Part 63

“I want you to think for yourselves.”

“But I mean,” said Miriam, “are we--something like Quakers--a sort of very broad Christians?”

“You are what you choose to be. If you want to keep in the church, then you must keep in the church. If you feel that the Christian doctrine is alive, then it is alive so far as you are concerned.”

“But the creeds?” asked Clementina.

He shook his head. “So far as Christianity is defined by its creeds, I am not a Christian. If we are going to call any sort of religious feeling that has a respect for Jesus, Christianity, then no doubt I am a Christian. But so was Mohammed at that rate. Let me tell you what I believe. I believe in God, I believe in the immediate presence of God in every human life, I believe that our lives have to serve the Kingdom of God....”

“That practically is what Mr. Chasters calls 'The Core of Truth in Christianity.'”

“You have been reading him?”

“Eleanor lent me the book. But Mr. Chasters keeps his living.”

“I am not Chasters,” said Scrope stiffly, and then relenting: “What he does may be right for him. But I could not do as he does.”

Lady Ella had said no word for some time.

“I would be ashamed,” she said quietly, “if you had not done as you have done. I don't mind--The girls don't mind--all this.... Not when we understand--as we do now.”

That was the limit of her eloquence.

“Not now that we understand, Daddy,” said Clementina, and a faint flavour of Lady Sunderbund seemed to pass and vanish.

There was a queer little pause. He stood rather distressed and perplexed, because the talk had not gone quite as he had intended it to go. It had deteriorated towards personal issues. Phoebe broke the awkwardness by jumping up and coming to her father. “Dear Daddy,” she said, and kissed him.

“We didn't understand properly,” said Clementina, in the tone of one who explains away much--that had never been spoken....

“Daddy,” said Miriam with an inspiration, “may I play something to you presently?”

“But the fire!” interjected Lady Ella, disposing of that idea.

“I want you to know, all of you, the faith I have,” he said.

Daphne had remained seated at the table.

“Are we never to go to church again?” she asked, as if at a loss.

(17)

Scrope went back into his little study. He felt shy and awkward with his daughters now. He felt it would be difficult to get back to usualness with them. To-night it would be impossible. To-morrow he must come down to breakfast as though their talk had never occurred.... In his rehearsal of this deliverance during his walk home he had spoken much more plainly of his sense of the coming of God to rule the world and end the long age of the warring nations and competing traders, and he had intended to speak with equal plainness of the passionate subordination of the individual life to this great common purpose of God and man, an aspect he had scarcely mentioned at all. But in that little room, in the presence of those dear familiar people, those great horizons of life had vanished. The room with its folding doors had fixed the scale. The wallpaper had smothered the Kingdom of God; he had been, he felt, domestic; it had been an after-supper talk. He had been put out, too, by the mention of Lady Sunderbund and the case of Chasters....

In his study he consoled himself for this diminution of his intention. It had taken him five years, he reflected, to get to his present real sense of God's presence and to his personal subordination to God's purpose. It had been a little absurd, he perceived, to expect these girls to leap at once to a complete understanding of the halting hints, the allusive indications of the thoughts that now possessed his soul. He tried like some maiden speaker to recall exactly what it was he had said and what it was he had forgotten to say.... This was merely a beginning, merely a beginning.

After the girls had gone to bed, Lady Ella came to him and she was glowing and tender; she was in love again as she had not been since the shadow had first fallen between them. “I was so glad you spoke to them,” she said. “They had been puzzled. But they are dear loyal girls.”

He tried to tell her rather more plainly what he felt about the whole question of religion in their lives, but eloquence had departed from him.

“You see, Ella, life cannot get out of tragedy--and sordid tragedy--until we bring about the Kingdom of God. It's no unreality that has made me come out of the church.”

“No, dear. No,” she said soothingly and reassuringly. “With all these mere boys going to the most dreadful deaths in the trenches, with death, hardship and separation running amok in the world--”

“One has to do something,” she agreed.