Hence the need for the second advent.”

“I wonder if we shall realize it when it occurs,” said Speke, his hand straying to his champagne glass. “In all its fundamentals the world is as it was two thousand years ago in Palestine. If Christ walked the earth again, it is certain that he would be treated now as he was then.”

“That, one cannot believe,” interposed Lady Jane with ready vehemence. “Even you admit, George, the amount of practical Christianity there is in the world. I, for one, will not believe all this sacrifice has been in vain.”

“I agree with you, Lady Jane,” said the vicar. “When He comes to resume His ministry, as come He will, at all events He will find that His Church has been true. But at present, I confess, one looks in vain for a sign of His advent.”

Speke shook his head. “With all submission,” he said, “if Christ appeared today he would be treated as a harmless crank, or he would be put in an asylum. Think of his reception by the yellow press—the ruler of nations, the maker of governments, the welder of empires. He would find it the same pleasant world he left two thousand years ago. Man, in sum, the vocal working majority, whether in London, Paris, Berlin, New York, or Petrograd, could not possibly meet the Master face to face or even hope to recognize him when he passed by.”

“That is true, no doubt,” said the vicar, “of the mass of the people. Men of truly spiritual mold are in a hopeless minority. But they are still among us. Depend upon it, when the hour comes they will recognize the Master’s voice, depend upon it, they will know His face.”

“I wonder?” said George Speke.

“I am absolutely convinced of that, George.” And Lady Jane, one with the law and the prophets, gave the signal to the ladies and rose superbly from the dinner table.

XII

When the ladies had left the room the vicar took the chair on the right of his host, and then he said across the table to George Speke: “Talking of poor Brandon, what opinion did you form of him mentally when you saw him this afternoon?”

“Mentally!... I thought him rather wonderful.”

The eyes of the vicar searched those of the man opposite. If this was a conventional statement it was the clear desire of those eyes to expose it.

“The poise of his mind seemed to me perfect. And somehow one hadn’t quite expected it.”

“You felt he was in full possession of his whole mental faculty?”

“Didn’t you?”

The vicar’s failure to answer the question might be taken for a negative.

“Moreover, he greatly impressed me,” Speke added. There were two George Spekes. One had the departmental mind; the other was something more considerable than a rather arid public record indicated. “I always knew that he had a very first-rate intellect, but this afternoon it was even more striking than usual.”

“But,” said the vicar cautiously, “don’t you think it may be misleading him?”

“How? In what way?”

“I will give you a concrete instance of what I mean.” The vicar spoke very gravely. “And by the way, Whymper, it is a matter I want to talk to you about particularly. At Penfold, we are cursed with a sort of village ne’er-do-well, who has taken to writing poetry, blaspheming the Creator, and upholding the cause of the enemy. I am sorry to say that for some years now Brandon has been this man’s friend, lent him books from his private collection, helped to support him, and so on. Well, this morning, when I went to Hart’s Ghyll, Brandon told me that he had lately read a poem of this fellow John Smith’s, and that it had made a very deep impression upon him.”

“That’s interesting,” said Speke. “He told me the same. He said that a young man who lived in the village had lately produced the most wonderful poem he had ever read.”

“On the face of it, didn’t that strike you as nonsense?”

“No, not in the way that Brandon said it. He spoke as one having authority; and in the matter of poetry, he is thought, I believe, to have a good deal.”

“It may be so. But one mustn’t forget that in this case he is claiming semidivine honors for a half-educated, wholly mad village wastrel.”

“Mad!”

“So mad that we are having to arrange for him to be taken care of.”

“But surely such a man as Brandon could hardly be deceived by one of that caliber! He gave chapter and verse. He said that John Smith was a great clairvoyant, who had more windows open in his soul than other people.”

“Didn’t it strike you as a fantastic statement?”

“Why should it? I haven’t seen the poem, and he has; I don’t know John Smith and he does. Why should it strike one as a fantastic statement?”

“No, of course, you couldn’t be expected to know that John Smith is as mad as a hatter. But Brandon should know that as well as I do.”

“He says the man’s inspired—Gottbetrunken was the word he used.”

“The man is a blasphemer and an atheist, and a pro-German to boot. And, as I say, steps are being taken to put him in a place of safety. We shall need your help, Whymper; there’ll be a magistrates’ order for you to sign presently. But the distressing thing is that such a mind as Gervase Brandon’s should be susceptible to the man’s claptrap. The only explanation that occurs to one is that the poor dear fellow’s brain is going.”

“Well, I can only say that there seemed no trace of it this afternoon. I’ll admit that I thought him a little exalted, a little more the seer and the visionary than one quite liked to see him. But after all he must have walked pretty close with God. If a man gives up all the fair and easy things of life to storm the beaches of Gallipoli, it is not unlikely that a corner of the prophet’s mantle may be found for him—even if one agrees that it is a rather uncomfortable vestment.”

“There may be something in what you say.” The vicar shook a sad, unconvinced head. “But we have to deal with the thing as it exists. We have to look the facts in the face.”

“But what are the facts—that the poet bears the prosaic name of John Smith, that he belongs to the charming village of Penfold, and that he is an atheist.”

“A blasphemer and a pro-German, and that circumstances have made it necessary to inquire into his mental condition. His recent conduct in the village has made him amenable to the Blasphemy Laws and the Defense of the Realm Regulations.”

“Does Brandon know this?”

“Unfortunately he does. And that is why one is compelled to take such a gloomy view of the poor dear fellow at the present time.”

“Very odd,” said George Speke.

“Very tragic,” said the vicar.

XIII

It was nearly midnight when old Alice turned in at the vicarage gate. Having handed her to the care of his man-of-all-work, the ancient Hobson, who was sitting up for her, the vicar said good-night to Edith and then went to his study. He had had a particularly trying day, and a man of less strength of will would have been content for this to be its end. But he could not bring himself to go to bed while that page of an accusing emptiness lay upon his blotting pad. It was within five minutes of Sunday and his sermon was hardly begun.

The clock on the chimneypiece struck the hour. The vicar turned up his reading lamp and sat down at his desk. He was really very tired and heart-sore, but for many a long year he had not failed in his pastoral duty, and he was not going to fail now. There was one line already traced in a bold, firm hand on the sheet before him. “Let us cast off the works of darkness, let us put on the armor of light.”

The words came upon him with a shock of surprise. He could not remember having written them. And at this moment, weary in body and spirit, he was not able to meet their implication. Overborne by the weight of an unintelligible world, he was unequal to their message. He drew his pen through them and wrote: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. I will repay.” It was lower, easier ground for a man tired and dispirited, and, after all, it was the ideal text for war time. He had preached from it many times already, but in that hour it seemed the only one for his mood.

Yes, such a vengeance had come upon the world as had been long predicted. Once more those prophetic words glowed on the page with a living fire: “There shall be wars and rumors of war.” Terrible, ancient phrases, vibrating with emotion, came with a subliminal uprush into his mind. How miraculously had the Word been fulfilled. But one thing was needed to complete the tale, and that the far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves.

But, the vicar asked, as phrases and thoughts of his own began to take shape, was this Second Coming to be regarded as a literal fact of the physical world, was it only to be regarded by the eye of faith, or was it merely the figment of a poet’s fancy? It behooved the world of men to search its heart. Let all face the question that the time-spirit was asking; let all face it fully, frankly, fearlessly.

The Christ was overdue. In the opinion of many, if civilization, if humanity was to continue, there must be a divine intervention. These organized and deepening hatreds were destroying the soul of the world. Even average sensual men had come to realize this vital need. But—the vicar began to gnaw the stump of his pen furiously—an age that had ceased to believe in miracles was now crying out for a miracle to happen.

“O ye of little faith,” wrote the vicar as the first subheading of his great theme. Only a miracle could now save a world that had so long derided them. The vicar wrote the word Nemesis, and then in brackets, “Terrible word—retributive justice.”

Yes, the only hope remaining for a blood-soaked world was to accept the miracle of the Incarnation. And to accept that miracle was to affirm the second advent.

How will He come? The vicar left a space on the slowly filling page, and then wrote his question in the form of a second subheading. How will He appear to us, this Christ of pity, and purity, and peace? Would the heavens open, as the Book of Revelation had foretold; would the King of the World emerge from the clouds to the blowing of trumpets, crowned in a chariot? Or would He come as a spirit on the face of the waters? Who should say? But come He must, because of the promise He had made.

“The duty of faith in this present hour,” wrote the vicar, as a third subheading. It was a man’s duty to reject the carpings of science and the machinations of modern denial. He must believe where he could not prove. The vicar wrote in brackets, “It is very difficult to do that in an age of skepticism.”

