Part 30

As cocky as though he had landed the biggest catch in the matrimonial waters, thought Franky, instead of that great, slangy, galumphing young woman without a halfpenny at her back. But he did the amiable, in a way characteristic of Franky, ushering the guest back to the luncheon-room, introducing "my cousin" to people worth knowing, doing the honours with a pleasant cordiality that won upon Sherbrand more and more.

Sherbrand took leave directly after lunch, saying that he had to catch the afternoon express for Bournemouth. He had left his bag and suit-case in the hall-porter's care. Would Patrine?--Patrine read the entreaty in the hiatus and yielded to it, saying Yes, she would drive with him, and see him off from Waterloo.

"It's lovely of you!" Sherbrand said to her gratefully as they rose. She gave him her cordial smile and a soft glance from the long eyes. They took leave of their hosts and passed out together, heads slewing as the tall young figures went by.

Once in a taxi, spinning down Short Street, Sherbrand possessed himself of the hand he coveted. Its warm strong, answering clasp thrilled him to speechlessness. He looked at the long white fingers intertwined with his own, and asked himself whether he were deserving of a happiness too great to be credited. When her shoulder touched his, its warm creamy whiteness gleaming through the dead-white of her thin sleeve, his heart drummed until it seemed as though she could not but hear it. But his was not the only heart that beat....

"Thank you." It was her rich warm voice speaking close by his ear. "Thank you for being so nice to my Kittums! She is the truest little soul going. We have been chums ever since I joined the Club. Never quarrelled once--until she made up her mind to marry Franky----"

"And now you're going to marry Franky's first cousin." Sherbrand laughed rather breathlessly. "'Marry' ... 'Marriage.' Two splendid words with meanings and meanings beyond meanings packed into them. Isn't it wonderful? ..." He gripped the warm white hand in his strong brown one. "Pat, your pulses are playing a tune!"

"So are yours," she answered in a low tone.

"What is it?" He bent his head and set his lips in a swift caress to the back of the white hand. Then he turned it gently over and looked earnestly at the blue wrist-veins. They were full and throbbing tumultuously. Her blood was answering to the call of his. He set a second swift kiss upon them and his voice was unsteady as he said:

"I know the name of the tune, my wonder. Patrine! Love!--it's the _Wedding March_!"

"Whose? Grieg's, or Wagner's in _Lohengrin_, or Haydn's?"

"Neither Wagner's nor Haydn's nor Grieg's. Yours and mine! I told Lord Norwater to-day that I meant to make sure of you before I fly for the Front."

"You're going to the Front? Oh!--why?" Her long eyes looked at him with sharp terror in them. He answered:

"When the Powers that be offer me a Commission in the Royal Flying Corps."

"I see." She breathed freely. "And so--we are not to be married until then?"

"Would you--to-morrow, if I----"

"You know I would!" Her voice broke over him in a wave of tenderness. "You've made me love you--so dreadfully, Alan. Now if the little tin gods hear us--the spiteful little gods who spoil people's lives--something will happen to part us, soon."

His arm went round her and gathered her against him. He said with a great thrill of triumph:

"If the Great God is for us we can defy the little tin devils! It was He who made us for each other, brought us together--will bring us closer still!"

He added, as a handsome boy of nineteen or twenty, dressed at the zenith of the fashion, and already showing the worn lines of habitual dissipation, flashed by driven in a silver-grey Lanchester, with a notorious Cyprian enthroned at his side:

"How can I thank Him enough for what He has done for me? How many temptations He has helped me resist, that I might come to you clean to-day!"

"Were any of the temptations like Mrs. Mallison?" She had freed her hand from his, and now leaned forwards, hiding her clouded face from Sherbrand under the pretext of following the grey car with her eyes. "That was little Wyvenhoe with her.... How young he is! And how old she must be! Why, I've seen her portrait in a Book of Beauty dated forty years back--with a chignon and waterfall. They called her the Marble Marvel in those days, didn't they? Before she pitched her cap over the windmill, and made hay of the Prunes and Prisms. Now she acts in Music Hall sketches--has a voice like a raven's, paints a quarter-of-an-inch thick, and exploits Eton boys. Is anything the matter?"

