He took his foot off Gotch"s shoulder, bent down towards the prostrate figure, stood listening, knelt--shook him. "Awake!" said the Angel. Then still more softly, "_Awake!_"
He remained listening some minutes or more, stood up sharply, and looked round him at the silent trees. A feeling of profound horror descended upon him, wrapped him round about. With an abrupt gesture he turned.
"What has happened to me?" he said, in an awe-stricken whisper.
He started back from the motionless figure. "_Dead!_" he said suddenly, and turning, panic stricken, fled headlong through the wood.
XLIX.
It was some minutes after the footsteps of the Angel had died away in the distance that Gotch raised himself on his hand. "By Jove!" he said.
"Crump"s right."
"Cut at the head, too!"
He put his hand to his face and felt the two weals running across it, hot and fat. "I"ll think twice before I lift my hand against a lunatic again," said Sir John Gotch.
"He may be a person of weak intellect, but I"m d.a.m.ned if he hasn"t a pretty strong arm. _Phew!_ He"s cut a bit clean off the top of my ear with that infernal lash."
"That infernal horse will go galloping to the house in the approved dramatic style. Little Madam"ll be scared out of her wits. And I ... I shall have to explain how it all happened. While she vivisects me with questions.
"I"m a jolly good mind to have spring guns and man-traps put in this preserve. Confound the Law!"
L.
But the Angel, thinking that Gotch was dead, went wandering off in a pa.s.sion of remorse and fear through the brakes and copses along the Sidder. You can scarcely imagine how appalled he was at this last and overwhelming proof of his encroaching humanity. All the darkness, pa.s.sion and pain of life seemed closing in upon him, inexorably, becoming part of him, chaining him to all that a week ago he had found strange and pitiful in men.
"Truly, this is no world for an Angel!" said the Angel. "It is a World of War, a World of Pain, a World of Death. Anger comes upon one ... I who knew not pain and anger, stand here with blood stains on my hands. I have fallen. To come into this world is to fall. One must hunger and thirst and be tormented with a thousand desires. One must fight for foothold, be angry and strike----"
He lifted up his hands to Heaven, the ultimate bitterness of helpless remorse in his face, and then flung them down with a gesture of despair.
The prison walls of this narrow pa.s.sionate life seemed creeping in upon him, certainly and steadily, to crush him presently altogether. He felt what all we poor mortals have to feel sooner or later--the pitiless force of the Things that Must Be, not only without us but (where the real trouble lies) within, all the inevitable tormenting of one"s high resolves, those inevitable seasons when the better self is forgotten.
But with us it is a gentle descent, made by imperceptible degrees over a long s.p.a.ce of years; with him it was the horrible discovery of one short week. He felt he was being crippled, caked over, blinded, stupefied in the wrappings of this life, he felt as a man might feel who has taken some horrible poison, and feels destruction spreading within him.
He took no account of hunger or fatigue or the flight of time. On and on he went, avoiding houses and roads, turning away from the sight and sound of a human being in a wordless desperate argument with Fate. His thoughts did not flow but stood banked back in inarticulate remonstrance against his degradation. Chance directed his footsteps homeward and, at last, after nightfall, he found himself faint and weary and wretched, stumbling along over the moor at the back of Siddermorton.
He heard the rats run and squeal in the heather, and once a noiseless big bird came out of the darkness, pa.s.sed, and vanished again. And he saw without noticing it a dull red glow in the sky before him.
LI.
But when he came over the brow of the moor, a vivid light sprang up before him and refused to be ignored. He came on down the hill and speedily saw more distinctly what the glare was. It came from darting and trembling tongues of fire, golden and red, that shot from the windows and a hole in the roof of the Vicarage. A cl.u.s.ter of black heads, all the village in fact, except the fire-brigade--who were down at Aylmer"s Cottage trying to find the key of the machine-house--came out in silhouette against the blaze. There was a roaring sound, and a humming of voices, and presently a furious outcry. There was a shouting of "No! No!"--"Come back!" and an inarticulate roar.
He began to run towards the burning house. He stumbled and almost fell, but he ran on. He found black figures running about him. The flaring fire blew gustily this way and that, and he smelt the smell of burning.
"She went in," said one voice, "she went in."
"The mad girl!" said another.
"Stand back! Stand back!" cried others.
He found himself thrusting through an excited, swaying crowd, all staring at the flames, and with the red reflection in their eyes.
"Stand back!" said a labourer, clutching him.
"What is it?" said the Angel. "What does this mean?"
"There"s a girl in the house, and she can"t get out!"
"Went in after a fiddle," said another.
""Tas hopeless," he heard someone else say.
"I was standing near her. I heerd her. Says she: "I _can_ get his fiddle." I heerd her--Just like that! "I _can_ get his fiddle.""
For a moment the Angel stood staring. Then in a flash he saw it all, saw this grim little world of battle and cruelty, transfigured in a splendour that outshone the Angelic Land, suffused suddenly and insupportably glorious with the wonderful light of Love and Self-Sacrifice. He gave a strange cry, and before anyone could stop him, was running towards the burning building. There were cries of "The Hunchback! The Fowener!"
The Vicar, whose scalded hand was being tied up, turned his head, and he and Crump saw the Angel, a black outline against the intense, red glare of the doorway. It was the sensation of the tenth of a second, yet both men could not have remembered that transitory att.i.tude more vividly had it been a picture they had studied for hours together. Then the Angel was hidden by something ma.s.sive (no one knew what) that fell, incandescent, across the doorway.
LII.
There was a cry of "Delia" and no more. But suddenly the flames spurted out in a blinding glare that shot upward to an immense height, a blinding brilliance broken by a thousand flickering gleams like the waving of swords. And a gust of sparks, flashing in a thousand colours, whirled up and vanished. Just then, and for a moment by some strange accident, a rush of music, like the swell of an organ, wove into the roaring of the flames.
The whole village standing in black knots heard the sound, except Gaffer Siddons who is deaf--strange and beautiful it was, and then gone again.
Lumpy Durgan, the idiot boy from Sidderford, said it began and ended like the opening and shutting of a door.
But little Hetty Penzance had a pretty fancy of two figures with wings, that flashed up and vanished among the flames.
(And after that it was she began to pine for the things she saw in her dreams, and was abstracted and strange. It grieved her mother sorely at the time. She grew fragile, as though she was fading out of the world, and her eyes had a strange, far-away look. She talked of angels and rainbow colours and golden wings, and was for ever singing an unmeaning fragment of an air that n.o.body knew. Until Crump took her in hand and cured her with fattening dietary, syrup of hypophosphites and cod liver oil.)
THE EPILOGUE.
And there the story of the Wonderful Visit ends. The Epilogue is in the mouth of Mrs Mendham. There stand two little white crosses in the Siddermorton churchyard, near together, where the brambles come clambering over the stone wall. One is inscribed Thomas Angel and the other Delia Hardy, and the dates of the deaths are the same. Really there is nothing beneath them but the ashes of the Vicar"s stuffed ostrich. (You will remember the Vicar had his ornithological side.) I noticed them when Mrs Mendham was showing me the new De la Beche monument. (Mendham has been Vicar since Hilyer died.) "The granite came from somewhere in Scotland," said Mrs Mendham, "and cost ever so much--I forget how much--but a wonderful lot! It"s quite the talk of the village."