At the end of the service Mr Jones waited till the rest of the congregation had dispersed and then knocked at the door of the vestry, which, upon an invitation to come in, he entered. ‘Might I presume to have a word with you, sir?’ he asked in a faltering voice. He met an answering look of surprise.
‘It is about the fresco—’
‘Surely this is hardly a time—’
‘I beg your pardon for my intrusion, but it is in connection with your sermon; I want to explain that I was in the church yesterday and something happened—an accident.’
‘An accident?’ said the vicar in astonishment.
‘I touched the fresco; I don’t know why; I really had not the least intention of—’
‘What! you touched the fresco?’ interrupted the vicar, with rising wrath. ‘You dared to lay your finger on a priceless, on a unique piece of work of the most sacred, I say, sir, of the most sacred—’ his indignation choked his utterance.
‘I am very sorry,’ said Mr Jones lamely.
‘What damage did you do?’ said the vicar, restraining himself with an effort. ‘Come with me.’ He hurried out of the vestry into the church, followed by Mr Jones, and went up to the fresco, at which he gazed with anxious enquiry. ‘You see, it was like this,’ said Mr Jones, plunging into his story, ‘the cross on the back of the demon was somehow loose—that demon there.’ He pointed to the thin gap, hardly noticeable to the casual eye. Then he started back in amazement. Where was the demon? Around the hole the fresco was a blank. There was no sign of any further injury, but the figure, so clearly visible yesterday, with its unspeakable hinder face, had simply vanished as if it had never been. ‘It’s gone; it got out and followed me,’ said Mr Jones, clutching at the vicar’s arm, ‘Oh! what is to be done? Hell is loose!’ The vicar was staring in the direction indicated by the schoolmaster’s outstretched finger. ‘This is very curious,’ he said in an altered tone, ‘Very curious indeed,’ he repeated, looking now at Mr Jones and now at the fresco. Then the tide of his anger welled up. ‘You meddling idiot,’ he exclaimed, ‘you sacrilegious fool; you have removed the Seal. Where is it? What have you done with it?’
‘The Seal? The Cross?’ said Mr Jones.
He stooped and picked up from the corner a small piece of stone, turning it over as he did so. ‘Here it is, look!’ he cried, showing the quatrefoil on the back. He placed it in the outstretched hand of the vicar; it seemed strangely heavy for such an object. No sooner had the latter touched it than he let it fall as if it had been of molten metal. Fury blazed in his eyes. He seemed about to strike Mr Jones. ‘Damn the thing!’ he shouted, ‘out of my presence, impostor! Your story is a lie; there was nothing—nothing, I tell you—nothing!’ He pushed Mr Jones out of the church, locked the door, and hurried in the direction of his house, leaving the schoolmaster even more puzzled than frightened in the porch. ‘Mad!’ he whispered to himself, ‘stark mad! And he cursed the Cross!’ He looked round fearfully.
Mr Jones retraced his steps slowly along the lane and over the Down till he reached the Pilgrims’ Way. A line from Lycidas kept repeating itself in his mind: ‘The golden opes, the iron shuts amain.’ The iron shuts amain: the key of Hell! Who should shut it again, if once it were opened? ‘He called it the Seal,’ he muttered. He sat down under the shadow of the same yew beneath which he had rested the day before. His hand mechanically sought his pocket for his pipe and encountered a packet of sandwiches which his housekeeper had pressed upon him when he left the flat; she had also handed him his flask. He ate the food and quenched his thirst. The flask was very welcome. He noticed to his surprise that he felt much easier than he had before his interview with the vicar. The danger seemed to have receded. Might there not be some occult means of preventing its return? Atonement—propitiation—had not the vicar said something about propitiation in his sermon? He looked about him, at the dark foliage overhead and the thick twisted roots at his feet, with flints lying here and there in the soft mould. He picked up some and examined them curiously.
Late that afternoon Mr Jones returned to Godstanely churchyard. How he had spent his time after his lunch and what he did that evening in the churchyard were matters which he could never afterwards clearly remember. He moved as one in a dream. Indeed it was the memory of his previous night’s dream that apparently prompted his actions, and when subsequently he tried to disentangle the dream vision from the reality the two got fantastically mixed. There was a dragging of stones together, and the building of a sort of altar on a spot surrounded by trees. Then there was a ritual which the moon shone upon through the branches. There were shadowy spectators and shadowy helpers. Ultimately he found himself in a dazed condition at the railway station. On his way home the cloud upon his intelligence gradually lifted; but for the rest of that evening and the whole of the next day he felt like one who is convalescent after an illness, too weak for mental exertion and disinclined to face the unpleasant. Nevertheless he went to school on Monday, and routine carried him through his work. Naturally he said nothing to anybody about his experiences during the week-end. He turned upon them a blind eye. If the subject recurred to him, he told himself that he had been the victim of his imagination.
On Tuesday morning, however, as he read his newspaper at breakfast, he experienced a great shock. A paragraph headed ‘Mysterious Death of a Clergyman’ caught his eye. What he read was as follows:
An unfortunate and up to the present inexplicable tragedy has cast a gloom over the village of Godstanely, near Hopton, where for the last twenty-two years the Rev. Augustine B. Brandon, M.A. (Oxon.) has been the esteemed incumbent of the parish. It will be remembered in archaeological circles that a short while since the reverend gentleman earned the gratitude of all virtuosos by discovering on the wall of Godstanely church an exquisite fresco said to belong to the twelfth century, and which he munificently restored at his own expense. Early yesterday morning the body of the unfortunate clergyman was found by a parishioner not far from the sacred edifice. Dr Boodle, who is the nearest medical practitioner, was immediately sent for, and on his arrival pronounced life to be extinct. It transpired that the deceased had left the vicarage at 9 p.m. on the previous evening, apparently for a stroll, as was his wont, telling his housekeeper not to sit up for him should he return after ten. When found, the body was adjacent to a slab of stone over which, it is believed, the elderly vicar had stumbled in the dark, thus injuring his head upon an ancient implement known to antiquarians as a ‘celt’? which was lying by his side. The learned archaeologist possessed several such curiosities in his collection and it is surmised he was carrying the instrument in his hand, though for what purpose is beyond conjecture. As to whether his death, however, was the result of an accident of this nature has been discredited by some. Our special correspondent learns that a village lad named John Cosstick deposes to having seen on Saturday evening in the vicinity of the church a large animal which he took to be a mad dog and from which he narrowly escaped. The torn condition of the deceased gentleman’s clothes and the trampled state of the adjacent ground might lend foundation to the hypothesis that Mr Brandon was the victim of a ferocious attack by an animal of this description; the theory however has not gained credence with the guardians of law and order. It was found that the features of the corpse were much contorted, and it is feared that the unfortunate gentleman suffered great pain as he lay in extremis. It would be beyond the limits of our space to adequately portray the consternation into which the tragedy has plunged the erstwhile happy village of Godstanely.