Sherbrand had suddenly started and pulled his watch out. Now he rapped on the glass at the back of the chauffeur, leaned out of the window and spoke to the man, and resumed his seat, answering:

"The matter is that I had forgotten an important appointment. I can manage to keep it by the skin of my eyelids by taking the three o'clock train to Bournemouth instead of the two-thirty Express. You won't mind? You'll come with me and wait for me?"

"Not a little bit! ..." she answered to the one question and to the other: "Of course I will!"

*CHAPTER LI*

*THE INWARD VOICE*

The taxi, arrested and reversed on its way to Piccadilly Circus, was soon speeding Westwards. It whirred up Berkeley Street, traversed Berkeley Square, and turned into a short street ending in railings, enclosing grass wonderfully green for August, clipped bushes of evergreens, and some autumn-foliaged planes.

"We'll keep the man. I'll take his number. He'll look after my kit for me. Let me help you out, dear!"

He opened a gate in the railings and let her through. A large double house, with many windows, severely screened with brown curtains and wire blinds, loomed behind them, commanding the oblong patch of London green. The Modern Gothic porch of a lofty building of smoke-darkened freestone rose up before them. Patrine said under her breath, realising the ecclesiastical character of the edifice:

"Great Scott! It's a church!"

But Sherbrand, who had stayed to shut the gate in the railings did not hear the tabooed expletive. He caught her up and turned the massive iron handle of the porch-door which was braced by bands of iron with trefoil heads, and studded with heavy nails. They went down two shallow steps into an oblong, vaulted chamber, very cool and dark and fragrant, tesselated with squares of black and white stone. Slabs of black marble lined the walls to the height of a tall man. An inscription in Early English lettering, cut into the black background and gilded, caught Patrine's eye in passing. She read beneath the symbol of the Cross:

Under were lists of names, all male, ranged alphabetically. Her quick eye dropped to the initial S. and found Sherbrand there. But when she looked for her companion, he was waiting hat in hand, at a door some distance beyond them.

"You will come in and wait for me?" he whispered as she came towards him.

"Why not? As well here as anywhere!" He opened the door and she passed in.

To Patrine's left hand, close to the door by which they had entered, was a small unpretending altar supporting the tinted image of an emaciated, bearded monk in a black robe girdled with a white cord. A clustered pillar of red and white marble supported a shallow basin containing a little water. Patrine shrugged as Sherbrand dipped his fingers and made upon brow and breast the sacred Sign. Then he seemed to hesitate--dipped again and held the wetted finger tips towards her, evidently courting her touch. She shook her head hastily. Her eyes swept purposely past his, scanning the vast interior. They were standing in the shorter southern transept of what was _some_ church.

The vast nave was dark and cool, full of silence and shadow and the perfume of flowers and incense, mingled with a fragrance far subtler than these. Pillars of richest Modern Gothic design supported the roof, whose forest of rich dark timbers showed little adornment, except at the Sanctuary end. Here coffering, diapering, and gilding made for splendour; rich marble cased the pillars and floored the stately choir with its rows of stalls, wrought in dark wood, elaborately carved. The north transept housed the organ, a towering instrument of many pipes. The scarlet cushion on the vacant organ-bench, the book of chants left upon the rack, the black and yellow-white of the well-used keys, the numbered heads of the stops, showed through the lattice-work of a high wrought-iron screen, wonderfully painted and gilt. Between Patrine and the nave was a pulpit of red and white marble like the pillars, with a carved sounding-board of obviously ancient work. Rows of pews flanked the wide central aisle and the two smaller, and on the right of a lofty oaken screen that masked the west door, with the mellow light of a great rose-window falling on it, towered a huge Crucifix in black marble, upholding a white tortured Figure whose drooping thorn-crowned Head, like His hands and feet and side, dripped with crimson.... Patrine winced at the sight, and turned hastily away.

