“Such is my task, but I do not know that it can be fulfilled by the printed word. There may be a surer way. The question I have to ask myself is, can I do the Father’s will more worthily? By prayer and fasting perhaps I may.”
“But the thing is so perfect. Why gild the lily?”
“It is only one of many keys, dear friend. It is not the Door itself. It is no more than a stage in a long, long pilgrimage; no more than a means to the mighty end that has been laid upon me.”
Brandon, however, had set his heart upon the poem’s publication. To him it was a perfect thing. Moreover, he saw in it a vindication of its author, a noble answer to those who were conspiring to destroy him.
Strangely, however, John was not to be moved from his resolve. And more strangely still, as it seemed to Brandon, intimations had come to him already of the terrible fate that was about to overtake him. “It has been communicated to me that I am about to be called to a great trial,” were the words he used.
Brandon, sick at heart, had hardly the courage to seek an explanation. “You—you have been told that?” He scanned anxiously the face of the man at his side.
“Yes,” was the answer. “The inner voice spoke to me last evening. I don’t know when the blow will fall, or what fate awaits me, but a sword hangs by a single hair above my head.”
“And—and you are not afraid?” To Brandon this calmness was almost superhuman.
“I am not afraid. The souls of the just are in the hands of God. And I ask you, my dear friend, to share my faith. You are one of two witnesses to whom I have been allowed to reveal myself. The other is an old woman who can no longer work with her hands. You have long given her a roof for her head, and I have kept a loaf in her cupboard and found her fire in the winter. But there is only the poorhouse for her when I am taken, and I think she fears it.”
“Whatever happens, that shall not be her fate.”