"Yes, your reverence," the housekeeper answered, as shortly; and Searell walked up the foggy stairs murmuring to himself, "The wind-flowers are out, and I am free."
Father Damon stood in a little square room hideously papered. He was small, dark, heavy-featured, peasant-like; and Searell saw at a glance that his successor was as dull in many ways as Oliver Vorse. All that he knew had been forced upon him almost violently; he had not gone forth gathering for himself, he dared not, his mind had been tilled by careful teachers, kept under restraint, all his side-growths pruned away, in order that orthodoxy might develop in one large unlovely head. When the order went forth to kneel, he knelt, and when it was time to lift his eyes to Heaven, he lifted them. It was a life of prison, and he could never smell the woodland through the fog of incense.
"He knows nothing," muttered Searell. "He thinks it is daylight where he stands."
"I come to give you information about the mission," he said aloud, and then began; but the telling took some time. How troublesome, how paltry, the details; and Father Damon was so dull. Everything had to be repeated, explained so carefully; and was it worth the words? The successor was very earnest, but not enthusiastic, that had been crushed out of him; and Searell grew impatient at the wooden figure, with its simple face and child-like questions. He spoke faster, almost angrily, desiring to get away and smell the earth; and his eyes wandered about the room, which was so unlovely, not bare, but filled with those things that make for the nakedness of life. There was wanting something to galvanise that sluggish Damon into passion, to destroy the machinery, turn him into a strong animal with dilating nostrils. One little touch would have done it. A portrait of a pretty woman upon the mantelshelf would have gone far; but there was nothing except pictures of mythical saints.
"You are retiring. You seem strong and well," said Damon, when he had obtained all the information that was required.
Searell was in a hurry to be gone, as the sleeper struggles to awake from a bad dream; but that voice and its stagnant repose aroused him.
"I am old, I am sixty," he said. "I am beginning again, trying to find what the Church has not shown me."
"What is that?"
"Light."
Damon stared with the eyes of horror, and put out his peasant-like hands as if to force away some weight that pressed against him; but he said nothing.