Many Dimensions, page 26
"She might have had love and happiness," the young man said, "and others too. There was always a light about her."
"Why, so it seemed," Lord Arglay said, and after a moment's pause, looking out of the window of the car, he went on. "But who can tell how that light came to be? It is but a few weeks since I gave sentence upon a man before me who had murdered through some sudden jealousy the girl he was to marry. And when, as is the ritual, I asked him if he had anything to say, he cried out that though I might hang him justly, for he confessed his crime, yet that there was a justice against which he had sinned which was greater than I and had already purged him. And though I have never made it my habit to do as some of my brethren do, offering their own moral opinions and the ethical and social rules of their own world, and condemning the guilty by such verbiage as well as by the law, I answered him that this also might be possible and that such a justice might already be fulfilled in him. But if indeed there be any such sovereign justice, may not this child have found a greater thing than either you or I could give her? Could she do more, while she was upon the stepping stones, than smile at the water that ran by her?"
"Must the water always run by?" Oliver said.
"It is its nature, as it was hers to pass over it," Lord Arglay answered. "And it may be that she has come into the light that was about her and the God in whom we determined to believe."
At Lancaster Gate he bade Doncaster farewell, came again into his study, and stood still to look round it. His charge was at an end, and for all he could tell there were still before him years of life. Something must be done, and instinctively he looked at the MS. of the Survey of Organic Law which had laid so long neglected, then he walked over and picked it up. The type-written sheets bore in places his own alterations and in places hers. There were sheets of annotations she had typed and sheets of references in her writing. Lord Arglay looked at them, and for a moment it seemed to him an offensive thing that another handwriting should be mixed with theirs. Yet after a moment he smiled: to accept such a ruling would indeed be to go against the whole nature of the Stone and the work they had done together. For here was this lesser work, and if it were worth doing-as it might be-and if without someone to supply necessary detail it would probably not be done-was not this also as much in the nature of organic law as the operation of the Stone? ...
"Besides," Lord Arglay said aloud, "in a year's time, child, I should be finding an excuse. I think I will not find an excuse. The way to the Stone is in the Stone, and I will choose to do this thing rather than to leave it undone or to be driven back to it by the weariness of time."
He walked across to the telephone, looked at it distastefully, and turned the pages of the directory.
With his hand on the receiver, "Also," he said, "though the King wrote Ecclesiastes, yet the Courts gave judgement in Jerusalem. This, I suppose, is Ecclesiastes. . . . Paddington 84.... Is that the Lancaster Typewriting Agency?"
THE END
Charles Williams, Many Dimensions
