第67章 THE NINTH - THE THIRD VISION(11)

By this time he had reached the banks of the Serpentine and was approaching the grey stone bridge that crosses just where Hyde Park ends and Kensington Gardens begins.Following upon his doubts of his religious faith had come another still more extraordinary question: "Although there is a God, does he indeed matter more in our ordinary lives than that same demonstrable Binomial Theorem? Isn't one's duty to Phoebe plain and clear?"Old Likeman's argument came back to him with novel and enhanced powers.Wasn't he after all selfishly putting his own salvation in front of his plain duty to those about him? What did it matter if he told lies, taught a false faith, perjured and damned himself, if after all those others were thereby saved and comforted?

"But that is just where the whole of this state of mind is false and wrong," he told himself."God is something more than a priggish devotion, an intellectual formula.He has a hold and a claim--he should have a hold and a claim--exceeding all the claims of Phoebe, Miriam, Daphne, Clementina--all of them....

But he hasn't'!...

It was to that he had got after he had left Lady Sunderbund, and to that he now returned.It was the thinness and unreality of his thought of God that had driven him post-haste to Brighton-Pomfrey in search for that drug that had touched his soul to belief.

Was God so insignificant in comparison with his family that after all with a good conscience he might preach him every Sunday in Lady Sunderbund's church, wearing Lady Sunderbund's vestments?

Before him he saw an empty seat.The question was so immense and conclusive, it was so clearly a choice for all the rest of his life between God and the dear things of this world, that he felt he could not decide it upon his legs.He sat down, threw an arm along the back of the seat and drummed with his fingers.

If the answer was "yes" then it was decidedly a pity that he had not stayed in the church.It was ridiculous to strain at the cathedral gnat and then swallow Lady Sunderbund's decorative Pantechnicon.

For the first time, Scrope definitely regretted his apostasy.

A trivial matter, as it may seem to the reader, intensified that regret.Three weeks ago Borrowdale, the bishop of Howeaster, had died, and Scrope would have been the next in rotation to succeed him on the bench of bishops.He had always looked forward to the House of Lords, intending to take rather a new line, to speak more, and to speak more plainly and fully upon social questions than had hitherto been the practice of his brethren.

Well, that had gone....

(9)

Regrets were plain now.The question before his mind was growing clear; whether he was to persist in this self-imposed martyrdom of himself and his family or whether he was to go back upon his outbreak of visionary fanaticism and close with this last opportunity that Lady Sunderbund offered of saving at least the substance of the comfort and social status of his wife and daughters.In which case it was clear to him he would have to go to great lengths and exercise very considerable subtlety--and magnetism--in the management of Lady Sunderbund....

He found himself composing a peculiar speech to her, very frank and revealing, and one that he felt would dominate her thoughts....She attracted him oddly....At least this afternoon she had attracted him....

And repelled him....

A wholesome gust of moral impatience stirred him.He smacked the back of the seat hard, as though he smacked himself.

No.He did not like it....

A torn sunset of purple and crimson streamed raggedly up above and through the half stripped trecs of Kensington Gardens, and he found himself wishing that Heaven would give us fewer sublimities in sky and mountain and more in our hearts.Against the background of darkling trees and stormily flaming sky a girl was approaching him.There was little to be seen of her but her outline.Something in her movement caught his eye and carried his memory back to a sundown at Hunstanton.Then as she came nearer he saw that it was Eleanor.

It was odd to see her here.He had thought she was at Newnham.

But anyhow it was very pleasant to see her.And there was something in Eleanor that promised an answer to his necessity.

The girl had a kind of instinctive wisdom.She would understand the quality of his situation better perhaps than any one.He would put the essentials of that situation as fully and plainly as he could to her.Perhaps she, with that clear young idealism of hers, would give him just the lift and the light of which he stood in need.She would comprehend both sides of it, the points about Phoebe as well as the points about God.

When first he saw her she seemed to be hurrying, but now she had fallen to a loitering pace.She looked once or twice behind her and then ahead, almost as though she expected some one and was not sure whether this person would approach from east or west.She did not observe her father until she was close upon him.

Then she was so astonished that for a moment she stood motionless, regarding him.She made an odd movement, almost as if she would have walked on, that she checked in its inception.Then she came up to him and stood before him."It's Dad," she said.

"I didn't know you were in London, Norah," he began.

"I came up suddenly."

"Have you been home?"

"No.I wasn't going home.At least--not until afterwards."Then she looked away from him, east and then west, and then met his eye again.

"Won't you sit down, Norah?"

"I don't know whether I can."

She consulted the view again and seemed to come to a decision.

"At least, I will for a minute."

She sat down.For a moment neither of them spoke....

"What are you doing here, little Norah?"

She gathered her wits.Then she spoke rather volubly."I know it looks bad, Daddy.I came up to meet a boy I know, who is going to France to-morrow.I had to make excuses--up there.I hardly remember what excuses I made.""A boy you know?"

"Yes."

"Do we know him? "

"Not yet."

For a time Scrope forgot the Church of the One True God altogether."Who is this boy?" he asked.