Father Benecke ceased to speak, his lips trembling. To find himself alone with Mrs. Burgoyne embarrassed him. He sat, folding his soutane upon his knee, answering in monosyllables to the questions that she put him. But her sympathy perhaps did more to help him unpack his heart than he knew; for when Manisty returned, he began to talk rapidly and well, a natural eloquence returning to him. He was a South German, but he spoke a fine literary English, of which the very stumbles and occasional naïvetés had a peculiar charm; like the faults which reveal a pure spirit even more plainly than its virtues.
He reached his climax, in a flash of emotion—
'My submission, you see—the bare fact of it—left my cause intact. It was the soldier falling by the wall. But my letter must necessarily be misunderstood—my letter betrays the cause. And for that I have no right. You understand? I thought of the Pope—the old man. They told me he was distressed—that the Holy Father had suffered—had lost sleep—through me! So I wrote out of my heart—like a son. And the paper this morning!—See—I have brought it you—the Osservatore Romano. It is insolent—brutal—but not to me! No, it is all honey to me! But to the truth—to our ideas.—No!—I cannot suffer it. I take it back!—I bear the consequences.'
And with trembling fingers, he took a draft letter from his pocket, and handed it, with the newspaper, to Manisty.
Manisty read the letter, and returned it, frowning.
'Yes—you have been abominably treated—no doubt of that. But have you counted the cost? You know my point of view! It's one episode, for me, in a world-wide struggle. Intellectually I am all with you—strategically, all with them. They can't give way! The smallest breach lets in the flood. And then, chaos!'
'But the flood is truth!' said the old man, gazing at Manisty. There was a spot of red on each wasted cheek.
Manisty shrugged his shoulders, then dropped his eyes upon the ground, and sat pondering awhile in a moody silence. Eleanor looked at him in some astonishment. It was as though for the first time his habitual paradox hurt him in the wielding—or rather as though he shrank from using what was a conception of the intellect upon the flesh and blood before him. She had never yet seen him visited by a like compunction.
It was curious indeed to see that Father Benecke himself was not affected by Manisty's attitude. From the beginning he had always instinctively appealed from the pamphleteer to the man. Manisty had been frank, brutal even. But notwithstanding, the sensitive yet strong intelligence of the priest had gone straight for some core of thought in the Englishman that it seemed only he divined. And it was clear that his own utter selflessness—his poetic and passionate detachment from all the objects of sense and ambition—made him a marvel to Manisty's more turbid and ambiguous nature. There had been a mystical attraction between them from the first; so that Manisty, even when he was most pugnacious, had yet a filial air and way towards the old man.
Eleanor too had often felt the spell. Yet to-day there were both in herself and Manisty hidden forces of fever and unrest which made the pure idealism, the intellectual tragedy of the priest almost unbearable. Neither—for different and hidden reasons—could respond; and it was an infinite relief to both when the old man at last rose to take his leave.