with their
humour, their companionableness, their kindness, their friendliness--it
need not be violent, and indeed if it was violent, that was fighting on the
wrong side--it had only to be calm and sincere and dutiful."

"Did he say that?" I said. "Yes, I am sure he did--no one else could say it
or think of it. Of course, we have to fight, but not by dealing injury and
harm, but by seeking and following peace and goodwill. Well, we must
try--and it may be that we shall find him again, though he is hidden for a
little while with God."

"Yes," said Barthrop, "we shall find him, or he will find us--it makes
little difference: and he will always be the same, though I hope we may be
different!"

LXXIV

DEPARTURE

It was a soft and delicious spring morning when I left Aveley--and I have
never had the heart to visit it again. I had had a sleepless night, with
the thought of Father Payne continually in my mind. I saw him in a score of
attitudes, as he loitered in the garden with that look of inexpressible and
tender interest that he had for all that grew out of the
earth--worshipping, I used to think, at the shrine of life--or as he sat
rapt in thought in church, or as he strode beside me along the uplands, or
as he came and went in a hurried abstraction, or as he argued and
discussed, with his great animated smile and his quick little gestures. I
felt how his personality had filled our lives to the brim, as a spring
whose waters fail not. It was not that he was a perfect character, with a
tranquil and effortless superiority, or with a high intellectual tenacity,
or with an unruffled serenity. He was sensitive, impatient, fitful,
prejudiced. He had little constructive capacity, no creative or dramatic
power, no loftiness of tragic emotion. I knew all that; I did not regard
him with a false or uncritical reverence. But he was vital, generous, rich
in zest and joy, heroic, as no other man I had ever known. He had no petty
ambition, no thirst for recognition, no acidity of judgment. He never
sought to impress himself: but his was a large, affectionate, liberal
nature, more responsive to life, more lavish of self, more disinterested
than any human being that had crossed my path. He had never desired to make
disciples--he was not self-confident or self-regarding enough for that. But
he had continued to draw us all with him into a vortex of life, where the
stream ran swiftly, and where it seemed disgraceful to be either li