"Why, yes, I'll drop around some time," rather too carelessly said Dick, who was no longer so thoughtful in little things. Too much success seemed to be going to his head.
David flushed and dropped the subject. Dick, too, dropped it, both from tongue and mind.
A few evenings later, while David was working on his new idea, violin strains rose from the parlor. But he did not go down or join his fellow roomers on the stairs, though Jonathan and Esther made music until the evening was no longer young. It was a good hour for work; the harmonies from below awoke other harmonies in his heart and clarified his vision. That evening he completed a first sketch of the interior: the picture you get looking toward the altar from a point well back in the nave. It was good even as a sketch, for he had seen very clearly and worked eagerly.
When it was finished he sat back and looked at it for a long time while the music from the parlor flooded up to him. But he saw not a sketch.
He was back in a simpler age when the symbols of faith had power; seeing with a new understanding a picture that had formed in his mind as he worked out this creation—for him it was already created. . . . A narrow crooked street, filled by a gay colorful throng that slackened its pace and lowered its voice before a gray, weathered old church. A beggar crouching on the steps, mouthing his whining song. A constant stream of worshipers passing in and out through the great open door: plumed cavaliers, their arrogant swagger for the nonce put off; gray pilgrims, weary and dusty, with blistered feet and splintered staves; mailed soldiers ready to march for the wars; tired-eyed crusaders home from a futile quest; a haughty lady, a troubled daughter of artisans, a faded wanton, brought into a brief gentle sisterhood by a common need; all seeking the same thing. And perhaps in the doorway a faltering sinner unconfessed, fear of punishment a flaming sword in his path. . . . Ah, well! It was not so absurd, that picture. For those seekers have even unto this day their children who, amid their pleasuring and warring and questing, sometimes grow faint and would rest.
In such company he entered. On the threshold they paused with a quick breath for the chaste beauty of vista and line, the soft play of color and shadow. Then sense of beauty faded before a thing that eye can not see nor tongue express, what the seekers had needed and what they found: peace, passing understanding, unseen but undoubted; hovering above them in the noble nave, kneeling with them in shadowy aisle, winging toward them on the shaft of sunshine streaming from heaven itself upon the altar. Here, for intrigant and ravager, penitent and saint, failure and world-weary, was sanctuary—respite, if only for an hour, from sin and strife, passion and hate and self. It was good to stay there a while, humbled yet uplifted, aspiring anew. For there was a Presence in His own house.
A wonderful thing had happened to David Quentin. His sensitive quivering heart had caught and recorded the great human need, and to him it had been given to build a rest house for many weary and poor in heart. Perhaps if his commonplace little trials had not seemed big and tragic to him, he never could have known the need and so he never would have written in stone and wood the story of sanctuary that has meant so much to the ages.
He did not foresee that. He did not think of it as a possibility. He was thinking only of the great discovery he had made: that a man may find sanctuary, as he may give worship, in a task well loved and well done. Life was a pretty good thing after all, since it could not take from him eyes to perceive or heart to rejoice in the beauty he could create, though none else cared to see. The days of his whimpering, even to himself, were ended.
"I should have been doing this all along."
Nor did he notice that the music had ceased. He did not know even that he was no longer alone, until a voice broke in on his reverie.