Mr. Trimblerigg, who during the past six months had been through deep waters and in his own eyes had done valiantly, sat up quivering with indignation.
‘If I hadn’t prayed,’ he cried, ‘prayed all I knew, prayed without ceasing—and if I had not depended every instant on my prayer being answered in ways beyond human power to devise, before this I should have been dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Davidina, ‘and if you had aimed your last prayer a little straighter, so should I. It missed—like some of the others, I’m thinking. Two days ago I met six of your prayers, as you call ’em, striped like a barber’s pole, dead as door-nails, standing on their heads in native earth. They weren’t exactly addressed to me; but I’ve come in answer to them; and if you don’t think it’s the word of the Lord I’m telling you now, Jonathan, put up another and have done with me!’
Mr. Trimblerigg’s sense of lifelong grievances came to a head, and he spoke plainly: ‘I shall never have done with you, Davidina, never, never! All my life you’ve hated me, persecuted me, wished me ill. Yes; you’ve been sorry whenever I succeeded, glad when I’ve failed; and if I were to fail now, you’d only say—“Serve him right! Serve him right!”’
‘That’s true,’ said Davidina; ‘the rest isn’t. Hated you? Don’t flatter yourself! You wouldn’t so much mind me hating you; it’s my seeing through you that you don’t like. “O Lord, so look upon me from on high that You don’t see me clear as Davidina sees me!” That has been your life-prayer, Jonathan, though you never put it into words. Yes, to you it may sound like blasphemy, but if you’d prayed a little less to yourself, and a little more to me, maybe, you might not have cut so famous a figure in the world—been such a firework, setting a spark to your own tail and running round after it (which is what you are doing here) but there’d have been more meat on you for one to cut and come again than there is now. It’s my belief, Jonathan, you don’t truly know where you begin and where you leave off. You’ve been standing in your own light so long, and walking in it, that you see yourself a child of light every time you look in the glass. I’ve only to switch this torch on’—she played it upon him as she spoke—‘and you look like a saint in a halo, waiting for the Kingdom of Heaven to come. Yes, that’s what you are always giving yourself—a halo; you’ve only to pray and it comes—like hiccoughs, or housemaid’s knee. You touch a button, you switch on the light, and you see yourself in a glory. Some day you’ll get one in real earnest; and when you do, I wonder what you’ll make of it, and what people will say? I think they’ll laugh.’
Mr. Trimblerigg looked at her with that same sort of uneasy awe which weak saints have for the Devil. Under her penetrating gaze he sealed himself to secrecy. This, that she was saying—so nearly true, yet treating it as a joke—was not a thing about which even relatively the truth could be told. Davidina had no sense of the mysterious, and very little of the divine; she lacked reverence; but her uncanny way of touching the spot did rather scare him. He changed the subject hastily. ‘Where have you been all this time?’ he inquired. ‘You’ve come a long way. How did you get on?’
Davidina, accepting the diversion, gave him a sketch of her travels. He heard of the toy air-balloons, the bird-warblers, and the soap-bubbles; the singing, and the playing, and the worshipping deputations of natives. Nor did Davidina disguise from him the fact that she had allowed godlike honours to be paid to her.
Mr. Trimblerigg, though he had used Relative Truth for his own ends, could not, as a Free Evangelical, think that was right.
‘I dare say it isn’t,’ said Davidina, ‘not as we think it. But if you start applying your own sense of what’s right to natives, they don’t think you a god, they think you a devil. That’s what you’ve been doing, Jonathan; and devil’s the result. And for my part, I don’t see that it’s any more against true religion to let yourself be worshipped as a god than to make yourself feared as a devil. Devil or god, it’s one or the other—you can’t get out of it; and to be thought a god and to act accordingly does less harm, comes cheaper, and makes things easier for all concerned.
‘Anyway here’s your object-lesson and there’s mine. I could have soon enough made them think me a devil if I’d taken your line, Jonathan. So now, unless it’s against your religion, you’d better try mine for a change. Be a god, Jonathan, be a god! It won’t be true; but believe me—sing, glory hallelujah! it’s the better hole to fall into. And now I’m going.’ So saying, she started to climb out the way she had come.