“The watchers.” The vicar drew a line under his fourth subheading. All men must stand as upon a tower, their eyes fixed on the far horizon, in the hope that they might see in the eastern sky the herald of a new heaven and a new earth. And by that portent, which was the light of sublime truth, must they learn to know the Master when He came among them. But only the faithful could hope to do that.

“The danger of His coming to a world in which none should know Him,” was the final clause of the vicar’s sermon. That would be the supreme tragedy.

The sudden striking of the clock on the chimneypiece startled the vicar. “Four o’clock!” he said. And he went to bed.

XIV

Mr. Perry-Hennington was troubled by many things, but he was tired out by his long day and fell asleep at once. He was still sleeping when Prince, the parlor maid, brought him a cup of tea at a quarter to seven. Another trying day was upon him. He had to take three services, and to give the children’s address in a neighboring parish in the afternoon. A hard but uninspired worker, he never flinched from his duty, but did the task next him. It pleased him to think that he got things done, and, like all men of his type, never allowed himself to doubt for a moment that they were worth the doing.

At the morning service Mr. Perry-Hennington preached a sermon that had done duty on many occasions. It was his custom to keep the new discourse for the evening, when the congregation was larger as a rule. “He came to His own and His own knew him not,” was the text of the morning homily. It had always been one of his favorites, and every time he rendered it he found some new embroidery to weave upon that poignant theme. And this morning, in the emotional stress of a recent event which lurked a shadow at the back of his thoughts, his mind played upon it with a vigor that surprised even himself. He was at his best. Such a feeling of power came upon him as he had seldom known.

While the last hymn was being sung the vicar’s eyes strayed to the back of the church. He was surprised and a little disconcerted to see John Smith standing there. The young man was singing heartily, and as the bright rays from the window fell upon his face it became a center of light. Yet that unexpected presence cast a shadow across the vicar’s mind. It was as if a cloud had suddenly darkened the sun.

At the end of the service Mr. Perry-Hennington was the last to leave the church. By the time he had taken off his vestments the small congregation had dispersed. But one member of it still lingered near the lich gate, at the end of the churchyard, and as the vicar came down the path this person stopped him. A rather odd-looking man wearing a white hat, he gave the vicar an impression of being overdressed, but his strong face had an individuality that would have commanded notice anywhere.

This man, who had been scanning the tombstones in the churchyard, had evidently stayed behind to speak to the vicar. Yet he was a total stranger to the neighborhood, whose presence among his flock Mr. Perry-Hennington had noted that morning for the first time. At the vicar’s slow approach the man in the white hat came forward with a hearty outstretched hand.

“Delighted to meet you, sir,” he said.

To the conventional mind of the vicar this was a very unconventional greeting on the part of one he had not seen before; and he took the proffered hand with an air of reserve.

“Allow me to congratulate you on your discourse,” said the stranger in an idiom which struck the vicar as rather unusual. “It was first-rate. And I’m a judge. I think I am anyway.” The man in the white hat spoke in such a cool, simple, forthcoming manner, that the vicar was nonplussed. And yet there was such a charm about him that even a spirit in pontificalibus could hardly resent it.

“Ah, I see,” said the stranger, noting the vicar’s stiffening of attitude with an amused eye, “you are waiting for an introduction. Well, I’m a neighbor, the new tenant of Longwood.”

“Oh, really,” said the vicar. The air of constraint lightened a little, but it was too heavy to vanish at once. “I am glad to meet you.”

“Let me give you a card.” The new neighbor suddenly dived into a hidden recess of a light gray frock coat, and whipped out a small case.

Mr. Perry-Hennington with a leisureliness half reluctant, and in almost comic contrast to the stranger’s freedom of gesture, accepted the card, disentangled his eyeglasses from his pectoral cross, and read it carefully. It bore the inscription: Mr. Gazelee Payne Murdwell, 94 Fifth Avenue, New York.

“Glad to meet you, Mr. Murdwell,” said the vicar, with a note of reassurance coming into his tone. “Allow me to welcome you among us.” The voice, in its grave sonority, rose almost to a point. It didn’t quite achieve it, but the fact that the man was an American and also the new tenant of Longwood accounted for much. For the vicar was already quite sure that he didn’t belong to the island. The native article could not have had that particular manner, nor could it have dressed in that particular way, nor could it have shown that extraordinary, half quizzical self-security. A new man from the city might have achieved the white hat (with modifications), the gray frock coat, the white waistcoat, the white spats, the wonderful checked cravat, but he could not have delivered a frontal attack on an obviously reverend and honorable gentleman, for long generations indigenous to the soil of the county, on the threshold of his own parish church.

“Now look here, vicar,” said Gazelee Payne Murdwell, with an easy note of intimacy, “you and I have got to know one another. And it has got to be soon. This is all new to me.” Mr. Murdwell waved a jeweled and romantic hand, a fine gesture, which included a part of Kent, a part of Sussex, a suggestion of Surrey, and even a suspicion of Hampshire. “And I’m new to you. As I figure you out at the moment, even allowing a liberal discount for the state of Europe, you are rather like a comic opera”—the vicar drew in his lips primly—“and as you figure me out, if looks mean anything, I’m fit for a Mappin Terrace at the Zoo. But that’s a wrong attitude. We’ve got to come together. And the sooner the better, because you are going to find me a pretty good neighbor.”

“I have not the least doubt of that, Mr.—er—Murdwell,” said the vicar, glancing deliberately and augustly at the card in his hand.

“Well, as a guaranty of good intentions on both sides, suppose you and your daughter dine at Longwood on Wednesday? I am a bachelor at the moment, but Juley—my wife—and Bud—my daughter—will be down by then.”

“Wednesday!” The vicar’s left eyebrow was mobilized in the form of a slight frown. But the invitation had come so entirely unawares that unless he pleaded an engagement which didn’t exist, and his conscience therefore would not have sanctioned, there really seemed no way of escape.

“You will? Wednesday. A quarter to eight. That’s bully.” And in order to clinch the matter, Mr. Murdwell slipped an arm through the vicar’s, and slowly accompanied him as far as the vicarage gate.

XV

Many things, however, had to happen in the parish before Mr. Perry-Hennington could dine at Longwood on Wednesday. And the first of them in the order of their occurrence was an inquiry of Edith’s at the Sunday luncheon in regard to their new neighbor.

“A most curious man has just waylaid me,” the vicar said. “An American, who says he has taken Longwood.”

“Oh, yes,” said Edith, in her precise voice. “The odd-looking man in church this morning, I suppose?”

“He gave me his card.” The vicar produced the card, and requested Prince, the parlor maid, to hand it to Miss Edith. “He insists on our dining at Longwood on Wednesday. It seems only neighborly to do so.”

“Immensely rich, I believe,” said Edith, scanning the card at her leisure, with the aid of a pair of tortoise shell spectacles, which she wore with considerable effect.

“Who is he? What is he?” There might, or there might not have been a slight accession of interest to the vicar’s tone.

“Lady Tyrwhitt was talking about him the other day. He is a great American inventor, the discoverer of Murdwell’s Law.”

“Ah-h,” said the vicar, intelligently. But Murdwell’s Law was a sealed book to him.

“Immensely important scientific fact, I believe,” Edith explained. “Lady Tyrwhitt seems to know all about it. I couldn’t grasp it myself. I only know that Lady Tyrwhitt says it is going to revolutionize everything.”

“Ah-h!” said the vicar.

“It has something to do with radioactivity I believe, and the liberation of certain electrons in the ether. That may not be exactly correct. I only know that it is something extremely scientific. Lady Tyrwhitt says Mr. Murdwell is tremendously pro-Ally, and that he is over to help us win the war.”

“Oh-h!” said the vicar. “He seems an uncommonly interesting man.”

“A very wonderful person. Lady Tyrwhitt says he is one of the most remarkable men living. And she says he is never out of sight of private detectives, because of the number of attempts that have been made on his life.”

“I shall look forward to meeting him again on Wednesday.”

Before Wednesday came, however, the vicar had much else to think about. Ever in the forefront of his mind was the vexatious matter of John Smith. It had been arranged that on the next day, Monday, Dr. Parker should come out from Brombridge, lunch at the vicarage, and then, if possible, interview the young man.

On Monday morning the vicar made a preliminary survey of the ground. He went down to the village, and had a little talk with Field, the carpenter. From him he learned that John Smith had downed tools for a fortnight past, that he had been roaming the countryside at all hours of the day and night, and that “he wor shapin’ for another of his attacks.” Field was a sensible man, whom the vicar respected in spite of the fact that he was not among the most regular of the flock; therefore at some length he discussed with him a very vexed question. In reply to a direct canvass of his judgment, Field admitted that “John might be a bit soft-like.” At the same time he confessed the highest affection and admiration for him, and somewhat to the vicar’s annoyance volunteered the opinion that “he went about doing good.”

“How can you think that, Field?” said Mr. Perry-Hennington, sternly.

