The Devil

The place was a wilderness, a solitude, the dead and barren landscape of dreams--quite empty, unoccupied, a place that even ghosts would shun. He sat thinking, and listening; and soon it occurred to him that, though all seemed so dead and so silent, this place was really full of life. He heard the faint buzz of belated bees questing in tufts of heather or foxglove bells, a bat flitted over his head, some small furred thing scuttled past his feet; and in the air there were thousands of winged insects, whose tiny voices one could hear by straining one's ears. Listening intently for such murmurs, he thought: "Perhaps really and truly one has not any right to kill the smallest of these gnats. All that stuff about self-protection, an' struggle for existence, is just fiddle-de-dee in so far's God's concerned. He never meant it, an' never will approve of it. It's just nature's hatefulness and cruelty--not permitted or intended, an' to be put right some day."

It grew darker and darker, and the shadows rose all round him till he was like a man who had climbed out of the gray sea upon the only rock that was not yet submerged. When he got up presently and looked down at the hollow where he believed the corpse had lain, he could no longer see it. It was gone, lost in shadow.

Then he knelt upon his rock, and prayed--offered up the last agonized prayer of a despairing human soul. "O God--have mercy on me just so far's this. Don't let me die hopeless. I've submitted myself into Your hands. I don't complain. I don't question. I'm going to do it. But don't send me out in total darkness. Give me a blink of light--just one blink o' light before I go."

Was it this that had been wanted, this that had been waited for--the true acknowledgment, the true submission, the cry for mercy of the repentant creature who has already tasted more than the bitterness of death?

He rose from his knees, and without once looking back left the rocks and came through the thicket to the ride. It grew darker, the clouds dropped still lower, and the wind again blew fierce and strong. He left the broad ride and sauntered along one of the narrow tracks. He could hear the wind as it tore through slender branches high above his head, but down here it did not touch him; and he strolled on slowly, feeling extraordinarily calm, full of a great reverence and wonder, not noticing external things because he wished to maintain this strange inward peace.