It was almost an hour from dark. Gwyon stared at the branches arm's length through the study window. From beyond those lacings of yew came the sound of the sleighbells, seeming more insistent with the approaching darkness. His arm rested as though lifeless on the Egyptian Book of the Dead; and he tapped the hard closed cover of the Malleus Maleficarum with his fingertip. Hardly moving in his chair, he took the flask from its cavity in the Dark Night of the Soul, and drank down half a tumblerful of schnapps. He placed the empty glass on the level surface of a volume of the Index, and said aloud, after a few minutes had passed so, — Make full proof of thy ministry. But the book open before him was not the Bible, nor the words Saint Paul's.
"Close to the outskirts of every big village a number of stones may be noticed stuck into the ground, apparently without order or method. These are known by the name of asong, and on them is offered the sacrifice which the Asongtata demands. The sacrifice of a goat takes place, and a month later that of a langur (Entellus monkey) or a bamboo-rat is considered necessary. The animal chosen has a rope fastened round its neck and is led by two men, one on each side of it, to every house in the village. It is taken inside each house in turn, the assembled villagers, meanwhile, beating the walls from the outside, to frighten and drive out any evil spirits which may have taken up their residence within. The round of the village having been made in this manner, the monkey or rat is led to the outskirts of the village, killed by a blow of a dao, which disembowels it, and then crucified on bamboos set up in the ground. Round the crucified animal long, sharp bamboo stakes are placed, which form chevaux de jrise round about it. These commemorate the days when such defences surrounded the villages on all sides to keep off human enemies, and they are now a symbol to ward off sickness and dangers to life from the wild animals of the forest. The langur required for the purpose is hunted down some days before, but should it be found impossible to catch one, a brown monkey may take its place; a hulock may not be used."
He walked up the stairs slowly. Wyatt slept, the sheet covering him rose to points on the bony protrusions of his body. Only faintly aware of the trouble in his mind over the apparent extreme shortness of the boy's legs, Gwyon suddenly brought this terrible impression straight up into his consciousness and, doing so, realized that the points of the sheet were not Wyatt's feet but his knees, so thin they stood up like feet. He moved quickly. He turned down the stairs, and walked from one room to another in the darkened parsonage, past the small butler's pantry where Aunt May had stood weeping silently and alone that day her hawthorn tree had been found torn from the ground. He passed Olalla, her nose broken off a century before by a suppliant whose prayers had gone unheeded, her arm raised in her niche as though to stay him. For an instant fragments of his passing were reflected in the powerful clear mirrors of that cruz-con-espejos said to have been used by Sor Patrocinio, the Bleeding Nun, whose pullulating stigmata upset Spanish politics and the throne to such extent that she inclined to wear mittens. Gwyon glanced in at the low table in the dining room, mesa de los pecados mortales, — Cave, cave, Dominus videt. Abscondam faciem meam ab eis et considerabo novissima eorum, not reading those words but repeating under his breath, as though to give himself strength, words of that fourteenth-century translator of the Bible who died in bed, only to be dug up and burned, already rewarded for his labor of Divine Love with the revelation, — In this world God must serve the devil.
In the living room, he turned away from Camilla's picture, where he had stopped, and took John H. down from the wall across. That portrait he put in a broom closet, muttering that the ancestor had probably got just what he deserved. All this time it seemed that Gwyon was putting off a decision which had already been made. He even stopped to cover a large mirror with a tablecloth. Finally he walked out to the back veranda of the house, and down onto the lawn.
Perhaps it was prospect of the white moon's rising which had upset Heracles. The sleighbells sounded furiously, and then stopped, leaving an urgent silence. Gwyon was perspiring freely as he paced toward the arbor and back, in spite of the cool night air mounting around him. Then he stopped for a full minute to look toward the shadowed hulk of Mount Lamentation.
When he went in at the carriage-barn doors, Heracles stood still, quivering his long arms slightly, and then came up to his full height, waving a piece of bread. Gwyon took the leash from the wall, fastened it to the animal's neck and together they walked up the lawn toward the house.
Afterwards Wyatt could not distinguish reality in these days, and the nights of the weeks just past. Deliria embraced in his memory, and refused to discriminate themselves from one another, from what had happened, and what might have happened. Memories of pain were lost between waking and sleep, and but for the merciless stabbing in his feet that night, no longer identified themselves with definite parts of his body. Prolonged hours of wakefulness, when all he sought was sleep, might turn out to have been sleep when he waked: but most insupportable was the sensational affair which went something like this: consciousness, it seemed, was a succession of separate particles, being carried along on the surface of the deep and steady unconscious flow of life, of time itself, and in fainting, the particles of consciousness simply stopped, and the rest flowed on, until they were restored: but this was the stoppage, the entire disappearance of that deeper flow which left the particles of consciousness suspended, piling up, ready any instant to shatter with nothing to support them. Still, at such times everything was in order, of shape and color to mass and distance, of minutes accomplishing hours by accumulation just as the clock itself stayed on the table where it was if only because it had been accumulating there for so long: that was the reassurance of weight. But had a voice, even his own, quoted, — "With regard to Saint Joseph of Copertino Rapture was accompanied by Levitation"? The grating cry of Janet rang in his ears stilclass="underline" had he chased her down the brick wall of someone's garden, where she turned on him transformed into a black man, and escaped? Had his father come in with Heracles, shaken him in his bed and pounded the walls saying words he could not understand, and turned to drive the animal out before him and down the stairs? And then a faint cry from the carriage barn below: had he leapt from his bed toward the pale casement of the window, forgetting that he had been so long off his feet that they were useless, their function totally forgotten, so that he fell screaming at the pain in them? For he woke on the floor with his father beside him, holding him up by the shoulders, his father whom he did not recognize, wild-eyed in that dim light. Then he broke open sobbing at the memory of the pain which had just torn up through his body. — In my feet, he cried, — it was like nails being driven up through my feet, as he was laid back on the bed blood-spotted at the shoulders, by this shaking man who could hardly walk from the room.
A few days later, Wyatt began to recover. He regained the weight of his body by meticulous ounces. That fever had passed; but for the rest of his life it never left his eyes.
The Town Carpenter came to call, and stood looking round the room at the wallpaper. The convalescent's bed had been moved to the sewing room, since its windows faced east and south and those of his own smaller room to north and west, away from the sun. Her sewing cabinet, with its long drawer still full of a thousand buttons, stood to one side of a window, and over it a shelf with a few books she had never opened since leaving school. There was nothing else of Camilla in the room, though here it was she had come at the moment of death, seeking something. — What was it? he whispered sometimes, looking up and around as though he expected her again, though her presence had always been one silent and expectant, often even while she was in the room it had seemed empty.