“But he’s so harmless. And a dear fellow.”
“I wish I could share your opinion. I can only regard him as a plague spot in the parish. Insanity is his only defense and it has taken such a noxious form that it may infect others.”
“Hardly likely, one would think.”
“We live in abnormal times. I am very sorry, but I can only regard this man as a moral danger to the community. Edith was greatly shocked. I was greatly shocked. You must excuse my saying so, Gervase, but I cannot help feeling that in the circumstances the vast majority of right-thinking people would be.”
“But who are the people who think rightly?”
Mr. Perry-Hennington raised a deprecating hand. Yet Brandon, having acted in the way he had, was entitled to put the question. He had given more than life for an idea, and that fact made it immensely difficult for the vicar to deal with him as faithfully as he could have wished. He was face to face with a skeptic, but the skeptic was intrenched in a special position where neither contempt nor active reproach of any kind must visit him.
But in spite of himself the old slumbering antagonisms were now awake in the vicar. Brandon, too, was a dangerous paradoxical man. Notwithstanding the honor and the love he bore him, Mr. Perry-Hennington felt his pulses quicken, his fibers stiffen. If ever man did, he saw his duty straight and clear. The only real problem was how to do it with the least affront to others, with the least harm to the community.
“By the way,” said Brandon, his gentle voice filling an awkward pause that had suddenly ensued, “have you ever really talked with John Smith?”
“Oh, yes, many times.”
“I mean have you ever really tried—if I may put it that way—to get at the back of his mind?”