"I never heard a more fantastic story," said Mrs Mendham from the basket chair. "The man must be mad. Are you sure----."
"Perfectly, my dear. I"ve told you every word, every incident----."
"_Well!_" said Mrs Mendham, and spread her hands. "There"s no sense in it."
"Precisely, my dear."
"The Vicar," said Mrs Mendham, "must be mad."
"This hunchback is certainly one of the strangest creatures I"ve seen for a long time. Foreign looking, with a big bright coloured face and long brown hair.... It can"t have been cut for months!" The Curate put his studs carefully upon the shelf of the dressing-table. "And a kind of staring look about his eyes, and a simpering smile. Quite a silly looking person. Effeminate."
"But who _can_ he be?" said Mrs Mendham.
"I can"t imagine, my dear. Nor where he came from. He might be a chorister or something of that sort."
"But _why_ should he be about the shrubbery ... in that dreadful costume?"
"I don"t know. The Vicar gave me no explanation. He simply said, "Mendham, this is an Angel.""
"I wonder if he drinks.... They may have been bathing near the spring, of course," reflected Mrs Mendham. "But I noticed no other clothes on his arm."
The Curate sat down on his bed and unlaced his boots.
"It"s a perfect mystery to me, my dear." (Flick, flick of laces.) "Hallucination is the only charitable----"
"You are sure, George, that it was _not_ a woman."
"Perfectly," said the Curate.
"I know what men are, of course."
"It was a young man of nineteen or twenty," said the Curate.
"I can"t understand it," said Mrs Mendham. "You say the creature is staying at the Vicarage?"
"Hilyer is simply mad," said the Curate. He got up and went padding round the room to the door to put out his boots. "To judge by his manner you would really think he believed this cripple was an Angel." ("Are your shoes out, dear?")
("They"re just by the wardrobe"), said Mrs Mendham. "He always was a little queer, you know. There was always something childish about him.... An Angel!"
The Curate came and stood by the fire, fumbling with his braces. Mrs Mendham liked a fire even in the summer. "He shirks all the serious problems in life and is always trifling with some new foolishness," said the Curate. "Angel indeed!" He laughed suddenly. "Hilyer _must_ be mad,"
he said.
Mrs Mendham laughed too. "Even that doesn"t explain the hunchback," she said.
"The hunchback must be mad too," said the Curate.
"It"s the only way of explaining it in a sensible way," said Mrs Mendham. [_Pause._]
"Angel or no angel," said Mrs Mendham, "I know what is due to me. Even supposing the man thought he _was_ in the company of an angel, that is no reason why he should not behave like a gentleman."
"That is perfectly true."
"You will write to the Bishop, of course?"
Mendham coughed. "No, I shan"t write to the Bishop," said Mendham. "I think it seems a little disloyal.... And he took no notice of the last, you know."
"But surely----"
"I shall write to Austin. In confidence. He will be sure to tell the Bishop, you know. And you must remember, my dear----"
"That Hilyer can dismiss you, you were going to say. My dear, the man"s much too weak! _I_ should have a word to say about that. And besides, you do all his work for him. Practically, we manage the parish from end to end. I do not know what would become of the poor if it was not for me. They"d have free quarters in the Vicarage to-morrow. There is that Goody Ansell----"
"I know, my dear," said the Curate, turning away and proceeding with his undressing. "You were telling me about her only this afternoon."
XXI.
And thus in the little bedroom over the gable we reach a first resting place in this story. And as we have been hard at it, getting our story spread out before you, it may be perhaps well to recapitulate a little.
Looking back you will see that much has been done; we began with a blaze of light "not uniform but broken all over by curving flashes like the waving of swords," and the sound of a mighty harping, and the advent of an Angel with polychromatic wings.
Swiftly, dexterously, as the reader must admit, wings have been clipped, halo handled off, the glory clapped into coat and trousers, and the Angel made for all practical purposes a man, under a suspicion of being either a lunatic or an impostor. You have heard too, or at least been able to judge, what the Vicar and the Doctor and the Curate"s wife thought of the strange arrival. And further remarkable opinions are to follow.
The afterglow of the summer sunset in the north-west darkens into night and the Angel sleeps, dreaming himself back in the wonderful world where it is always light, and everyone is happy, where fire does not burn and ice does not chill; where rivulets of starlight go streaming through the amaranthine meadows, out to the seas of Peace. He dreams, and it seems to him that once more his wings glow with a thousand colours and flash through the crystal air of the world from which he has come.
So he dreams. But the Vicar lies awake, too perplexed for dreaming.
Chiefly he is troubled by the possibilities of Mrs Mendham; but the evening"s talk has opened strange vistas in his mind, and he is stimulated by a sense as of something seen darkly by the indistinct vision of a hitherto unsuspected wonderland lying about his world. For twenty years now he has held his village living and lived his daily life, protected by his familiar creed, by the clamour of the details of life, from any mystical dreaming. But now interweaving with the familiar bother of his persecuting neighbour, is an altogether unfamiliar sense of strange new things.
There was something ominous in the feeling. Once, indeed, it rose above all other considerations, and in a kind of terror he blundered out of bed, bruised his shins very convincingly, found the matches at last, and lit a candle to a.s.sure himself of the reality of his own customary world again. But on the whole the more tangible trouble was the Mendham avalanche. Her tongue seemed to be hanging above him like the sword of Damocles. What might she not say of this business, before her indignant imagination came to rest?
And while the successful captor of the Strange Bird was sleeping thus uneasily, Gully of Sidderton was carefully unloading his gun after a wearisome blank day, and Sandy Bright was on his knees in prayer, with the window carefully fastened. Annie Durgan was sleeping hard with her mouth open, and Amory"s mother was dreaming of washing, and both of them had long since exhausted the topics of the Sound and the Glare. Lumpy Durgan was sitting up in his bed, now crooning the fragment of a tune and now listening intently for a sound he had heard once and longed to hear again. As for the solicitor"s clerk at Iping Hanger, he was trying to write poetry about a confectioner"s girl at Portburdock, and the Strange Bird was quite out of his head. But the ploughman who had seen it on the confines of Siddermorton Park had a black eye. That had been one of the more tangible consequences of a little argument about birds"
legs in the "Ship." It is worthy of this pa.s.sing mention, since it is probably the only known instance of an Angel causing anything of the kind.
MORNING.
XXII.
The Vicar going to call the Angel, found him dressed and leaning out of his window. It was a glorious morning, still dewy, and the rising sunlight slanting round the corner of the house, struck warm and yellow upon the hillside. The birds were astir in the hedges and shrubbery. Up the hillside--for it was late in August--a plough drove slowly. The Angel"s chin rested upon his hands and he did not turn as the Vicar came up to him.
"How"s the wing?" said the Vicar.