His thoughts went back to his own boyhood, to the time when, at sixteen, he himself had stood upon the verge of the pit. Assuredly, in his most unregenerate days, he had never been guilty of anything so monstrous as the revelations of this morning; nevertheless, he had come near to being expelled from school for corrupting the morality of the younger boys. No irrevocable harm had been done; yet, after more than thirty years, the blood went up to his forehead at the recollection. He thought of his sullen obstinacy when found out; his insistence, in the face of absolute proof to the contrary, that he knew nothing of the matter; his panic of terror on hearing that his father had been sent for. He remembered how the iron-faced old Puritan had arrived, silent and grim, and had wrung confession out of him by sheer physical violence. "It cured me," he thought, "once for all; and it will cure even Jack, with all his vices."
As for Jack, he did not think, in any conscious way, at all; the lamed imagination stumbled helplessly among familiar trifles, falling upon now one, and now another. A red rose-bud was tapping on the shutter; and he thought: "The wind is in the south."
Then he remembered a stormy afternoon last January, and the slanting rain which had lashed against the fuchsia hedge, and Molly in the tool house, mourning for Tiddles.
The hand of the watch had crept past nine of the ten minute marks. He remembered I climbing one day on Deadman's Cliff, and seeing a rabbit which some one had shot, but not killed, and which had fallen to an inaccessible place, and lay there, bleeding to death. He could see the quivering of its feet again quite distinctly, and the white tuft of the tail, and the blood trickling in a thin, slow stream down the grey rock face. Now again, something was bleeding to death, as the watch ticked. When the hand should reach the minute mark the thing would die; and after that nothing in the world would ever matter any more.
The ten minutes were over. Mr. Raymond rose and took the boy by the arm. "Come upstairs," he said.
They went up in silence into Jack's room; and the key turned in the lock.
CHAPTER V
On Friday evening after family prayers Mr. Raymond went up, as usual, to the locked gable room. It was after sunset, but there was still light enough to see.
Jack was crouching on the floor, half-dressed, in the furthest corner of the room, He would stay so without moving, sometimes, for hours together. On the table stood a plate of bread and a water-jug. There was also a Bible, for examination by the question must alternate with prayer and solemn exhortation, or it would seem too like mere butchery. The bread, to-day at least, had been a little neglected, but there was no water left in the jug. Jack, for the most part, had been quite passive. He had not tried to escape by the window, yet the descent, though less easy than from the other rooms, was possible, had the idea but occurred to him. On Tuesday evening he had sprung suddenly at his uncle and tried to strangle him. For one moment the furious pressure of fingers on his throat had made the Vicar wild with fear; then the boy had been overpowered and flung down on the floor. And then had followed horrors which would haunt the dreams of both for years to come.
After that his hands had been tied; but the precaution was needless; he had no thought of resistance. There had been some helpless, mechanical struggling, but nothing more. When unfastened he would cower down again in his corner, silent, understanding nothing. Now, as his uncle approached and spoke to him, he dropped face downwards on the floor in hysterical convulsions.
If, at the beginning, it had occurred to the Vicar as a conceivable possibility that any boy could hold out so long, he would certainly never have entered upon the contest; but having once made the initial mistake, to give in now would be the end of all his authority. And yet, he must give in; his position was no longer bearable. The villagers had already begun to whisper and glance at each other when he passed in the street; and now this...
He fetched water from the next room, and tried to make the boy drink it. But Jack's teeth were set like a vice. When at last the dumb writhing stopped, he began to sob uncontrollably.
"Thank God!" the Vicar murmured. This, without doubt, was the final break-down of the stubborn will that he had set himself to conquer; the hardest victory he had ever won. He rose with a long sigh of relief.
He had accomplished, without flinching, a very painful duty. He had disregarded not merely his own natural repugnance, but the tears and entreaties of the household, and even a grave danger of misrepresentation and scandal; and, probably, he had saved the boy's soul alive. He thought of the dead sailor among the sunken reefs by Longships Light. "It wouldn't go on if Captain John were alive," he had heard one fisherman's wife say to another that morning. She was right. Poor John would never have had firmness enough to drive out the dumb devil which had possessed the boy; but he would be grateful on the Day of Judgment if he found his son among the saved.
The sobbing had stopped at last; Jack was lying on his bed, quite still, his face buried in the pillow. The Vicar sat down beside him and touched him gently on the arm.
"There, Jack, don't cry any more; sit up and listen to me."
Jack sat up obediently, but he shrank away as far as he could. Apparently he had not been crying, from the look of his eyes. There was a curious glitter in them.
"My dear boy," the Vicar began with gentle solemnity; "all this has been as dreadful to me as to you; I have seldom had so hard a duty to perform. But as a Christian man and a minister of God's word, I will not and I dare not tolerate impurity. That my house should have been made a centre of defilement and contamination, to spread the poison of vice among my flock; that my dead brother's child should have been a cause of offence to these innocent members of Christ, has been to me perhaps the bitterest disappointment of my life."
He paused a moment. Jack had not moved. A sense of fear came over the Vicar as he saw how wide and strained the great eyes were. His voice began to shake a little. "I know," he went on, "that you now think me harsh and cruel; but you will thank me for it some day. My child, you have been in danger of hell fire."
The boy was still motionless; he seemed scarcely to breathe. The Vicar took him by the hand.
"But I see that your evil pride is broken, and that you are sorry for your sin. Come and lay your hand on God's holy Book, and promise me that you will abandon your wickedness. Then we will kneel down together and pray that it may please Him to forgive you this deadly sin and to lead you into righteousness."
He rose, holding the boy's hand. It was silently, furtively pulled away.
"Jack!" he cried out. "Have you still not repented?"
Jack stood up and looked round him two or three times, like a creature caught in a trap. His breathing had a sharp staccato sound.
"Are you... going on?" he said. It was the first time that he had spoken since Tuesday night.
"Jack!" the Vicar cried again. A slow dark flush went up to his forehead; the line of his mouth grew thin and straight Something atavistic, something sensual and violent came over the whole face. The nostrils began to quiver.