"I meant to tell you both"—they heard his words stumbling towards them through a clogging mist—"I have thought a good deal about you—and prayed. But, somehow—I suppose because I am not quite sure of my right to advise—light has not come to me yet. The solution slowly dawning may be a mirage. I must leave you to judge of that. It is not for me to follow the w-wise across the desert. My place is in the fields w-with the blind flocks. Still, since you must go back and live practical lives in a practical w-world, there is such a thing as rendering unto Cæsar. In this case—to a custom, if an unlawful custom, as many considered Cæsar's tribute. Yet, the disciples were permitted to pay that, to give their enemies no handle. You could pay it—this tribute to our so-called Civilization—by obtaining your divorce and contracting, according to the law of the land, to live together as it permits you. A marriage in a registry office counts as no marriage to a Catholic; but this you know. Your lives together after it w-would be a matter for yourselves and your own consciences, supposing you can continue to live together under the same conditions you have observed up to now. If you find you cannot, then I, honestly, see no w-way out but the one w-which seems to spell living death to both of you—separation.
"There is another consideration. The Roman Communion and its rules are outside my scope. You know best w-whether it w-will permit a w-wife separated from her husband, in such special circumstances, to remain under the innocent protection of another man, in a state fulfilling the demands of both Civil and the Ecclesiastical Law. In my own very humble opinion—and I speak after much consideration—the thing is permissible. But I live so far beyond the reach of those dogmatic burdens w-with which Man impedes his progress to bear as offerings along the steep road to God. Clever theologians w-would, doubtless, frustrate my arguments, in one sentence. I can only say that I do not think they could alter my feeling in the matter.
"The views of any Church are immaterial to one of you, who has been, hitherto, a law unto himself. They are not immaterial to me; but my heart is ready to let the situation rest between you and the Greatest of all Lovers, who sees further than His disciples in the Church."
The speaker pushed his untasted tea aside with a little clinking jerk of china, and moved swiftly away from the two under the restless palms.
In the distance they watched him climb the steps of the toy ark and, a moment later, the cracked bell clanged.
* * * * * *
Cyprian spoke first, when the cadences of the concertina would have been inciting to hilarity most listeners superior to the Nicobarese and inferior to the angels.
"Did you ever hear of Er, the son of Armenius? No. You never trod the mill of the ordinary Greek classics. Er was a brave man who was killed in battle, and the story goes that, ten days later, his body was discovered quite fresh. The twelfth day they laid him on a funeral pyre, when he wisely came to life again. He brought news that he had been permitted to see the other world and return, and described a long and complicated vision—Socrates' idea of the justice meted out to Man after death.
"While I was ill my brain was troubling itself with an account of the method by which the sky's vault was held together, in the vision, at either end, by a belt of light."
"What are 'whorls'?" Ferlie asked him suddenly.