“Because my eyes have been opened—”
“By Harry Spink?” the disciple sneered.
The old man raised his hand. “‘Out of the mouths of babes—’ But it is not Harry Spink who first set me thinking. He has merely loosened my tongue. He has been the humble instrument compelling me to exact the truth of you.”
Again Bent felt his heart dropping down a long dark shaft. He found no words at the bottom of it, and Mr. Blandhorn continued: “The truth and the whole truth, Willard Bent. We have failed—I have failed. We have not reached the souls of these people. Those who still come to us do so from interested motives—or, even if I do some few of them an injustice, if there is in some a blind yearning for the light, is there one among them whose eyes we have really opened?”
Willard Bent sat silent, looking up and down the long years, as if to summon from the depths of memory some single incident that should permit him to say there was.
“You don’t answer, my poor young friend. Perhaps you have been clearer-sighted; perhaps you saw long ago that we were not worthy of our hire.”
“I never thought that of you, sir!”
“Nor of yourself? For we have been one—or so I have believed—in all our hopes and efforts. Have you been satisfied with your results?”
Willard saw the dialectical trap, but some roused force in him refused to evade it.
“No, sir—God knows.”