The question was asked more to himself than to Ferlie, but she replied to it gently; she, who hated hypocrisy from the depths of a soul which felt plunged into it.
"No, Padre. I understand what you feel. I belong to a Church much criticized for its adamant attitude towards such logic as is Cyprian's."
"You cannot think," he told her in a broken voice, "w-what it has meant to me to have you two here. Merely to w-watch you both makes me less lonely. It used to be my dream, before I vowed myself to celibacy, that one day a w-woman might stand to me, even me, in the same relationship that you stand to him. I could be tempted to pray for it, even now."
She shivered slightly.
"And God would reply that you know not what you ask," she said, so low that he did not catch the words, and went on speaking: "But sometimes I have thought that, in spite of the perfect unity between you, w-which turns this self-chosen isolation into an Utopia of contentment, there is yet something troubling you; something deep and painful. Forgive me if I am mistaken. Living apart, as I do—I have deliberately chosen Mission work, you know, though Colonel Maddock offered to help me to a Living—one's instincts become sharpened, like a dog's when someone it knows is in trouble."
Then Ferlie made a resolve she would have found impossible to justify but, in after-life, found it impossible to regret. Peter had always condemned her as doctrinally unsound, and wondered that the Church could not see it.
Perhaps the Church did see it but was wiser than Peter in its utterly trained patience.
Poor Cyprian, who, in these lost islands, could not escape the pursuit of the Men in Black.
* * * * * *
Every Saturday evening the communicants of the toy church arrived in a complacent body, turn-about to kneel under the struggling night-light and receive mild directions from their harassed shepherd, balanced on the harmonium stool behind a yard of green baize, as to the speedy restoration of unlawfully-acquired coco-nuts and pigs illicitly retained in huts to which they did not belong. Most defrauded neighbours could be certain of recovering the fowl that was lost, before the metal bell was jerked by Young Brown for Sunday Mass.