No, I
fancy your intuition of this morning is nothing more than one of those
movements which warn us that the sleeper will soon wake."
Mark went away from this conversation with the Rector dissatisfied. He
wanted something more than analogies taken from the experience of
spiritual giants, Titans of holiness whose mighty conquests of the flesh
seemed as remote from him as the achievements of Alexander might appear
to a captain of the local volunteers. What he had gone to ask the Rector
was whether it was blasphemous to suppose that God was going to play a
horrible trick on him. He had not wanted a theological discussion, an
academic question and reply. Anything could be answered like that,
probably himself in another twenty years, when he had preached some
hundreds of sermons, would talk like that. Moreover, when he was alone
Mark understood that he had not really wanted to talk about his own
troubles to the Rector at all, but that his real preoccupation had been
and still was Esther. He wondered, oh, how much he wondered, if her
brother had the least suspicion of her friendship with Will Starling, or
if Miriam had had the least inkling that Esther had not come in till
nine o'clock last night because she had been to Wych Maries? Mark,
remembering those wild eyes and that windblown hair when she stood for a
moment framed in the doorway of the Rector's library, could not believe
that none of her family had guessed that something more than the whim to
wander over the hills had taken her out on such a night.
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