The Strange Affair of Adelaide Harris by Leon Garfield Page B

that hisreason was chiefly that he’d received no answer to his gift of the brass button.
    â€œBut there
must
be a God,” urged Bostock desperately.
    â€œWhy, old friend?”
    â€œBecause—because of everything. Look about you, Harris! All the grass and trees and different animals and flowers—who made them if not God?”
    â€œSomebody else,” said Harris bleakly. The friends stared at one another, Harris as still and somber as the headstones among which they stood, and Bostock swaying slightly, as if rocking on a sea of doubt. Bostock turned his small, fierce eyes from side to side, ranging the wide landscape as if trying to see it in some other light than the bright sun’s. Painfully he stared from the soft, silken sea to the green velvet folds of the Downs. Not two miles off he saw the tiny village of Preston clustering like a brood of kittens about the wise gray church whose square head watched over the cottages, ready to call them back if they strayed into danger. Bostock’s eyes began to fill with tears. Passionately he struggled to reject Harris’s grim philosophy, and to bring his friend back into the warm, motherly world.
    â€œLook, Harris—look!” he muttered, pointing to the village but unable to put his thoughts into words.
    Wearily Harris looked. “What is it, old friend?”
    â€œThe—the church,” said Bostock incoherently, and hoped Harris would understand.
    Harris gazed at the aged building that looked, from where he stood, to be no better than a child’stoy. “Poor, poor Bosty,” he whispered pityingly. He was half sorry for the damage he’d done his friend, but nevertheless the truth was more sacred than anything else; nothing was worse than worshiping a lie. Just how Harris, whose mind was furtive in the extreme, managed to believe in this philosophy, was a mystery as deep as life. But then, he was a scientist.
    â€œYes, Bosty—another church.”
    He stopped. His heart quickened.
Another
church. In his mind’s eye he saw once more the horseman and the baby of the previous night, and in a blaze of understanding he guessed what had happened. Ralph Bunnion, with Adelaide in his arms, for some reason or another must have ridden
past
St. Nicholas’s and on to the church at Preston!
    The lights came on in his eyes. He thumped Bostock on the back. “Now I know, old friend!”
    â€œI don’t want to hear it,” said Bostock bitterly, thinking Harris had shifted the heavens still farther afield.
    â€œHe took her to Preston,” said Harris. “
That’s
where Adelaide went!”
    â€œOh,” said Bostock. “I thought you meant God.”
    â€œWhat’s God got to do with it? Come on, Bosty!”
    He set off at a smart trot toward Preston and Bostock followed after. All questions of faith and belief had vanished from Harris’s mind. He left the gates of heaven swinging open, so to speak, for God to resume His leasehold until he, Harris, chose to foreclose again.
    When the friends reached Preston, Harris’sinspiration was confirmed. Ingeniously they fell into conversation with a boy and learned that a baby had indeed been left in the church on the previous night. But almost at once their lifted hopes were dashed to the ground. They were too late. The baby had already been taken to the poorhouse in Brighton.
    As they walked back in the deepest dejection, the fleeting thought struck Harris that had he put his shilling, or even his sixpence in the collecting box instead of the brass button, they might have been in time. Then he shook his head. No god could be
that
petty.
    â€œAt least we know where she is,” said Bostock hopefully, and secretly considered the shilling he’d sacrificed in church had been money well spent. Of such strange materials is faith built, unbuilt and built again, in ever changing designs.
    By the time the two friends drew near their homes,