Deliver us from Evil Read Online Free PDF Page A

her cheeks, tears were flowing in silent tracks.
    '. . . a prowling wolf,
    Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey,
    Watching where shepherds pen their flocks at eve
    In hurdled cotes amid the field secure,
    Leaps o'er the fence with ease into the field!'
    John Milton, Paradise Lost
    C
    aptain Foxe joined them later that same night. His face was perfectly blank. He kissed his wife, and then his son; but he said nothing of what he had been doing, nor of what success his investigation might have had. He caught Mr Webbe's eye, though, and almost imperceptibly shook his head; Robert, observing this, doubted his father had discovered much. Mr Webbe, who rarely spoke a word when the spirit of the Lord was not upon him, only shrugged; he rose and. crossing to a dark corner of the room, rolled out a bedding mat. He had no need to ask if he could stay. He was an old acquaintance of Captain Foxe's; how old, Robert had never presumed to ask, but he knew the two men had served together in the army, and doubtless had shared much. For the purposes of his own curiosity, he wished that Mr Webbe would sometimes be less close; but it was the preacher's habit of silence, Robert knew, which did most to recommend him to Captain Foxe's good opinion. Mrs Foxe too, when she woke the next day, would be glad of Mr Webbe's company. For he was a good man; and gifted, she believed, with prophecy. He would help as he had already done, to guide her through the courses of her bereavement and grief.
    Robert, as he lay in bed later, wished that he too could be so comforted. For unlike his mother, he had Found little solace in the scriptures they had read; he had seen the Devil's mark stamped too clearly on the world, and its print had seemed more terrible than any mark of God. That night, although he lay with his eyes closed for many hours, sleep would not come to him, and the shadow of darkness lay thick on his soul. He tried to picture Hannah in his mind as Mr Webbe had described her, one amongst the company of saints; but instead, he could see her only as a mess of stinking corruption, and her dead baby too, slung upon the dunghill to be the blowflies' meat; and he dreaded to think how feeble was life, that could be reduced so easily to rottenness. At length, he rose from his bed, for he had found it impossible to banish such imaginings from his mind; he lit a candle and turned to his Greek, but as he read, he came to a passage describing the fall of Troy, and how Hector's baby child had been flung from the walls to be fed upon by dogs, and he could not bear to read the poet any further, and so he tossed the book aside. He rose to his feet again, for he knew that he needed to escape the closeness of the room and walk his nervous humour away. As he crossed to the doorway, he wondered if his parents at least had obtained their rest, and he turned back to look. His mother was asleep, and he was glad to see it, but the place beside her was empty, and he saw that his father's riding-boots were gone. Robert was not alarmed, for it was often his father's habit, when oppressed by a matter of business, to sleep barely at all - and the business before him now, it seemed likely, was as great as any he might ever have confronted.
    As he returned to the doorway, Robert noticed that Mr Webbe's place was empty as well, and when he looked through the window at the stable doors, he saw that two of them were hanging open, and the horses were gone. Folding his cloak about him, he hurried outside. The snow was no longer falling, and the clouds had been blown away so that the sky was lit a crisp, cold blue by the blaze of the stars. Robert gazed up and down the village road, but he could neither see nor hear his father, although the snows gleamed as blue as the sky and the crunch of his own footsteps was loud in the air. He walked down the road until he was past the village, and approaching the wood; an owl called out once from the bare boughs of the trees, but otherwise