The curate stared at the familiar words. Once he had preached a sermon from that very text. He smiled sadly as he recalled that sermon.
"What do these words mean?" he had asked. "Could it be possible they were ever meant to be obeyed literally? Was it not rather a piece of oriental symbolism, a parable without words teaching the lesson of humility............" If only he had ended his discourse there. If some angel of discretion had barred the way to that fateful peroration; "Not the mock humility of the imperial blasphemer who once a year descends from his throne to wash the feet of twelve disinfected beggars......." How should he, Horatio Merle, have known that the crotchety old Rector of Deepmold not only had decided views on the sanctity of kings, but was a relation by marriage of a certain quasi-ecclesiastical person in high favor in the Austrian Emperor's household?
"You would have said it just the same, Horatio!" Harriet had declared in a burst of indignant tears as she crumpled up the rector's letter accepting Horatio's resignation. Perhaps he would—who knows?
Merle sighed regretfully as he thought of that cosy little cottage at Deepmold—the little terrace with the mossy steps—his rose garden, where he used to smoke his pipe (smoking destroyed the pernicious aphidas) and think about his sermon. There was an old sundial on the terrace and round its stone dial Horatio had chiselled with his own hands a verse of Omar Khayyam:
"The moving finger writes and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit
Can lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it."
Somewhere deep down in Horatio Merle was a soul stratum of fatalism, not the wine-instilled bravado of Omar; rather the inspired fatalism of one who said: "Take no thought of the morrow."
And now, in the afternoon silence of the woods, the curate pondered on the fate that had seemed to shape his ends so unprofitably. Was there ever anyone in the world less fitted to be a clergyman than he?
Why has the silence of the summer woods been so often likened to the silence of a cathedral? They have nothing in common. The silence of the cathedral is the silence of great stones frozen together by Fear. The silence of the woods is the stillness of innumerable sounds blended, as all the colors of the rainbow are blended, into the white light which is invisible.
"Daddy Merle, how do you spell enjoyed?" An Petronia looked up from her writing.
He spelled it for her slowly and she said it after him.