“Well, sir, they say he keeps the chaps out of the publics.”

“Who says so?”

“At Brombridge, sir. They are getting to think a lot of him there.”

“Are they indeed?”

“He preaches there you know, sir, on Sunday afternoons at the market cross.”

The vicar was shocked and scandalized. “I hope,” he said, “that he doesn’t give vent to the sort of opinions he does here.”

“Yes, sir,” said Field, with respectful perplexity. “I know you parsons think him a bit of a freethinker, but I’m sure he means well. And begging your pardon, sir, he knows a lot about the Bible too.”

“I take leave to doubt that, Field,” said the vicar, who had suddenly grown so deeply annoyed that he felt unable to continue the conversation. He left the shop abruptly. A little more light had been thrown on the subject, but somehow it increased his sense of worry and discomfort. He had not thought well to enlighten Field as to the gravamen of the charge, yet it was hard to repress a feeling of irritation that so sensible a man should hold such a heterodox view of his employee.

True to his appointment, Dr. Parker arrived at one o’clock. Before he came Mr. Perry-Hennington told Edith in a casual way the reason of his coming to Penfold. To her father’s consternation, something in the nature of a scene had followed.

“Then you intend to have him removed to an asylum!” she exclaimed in a tone of horror.

“Undoubtedly. The public interest demands nothing less.”

The girl was greatly upset. And nothing her father could say had any effect upon her distress. She felt herself responsible for this tragic pass. Her unhappy intervention in the first place had brought the thing about, and now she rued it bitterly. She implored her father to let the matter drop. But her prayer was vain. At all times a singularly obstinate man, upon a question of conscience and duty he was not likely to be moved by mere words.

Out of respect for his daughter’s feelings, and also out of regard for the ears of Prince, the parlor maid, Mr. Perry-Hennington did not refer to the matter in the course of the meal. But as soon as it was over he discussed it at length with his visitor. And he presented his view of the matter with such a cogent energy that, for such a mind as Dr. Parker’s, whose main concern was “things as they are,” the case of John Smith was greatly prejudiced. He did not say as much to the vicar, indeed he did his best to keep an open and impartial mind on the subject, but he would have been more or less than himself had he not felt that only the strongest possible justification could have moved such a man as Mr. Perry-Hennington to his present course of action.

In the privacy of the study the vicar explained the situation to Dr. Parker at considerable length, giving chapter and verse for the theory he had formed. And then the two gentlemen set out to find John Smith.

Fate went with them. A slow, solemn climb from the vicarage to the village green brought a prompt reward. Straight before them a frail, bareheaded, poorly-clad figure was outlined against a rather wild June sky.

“Our man,” the vicar whispered.

Dispositions of approach were made automatically. The two gentlemen stepped on to the common sedately enough. As they did so, the vicar ostentatiously pointed out the grandeur of the scene, and its wide, sweeping outlook on two counties, while the doctor lingered in examination of the heath and the plucking of a flower.

As usual the young man was leaning against the priest’s stone. Near by was a delicate flower which Dr. Parker stooped to gather.

“Tell me, what’s the name of this little thing?” he said to the vicar, in a loud bluff voice.

“You’re overtaxing my knowledge,” said the vicar, with a similar bluff heartiness. “I don’t think I’ve ever noticed it before. But here is a man who can help us, no doubt.”

With a courteous, disarming smile, the vicar suddenly brought his eyes to bear on John Smith. And then he added in a voice full of kindness and encouragement: “I am sure you can tell us the name of this flower.”

“Yes, I should very much like to know.” As the doctor gave John Smith the flower, he seized the moment for the closest possible scrutiny of the man before him. Not a detail was lost of the extraordinarily sensitive face, with its gaunt but beautiful lines, the luminous eyes, whose pupils were distended to an abnormal width, the look of fastidious cleanliness, which the poor clothes and the rough boots seemed to accentuate.

“It is a kind of wild orchis,” said the young man in a gentle tone, which to the doctor’s ear had a rather curious sound. “It is not common hereabouts, but you will find a few in Mr. Whymper’s copse over at Grayfield.”

“You seem well up in the subject of flowers,” said Dr. Parker.

“I study them,” said the young man with a quick intensity which caused the doctor to purse his lips. “I love them so.” He pressed the slender, tiny petals to his lips. “What a wonderful, wonderful thing is that little flower! I weep when I look at it.”

Involuntarily the doctor and the vicar looked at the young man’s face. His eyes had filled with tears.

“Why do you let a harmless little flower affect you in that way?” said Dr. Parker.

“I suppose it’s the joy I feel in its beauty. I love it, I love it!” And he gave back the little flower to the doctor with a kind of rapture.

“Do you feel like that about everything?”

“Oh, yes. I worship the Father in all created things.” The too-sensitive face changed suddenly. A light broke over it. “I am intoxicated with the wonders around me, I am enchanted with the glories of the things I see.”

“It certainly is a very wonderful world that we live in,” said the vicar, who sometimes fell unconsciously into his pulpit voice.

“Think of the continents of divine energy in the very air we breathe.” There was a hush of awe in the voice of John Smith. “Think of the miracles happening under that tiny leaf.”

“They are not visible to me.” Dr. Parker impressively removed his gold-rimmed eyeglasses and rubbed them slowly on a red silk handkerchief.

The young man drew aside a frond of bracken, and disclosed a colony of black ants.

“Does the sight of that move you also?” said Dr. Parker.

“They are part of the mystery. I see the Father there.”

“I presume you mean God?” said the vicar.

“Male and female created He them,” said the young man in a hushed tone. “I hardly dare look at the wonders around me, now the scales have fallen from my eyes and the heavens have opened.”

“The heavens have opened!” said Dr. Parker.

“Oh, yes. I can read them now. I gaze upon the portals. I see the chariots. There are the strong souls of the saints riding in glory across the sky. Look! look!”

The doctor and the vicar followed the lines of the young man’s hand, which pointed straight into a brilliant, but storm-shot sun. They had instantly to lower their eyes.

“It would blind one to look at that,” said Dr. Parker.

“Nothing can blind you if you have learned to see,” said the young man. It astonished them to observe that his gaze was fixed upon the flaming disc of light. Suddenly he placed a finger on his lips, entreating them to listen.

The doctor and the vicar listened intently.

“Do you hear the music?”

“I am afraid I hear nothing,” said Dr. Parker.

“Nor I,” said the vicar.

“There are harps in the air.”

“I don’t hear a sound,” said Dr. Parker.

“Nor I,” said the vicar, straining his ears; “or if I do it is the water of the mill by Burkett’s farm.”

“The longer I listen, the more wonderful the music grows.”

The vicar and the doctor shook their heads gravely.

“There are also times, I believe, when you hear voices?” said the vicar.

“Yes, a voice speaks to me continually.”

“Would you say it belonged to any particular person,” said the doctor, “or that it came from any particular source?”

“It is the voice of the Father.”

“The voice of God, I presume?”

“Yes—the voice of God.”

“Does it lay a charge upon you?” the vicar asked.

“It tells me to save the world.”

The complete simplicity of the statement took the vicar and the doctor aback. They looked solemnly at each other, and then at him who had made it.

“And you intend to obey it?” The doctor managed to put the question in a tone of plain matter-of-course.

The young man’s face took a strange pallor. “I must, I must,” he said. And as he spoke his questioners noticed that he had begun to shake violently.

“Are we to understand,” said the vicar, speaking very slowly, “that you expect supernatural powers to be given you?”

“I don’t know. I cannot say.” A light broke over the gentle face. “But a way will be found.”

“How do you know that?” said the vicar.

“It has been communicated to me.”

“Is that to say,” the vicar sternly demanded, “that you are about to claim plenary powers?”

Before the young man answered the question he covered his eyes with his hands. Again he stood in an attitude of curious listening intensity. The doctor thought he could hear a wind, very faint and gentle, stirring in the upper air, but to the vicar it was the sound of water flowing by Burkett’s farm.

The vicar repeated his question.

“I am to claim nothing,” said the young man at last.

“You do not claim to be a Buddha or a Messiah, or anything of that kind?” said the vicar, compressing stern lips.

Again there was silence. Again the young man closed his eyes.

“I am to claim nothing,” he said.

XVI

Involuntarily, as it seemed, and without an attempt to carry the matter further, the vicar and the doctor turned abruptly on their heels and left the common.

“A case of possession,” said the doctor, by the time they had reached the top of the village street. “And quite the most curious in my experience.”

“At any rate,” said the vicar, “now you have seen the man for yourself, you will have not the slightest difficulty in certifying him!”

“You really feel it to be wise and necessary?”

“I do.” The vicar spoke with his habitual air of decision. “I feel very strongly that it will be in the public interest. In fact, I go further. I feel very strongly that it will be in the national interest to have this man certified as a lunatic.”

