“THE TREE OF BEAUTY”
“That,” said the playwright, “is a beautiful story. I suppose every one who reads it will think so; but I am not sure that more than one in a million will guess a tithe of what it means. Frankly, I know I don’t. I daresay even the writer himself didn’t know all that it suggests.”
The book was The Light Invisible, and the story was “Consolatrix Afflictorum.”
“Do you agree with me?” said the playwright after a pause, in which the only sound heard was the wind and the drumming of the waves on the rocks. Since he received no answer he looked at his companion, a man whom he believed he knew very well; when he looked at him he knew his own folly, and was silent.
Presently the man said:
“Do you like stories? Shall I tell you one?”
“Is it true?”
“Naturally. How could it be otherwise? Do you think I can create out of nothingness? The story in itself must be true, if I could understand it. But I shall have to grope after it, and translate it for you; and I shall do it badly, no doubt. Still—shall I tell it?”
“Do,” said the playwright. Whereupon the man began as follows:
“Years ago, perhaps a couple of centuries or so, there was a village in the north of England, which remains little altered to this day. It has never been touched by that change in the method of viewing truth which some call the Reformation, and others name after a different fashion. This was partly because it is an isolated moorland village; partly because it was, and is, owned by a family whose representative at that time was not only a very rich and influential man, but also of the type with whom other men, and even Church and State, do not very readily interfere. He was grave and discreet, sober of speech and very devout, and he ruled his village with a most benevolent despotism. He was especially filled with devotion for the Virgin Mother, “the blossoming Tree, the Mother of Christ,” in whose honour he had built a small but most beautiful chapel in his grounds; here the rites celebrated were of the highest perfection of reverent elaboration, and here the devout builder retired daily for prayer and meditation.