"That"s all right," said Crump when the bandaging was replaced. "It"s a trick of memory, no doubt, but these excrescences of yours don"t seem nearly so large as they did yesterday. I suppose they struck me rather forcibly. Stop and have lunch with me now you"re down here. Midday meal, you know. The youngsters will be swallowed up by school again in the afternoon."
"I never saw anything heal so well in my life," he said, as they walked into the dining-room. "Your blood and flesh must be as clean and free from bacteria as they make "em. Whatever stuff there is in your head,"
he added _sotto voce_.
At lunch he watched the Angel narrowly, and talked to draw him out.
"Journey tire you yesterday?" he said suddenly.
"Journey!" said the Angel. "Oh! my wings felt a little stiff."
("Not to be had,") said Crump to himself. ("Suppose I must enter into it.")
"So you flew all the way, eigh? No conveyance?"
"There wasn"t any way," explained the Angel, taking mustard. "I was flying up a symphony with some Griffins and Fiery Cherubim, and suddenly everything went dark and I was in this world of yours."
"Dear me!" said Crump. "And that"s why you haven"t any luggage." He drew his serviette across his mouth, and a smile flickered in his eyes.
"I suppose you know this world of ours pretty well? Watching us over the adamantine walls and all that kind of thing. Eigh?"
"Not very well. We dream of it sometimes. In the moonlight, when the Nightmares have fanned us to sleep with their wings."
"Ah, yes--of course," said Crump. "Very poetical way of putting it.
Won"t you take some Burgundy? It"s just beside you."
"There"s a persuasion in this world, you know, that Angels" Visits are by no means infrequent. Perhaps some of your--friends have travelled?
They are supposed to come down to deserving persons in prisons, and do refined Nautches and that kind of thing. Faust business, you know."
"I"ve never heard of anything of the kind," said the Angel.
"Only the other day a lady whose baby was my patient for the time being--indigestion--a.s.sured me that certain facial contortions the little creature made indicated that it was Dreaming of Angels. In the novels of Mrs Henry Wood that is spoken of as an infallible symptom of an early departure. I suppose you can"t throw any light on that obscure pathological manifestation?"
"I don"t understand it at all," said the Angel, puzzled, and not clearly apprehending the Doctor"s drift.
("Getting huffy,") said Crump to himself. ("Sees I"m poking fun at him.") "There"s one thing I"m curious about. Do the new arrivals complain much about their medical attendants? I"ve always fancied there must be a good deal of hydropathic talk just at first. I was looking at that picture in the Academy only this June...."
"New Arrivals!" said the Angel. "I really don"t follow you."
The Doctor stared. "Don"t they come?"
"Come!" said the Angel. "Who?"
"The people who die here."
"After they"ve gone to pieces here?"
"That"s the general belief, you know."
"People, like the woman who screamed out of the door, and the blackfaced man and his volutations and the horrible little things that threw husks!--certainly not. _I_ never saw such creatures before I fell into this world."
"Oh! but come!" said the Doctor. "You"ll tell me next your official robes are not white and that you can"t play the harp."
"There"s no such thing as white in the Angelic Land," said the Angel.
"It"s that queer blank colour you get by mixing up all the others."
"Why, my dear Sir!" said the doctor, suddenly altering his tone, "you positively know nothing about the Land you come from. White"s the very essence of it."
The Angel stared at him. Was the man jesting? He looked perfectly serious.
"Look here," said Crump, and getting up, he went to the sideboard on which a copy of the Parish Magazine was lying. He brought it round to the Angel and opened it at the coloured supplement. "Here"s some _real_ angels," he said. "You see it"s not simply the wings make the Angel.
White you see, with a curly whisp of robe, sailing up into the sky with their wings furled. Those are angels on the best authority. Hydroxyl kind of hair. One has a bit of a harp, you see, and the other is helping this wingless lady--kind of larval Angel, you know--upward."
"Oh! but really!" said the Angel, "those are not angels at all."
"But they _are_," said Crump, putting the magazine back on the sideboard and resuming his seat with an air of intense satisfaction. "I can a.s.sure you I have the _best_ authority...."
"I can a.s.sure you...."
Crump tucked in the corners of his mouth and shook his head from side to side even as he had done to the Vicar. "No good," he said, "can"t alter our ideas just because an irresponsible visitor...."
"If these are angels," said the Angel, "then I have never been in the Angelic Land."
"Precisely," said Crump, ineffably self-satisfied; "that was just what I was getting at."
The Angel stared at him for a minute round-eyed, and then was seized for the second time by the human disorder of laughter.
"Ha, ha, ha!" said Crump, joining in. "I _thought_ you were not quite so mad as you seemed. Ha, ha, ha!"
And for the rest of the lunch they were both very merry, for entirely different reasons, and Crump insisted upon treating the Angel as a "dorg" of the highest degree.
x.x.x.
After the Angel had left Crump"s house he went up the hill again towards the Vicarage. But--possibly moved by the desire to avoid Mrs Gustick--he turned aside at the stile and made a detour by the Lark"s Field and Bradley"s Farm.
He came upon the Respectable Tramp slumbering peacefully among the wild-flowers. He stopped to look, struck by the celestial tranquillity of that individual"s face. And even as he did so the Respectable Tramp awoke with a start and sat up. He was a pallid creature, dressed in rusty black, with a broken-spirited crush hat c.o.c.ked over one eye. "Good afternoon," he said affably. "How are you?"
"Very well, thank you," said the Angel, who had mastered the phrase.
The Respectable Tramp eyed the Angel critically. "Padding the Hoof, matey?" he said. "Like me."
The Angel was puzzled by him. "Why," asked the Angel, "do you sleep like this instead of sleeping up in the air on a Bed?"
"Well I"m blowed!" said the Respectable Tramp. "Why don"t I sleep in a bed? Well, it"s like this. Sandringham"s got the painters in, there"s the drains up in Windsor Castle, and I "aven"t no other "ouse to go to.