"Thank you, Daddy Merle."
Again he found himself staring at the picture of the apostles. It fascinated him. It seemed to Merle as if the painter's self were speaking to him across the centuries.
"Do they look as if they were acting a play, these holy men that I have painted? Has the spirit of Christianity so changed that the sacred commands of the Master must be explained away with strange words? Has the flock strayed so far that the shepherd's crook has come to be only a symbol and the shears of the shearer a metaphor and the sheepfold a figure of speech? Have I painted my picture in vain?"
And now the printed words of the text before him seemed to speak aloud, to call to him:
"For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you."
There was no mistake about the meaning. It was a command, a command to be obeyed literally. If the church thought otherwise, then he must part company with the church. He could not serve two masters. He had made his choice, he would obey the call. The humbler the service he found to do, the more gladly would he do it. Was not that what Hiram Baxter himself had tried to tell them in his homely way? "It will make men and women of you," that's what he had said. Hiram Baxter was right.
And then a great resolve formed itself in the heart of Horatio Merle. He would take Hiram Baxter at his word, he would tell him he wanted to work. He was willing to do anything so long as it was work, so long as it was helpful. He had been blind, and in his blindness he had tried to lead others as blind as himself.
"I have lost my way," he said aloud. He had risen to his feet and stood with head bowed and hands extended in an attitude that would have been theatrical if it had not been so utterly unconscious.
"You isn't losted, Daddy Merle." He felt the clasp of her little hand. "Tum with me, I know the way."
Together they walked through the high ferns, in some places over An Petronia's head, and through dim, winding woodland passages and secret stairways of mossy rocks behind the tapestry of ivy and convolvulus known only to An Petronia, until they came out on the Millbrook lane just in time to see the last flicker of sunlight through the hawthorn hedge.