"Why," he exclaimed suddenly standing still and addressing a thorn-tree on the green down. "Why, of course, now I realize the Reformation!"
This sudden apprehension of a tremendous historical fact was rather disconcerting in the way it brought home to him the uselessness of all the information that he had for years absorbed without any real response of recognition. It brought home to him how much he would have to discover for himself and appalled him with the mockery it made of his confidence hitherto. How if all those poems he had written were merely external emotion like his conception of religion until this moment? He really hoped the manuscript would come back this evening from whatever publisher had last eyed it disdainfully, so that in the light of this revelation of his youthfulness he could judge his life's achievement afresh. It was indeed frightening that in one moment all his comfortable standards could be struck away from beneath his feet, for if an outburst of jealousy on account of a priest's interference could suddenly re-shape his conception of history, what fundamental changes in his conception of art might not be waiting for him a little way ahead?
The spectacle of Pauline's simple creed had hitherto pleasantly affected his senses; and she had taken her place with the heroines of romantic poets and painters. It had been pleasant to murmur:
Pray but one prayer for me 'twixt thy closed lips,
Think but one thought of me up in the stars:
and to compare himself with the lover of The Blessed Damozel had been a luxurious melancholy. Pauline and he had worshipped together in chapels of Lyonesse where, if he had knelt beside her with rather a tender condescension toward her prayers, he had always been moved sincerely by the decorative appeal they made to him. He had felt a sentimental awe of her hushed approach to the altar and he had derived a kind of sentimental satisfaction from the perfection of her attitude, perhaps, even more, he had placed upon it a sentimental reliance. Her faith had been the decorative adjunct of a great deal of his verse, and he flushed hotly to remember lines that now appeared as damnable insincerities with which he had allowed his pen to play. All that piety of hers he had sung so prettily was real and possessed an intrinsic power to injure him, so that what he had patronized and encouraged could rise up and pit itself deliberately against him. Pauline actually believed in her religion, believed in it to the extent of dishonouring their love to appease the mumbo-jumbo. That something so monstrously inexistent could have any such power was barely comprehensible, and yet here he was faced with what easily might prove to be a force powerful enough to annihilate their love. He remembered how in reading of Christina Rossetti's renunciation of a lover who did not believe as she believed, he had thought of the incident as a poet's exaggeration. And it might well have happened. Now indeed he could see why she was so much the greatest poetess of them all: her faith had been real. Lines from that Sonnet of sonnets came back to him, broken lines but full of dread:
I love ... God the most;
Would lose not Him but you, must one be lost:
And if Pauline should speak so to him, if Pauline should disown him at the bidding of her phantom gods? How the thought swept into oblivion all his pitiful achievement, all his fretful emotions set down in rhyme. Either he must convince her that she was affrighted by vain fancies or he must bow before this reality of belief and seek humbly the truth where she discovered it. Yet if he took that course, it held no pledge of faith for him. Shamefacedly and scarcely able to bear even the thorn-tree's presence Guy knelt down and prayed that he might be given Pauline's single heart. The song of the innumerable larks rose into the crystalline, but all the prayers tumbled down from that stuffy pavilion of sky. The moment that the first emotional aspiration was thus defeated Guy was only conscious of his lapse into superstition, and furious with the surrender he went walking over the downs in a determination to shake Pauline's faith at whatever the cost temporarily to the beautiful appearance of their love.
He wrote that evening in a fine frenzy of declamation against God, affirming in his verse the rights of man; but on reading the lines through next morning they seemed like the first vapours of adolescence; and when he turned for consolation to Shelley, he found that even a great poet's rage on behalf of man against God was often turgid enough. It was however a hopeful sign that he could still perceive what puddles these aerial fountains of song often left behind them, and he was glad to find that not all the value of critical experience had been destroyed by the imperative need to readjust his values of reality.
Birdwood brought a note from Pauline just when Guy had burnt his effusion of the night before and come to the conclusion that as a polemical and atheistic rhymester he was of the very poorest quality.
The gardener was inclined to be chatty, and when the weather and the flowers in season had been discussed at length, he observed that Miss Pauline was not looking so well as she ought to look.