The writer was indeed quite captivated by the old gentleman’s originality and scientific passion. It puzzled him a good deal that his young friend had not told him more about her father, had not made clear to him what a remarkable and unusual man he was. I bet, he thought to himself, that ass of a Canyot has no idea what a treasure this old fellow is! I hope my little girl is kind to him. If she isn’t I shall give her a very serious scolding. Scolding? I shall whistle her down the wind, for an undiscerning little impious baggage!
From general philosophic topics of a semi-scientific character, in handling which Richard found Mr Moreton to be quite as imaginative and daring in his speculations as the boldest modern thinker, they passed by insensible degrees to the great ‘sphinx problem’ of the unknown reality lying behind it all.
‘It would interest me to hear,’ Storm at length ventured to say, ‘how a man of science like yourself reconciles your priestly functions with what we’ve been talking about. I’ve known several scientific priests in France and they do it by keeping the two realms rigidly and inflexibly apart. But I never quite feel as if that were a satisfactory solution. Both views of life are so entirely natural and human; and both, it seems to me, spring from the same fundamental passion in the human soul — the passion to grasp life in its inmost secret.’
The old man looked at him from under his shaggy eyebrows with a look of slow interrogative caution; the caution of an old peasant who hesitates to reveal some piece of instructive local knowledge which to him has a deep inexplicable value.
Richard’s direct candid gaze in answer to this peering scrutiny seemed to satisfy the man; for, prodding the ground with his heavy cane, he searched for the exact words in which to sum up his position.
‘What I’ve come to feel,’ he said, ‘and I speak as an ordinary secular layman in the eyes of the world, for I intend to resign my living (though to myself, as you will doubtless understand, I shall always be a priest), is that there are two entirely separate conceptions — the conception of God round which have gathered all the tyrannies, superstitions, persecutions, cruelties, wars, which have wounded the world; and the conception of Christ round which has gathered all the pity and sympathy and healing and freedom which has saved the world.
‘The conception of Satan has been torn asunder between these two. As Lucifer the Light-Bearer, as the Eternal Rebel, he is an aspect of Christ. As the Infernal Power of malice and opposition to life, he is an aspect of God.
‘To my mind the world is an arena of perpetual conflict between these two forces, one of which I renounce and defy; the other I worship in the Mass.’
‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!’ cried the plovers over the old man’s head as he concluded this strange statement of heresy; and Richard thought to himself — On which side would he put the cry of that bird?
But he answered aloud: ‘Your view is not a new one, sir. William Blake seems to have felt something of what you say — and there are modern French poets, too, who have—’
The old man waved his hand in the air with a proud gesture. ‘What I’ve told you, young man, I’ve learnt from beetles and mosses, from shrikes and redshanks, from newts and slow-worms. It is not a poetical fancy with me. It is my discovery. It is what I’ve been thinking out for myself, for sixty-odd years. And what I’ve got to do now is what all discoverers have to do, I’ve got to pay the price!’
‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!’ cried the agitated plovers, wheeling in circles round the field behind them.
‘It seeems to me,’ remarked Richard after a moment’s hesitation; for his habitual desire to propitiate rather than to contradict made opposition difficult to him — ‘it seems to me that you have avoided the chief problem. Surely the human instinct which has in all ages groped after something it calls God is really seeking a reconciliation between your two forces? Surely, sir, you will admit, constituted as we are, we cannot escape from the notion of some fundamental unity in things? And isn’t it a desperate pathetic desire in us that this unity should be essentially good rather than evil, that has led to the theological conception of a Father of the Universe?’
The old man started up to his feet with an angry leap. ‘Theological!’ he cried beating the top of the mossy wall with his fists. ‘That’s just what it is — theological!’
‘It might just as well,’ muttered Richard, losing his propitiatory manner, for something bitter and personal in the old man’s tone irritated and incensed him, ‘be called human. For not to want the universe to be good at bottom is surely an inhuman feeling.’
‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!’ cried the plovers in the field behind them.
To their intelligence, the appearance of the old naturalist’s grizzled pate, across the familiar saxifrages and pennyworts and kiss-me-quicklys of that old wall, must have been very menacing.
‘You will hardly deny, sir,’ went on Richard, though a secret monitor in his heart kept whispering to him You’re a fool to annoy him; you’re a fool to argue with him, ‘that our Lord himself believed in what we usually mean when we use the expression God?’
The Reverend John Moreton stared down at his visitor with a look of infinite contempt.
‘The Christ I celebrate in the sacrament,’ he said, ‘has nothing to do with ignorant repetitions of badly reported misunderstandings. The few great authentic logia which I adhere to make no mention of the Eidolon Vulgaris of which you speak!’
Richard had really lost his temper now. ‘You are a very good example, sir,’ he flung out, ‘of what happens when a Church separates itself from the traditions of Christendom!’
‘It is reason, it is science, it is common sense!’ roared the old man. ‘It is a confounded exhibition of obstinate private judgement!’ shouted the writer back to him.
‘Pee-wit! pee-wit!’ cried the birds behind the wall.
At that moment a faded specimen of the butterfly called a painted lady fluttered rapidly across the graves.
Richard’s outburst had left him with a sense of shamefaced remorse. He certainly had behaved like an arrant fool in contradicting the old gentleman.
He moved forward towards the dilapidated insect that kept wheeling backwards and forwards over the orchis maculata, newly planted on Cecily Moreton’s mound.
‘What’s that, sir? What ever kind of butterfly is that? I have never seen anything like that before!’
He removed his hat and made as though he would pursue the swift-winged creature.
‘A painted lady!’ muttered the old man sulkily. But the naturalist’s vanity was stronger in him than the theologian’s rancour. ‘You’ve never seen one? You young men are very unobservant! Painted ladies are well known in France.’ ‘Not that kind, sir, surely?’ cried the cunning biographer of the poet of the demimonde. Ours in France are lighter on the wing’; and he pursued the faded wanton with more discretion than success.
The old man was completely won over by this boyish display. He stumbled after his antagonist and laid his hand on his arm. ‘Let it go!’ he said chuckling grimly. ‘She’s one too many for you. Many a time have I hunted them for miles over the Downs. In some seasons they’re very rare. They’re interesting little things! Very prettily marked when you get a good specimen.