At this point Mr. Clavering intervened with an eager and passionate question. He had been listening intently to his visitor’s words, and his clear-cut, mobile face had changed its expression more than once during this long discourse.
“You do not, then, think,” said he, in a tone of something like supplication, “that there is anything wrong in giving ourselves up to the intense emotion which the presence of beauty and charm is able to excite?”
“Wrong?” said Mr. Taxater. “It is wrong to suppress such feelings! It is all a matter of proportion, my good sir, a matter of proportion and common sense. A little psychological insight will soon make us aware whether the emotion you speak of is likely to prove injurious to the object of our admiration.”
“But oneself—what about oneself?” cried the young priest. “Is there not a terrible danger, in all these things, lest one’s spiritual ideal should become blurred and blighted?”
To this question Mr. Taxater returned an answer so formidable and final, that the conversation was brought to an abrupt close.
“What,” he said, “has God given us the Blessed Sacraments for?”
Hugh Clavering escorted his visitor to the corner of the street and bade him good-night there. As he re-entered his little garden, he turned for a moment to look at the slender tower of St. Catharine’s church, rising calm and still into the hot June sky. Between him and it, flitted like the ghost of a dead Thaïs or Phryne, the pallid shadow of an impassioned temptress holding out provocative arms. The form of the figure seemed woven of all the vapours of unbridled poetic fantasy, but the heavy yellow hair which most of all hid the tower from his view was the hair of Gladys Romer.
The apologist of the papacy strolled slowly and meditatively back to his own house with the easy step of one who was in complete harmony both with gods and men. Above him the early stars began, one by one, to shine down upon the earth, but as he glanced up towards them, removing his hat and passing his hand across his forehead, the great diplomatist appeared quite untroubled by the ineffable littleness of all earthly considerations, under the remoteness of those austere watchers.
The barking of dogs, in distant unknown yards, the melancholy cry of new-shorn lambs, somewhere far across the pastures, the soft, low, intermittent breathing, full of whispers and odours, of the whole mysterious night, seemed only to throw Mr. Taxater back more completely and securely upon that firm ecclesiastical tradition which takes the hearts of men in its hands and turns them away from the Outer Darkness.