On every side now it seemed that the Archdeacon was making some blunder. Little unimportant blunders perhaps, but nevertheless cumulative in their effect! The balance had shifted. The Powers of the Air, bored perhaps with the too-extended spectacle of an Archdeacon successful and triumphant, had made a sign....
Ronder, as he stood in the spring sunlight, glancing up and down the High Street, so full of colour and movement, had an impulse as though it were almost a duty to go and warn the Archdeacon. "Look out! Look out! There's a storm coming!" Warn the Archdeacon! He smiled. He could imagine to himself the scene and the reception his advice would have. Nevertheless, how sad that undoubtedly you cannot make an omelette without first breaking the eggs! And this omelette positively must be made!
He had intended to do a little shopping, an occupation in which he delighted because of the personal victories to be won, but suddenly now, moved by what impulse he could not tell, he turned back towards the Cathedral. He crossed the Green, and almost before he knew it he had pushed back the heavy West door and was in the dark, dimly coloured shadow. The air was chill. The nave was scattered with lozenges of purple and green light. He moved up the side aisle, thinking that now he was here he would exchange a word or two with old Lawrence. No harm would be done by a little casual amiability in that direction.
Before he realised, he was close to the Black Bishop's Tomb. The dark grim face seemed to-day to wear a triumphant smile beneath the black beard. A shaft of sunlight played upon the marble like a searchlight upon water; the gold of the ironwork and the green ring and the tracery on the scrolled borders jumped under the sunlight like living things.
Ronder, moved as always by beauty, smiled as though in answer to the dead Bishop.
"Why! you're the most alive thing in this Cathedral," he thought to himself.
"Pretty good bit of work, isn't it?" he heard at his elbow. He turned and saw Davray, the painter. The man had been pointed out to him in the street; he knew his reputation. He was inclined to be interested in the man, in any one who had a wider, broader view of life than the citizens of the town. Davray had not been drinking for several weeks; and always towards the end of one of his sober bouts he was gentle, melancholy, the true artist in him rising for one last view of the beauty that there was in the world before the inevitable submerging.
He had, on this occasion, been sober for a longer period than usual; he felt weak and faint, as though he had been without food, and his favourite vice, that had been approaching closer and closer to him during these last days, now leered at him, leaning towards him from the other side of the gilded scrolls of the tomb.
"Yes, it's a very fine thing." He cleared his throat. "You're Canon Ronder, are you not?"
"Yes, I am."