“He seems a singularly harmless creature.”

“There is always the fear that he may get worse. But apart from that, he is having a bad effect on weak, uneducated minds. He already pretends to powers he doesn’t possess, and has taken lately to faith-healing, and mischievous nonsense of that kind.”

The rubicund visage of Dr. Parker assumed a grave, professional look. “There can be no doubt,” he said, “that he is on the verge of, if he is not already suffering from, mania.”

“In a word,” said the vicar, “you fully agree that it will be wise to have him taken care of?”

“From what you have told me,” said Dr. Parker, with professional caution, “I am inclined to think that, in a time like the present, it may be the right course to adopt.”

“Very well,” said the vicar gravely. “Let us now go and see Joliffe, and get him to indorse your opinion as the law requires. And then tomorrow morning I will run over to Grayfield and get Whymper to move in the matter without delay.”

XVII

The vicar and Dr. Parker slowly descended the long, straggling village street, until they came to Dr. Joliffe’s gate. They found their man at home. In shirt sleeves and pipe in mouth he was mowing the back lawn with a very creditable display of energy for a householder of fifty-five, on an extremely oppressive afternoon.

The perspiring Dr. Joliffe donned a light alpaca coat, and then led his visitors to the summerhouse at the bottom of the garden, where they could talk without fear of being overheard.

The vicar began at once in a concise, businesslike way.

“Dr. Parker has seen John Smith. And he is quite ready to certify him.”

“Hopelessly mad, poor fellow, I’m afraid,” said Dr. Parker.

A quick frown passed across the face of Dr. Joliffe.

“Dangerously?” The tone was curt.

Dr. Parker slowly weighed out a careful reply.

“Not exactly, in an active sense. But there is no saying when he will become so. At any time acute mania may intervene.”

“It may, of course.” But it was a reluctant admission. Moreover, there was an implication behind it which Dr. Parker was not slow to understand. No love was lost between these two, nor was their estimate of each other’s professional abilities altogether flattering.

“Highly probable,” said Dr. Parker, in a warming tone.

“Contrary to my experience of the man. I’ve known him some years now, and though I’m bound to own that he has always seemed a bit cracked, it has never occurred to me that it was a case to certify, and with all deference I am not quite convinced even now.”

“But surely, Joliffe,” the vicar interposed, with some little acerbity, “the need for the course we propose to take was made clear to you on Saturday?”

The look of doubt deepened in Dr. Joliffe’s red face. “I’m very sorry”—there was obvious hesitation in the tone—“but you are really asking a general practitioner to take a great deal on himself.”

“But why?” There was a perceptible stiffening of the vicar’s voice. “I thought I had fully explained to you on Saturday what the alternative is. You see if we can’t get the man into an asylum quietly and humanely, he must be made amenable to the Defense of the Realm Regulations. If you would prefer that course to be taken I will go over to the Depot and see General Clarke. We are bound in honor to move in the matter. But Dr. Parker agrees with me that an asylum will be kinder to the man himself, less disturbing to the public mind, and therefore in the national interest.”

“I do, indeed,” said Dr. Parker.

But the frown was deepening upon Dr. Joliffe’s face.

“I see the force of your argument,” he said. “But knowing the man as I do, and feeling him to be a harmless chap, although just a little cracked, no doubt, I’m not sure that you don’t take an exaggerated view of what he said the other day.”

“Exaggerated view!” The vicar caught up the phrase. “My friend,” he said imperiously, “don’t you realize the danger of having such things said in this parish at a time like the present?”

“Yes, I do.” There was a stiffening of attitude at the vicar’s tone. “But even in a time like the present, I shouldn’t like to overstate its importance.”

The vicar looked at Dr. Joliffe almost with an air of pity. “Don’t you realize the effect it might have on some of our young villagers?”

“Well, that is the point, and I’m not sure that you don’t overstate it, vicar.”

“That’s an Irishman all over,” said Mr. Perry-Hennington to Dr. Parker in an impatient aside. “One can never get him to agree to anything.”

“Even if I was born in Limerick,” said Dr. Joliffe, with an arch smile, “it gives me no particular pleasure to be unreasonable. I’ll own that when the best has been said for the man he’s not so wise as he might be.”

“And don’t forget that he claims to be a Messiah.”

“So I understand. But there’s historical precedent even for that, if we are to believe the Bible.”

The vicar drew his lips into a straight line, and Dr. Parker followed his example.

They did not venture to look at each other, but it was clear they held the opinion in common that Dr. Joliffe had been guilty of a grave breach of taste.

“The trouble with you Saxons,” said Dr. Joliffe, who had been getting his back gradually to the wall, “is that you have too little imagination; the trouble with us Celts that we have too much.”

“Joliffe,” said the vicar, in a tone of pain and surprise, “please understand that such a thing as imagination does not enter into this matter. We are face to face with a very unpleasant fact. There is a mad person in this parish, who goes about uttering stupid blasphemies, who openly sides with the enemy, and we have to deal with him in a humane, but practical and efficient way. Dr. Parker and I are agreed that the public safety calls for certain measures; we are also agreed that the national interest will be best served by their adoption. Are you ready to fall in with our views?—that is the question it is my duty to ask you.”

Dr. Joliffe stroked a square jaw. He resented the vicar’s tone and at that moment he disliked Dr. Parker more intensely than he had ever disliked any human being. In Dr. Joliffe’s opinion both stood for a type of pharisee behind which certain reactionary forces, subtle but deadly, invariably intrenched themselves. But Dr. Joliffe, although cursed with an average share of human weakness, was at heart a fair-minded man. And his one desire, now that he was up against a delicate problem, was to hold the balance true between both parties. From the Anglo-Saxon standpoint the vicar and that old fool, Parker, were right no doubt; but from the Celtic outlook there was also something to be said of John Smith.

“Now, Joliffe,” said the vicar, “please understand this. Our man has to be put away quietly, without any fuss. He will be very comfortable in the county asylum. I speak from experience. I go there once a month. Everything possible is done to insure the well-being of the inmates. It may be possible to let him take his books with him. He is a great reader, I hear—even writes verses of sorts. Anyhow I will speak to Dr. Macey about him at the first opportunity, and do all I can for his comfort and happiness.”

But Dr. Joliffe compressed obstinate lips, and stared with a fixed blue eye at the storm clouds coming up from that dangerous quarter, the southwest.

“By the way, as I think I told you,” continued the vicar, “I spoke to Whymper on Saturday evening. He sees as I do. And he said the bench would support my action, provided the man was duly certified by two doctors to meet the requirements of the Lord Chancellor. Now come, Joliffe, be reasonable.”

But Dr. Joliffe shook a somber head.

“I don’t like to do it on my own responsibility,” he said.

“But you have our friend Parker to share it.”

“The fact is,” said Dr. Joliffe slowly, “I walked as far as Hart’s Ghyll this morning to have a little talk with Brandon on the subject.”

“Gervase Brandon!” To the mind of the vicar much was explained. “Wasn’t it rather a pity to trouble the poor fellow with a thing of this kind in his present condition?”

“I understand that you didn’t hesitate to trouble him with it on Saturday.”

“I did not. I felt it to be my duty.”

The retort was so obvious, that Dr. Joliffe did not trouble to make it. When the vicar chose to look at things from the angle of his official status it was hardly worth while to argue with him.

“May I ask what you said to Gervase Brandon?”

“I told him what you proposed to do.”

The vicar shook a dubious head. “Was that wise, do you think—in the circumstances?”

Dr. Joliffe ignored the question.

“I informed him also,” he added, “that I didn’t feel equal to taking such a great responsibility upon myself.”

“You went so far as to tell him that?”

“I did. This affair has cost me a great deal of anxiety since I saw you on Saturday. I feel very strongly that we ought to have further advice.”

“We have it.” The vicar inclined a diplomatist’s head in Dr. Parker’s direction.

“I told the squire,” said Dr. Joliffe, with a menacing eye upon Dr, Parker, “that I didn’t feel able to move in the matter without the advice of a mental specialist.”

“The man is as mad as a hatter,” said Dr. Parker, with the air of a mental specialist.

“But is he certifiable—that’s the point?”

“He’s a source of danger to the community,” the vicar cut in. But Dr. Joliffe had asked Dr. Parker the question, and his eye demanded that Dr. Parker should answer it.

“I think we may take Mr. Perry-Hennington’s word for that,” said Dr. Parker.

“Well, with all deference,” said Dr. Joliffe, “the squire feels very strongly that the man ought not to be interfered with.”

The vicar was plainly annoyed. He caught up Dr. Joliffe sharply. “I am sorry to say that Brandon with all his merits is little better than an atheist.”

The tone and the manner were a little too much for Irish blood. “And so am I if it comes to that,” said Dr. Joliffe; and then like a true Hibernian he added: “And I thank God for it.”

