“I’ve tried to tell myself it’s nonsense,” went on David, “but it’s no good. And it doesn’t seem like play now. I can’t explain. Of course reason tells me I’m being a bit mad, but the thought has got hold of me and won’t let me go. Mr. Elmore talked to me yesterday, down on the beach. He talked what seemed to me a good deal of rubbish, though I’ll grant it sounded all right in one way. I told him what I thought about it. But what we both said is beside the matter. It’s just that all the time this idea was gripping me tighter and tighter. It was as if the quest was real. Everything—the sea, the rocks, the birds, the sun, the wind—was telling me so. I wanted to speak to someone about it. Somehow I felt I could tell you. It seems so real, and yet— What do you make of a fantastic idea like that?” There was almost a wistful note in his voice.
Elizabeth’s eyes were shining. Perhaps there was the faintest hint of tears in them.
“I don’t think it is fantastic,” she said quietly. “I—I know it isn’t.”
“You know it is real?” asked David wonderingly.
“I know it is real,” she said. “There are others who could tell you probably a great deal better than I can; yet you’ve asked me, so I will do my best. The story of King Arthur and his knights seeking the Holy Grail, is a beautiful story, a wonderful story. It was a marvellous quest. It was the quest far the holiest purely material thing that ever existed. And yet there is Something more wonderful even than it, Something always present upon the earth which may be found by all who seek It. I think you have been given a glimpse of that Quest.”
David looked at her silently.
Elizabeth drew in her breath.
“Christ in the Blessed Sacrament,” she said.
A silence fell on the words. Elizabeth’s heart was beating quickly. David was looking at the water.
“When the bell rang,” went on Elizabeth, speaking simply, almost as she would have spoken to a child, “it meant that Christ had come to the altar within the chapel. He was lying there as helpless as when He was nailed to the Cross. It needs, perhaps, as great faith to see Him there, under His white disguise, as it did to see God in the Man nailed to the tree of shame. Yet the one stupendous marvel is as true as the other. Up there, in the wood, you recognized the miracle, without realizing what it was that you recognized.”