"What?"
"Promise."
"You must tell me what it is first. I can't tie my hands, even for you."
"Well, promise that whatever happens to you, you'll never laugh at all this."
They were at her corner, and the boy looked into her grave face. "I won't," he said. "I promise. I owe it too much. But, Edith, one thing I won't promise. I won't promise that, if I ever see it to be false, I won't fight it with every weapon on which I can lay hand."
And she dropped her eyes from his, forlorn, for she saw that it was not in him to say more.
(5)
Paul went to Ripon, and Dick, saying good-bye for some time, to the South. He was to be ordained in September, and had to interview his prospective Vicar, somewhere in North London. Paul was staying with Judson for a few days, that Judson whom he had hardly known at the college feast, but who had come rather more intimately into his life of late.
Judson was a Congregationalist, and his father was a minister of the denomination in Ripon. He himself was a short, bullet-headed sort of person, whom Paul usually thought of as a bullet. At any rate, there did not seem to be much room for emotionalism or sentiment in his make-up, and he had a bullet-like way of boring into things. He had bored straight into Paul. Blunt, definite, ready, he had liked Paul, and had started to call and to demand to be called upon. His rooms reflected in a negative way his personality. Being poor, they remained poorly furnished, but even on tuppence-halfpenny they might have been less hard. On either side of the mantelpiece were two humorous coloured plates out of Printers' Pie. Paul thought they symbolised the man. How anyone could look at the same two jokes for ever, one on each side of the mantel-piece, used to strike him as an incredible mystery. He thought at first that it meant that Judson had no soul at all.
It was when he discovered his mistake that he began to like the man. For Judson had a soul. He went regularly, without any advertisement of it, to a Congregational chapel. He addressed Congregational meetings in villages at considerable inconvenience and quite unobtrusively. He and Paul alone at St. Mary's had the sin of public preaching to their charge. And Paul was beginning to find out that he alone neither mocked at nor disregarded his own religious struggles. Judson surveyed the Catholic Church with a shrewd eye. He left Paul to make enquiries, but he took them seriously. In his rooms he wore carpet slippers and a blazer, and smoked an ugly pipe, but, feet on his mantelpiece and hands in his pockets, he was prepared to admit that there were many points of view.