The vicar and Dr. Parker were greatly pained by this indiscretion, but both were careful to refrain by word or gesture from making the slightest comment upon it.

“Well, Joliffe,” said the vicar, when at last he was able to achieve the necessary composure, “if you cannot see your way to act with us we must find someone who will.”

By now the blood of Dr. Joliffe was running dangerously high. But fresh with his talk with Brandon, which had greatly impressed him, he somehow felt that big issues were at stake. Therefore he must hold himself in hand.

“Mr. Perry-Hennington,” he said, after an inward struggle, in a voice scrupulously mild, “I must tell you that Mr. Brandon has offered to pay the fee of any mental specialist we may like to summon, and that he will abide by his decision.”

“Abide by his decision!” The words were unfortunate, but tact was not one of Dr. Joliffe’s virtues. “Very good of Brandon I’m sure. But may one ask where he stands in the matter?”

“He’s the friend of John Smith.”

“It hardly seems a friendship to be proud of.” The vicar continued to let off steam. “Still I think I see your point. The law entitles the man to have a friend to speak for him, and if Brandon constitutes himself his champion we can’t complain. What do you say, Parker?”

“By all means let him be given every chance,” said Dr. Parker, in a suave, judicial tone. “Personally I don’t think there is a shadow of a doubt that the man is of unsound mind, and I am convinced, after what you have told me, that he ought to be taken care of; but as Joliffe doesn’t agree, and as Mr. Brandon will pay a specialist’s fee, I am quite willing to meet him in consultation.”

“Very well, Parker,” said the vicar, in his getting-things-done voice, “that seems reasonable. Let us have a man down at once. Suggest somebody, and we’ll telegraph here and now.”

Dr. Parker thought for a moment.

“Shall we say Murfin? A sound man, I believe, with a good reputation.”

“Belongs to the old school,” said Dr. Joliffe. “Why not Moriarty?”

Dr. Parker stiffened visibly at the interruption. “Wrote a cranky book, didn’t he, called ‘The Power of Faith’ or something?”

“Moriarty is a pioneer in mental and psychical matters. And Mr. Brandon has a high opinion of his book. It is only the other day that he advised me to read it.”

But the vicar shook his head in vigorous dissent. “The trouble is,” he said, “that Brandon is getting more than a little cranky himself.”

“Depends upon what you mean by the term,” said Dr. Joliffe bridling.

“You know, Joliffe, as well as I do,” the vicar expostulated, “that our friend Brandon, fine and comprehensive as his intellect may be, is now in a very curious state. His judgment is no longer to be trusted.”

“I’d trust his judgment before my own in some things,” was Dr. Joliffe’s rejoinder.

“I’d trust no man’s judgment before my own in anything,” said the vicar. “I’m no believer in the gloss that is put on everything nowadays. White is white, black is black, and two and two make four—that’s my creed, and no amount of intellectual smear is going to alter it. However, we shall not agree about Brandon, therefore we shall not agree about Dr. Moriarty. And as it will devolve upon our friend Parker to meet the specialist and issue the certificate, it seems to me only fair and reasonable that he should make his own choice.”

With a touch of professional rigor, Dr. Parker thought so too.

“Well, it’s immaterial to me,” said Dr. Joliffe, “as I’m retiring from the case. All the same I think it would be best for the squire to decide. He who pays the piper has a right to call the tune.”

“It doesn’t apply in this case,” said the vicar incisively. “One feels that one is making an immense concession in studying Brandon’s feelings in the way one is doing. You seem to forget, Joliffe, that we have a public duty to perform.”

“I am very far from forgetting it. But Brandon and I feel that we have also our duty to perform. And that is why I take the liberty to suggest that he should choose his own mental specialist.”

“Preposterous. What do you say, Parker?”

Dr. Parker tacitly agreed.

“Well,” said Dr. Joliffe, “if the squire will consent to Murfin, it’s all the same to me, but if my opinion is asked, I am bound to say that to my mind Moriarty is by far the abler man.”

“Why do you think so?” Dr. Parker asked.

“More modern in his ideas. Sees farther. Knows we are only at the threshold of a tremendous subject.”

“Nonsense, Joliffe.” The vicar was losing a little of his patience. “White’s white, and black’s black. This man John Smith ought not to be at large, and neither you nor Brandon nor all the mad doctors in Harley Street can be allowed to dictate to us in the matter. We have our duty to do, and very disagreeable it is, but fortunately there is the county bench behind us.”

“Quite so,” said Dr. Joliffe, drily.

“At the same time we don’t want to put ourselves wrong with public opinion, nor do we want to act in any way that will hurt people’s feelings. And it is most undesirable that it should be made into a party or sectarian matter. Therefore, before we take definite action, I think I had better walk as far as Hart’s Ghyll, and have a few further words with Gervase Brandon myself.”

Both doctors promptly fell in with the suggestion. There seemed much to be said for it. Dr. Parker was invited to await Mr. Perry-Hennington’s return and to join Dr. Joliffe in a cup of tea in the meantime. To this proposal Dr. Parker graciously assented; and the vicar, already inflamed with argument, went forth to Hart’s Ghyll to lay his views before Gervase Brandon.

XVIII

As Mr. Perry-Hennington impatiently clicked the doctor’s gate, “Village pettifogger!” flashed along his nervous system. Only a stupid man, or a man too much in awe of Hart’s Ghyll could have been guilty of Joliffe’s scruples, at a moment so ill-timed.

The afternoon’s oppression was growing into the certainty of a storm. There were many portents from the southwest to which the vicar, walking rapidly and gathering momentum as he went, paid no attention. He was really angry with Joliffe; a spirit naturally pontifical had been fretted by his attitude. Apart from the fact that the issue was clear to all reasonable minds, Joliffe, having to make a choice between Cæsar and Pompey, had chosen the latter. It was very annoying, and though Mr. Perry-Hennington prided himself upon his breadth of view, he could not suppress a feeling of resentment.

In the middle of Hart’s Ghyll’s glorious avenue a fine car met the vicar, drove him under the trees and glided by with the flight of a bird. A lean-looking man in a white hat sat in a corner of the car. As he went past he waved a hand to the vicar and called out “Wednesday!” It was his new acquaintance, Mr. Murdwell.

When Mr. Perry-Hennington reached the house, a rather unwelcome surprise awaited him. Edith was seated in the inner hall with niece Millicent. Driven by the pangs of conscience, she had come to implore help for John Smith. But for Millicent, this meant the horns of a dilemma. Her sympathy had been keenly aroused by her cousin’s strange confession, but Gervase had been too much troubled by the matter already, and his wife was very unwilling to tax him further.

The arrival of the vicar, while Edith and Millicent were still anxiously discussing the line to take, was very embarrassing for all three. It only needed a hint to set Mr. Perry-Hennington on the track of their conversation. And when he realized, as he did almost at once, that Edith was in the very act of working against him, he felt a shock of pain.

Dissembling his feelings, however, he asked that he might see Gervase. But Millicent with a shrewd guess at his purpose, went the length of denying him. Gervase was not quite so well, and she had foolishly allowed him to tire himself with their American neighbor, the new tenant of Longwood, who had stayed more than an hour. But the vicar was not in a mood to be thwarted. The matter was important, and he would only stay five minutes.

“Well, Uncle Tom,” said the wife anxiously, “if you see Gervase for five minutes, you must solemnly promise not to refer to John Smith.”

Mr. Perry-Hennington could give no such undertaking. Indeed he had to admit that John Smith was the sole cause and object of his visit. Thereupon to Edith’s horror, Millicent suddenly flashed out:

“I think it’s perfectly shameful, Uncle Tom, that you should be acting toward that dear fellow in the way that you are doing.”

The vicar was quite taken aback. He glanced at the disloyal Edith with eyes of stern accusation. But it was not his intention to be drawn into any discussion of the matter with a pair of irresponsible women. He was hurt, and rather angry, but as always there was a high sense of duty to sustain him.

“Not more than five minutes, I promise you,” he said decisively. And then with the air of a law-giver and chief magistrate, he marched along a low-ceiled, stone-flagged corridor to the library.

XIX

Brandon was alone. The spinal chair had been set in the oriel that was so dear to him, and now he was propped up, with a book in his hand and his favorite view before him.

The vicar’s greeting was full of kindness, but the stricken man met it with an air of pain, perplexity and secret antagonism.

“The very man I have been hoping to see,” he said in a rather faint voice. And then he added, almost with distress, “I want so much to have a talk with you about this miserable business.”

“Don’t let it worry you in any way, my dear fellow,” said the vicar in a tone of reassurance. “Proper and ample provision can easily be made for the poor man if we behave sensibly. At least Whymper thinks so.”

“Hidebound donkey! What has he to do with it?”

The abrupt querulousness of the tone was so unlike Brandon that it rather disconcerted the vicar.