Now she was looking over the head of Sherbrand, who knelt before her upright and motionless,--at the High Altar, backed with a noble triptych, its three panels displaying the Annunciation, the Visitation, and the Nativity. A silver lamp depending by chains from the centre of the Sanctuary roof burned with a small steady flame before the Tabernacle--standing between tall tapers burning in gleaming candlesticks, and vases of huge white golden-anthered August lilies--hiding behind its broidered curtains and golden doors, the Ineffable Mystery.

"Come!" Sherbrand's whisper said, close at her ear as he rose up. She turned and followed him down a side-aisle. "Sit here!" he signed to her, pointing to a narrow bench. He waited until she was seated, laid his hat and stick beside her, gave her a grave smile, bent his knees once more, looking towards the High Altar and moved noiselessly away.

Turning her head to follow him with her eyes, Patrine saw that the large dark church was not as empty as she had supposed. Kneeling or seated figures of men and women were scattered here and there amongst the wilderness of empty pews. The serried rows of rush-bottomed kneeling-chairs in either side-aisle showed aggregations of people, ten or a dozen together, chiefly in the neighbourhood of certain narrow wooden doors appertaining to small structures that might be little chapels or vestries, set between groups of pillars in regular sequence down the length of the side-walls. Still following Sherbrand's figure with her eyes she saw him knock at one of the doors, wait as though for an answer, and enter. As the door swung towards her, she saw that it bore a name in gilt letters within an oval on the upper panel. Each of the doors, a questing glance satisfied her, bore a name.

Of course the little wooden chapels were confessionals. Was Confession the important business that necessitated Sherbrand's losing a train and foregoing the company of Patrine to the station, a favour so eagerly sought and so ardently received? Her red lips curled a little at the corners as she turned her face back towards the High Altar, rising within the low barrier of the red and white marble Communion-rail. So remote and pure and set apart with its tall, shining lights and gleaming vases of pure white lilies, its snow-white silk frontal embroidered with a golden ray-surrounded Chalice, its fair white linen Altar-cloth, with a running border of Old English lettering in dark rusty red:

"He had borne our Infirmities and Carried out Sorrows. He was Wounded for our Iniquities. He was Bruised for our sins."

The words seemed to have a physical as well as mental force and impressiveness. It was as though they swept from the high white Table through the fragrant, wax-lit stillness of the Sanctuary, winnowing the still, spicy air of the dark nave and the lighter side-aisles as with wide, powerful, unseen wings. And despite the presence of nearly a hundred people scattered about the great building, the stillness was extraordinary. It got on the nerves.

Almost awfully upon the nerves. For a long way behind her, where the shadowy dusk brooded thickest, and the white tortured Figure of the Crucified hung drooping from the great Cross of black marble against the background of the towering oak screen, it was as though the first great drops of a thunder-shower were falling, _pat, pat, pat!_ upon the pavement below.

Merely a trick of imagination--and yet it tortured. One knew by sensations like these that one had been frightfully overstrained of late. One had done lots of things one regretted--several things one disliked to think of; one thing that made one hate oneself sometimes with a very fury of intensity, when one wasn't too busy hating _him_. But since he was drowned, one had felt it scarcely cricket to go on expending fierce resentment and savage disgust and acute loathing in that direction. One heaped it on the living of the two gross, sensual offenders. Oh God! when Sherbrand had said in that tone of triumph:

"_I come to you clean!_"

How inexpressibly one had abominated oneself. How one had shrunk against the side of the taxicab, pretending to look after wretched little decadent Wyvenhoe and the unquenchable Mrs. Mallison--feigning sudden absorption in the Piccadilly shop-windows, to escape those clear undoubting eyes that pierced one to the very soul. To be thought good when one was wicked, pure when one was the other thing; believed candid when one was a living lie. Ah!--that not only pierced but scorched.

If anybody, a month or so back, had asked Patrine: "Are you a Christian?" she would have retorted: "What are you playing at? Of course I am--I suppose!" Of late that conjectural Being she had called God had receded, faded, grown dimmer, and vanished. But here in the stillness, looking towards the Altar, she was conscious as those candle-flames went up like prayers from faithful souls, that Good and Evil were living warring Forces. You chose White or Black deliberately, and when Death came--it was anything but the end.

