accepting with the briefest hesitation the smallest of offered hands.
"I thought it must be the same!--I was certain there couldn't be two
Flying Sherbrands. Pat!--Mr. Sherbrand can't deny the relationship,
though he disapproves of Franky and me most fearfully. You'll have to
teach him," went on the coaxing little voice, "that we're lots and lots
nicer than he thinks us! For we've got to be friends," said Kittums,
"if you and my dear Pat are going to be married! No time like the
present! Can't we begin now?"
What a vivid little face it was, though there were tired marks like
faint bruises under the great dark eyes, and the rose-flush in the
cheeks was less bright than it had seemed in June. He released the tiny
jewelled fingers, and found himself presented to the husband.
"Frightfully glad to meet you--more reasons than one!"
Franky, slim, sleek-headed, and dapper in unblemished Regulation
tea-leaf, held out his hand, saying as he looked the other squarely in
the eyes:
"If I had known your Home address, I should like to have dropped a line
to you, when I--when I saw the newspaper yesterday."
"My mother lives at Bournemouth. My father had been an invalid for
years. I go down to-day by the afternoon train."
"Ah! Please remember me to my--Aunt Jeannette."
From what dusty shelf of memories had Franky reached down the name of
his uncle's unknown wife? But it sounded pleasantly to Mrs. Sherbrand's
son. The cloud upon his forehead cleared away, and his cold sea-blue
eyes began to thaw into kindness:
"I'd like a word with you in private. Do you mind comin' out of this
clackshop into the vest*i*bulee?" Franky went on, quoting his favourite
Jimmy Greggson, and with a word to Margot and a glance on Sherbrand's
part at Patrine, the two men passed through the swing-doors. Here
Franky wheeled, and said with effort:
"This is a bit subsequent! but--if there's time available and the date
of my uncle's funeral doesn't happen to be fixed, I should like to
say--" He grew furiously red and began to stammer: "My father ...
myself ... Dash! how brutally I bungle! But my uncle has a right to--to
lie in the family vault with his ancestors. It's at Whins--the Church
is in the Castle grounds. I can guarantee that my father--every
facility--sympathy--proper respect--" He broke down. Sherbrand
answered, now the cooler of the two:
"You are very kind, Lord Norwater. My mother has already received a
telegram from Lord Mitchelborough conveying a message to the same
effect."
"I engineered that!" thought Franky complacently. But he was fish-dumb.
Sherbrand went on:
"She would thank you, as I do, gratefully. But my father--would have
preferred to be buried where he died!"
"Good egg! And now there's another thing to get off my chest," said
Franky. "You know you stand in for the Viscounty when I succeed my
father, or if I get knocked out in this scrap--supposing I should kick
without heirs! That being so, suppose you bury the hatchet and lunch
with us? Wouldn't in Paris--perhaps you will now? The War seems to rub
up old saws like new somehow. That copy-book tag about Blood bein'
thicker than water! that's one of the ones I mean. In case my wife got
left--do you tumble?"--the ambiguous term was quite expressive--"I'd
like to think that you were--would be kind to her!"
"I should certainly--in that case--try to do what I could." A certain
physical and mental resemblance showed between these two long-legged,
lightly-built, clean-made Sherbrands, standing together talking of grave
matters, with candour and simplicity and British avoidance of sentiment
and excess of words.
"But,"--Sherbrand found himself yielding to an impulse of confidence in
the owner of the brown eyes that were some inches below his own, "this
War is my chance! I'm a certified pilot-aviator and constructor and
engineer. Perhaps there'll be a chink in the Royal Flying Corps for
me--and many another fellow like me--before long--I hope, not very long!
For my father's sake as much as for my own, I'm bound to make good--you
understand?"
The brown eyes understood. His kindred blood warmed to the look in
them.
"He knew--my father knew that he had failed in life through his own
fault. He did not resent his brother's attitude. He bore the
consequences more or less patiently, and when he died he left the
cleansing of his name to me. Not that he was as badly to blame as
people thought. He was born without sufficient of the quality
called--objectivity. It's the power that keeps a man slogging, slogging
in one groove without getting mechanical or stupid, as long as he attain
his ends or can serve his country by keeping on. It's
_indispensable_!"--he emphasised the word, his strong blue-grey eyes
full on Franky's--"as indispensable as lymph in your inner ear-tubes.
Without it you can't keep a level balance--whether you stand, or walk,
or fly!"
"Miss Saxham--knows, I suppose?"
A flush crept up through Sherbrand's tanning:
"I have told her. It wasn't pleasant. But she--likes me enough to
overlook it. She--seems to think I should never fail in that way! I
hope to God I never shall!" The old boyish terror of inherited weakness
cropped up in the tone of the man grown. "It would be horrible to
suspect the bacillus of slackness lurking in my blood! If there is--the
sooner I get scrapped, the better for her and for me!"
"Well, you've chosen the--kind of career that is going to use up a good
many men pretty quickly." Franky was warming more and more to this big
blond, candid cousin. "Not that I think there's much of the slacker
about you. Few chaps more fit and nervy--that is, going by looks, you
know! But if the Kaiser's Flying Men can shoot on the wing as well as
they brag they can"--his brown eyes were watchful for a change in the
other's face--"then----"
"Then I tumble out of my sky, a dead bird!" said Sherbrand, squaring his
broad shoulders, "and someone luckier fills my place!"
"Thumbs up! Ten to one you'd come down with a broken wing or so."
There was something that touched Franky's latent quality of imagination
in the fellow's queer way of saying "my sky." "This cousin of mine is a
handsome fellow," he said to himself, "and a plucky one. And--by the
Great Brass Hat!--now I come to think of it--the livin' image of old Sir
Roger Sherbrand--his and my great-grandfather--goin' by the portrait in
the gallery at Whins."
"So you're firm on joinin' the Flying Corps..." he went on, feeling for
the moustache which had been reduced to Regulation toothbrush size.
"Good egg You! Wish you all the sporting chances----"
"And better luck," said Sherbrand drily, "with Bird of War No. II. than
I had with No. I.!"
"You're building a new 'plane?" The brown eyes were alight with
interest.
"Rather! Come and have a look at her one day."
"Like a shot, if only I'd time! Did she tot to a hatful of money?"
"Something under L700. L500 of that goes for the new 'Gnome' engine.
You see that German--" Sherbrand broke off.
"I remember! Pretty rough on you, that North Sea crossin' business.
Must have been an awful loss. Look here!" Franky reddened again and
began to flounder. "Could I--couldn't I--help with the boodle? Got L700
lying by idle. Frightfully glad if you'd let me chip in!--just in a
cousinly sort o' way!"
"I am much obliged to you, Lord Norwater."
Confound the fellow! how he froze at the least hint of patronage. He
went on, holding his head high:
"You are very kind, but I am not poor, unless as poverty is understood
by people of your world. Apart from what my profession brings me I have
something in the way of income. My mother's brother left me a sum of
money that brings in yearly over L200." He went on as Franky regarded
with unaffected interest the man who wasn't poor on two hundred _per
annum_: "The principal--I suppose it tots up to L6,000--I shall
naturally settle on my wife."
He warmed and brightened with the utterance of the word. His cold eyes
grew soft and his brows smoothed pleasantly. He said with a glowing
pride, and a kind of brave shyness that a woman who loved him would have
adored:
"I have said nothing yet to Miss Saxham about my hopes of a
Commission--I suppose for fear of not pulling the thing off. But the
moment it comes along I shall persuade her to marry me. We'll be man
and wife before I fly for the Front."
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:
[Illustration: Cross. "Sodality of the Blessed Sacrament"]
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.