“I have always found Whymper a very honest man,” he said soothingly. “And he is also a magistrate.”

“Oh, yes, a local Shallow.”

The vicar was hurt, but the high sense of duty was with him in his task. And that task was to tell Brandon in a few concise words of Dr. Parker’s visit, of his opinion of John Smith, and his views concerning him.

“And I felt it my duty to come and tell you,” said the vicar, in a slow, calm, patient voice, “that Parker will meet a specialist in consultation. But the question now is, who shall it be? To my mind the point does not arise, but Joliffe, who I am sorry to say is not as helpful as he might be, is making difficulties. Parker would like Murfin, but Joliffe thinks Moriarty. But Murfin or Moriarty, what does it matter? They are both first-rate men; besides the case is so clear that it doesn’t present the slightest difficulty. It is really a waste of money to pay a big fee for a London opinion when a local man like Sharling of Brombridge would do quite as well.”

Brandon shook his head. A look of grave trouble came into his eyes. “No,” he said, “this is a case for the best man the country can provide.”

“Well, you shall choose him, my dear fellow,” Mr. Perry-Hennington’s air was all largeness and magnanimity. “Murfin or Moriarty, or why not such a man as Birdwood Thompson? He is in quite the front rank, I believe. But before you incur an expense that I’m convinced is unnecessary, I should like you to realize my own position in the matter. To my mind, it will be far kinder to have the man certified and quietly removed, rather than ask the law to take a course which may stir up local feeling in certain directions, and breed undesirable publicity in certain newspapers. Still that is neither here nor there. One is prepared to face all consequences, be what they may.”

“Mr. Perry-Hennington,” said Brandon in a hollow tone, “I can’t help thinking that you are making a tragic mistake.”

“The matter hardly admits of discussion I’m afraid. My duty lies before me. Cost what it may it will have to be done.”

“But what possible harm is the man doing?”

The vicar deprecated the question by spreading out his large, strong hands. “We can’t go into that,” he said in a kind tone. “We don’t see eye to eye. Believe me, a matter of this sort doesn’t admit of discussion. Besides it will only excite you. A man has to act in these things as his conscience directs.”

“Yes, of course. But with all submission, one should try to keep a sense of proportion, shouldn’t one?”

“I fully agree.”

“Then why immure a constructive thinker?”

In spite of the watch he was keeping on himself the vicar caught up the phrase almost with passion.

But Brandon held his ground. “In common fairness,” he said, “I feel you ought to read his noble work before you take any action.”

“Words, words, words.”

“Here are words also.” Brandon indicated the open book beside him.

“The Bible!” The vicar could not conceal his surprise. It was almost the last thing he expected to see in the hands of so distinguished a skeptic.

Brandon was secretly amused by the air of sudden perplexity. “You see I am making my soul,” he said.

The vicar was puzzled. It was hard to forbear from being gratified. But fearing the ironical spirit of the modern questioner, he kept on his guard. Brandon, he knew, had a secret armory of powerful weapons. A primitive distrust of the intellect knew better than to engage him at close quarters.

“Our friend, John Smith, has led me back to the Bible,” said Brandon, with a simplicity which Mr. Perry-Hennington greatly mistrusted.

“John Smith!” The tone was frankly incredulous.

“Until the other day I had not opened it for twenty years. But that wonderful work of his has suddenly changed the angle of vision. And in order to read the future by the light of the past, which is the advice he gives to the world, I return to the fount of wisdom.”

The vicar was more and more puzzled. To be led to the Bible by John Smith was like being inducted by the devil into the use of holy water. If Brandon was sincere he could only fear for the state of his mind. On the other hand an intellectual bravo of the ultramodern school might be luring one of simple faith into a dialectical trap. Therefore the vicar hastened to diverge from a perilous subject.

The divergence, however, was only partial. All the vicar’s thought and interest played upon this vital question of John Smith, and he was there to carry it to a crucial phase. At this moment, he must see that he was not sidetracked by one whom he could only regard, at the best, as a dangerous heretic.

“Whom do you choose, my dear fellow?” said Mr. Perry-Hennington, after a wary pause. “Murfin? Moriarty? Birdwood Thompson?”

“I decline to make a choice,” Brandon spoke bitterly. “It would be an insult and a mockery.”

“But don’t you see that it offers a protection, a safeguard for the man himself?”

“In the eyes of the law, no doubt. But, in my view, John Smith stands above the law.”

“No human being stands above the law.”

“That is where I dissent.”

Brandon’s tone simply meant a deadlock. The vicar needed all his patience to combat it. One thing was clear: a change for the worse had set in. It would be an act of simple Christian kindness not to argue with the poor dear fellow.

“Very well,” the vicar’s tone was soothing and gentle, “Joliffe shall choose. He is acting for you in the matter.”

“I beg your pardon. No one is acting for me in this affair. I won’t incur the humiliation of any vicarious responsibility.”

“But one understood from Joliffe that you would abide by the decision of a London specialist.”

“That is not my recollection of the exact position I took up. In any case, I withdraw from it now. Second thoughts convince me that you mean to destroy a very exquisite thing. I am further convinced that as the world is constituted at present you can work your will, if not in one way, in another. History shows that. But it also shows that you will only be successful up to a point. Immure the body of John Smith if you must. Kill his soul if you can. In the meantime go your ways and leave me to abide the issue.”

The vicar was distressed by this sudden flaming. He apologized with Christian humility for having worried one in a delicate state of health with a matter which, after all, did not concern him. Soothing the dear, excitable fellow as well as he could, he prepared to withdraw from the room. But Brandon was not in a mood to let this be the end of the matter.

“Before you go,” he said, “I would like to speak of something else. It has a bearing on the subject we have been discussing.”

Although conscience-bitten by the sudden recollection of his promise to Millicent, the vicar allowed himself to be further detained.

“I have just had a visit from the new tenant of Longwood.”

“Yes, I met him in the avenue as I came here. He has very simply invited me to dine with him on Wednesday.”

“Be sure you do. A very remarkable man. We had a most interesting talk.”

“A great scientist, I hear.”

“One of the forces of the material world. A modern Newton, the discoverer of Murdwell’s Law.”

“Tell me, what is Murdwell’s Law exactly?”

“At present it can only be rendered in terms of the highest mathematics, which I’m afraid is beyond a layman’s power. But Murdwell himself has just told me that he expects soon to be able to reduce it to a physical formula.”

“And if he does?”

“It will be the worst day this planet has known. For one thing it will revolutionize warfare completely. Radioactivity will take the place of high explosives. It may become possible to wipe out a city like London in less than a minute. It may become possible to banish forever organic life from a whole continent.”

“But surely that will be to abrogate the functions of the Creator.”

“Quite so. And science tells us that Man is his own Creator, and that he has been millions of years in business. And now this simple, gentle, peace-loving American of the Middle West comes along with the information that, Man having reached the phase in which he bends the whole force of his genius to destroy his own work, successes of that kind are open to him beyond the dreams of his wildest nightmares. As the learned professor said to me just now: ‘Any fool can destroy. We are near the point where it will be possible for the infant puling in the arms of its nurse to press a button and punch a hole through the planet!’”

“No doubt he exaggerates.”

“He may. On the other hand he may not. He is a great and daring thinker, and he declares there are hidden forces in the universe that man is about to harness in the way he has already harnessed electricity, which, by the way, less than a hundred years ago was a madman’s dream.”

“I hear he is subsidized by the government.”

“He takes no payment for his services. He believes our cause to be that of civilization. Two of his boys are with the French Army, as he says, ‘doing their bit to keep a lien on the future.’”

“His country can be proud of him.”

Brandon could not repress a smile. The assumption of the tone was so typical of the man who used it that he was tempted to look at him in his relation to those events which were tearing the world in pieces. Had any man a right to sit in judgment on the actions of others in that calm, confident way? There was something far down in Brandon which asked the question, something deeper still which answered it. The self-complacency of this sublime noodle was not a thing to smile at after all; he had a sudden craving for a tomahawk.

“It seems to me,” said Brandon after a pause, “that modern materialism has at last managed to produce the kind of man it has been looking for. This charming church-going American says he hopes presently to be able to establish war on a scientific basis. So far, he says, man has only been toying with the subject.”

“If he can bring the end of this war a stage nearer, all honor to him,” said the vicar in a measured tone.

“He certainly hopes to do that. He says that his committee of Allied scientists, which sits every day in Whitehall, is already applying Murdwell’s Law to good purpose. It has every hope of finding a formula, sooner or later, which will put the Central Empires permanently out of business.”

“Really!” said the vicar.

“He says that so awful are the potentialities of self-destruction inherent in Murdwell’s Law that future wars may involve the planet, Earth, in cosmic suicide.”

“Really!” said the vicar.