Her hair stiffened slightly on her scalp and a light shudder thrilled through her. She felt with a growing awe, and sense of dreadful certainty, that Someone was looking at her. And to relieve the insupportable tension she stretched out her hand, and took a squat, thick little book from the shelf below the seat in front of her. It was a copy of the Douai translation from the Latin Vulgate of the Bible, and there was a purple marker where she opened it, in the middle of the Book of Job.

"_Power and terror are with Him...._"

That was the first line that caught her eye. A little lower on the page came:

"_Was it not Him that made life? Hell is naked before Him and there is no covering for destruction.... He stretched out the North over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing._

"_He hath set bounds about the waters, till light and darkness come to an end...._

"_The pillars of heaven tremble and dread at His beck. By His power the seas are suddenly gathered together, and His Wisdom hath struck the proud one._

"_His Spirit hath adorned the heavens ... and seeing we have heard scarce a little drop of His Word, who shall be able to withstand the thunder of His greatness?_"

It was like a Voice speaking--a Voice of inconceivable magnitude. It made one go cold, asking oneself the question: What if sin were an insult to Him? A scrap of filth flung in the Face of One who created the atom, the protoplasm, the cell, and the bacillus, and built from these in His own Image, Man.

Sitting in the stilly duskiness the woman He had made shut her eyes and tried to envisage Him. He was not the God of the Curate's Confirmation-class, nor the God the Anglican Vicar of the West End Church preached about, but a Being the hem of whose garment extends beyond the confines of Space, and in whose lap lies Eternity. Infinite Goodness, infinite Love, infinite Purity, infinite Beauty, He could stoop to care for the little beings of His Workmanship so much, that for them He did not hesitate to sacrifice Himself in the Person of His Only Son. Did not love such as this make wilful sin an insult to Him in that Son's Person? Wasn't it--pretty rough on Our Saviour--to have poured out His Blood upon the Cross of Calvary as an atonement for the sins of men like dead von Herrnung, and women like Patrine Saxham, and know them still so beastly, so prurient, so base, so vile? ... It began to dawn upon Patrine, still possessed by that strange hallucination of the Blood that dripped heavily from the tortured Body on the great black Cross behind her, how it might be that evil wilfully committed, opened its Wounds afresh. Drove the thorns anew into the drooping Head of the Crucified, pierced once more the Heart, that inexhaustible fountain of love....

"_O! all you that pass by ... attend and see if there be any sorrow like unto My Sorrow._"

The words came cropping up through layers of sentences heard and forgotten, clearly as though a voice had spoken them at her side.

This afternoon the headlines of papers had shrieked of horrors. You remember that at seven o'clock in the morning two German Army Corps had poured into Belgium by the eleven strategic railways that provided for The Day. The vast grey-green flood of marching men, the huge python-like columns of machine-guns, the splendidly-horsed batteries of field artillery, the Brobdingnagian siege howitzers thundering behind their traction-engines, the miles of motor- and horse-drawn transport-waggons, carts, and lorries, blotted out the familiar features of the landscape, as, preceded by massed brigades of cavalry, with squadrons of Field Flying Service aeroplanes reconnoitring three thousand feet overhead, the hosts of Germany rolled down towards the banks of the Meuse.

Directly in line of them rose the fortified City of Liege, termed "the Birmingham of Belgium," holding in the suburb of Seraign, five miles distant from the city, the huge Cockerill machine-plant and foundry, one of the largest ironworks in the world. They had stayed three hours at the frontier station of Vise, a Belgium Custom House town of less than 4,000 inhabitants, where a few squadrons of Belgian Cavalry and the Belgian 12th Line Regiment, aided by some heroic peasants, farmers, and townspeople had risen up with desperate gallantry to oppose their inevitable advance.

