"You do surprise me," George Lovegrove said again presently, and in a lamentable voice. "My mind refuses to grasp it. I would rather have lost five hundred pounds than have heard this. I declare I am fairly unmanned. I have never received a greater shock."
Iglesias remained silent. He was weary and sad. But he straightened himself, trying to keep his gaze fixed steadily upon the far horizon where dwells the everlasting light.
"It is presumptuous in me to criticise your action, perhaps," his companion continued. "I never did such a thing before, having always hesitated to set up my views against yours; but I cannot but fear you have made a sad mistake. And if you were contemplating any change of this kind, why did you not come into our own national English Church?"
"Very much because it is English and national, I think," he answered. "In my opinion there is an inherent falsity of conception in subjecting our approach to the Absolute to restrictions imposed by country or by race, if these can, by any means, be avoided. Why hamper yourself with a late, expurgated, and mutilated edition, when the original, in all its splendour and historic completeness, bearing the sign-manual of the Author, is there ready to your hand?"
Again Iglesias spoke with subdued but unmistakable enthusiasm. The two friends had just reached the iron gate leading into High Street. Here George Lovegrove stopped. He still kept carefully at a distance, averting his eyes as from some distressing, even disgraceful, sight, while his good honest face worked with emotion.
"I think if you will kindly excuse me, I will go no farther," he faltered. "What you say may be true—I am sure I don't know. It is all beyond me. But I should prefer not to talk any more about it until I have accustomed myself to the thought of this change in you. Nothing does come between people like religion," he added with unconscious irony. "So I think, if you will kindly excuse me, I will just go away, Dominic."
And, without more ado, he turned back into the Gardens.
The small polar bears, meanwhile, satiated with exercise, air, and light, had begun to grow restive and fretty. Their stomachs cried cupboardwards, and they were disposed to filch each other's toy horses and hoops, and use each other's small persons as targets for balls, thrown as bombs in a fashion far from polite. Anxious maids and nurses hunted them homewards, not without slight asperity on the one part, on the other occasional squealings and free fights. But upon the babies, engaging even in naughtiness, George Lovegrove had ceased to bestow any attention. He went forward blindly, cruising among them and their attendants and smart little carriages, elephantine, careless where he placed his feet, to the obstruction of traffic and heightening of general annoyance, as sorrowful a man as any would need to meet. For it seemed to him things had gone wrong, just then, past all hope of setting right. His idol, light of his eyes and joy of his guileless heart, has fallen from his high estate, discovering capacity of playing the most discreditable and soul-harrowing pranks. Prejudice is myriad-lived here on earth; and in George Lovegrove all the bigotry, all the semi-superstitious, terror fostered by the accumulated ignorance which generations of Protestant forefathers have bequeathed to the English middle-class, reared itself, not only stubborn, but militant. His thought travelled back to those barbarities of rougher ages which are, in point of fact, more common to the secular than to the religious criminal code; but which Protestant teachers, even yet, find it convenient to put down wholly to the account of the Catholic Church. Practically ignorant of the spoliation and persecution practised under Henry the Eighth—of blessed domestic memory—of the further persecution which disfigured the "spacious days of great Elizabeth," not to mention the long and shameful history of the Penal Laws, he fixed his mind upon lurid legends of the reign of unhappy Mary Tudor, illustrated by prints in Fox's Book of Martyrs; upon inquisitorial tortures, the very thought of which—even out of doors in the pleasant spring sunshine—made him break into a heavy sweat, and which, by some grotesque perversion of ideas, he believed to be not only the necessary outcome of, but vitally essential to, the practice of the Faith. Against this hideous background he set the calm and stately figure of his beloved friend Iglesias—seeing him no longer as the faithful comrade of more than half a lifetime, but as a foreign being, an unknown quantity, a worshipper of graven images, a participant in blasphemous rites, a believer, in short, in just all that which sound, respectable, and godly British common sense cast forth, with scorn and contumely, close on four centuries back. He was frightened. His everyday, comfortable, jog-trot, little odd and end of a local parochial suburban middle-class world was literally turned upside down and inside out.
"And however will the wife take it—however will she take it?" he mourned to himself. "To think we have been harbouring a Papist in disguise! I dare not contemplate her feelings. She will be upset. I must keep it from her as long as possible. And Serena, too, and Susan! I don't know how I can face them. Females are so very eloquent when put out. Of course I have known there was something wrong for a long time past. I saw there was a change in him, and felt there was some cause of coldness; but it never entered my head it could be as bad as this. Oh! my poor, dear friend. Oh! my poor Dominic, perhaps I have been overattached to you and this comes as a judgment. It would be hard enough to have anything break up our friendship, but this folly, this dreadful doting apostasy—"
He walked on blindly along the sheltered path between the flower-borders, deaf to remonstrant nurses and scornful, beautiful babes clothed in spotless white.