“He says that science sees already that warfare cannot remain in its present phase. Moreover, at the present moment it is an interesting speculation as to which side can first carry it a step further. Enemy scientists are already groping in the direction of the new light. They will soon have their own private version of Murdwell’s Law; they know already the forces latent in it. If we are the first to find the formula we may be able to say a long farewell to the Wilhelmstrasse, and even to deep, strong, patient Germany herself. And if they find it first it may be a case of ‘Good-by, Leicester Square,’ because the first intimation the world may have is that there is a small island missing in Europe.”

“Really!” said the vicar.

“It sounds fantastic. But there is not the slightest doubt that Murdwell’s Law opens up a mental vista which simply beggars imagination. And there is no doubt, in the opinion of its discoverer, that by its means Man will get into touch with unknown elements capable of sealing the doom of the group of things to which he belongs.”

“We’ll hope not,” said the vicar. “At any rate, if that is so, it seems to me that Murdwell’s Law impinges upon the order of divine providence.”

“There we enter upon the greatest of all questions. Just now all creeds are asking: What is Man’s relation to God and the universe? Theology has one interpretation, science another. Which is right? Philosophy says that each has a glimpse of the truth, yet it is now inclined to believe that we have touched a new stratum which literally turns all previous theories inside out. Of course, it is not so new as it seems. Plato reached similar conclusions by a different road, but the world of empirical science has hitherto been content to regard them as brilliant but fantastic speculations. Gazelee Payne Murdwell claims to have brought them within the region of hard fact; he says science and philosophy are already half converted to his view. We enter a new era of the world’s history in consequence, and very amazing manifestations are promised us.”

“Whatever they may be,” said the vicar stoutly, “I will not allow myself to believe that Man can abrogate the functions of the Deity.”

“But what are the functions of the Deity? Would you say it was the exercise of those functions which saved Paris from being blown to pieces by the Hun?”

“Undoubtedly!”

“And yet permitted him to sink the Lusitania?’

“Undoubtedly. Don’t let us presume to question that God had a reason for his attitude in both cases.”

“Well, in my view I am bound to say that T. N. T. and the U-boat abrogate the functions of the Deity in their humble way, just as surely as Murdwell’s Law may expect to do in a higher one. However, discussion is useless. We shall never agree. But if on Wednesday you can persuade Professor Murdwell to talk, you may hear strange things.”

“No doubt he exaggerates,” said the vicar robustly. “It’s the way of these inventive geniuses. On the other hand, should it seem good to the Divine Providence to destroy all the inhabitants of this wicked planet, let the will of God prevail. But in any case, my dear fellow, I hope you will not allow the ideas of the American to excite you.”

“They are far from doing that, but it was very civil of a man like Murdwell to take the trouble to come and see a man who couldn’t go and see him. He is one of the forces of the modern world, and in the near future he will be the problem for the human race.”

“It may be so,” said the vicar. “I know nothing of science. But to return to this problem of John Smith. Shall we say Birdwood Thompson? Parker is waiting to know?”

“As you please,” said Brandon in a voice of sudden exhaustion.

“Very well. I’ll telegraph. We must be scrupulously fair in the matter. And now let us dismiss an unprofitable subject. I’m afraid you have been talking too much.”

“A little too much, I’m afraid,” said Brandon rather feebly.

“Well, good-by, my dear fellow,” said the vicar heartily. “And forget all about this tiresome business. It doesn’t in any way concern you if only you could think so. Whatever happens, the man will be treated with every consideration. As for Professor Murdwell, I’m afraid he draws the long bow. These brilliant men of science always do. Good-by. And as I go out I’ll ask the nurse to come to you.”

XX

In the meantime in Dr. Joliffe’s summerhouse the pipe of peace was being smoked. Dr. Joliffe’s cigars had a virtue of their own, and Dr. Parker, who was no mean judge of such things, had rather weakly allowed the flesh to conquer. Joliffe was a perverse fellow, but even he, apparently, was not quite impossible. His cigars somehow just saved him.

The third whiff of an excellent Corona suddenly transformed Dr. Parker into a man of the world.

“The fact is,” said he, “our friend here, like all country parsons who have been too long in one place, is a bit too dogmatic.”

An answering twinkle came into the eye of Dr. Joliffe. Somehow the admission seemed to clear the air considerably.

“He wants humoring.”

“No doubt. But this poor chap is as harmless as I am.”

“A good deal more harmless than you are Joliffe. But you know the sort of man we have to deal with. And after all old Henny-Penny’s quite right—in war time. You see this chap is not pulling his weight in the boat. He’s a bad example. Our parson is rather down on him no doubt; still, in the circumstances, he’s quite right to bring him under control.”

“You think so?”

“It can do no harm at any rate.”

“But, you see, it’s going to upset the squire. And he’s such a good chap that it seems a pity.”

“Well, it’s no use trying to please everyone.”

“Quite so.”

“Why not certify the fellow and have done with it?”

“I can’t, after what I said to Brandon.”

“Tell me, Joliffe, why does Brandon take such an interest in him?”

“Nay,” said Joliffe, “that’s more than I can fathom.”

“Do you think his mind has been affected by Gallipoli?”

“They seem to think so.”

“Do you?”

“I seem to notice a change coming over him. But it’s so very gradual that one can hardly say what it may be.”

“At any rate it is not a good sign for a man like Brandon to be wrapped up in such a fellow as John Smith.”

“There I entirely agree,” said Joliffe. “And to my mind that is the worst feature of the whole affair.”

The two doctors exchanged their views at considerable length. And when the vicar returned from Hart’s Ghyll, after an absence of more than an hour, he found the moral temperature much more equable. In fact the lion and the lamb were lying down together. Moreover, he had only to make known his own proposal that Murfin and Moriarty should be superseded in favor of Birdwood Thompson for this course to be acceptable to both. Dr. Joliffe at once led his visitors to his study, in order that a letter might be drawn up for the purpose of summoning the eminent specialist.

It took some little time for this task to be performed. There were niceties of professional phrasing to consider; also the nature of the case called for a certain amount of discreet description. At last the letter was written, and then Dr. Parker was reminded by the sight of his car, which had come round from the vicarage, that he was urgently due elsewhere.

XXI

Pressed for time, Dr. Parker fled. But he took the letter with him in order that he might post it in Brombridge, and so insure its earlier delivery in London. As soon as Dr. Parker had gone the vicar made a survey of the elements, and then set off at his best pace on a ten-minute walk to his house.

In doing this he knew that he ran the risk of a soaking. Storm clouds which had hovered all the afternoon were now massed overhead. Hardly had he entered the village street, when he perceived large drops of rain. But in his present frame of mind he did not feel like staying a moment longer under Joliffe’s roof than he could help. He was still seething within. He was still marveling at the crassness of certain of his fellow creatures. The open defection of one whom he had counted a sure ally was very hard to forgive.

However, by the time he had reached the edge of the common he realized that he was in a fair way of being drenched to the skin; moreover the rainstorms of the district, though often of great severity, did not last long as a rule.

Near by was a thicket of well-grown trees, which at once lured the vicar to accept their protection. As he crept under the branches there came a play of lightning, followed by thunder in a series of deafening crashes. Devoutly thankful that he had had the wit to gain shelter he crouched low, turned up his coat collar and looked out at the rain descending in a sheet. A hundred yards or so away, an old, white-aproned village woman, very thinly clad, was struggling toward her cottage. As she came near the priest’s stone in the middle of the village green, a man without a hat, and no better protected from the storm than herself, suddenly sprang up before her. In an instant he had taken off his coat and placed it round her shoulders.

The old woman went slowly on toward her cottage, while the man stood coatless in the rain. It did not seem to cause him any concern, he seemed, in fact, almost to welcome the storm, as he stood erect in its midst, the elements beating upon him, the thunder rolling over his head. And the vicar, peering from his shelter, thought that once or twice his right hand was raised as if he were in the act of speaking to heaven.

The man was John Smith. The vicar was amazed; such sheer insensibility to what was going on around was uncanny. Bareheaded, coatless, drenched to the skin, the man scorned the shelter so close at hand. The first thought that passed through the vicar’s mind was one of pity for the man’s physical and mental state. But hard upon that emotion came regret that the stubborn Joliffe was not also a spectator of the scene. Any doubts he still held as to the man’s sanity must surely have been dispelled.

A great wind began to roam the upper air. The lightning grew more vivid, the thunder louder, the weight of rain still heavier. The vicar crouched against the bole of the best tree. And as he did so, his thoughts somehow passed from the poor, demented figure of fantasy still before his eyes, to those overwhelming forces of nature in which they were both at that minute engulfed.

Intellectually the vicar was a very modest man. Sometimes, it is true, he had been tempted to ask himself poignant questions. But he had never presumed to give an independent answer of his own. For him the solution of the central mystery of man’s relation to the forces around him was comprised in the word “Faith.”

