'You said something to Professor Madgwick the other day about a line of Goethe you used to like so when you were a boy. What did it mean?'
She flushed, as though she were venturing on something which would make her ridiculous.
'A line of Goethe?' repeated David, pondering. 'Oh! I know. Yes, it was a line from Goethe's novel of "Werther." When I was young and foolish—when you and I were first acquainted, in fact, and you used to scold me for going to the Hall of Science!—I often said this line to myself over and over. I didn't know much German, but the swing of it carried me away.'
And, with a deep voice and rhythmic accent, he repeated:' Handwerker trugen ihn; kein Geistlicher hat ihn begleitet.'
'What does it mean?' said Lucy.
'Well, it comes at the end of the story. The hero commits suicide for love, and Goethe says that at his burial, on the night after his death, "labouring men bore him; no priest went with him."'
He bent forward, clasping his hands tightly, with the half smiling, half dreamy look of one who recalls a bygone thrill of feeling, partly in sympathy, partly in irony.
'Then he wasn't a Christian?' said Lucy, wondering. 'Do you still hate priests so much, David?'
'It doesn't look like it, does it, madam,' he said, laughing, 'when you think of all my clergymen friends?'
And, in fact, as Lucy's mind pondered his answer, she easily remembered the readiness with which any of the clergy at St. Damian's would ask his help in sending away a sick child, or giving a man a fresh start in life, or setting the necessary authorities to work in the case of some moral or sanitary scandal. She thought also of various Dissenting ministers who called on him and corresponded with him; of his reverent affection for Canon Aylwin, for Ancrum.