The sweet warm sun was releasing a thousand scents. Paul drew trailing fingers through a spiky host of lavender. Butterflies fluttered their apparently aimless dance over the beds, and bees, more obviously purposeful, dived into flowerets. Even the ancient flags on which they stood were cracked and broken by the impetuous thrust of tiny tendrils one could destroy with a pinch.
Arnold Manning took up his parable. "'Consider the lilies,'" he quoted. "Christ took a far step forward, anyway, Paul. The savage only saw horror, and made his grinning abomination as an image of God. The Jew saw, for some reason, the beauty of law and unity, and Elijah mocked the poor leaping priests of Baal and cried out on Jehovah. Christ saw beauty and tenderness, and invested His God with a still higher personality. 'Ye know not the Father,' He said. And we, we poor moderns, we see it all, Paul, and we see that all—all—those conceptions were just shadows of ourselves."
Paul was gazing up towards the Downs with a far-away look in his eyes. Little fleecy floating clouds were racing shadows of themselves across the rich green turf. "I see," he said sadly.
They strolled up and down. "Go and write a poem about this," said Manning with unusual gentleness. "That will buck you up."
Paul slowly shook his head.
(4)
It would be foolish to pretend that a couple of conversations shattered the faith of years, and yet, in life, it often seems so. Under the surface, the insidious work goes on, and perhaps there is never a crisis for which there has not been preparation. So it was with Paul. The ground had been steadily slipping from beneath his feet. Upon a proffered rock, for good or ill, he had not climbed. Now, with all the thunder and confusion of a cataclysm, the elaborate structure fell.
Manning's cool challenge, as much or more than his logic, had brought about the ruin. Does God hear? he had asked, and deliberately awaited the answer. Once Paul would have been as swift and as assured in his reply. In Lambeth Court, on Parker's Piece, even at Port o' Man, he would instantly have answered yes. But those days had gone. He fought the conclusion, wrestled with it, even still prayed earnestly against it, but could not escape the only possible deduction, as it seemed to him. There had been no answer at all, absolutely and literally none; or else, as Father Vassall would have it, he had been heard and led, led deliberately and as he could bear it, to the threshold of the Catholic Church. But his father, than whom none prayed more earnestly, said that that was the devil, and the Bishop of Mozambique that there the angels of God had been set about him for deliverance. Which was right? He had been tossed like a shuttlecock among them.
Out of that dilemma, Tressor's quiet reasoned judgment had opened up a way of escape. Fordham Manor had seemed so plainly the best and wisest refuge. His father, again, had approved. Besides, if he could write verse, that was a gift of God given him for improvement. And it was not that he did not pray even now, and read the Bible, too, as he had been taught. Only the Bible pointed, if anywhere, where they who advised him most to read it would not admit there was any conceivable possibility of going.
No, the arches of the years had led Paul irresistibly on. One by one, soaring unseen before him, they had closed down at the end of each span an appreciable march nearer to the brink of the precipice. He stood there now, peering into its depths, discerning no path at all, suspecting that the plunge into the abyss was only a matter of weeks, or days. Does God hear? demanded Manning, and Paul had no answer but the echo of Job's old cry: "Oh that I knew where I might find Him!"