But now that he was the witness of poor John Smith’s dementia, the sense of human futility recurred to him. It needed a power of Faith to relate that drenched scarecrow, a mere insect upon whom Nature was wreaking a boundless will, to the cosmic march and profluence. For a moment the vicar was almost tempted to deny the still, small voice within and submit entirely to the judgment of the senses. His eyes, his ears, his sense of touch assured him that the poor madman out in the rain was lost in the sum of things. What relation could he have to those majestic powers by whom he was buffeted? Surely that lone, hapless figure was the symbol of Man himself.

And yet the act of devotion the man had just performed must have a meaning. It was a mystery within a mystery. Of whom had this poor blasphemer learned that trick; by what divine license did he practice it? For nearly half an hour it continued to rain pitilessly, and during that time the vicar searched and questioned his heart in regard to the man before him. At last the storm subsided; he came out of his shelter and went thoughtfully home. But in bed that night, when he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, he found the image of John Smith printed inside his eyelids.

XXII

The next morning, when John Smith called as usual at Hart’s Ghyll with his bunch of flowers, he was allowed once more to see his friend. The stricken man received him in the library with the most affectionate intimacy.

“My dear, dear fellow,” he said, “how good it is to see you. You bring the light of the sun to this room whenever you enter it.”

The visitor took Brandon’s hand with the caressing touch of a woman. “Dear friend,” he said, “I always pray that the light may accompany me wherever I go.”

The simplicity of the man, which it would have been easy to misread, had now, as always, a strange effect upon Brandon. And yet he was heart-sore and miserable. The weight of sorrow now upon him seemed to transcend all his other sufferings. A cruel sense of the futility of his terrible sacrifice had overtaken him. What proof was there that it had not been in vain? After all, what hope could there be for the future of men; what was there to expect from a purblind, material world? He was now in the throes of a cruel reaction. Somehow his talk with the vicar had struck at his faith in his own kind.

He took no comfort from the thought that Mr. Perry-Hennington was a profoundly stupid man. Turning his mind back, he saw the parson of Penfold as the spiritual guide of the race of average men, of a race which allowed itself to be governed by the daily newspaper, which in one feverish hour threw away the liberties it had cost its father hundreds of years to win. Prussia was being met with Prussia, Baal with the image of Baal.

Throughout a wakeful night, that had been the thought in Brandon’s heart. Behind all the swelling heroics and the turgid phrases of organized opinion, was this Frankenstein monster. The world was moving in a vicious circle. The public press had somehow managed to recreate what it had set out to destroy. The question for Brandon now was, had he been the victim of a chimera? In the course of a long night of bitterness, the thought had taken root in him that all the blood and tears humanity was shedding would merely fix the shackles more cruelly on generations yet unborn.

This morning Brandon saw no hope for the ill-starred race of men. Hour by hour his fever-tinged thoughts had flown to one for whom he had conceived an emotion of the highest and purest friendship, to one whom his fellows were seeking a means to destroy.

“I have been wondering,” said Brandon, “whether you will consent to have your poem published? I know you are shy of print, but this is a rare jewel, the heritage of the whole world.”

“Don’t let us talk of it just now.” There was a shadow upon the eloquent face. “I have need of guidance. My poem, such as it is, is but one aspect of a great matter. I pray that I may find a more universal one.”

Brandon dissembled his surprise, but he could not bridle his curiosity. “Your poem is a great matter,” he said. “To me it is wonderful. You call it ‘The Door.’ Why not let all the world pass through?”

“Such is my task, but I do not know that it can be fulfilled by the printed word. There may be a surer way. The question I have to ask myself is, can I do the Father’s will more worthily? By prayer and fasting perhaps I may.”

“But the thing is so perfect. Why gild the lily?”

“It is only one of many keys, dear friend. It is not the Door itself. It is no more than a stage in a long, long pilgrimage; no more than a means to the mighty end that has been laid upon me.”

Brandon, however, had set his heart upon the poem’s publication. To him it was a perfect thing. Moreover, he saw in it a vindication of its author, a noble answer to those who were conspiring to destroy him.

Strangely, however, John was not to be moved from his resolve. And more strangely still, as it seemed to Brandon, intimations had come to him already of the terrible fate that was about to overtake him. “It has been communicated to me that I am about to be called to a great trial,” were the words he used.

Brandon, sick at heart, had hardly the courage to seek an explanation. “You—you have been told that?” He scanned anxiously the face of the man at his side.

“Yes,” was the answer. “The inner voice spoke to me last evening. I don’t know when the blow will fall, or what fate awaits me, but a sword hangs by a single hair above my head.”

“And—and you are not afraid?” To Brandon this calmness was almost superhuman.

“I am not afraid. The souls of the just are in the hands of God. And I ask you, my dear friend, to share my faith. You are one of two witnesses to whom I have been allowed to reveal myself. The other is an old woman who can no longer work with her hands. You have long given her a roof for her head, and I have kept a loaf in her cupboard and found her fire in the winter. But there is only the poorhouse for her when I am taken, and I think she fears it.”

“Whatever happens, that shall not be her fate.”

“I will not thank so good a man. But it is your due that you should know this.”

“It is my great privilege. Is there any other way in which I may hope to be of use?”

“At the moment, none.” John Smith laid his hand on the arm of the stricken man with a gesture of mingled pity and solicitude. “But a time is surely coming when a heavy tax will be laid upon your friendship.”

“I cannot tell you how I shall welcome it.” As Brandon spoke he gazed upward to the eyes of the man who bent over him. As he met those large-pupiled orbs, a curious thrill passed through his frame. In the sudden sweep of his emotion was an odd sense of awe.

“I foresee, dear friend, that you are about to be called to a hero’s task.” The soft, low voice seemed to strike through Brandon as he lay.

“Whatever it may be, I accept it joyfully. In the meantime I can only pray that I may stand worthy in the day of trial.”

“Of that there can be no doubt—if you will always remember that one unconverted believer may save the whole world.”

For many days to come these cryptic words were to puzzle Brandon, and to linger in his ears. But in the moment of their utterance he could seek no elucidation. His whole soul was melted by a sense of awe. It was as if a new, unknown power was beginning to enfold him.

John Smith kissed Brandon gravely on the forehead and then went away. The stricken man was left in a state of bewildered perplexity. And a heavier load of misery was now upon him than any he had known. A rare, exquisite thing had been revealed to him in a miraculous way. It was about to suffer a cruel fate, and he had not the power to save it.

XXIII

Brandon was still brooding over a tragedy he could not avert when a nurse came into the room. She was a practical, vigorous creature, plain and clean of mind, and after a single shrewd glance at the patient she proceeded to take his temperature with a clinical thermometer.

“Just as I thought.” An ominous head was shaken. “That man always has a bad effect upon you. I shall have to forbid him seeing you in the future.”

“What nonsense!” said Brandon.

“This speaks for itself.” The nurse held up the thermometer. “He always puts you up to a hundred. You are nearly a hundred and one now, and you’ll have to go to bed and stay there until you are down a bit.”

It was vain for Brandon to desist. He was at the mercy of Olympians who did not hesitate to misuse their powers. He was whisked off to bed like a naughty child, and the privilege of a further talk with John Smith was withdrawn indefinitely. He protested strongly to the nurse and bitterly to his wife, but he was told that it would not be safe to see the young man again until he could do so without playing tricks with his temperature.

Brandon fumed in durance for the rest of the day. The patience which had borne him through all his trials threatened to desert him now. He was tormented with the thought of his own helplessness. The recent visit had moved Brandon to the very depths of his being, and the longing to help John Smith escape the coil that fate was weaving now burnt in his veins a living fire. As he lay helpless and overwrought, on the verge of fever, the stupidities of the little world around him were magnified into a crime for which humanity itself would have to pay.

The next morning, Wednesday, at eleven o’clock came Dr. Joliffe. The higher medical science had begun to despair of ever restoring to Brandon the use of his limbs, and he was now in the sole care of his local attendant, who came to see him every other day.

Dr. Joliffe found the patient still keeping his bed by the orders of the nurse. In the course of an uncomfortable night he had slept little, and his temperature was still a matter for concern. Moreover, not the nurse alone, but Mrs. Brandon also, had already delivered themselves vehemently on the subject of John Smith.

For one reason or another Dr. Joliffe would have been very willing just now to consign John Smith to limbo. Nor was this desire made less when the patient, after being duly examined, reported upon, and admonished, requested the nurse to withdraw from the room in order that he might talk with the doctor privately.

Joliffe knew well enough what was coming. And he would have done much to avoid further contact with a most unhappy subject, from which consequences were flowing of an ever-increasing embarrassment. But there was no means of escape. For Brandon, the subject of John Smith had become almost an obsession; a fact which the doctor had begun to realize to his cost.

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