They had written the sign-manual of the Hun upon the ashes of Vise in the blood of its massacred inhabitants. Frightfulness, the many-headed hydra, was uncaged and let loose ere they rolled on to Liege peeved by their three hours' intolerable delay. While I who write and you who read far from the sound of fusillades, or the crash of shells or the yells of peasants dying amongst the flames of burning houses, learned of these deeds from the shrilly clamorous headlines, and asked one another with raised eyebrows, in incredulous voices: "_Can these hideous things possibly have been done?_"

Patrine had no doubt that they had been done!--were being done even while she sat waiting in Sherbrand's church for Sherbrand. Did she not know von Herrnung? Were not his fellow-officers and the soldiers he and they commanded, lustful, brutal, cruel, rapacious, arrogant, and pitiless even as he? He was a Type--not the isolated example of a new species. It would not be easily stamped out; its dominating characteristics would write themselves upon a conquered race. Those outraged wives, those violated daughters of Belgium would live to see it reproduced in the living fruit of their humiliation. What honest man could bear to stoop over his wife's bedside and meet the eyes of the Enemy looking at him--from the face of a new-born child!

A rigor of horror seized upon her body and shook it. Her jaw dropped, her eyes closed as though they shrank and withered under their contracting lids. She slid from her seat and fell upon her knees helplessly. Her head sank forwards upon the hands that rose instinctively to hide her face. In the same instant Sherbrand's low voice speaking behind her turned the heart in her bosom to ice.

"Dearest--I am ready, that is if you are? My keeping you was unavoidable. I am going to Communion with my mother, before the Funeral Mass to-morrow, and I wanted to make my Confession first. Has the time seemed long?"

"Not long. Shall we go now?"

He bent the knee to the High Altar and moved with Patrine down the nave towards an altar dedicated to the Virgin Mother, that was on the south side of the church near the great west door. Wax tapers of several sizes burned in a brass stand beside the tiny altar-rail. Sherbrand lighted three tapers and placed them, felt in his waistcoat-pocket for a bit of silver and balanced it on the slotted top of the money-box too gorged with pennies to admit of the slender sixpenny bit. Then with a beautiful, devotional simplicity he knelt upon the narrow blue golden-starred cushion for a moment, looking up at the gracious veiled head that bent above.

But for the modernity of the tweed clothes, the pose of the athletic, lightly-built body would, with the mellowed light from the great rose window falling on the keen bronzed face and thick fair hair, have suggested a knight at prayer. In a moment he rose. They returned as they had come, passed through the chapter-house of the Sodality, and issued through the door into the garden. She said, as he triumphantly possessed himself of the dear white hand:

"Tell me, when you lighted and placed those three candles and knelt down--what did you intend--what was it for? A practical insurance against a railway-accident?"

The dull, ill-timed gibe was no sooner uttered than she sickened with self-contempt. For Sherbrand answered with direct simplicity:

"Well, no! Call my three candles a reminder that I have asked Our Lady's help and protection and guidance for three dear people. My father, my mother, and my wife that is to be. For myself I asked that I might never disappoint you. You don't know how I shall try to live up to your belief in me!"

"You dear boy!" Touched to the quick response of tears she could barely falter: "You're a million times too good for me, if only you knew!"

"I know this--that the wide world doesn't hold another woman like my woman! Why, Pat, the very sound of your voice lashes all the blood in me into big red roaring waves of love."

"'Big red roaring waves.' Oh, Alan!"

She laughed, driving back the hot salt tears that stung her eyelids. The taxi was waiting at the corner of Blount Street, patiently ticking out twopence. Sherbrand whistled and it approached them. But this time Patrine did not enter. She could not now drive to Waterloo. It was much, much too late. She refused even to be dropped anywhere. She infinitely preferred walking. It was quite a pleasant stroll from there to Harley Street.

So they wrung hands and looked in each other's eyes and parted. When the taxi vanished round the corner of Blount Street, the tall, gallantly-borne figure in the golden-braided hat and pale rose gown began to walk swiftly towards Grosvenor Square. Suddenly it paused, wheeled, and returned upon its paces, passed through the gate in the railings and disappeared into the church.

In bed that night in the chintz-hung room at Harley Street, Patrine, recalling the experience that had followed the yielding to that irresistible prompting, wondered if it had actually taken place, or were woven of the tissue of dreams.