He paused for a long time. Hyacinth was familiar enough with his father’s ways of speech to know that the emphatic ‘Him’ meant the God whom he worshipped.
‘There is, I am sure, only one way in which we can become His friends. These are they which have come out of great tribulation! You remember that, Hyacinth? That is the only way. You may be taught truths about Him, but they matter very little. You have already great thoughts, burning thoughts, but they will not of themselves bring you to Him. The other way is the only way. Shall I wish it for you, my son? Shall I give it to you for my blessing? May great tribulation come upon you in your life! Great tribulation! See how weak my faith is even now at the very end. I cannot give you this blessing, although I know very well that it is the only way. I know this, because I have been along this way myself, and it has led me to Him.’
Again he paused. It did not seem to Hyacinth to be possible to say anything. He was not sure in his heart that the friendship of the Man of Sorrows was so well worth having that he would be content to pay for it by accepting such a benediction from his father.
‘I shall do this for you, Hyacinth: I shall pray that when the choice is given you, the great choice between what is easy and what is hard, the right decision may be made for you. I do not know in what form it will come. Perhaps it will be as it was with me. He made the choice for me, for indeed I could not have chosen for myself. He set my feet upon the narrow way, forced me along it for a while, and now at the end I see His face.’
Hyacinth had heard enough of the brief bliss of his father’s married life to understand. He caught for the first time a glimpse of the meaning of the solitary life, the long prayers, and the meditations. He was profoundly moved, but it did not even then seem to him desirable to choose such a way, or to have such attainment thrust on him.
Next morning the autumn sunlight chased the recollection of his emotion from his mind. The fishermen stopped his car as he drove through the street to shake hands with him. Their wives shouted familiar blessings from the cabin doors. Father Moran came bare-headed to the gate of his presbytery garden and waved a farewell.
CHAPTER II
There is that about the material fabric, the actual stone and mortar, of Trinity College, Dublin, which makes a vivid appeal to the imagination of the common man. The cultured sentimentalist will not indeed be able to lave his soul in tepid emotion while he walks through these quadrangles, as he may among the cloisters and chapels of the Oxford colleges. The amateur of the past cannot here stand at gaze before any single building as he does before the weather-beaten front of Oriel, tracing in imagination the footsteps of Newman or Arnold. Yet to the average man, and far more to the newly emancipated schoolboy, Trinity College, Dublin, makes an appeal which can hardly be ignored. In Oxford and Cambridge town and University are mixed together; shops jostle and elbow colleges in the streets. In Dublin a man leaves the city behind him when he enters the college, passes completely out of the atmosphere of the University when he steps on to the pavement. The physical contrast is striking enough, appealing to the ear and the eye. The rattle of the traffic, the jangling of cart bells, the inarticulate babel of voices, suddenly cease when the archway of the great entrance-gate is passed.
An immense silence takes their place. There is no longer any need for watchfulness, nor risk of being hustled by the hurrying crowds. Instead of footway and street crossing there are broad walks, untrodden stretches of smooth grass. The heavy campanile is in front, and heights of gray building frown down on each side. It needs no education, not even any imagination, to appreciate the change. It is not necessary to know that great scholars inhabited the place, to recall any name or any man’s career. The appeal is not to a recollected impression of the Middle Ages, or indeed of any past, remote or near. It is the spirit of scholarship itself, abstract, intangible, which creates this atmosphere. Knowledge, a severe goddess, awes while she beckons.