‘Amen!’ echoed Tom loudly. ‘Amen, I say. Amen! Amen!’

He rolled his head from side to side, puffing at the cigarette that he still held in his right hand. The movement was obviously extremely painful and caused him to groan as loudly as before, but at the same time his excitement seemed to increase. ‘Don’t stop, sir, I beg you. More prayers, more prayers.’

Sir Randolph looked desperately over the field towards the gate through which Doctor West might be expected to come.

‘We could say the Lord’s Prayer together,’ he said, and began, ‘Our Father which Art in Heaven …’

‘Our Father …’ Tom seemed to seize on the words with a kind of greed, although as he repeated the prayer phrase by phrase after Sir Randolph his words ran into each other, becoming increasingly blurred, a difficulty he tried to make up for by increasing the volume.

Cicely was standing a few feet away, having resisted Tibor’s efforts to persuade her to leave after giving her message to Glass. She felt the scene infinitely distressing but could not bring herself to leave it, determined only not to draw attention to herself by sobbing aloud. Cornelius, looking at her across the prostrate Tom and the kneeling Sir Randolph, across the other silent watchers, across Sir Randolph’s quiet voice and its terrible loud echo, would have liked to walk round to speak to her, stand beside her, lead her away, but felt frozen by his own helplessness and by the curious sensation he had as if he were watching the whole scene reflected in a mirror or through a window he could not open.

As they reached the end of the prayer and the laborious indistinct Amens continued, Sir Randolph covered both of Tom’s hands with his. The cigarette had dropped so he held the right hand on Tom’s chest and the other over the blood-soaked handkerchief and said, ‘Now say after me, Into Thy hands O Lord …’

‘Thy hands O Lord …’

‘I commend my Spirit.’

‘Commend my Spirit …’

There was a merciful silence. He lay still. Sir Randolph, leaning over him holding his hands, looked again towards the gate and said quietly, ‘It’s all right, Tom, here’s Doctor West.’

Dan was leading the way, running; the Doctor following, bag in hand. And then Tom Harker suddenly sat upright, startling Sir Randolph who steadied him by putting his arms round him, shouted at the top of his voice though with the same indistinctness as before, ‘God save the British Empire!’ and fell back against Sir Randolph, covering with crimson the encircling white shirt sleeves.

‘Oh God,’ said Cornelius, as if to say, now look what they’ve done.

He felt overwhelmingly that apart from himself, the helpless spectator, they were all in it together, the big men in tweeds, the smaller men in smocks, the sorrowing girl, the bleeding victim. What the ritual was that had required the sacrifice he could not exactly say, only that he was outside it, condemned by something in himself, some cowardice, some over-cerebration, only to watch, to comment, scold, diagnose, analyse, but not to cure; the cure could not come from a non-participant, from someone who was not part of the game, for how could a mere spectator be expected to be listened to when he wanted to tell the players not just that they were using the wrong rules but that they were playing the wrong game?