He shook himself as though to shake off the adverse paternal judgment.
"I had my reasons for not going in for the Army, though I love it. They weren't easy to explain, and so I didn't try. But my father never liked the idea of my being a civil engineer. Even my mother, and my uncle--dear old fellow--he understands me better now!"
"Why?"
"Because he's dead!" said Sherbrand simply, "and the Holy Souls know everything!"
"The Holy Souls?" By the glare of the flare-light her puzzled eyes questioned him.
"The Holy Souls in Purgatory. They're privileged to help us. We help them--by praying for them. It's--a spiritual intercommunication--a kind of endless chain. A circuit of influence, received and transmitted, not by etheric flashes, but by a medium more subtle. Prayer--in a word!"
His bright-winged intellect had outstripped her heavier, duller intelligence. She suddenly felt like a caterpillar on a cabbage-leaf, slow-moving, groping, but dimly conscious of a distant affinity with the jewel-winged butterfly hovering high in golden air....
"_Prayer_," she repeated dully, "do you believe in prayer?"
"Naturally!" said Sherbrand--"since I believe in God. Do not you? ..."
"I hardly----"
In the ensuing pause Patrine had a brief retrospective vision of the curate who had prepared her for Confirmation, and who had talked of the Almighty as though He were a crotchety but benevolent old man. And last time she had been to Church--a fashionably attended High Church in the West End--another curate in a black cassock and tufted biretta had preached about the 'Par of Card, the baptismal dar of Grace, the bar of flars,' in which our first parents dwelt in Eden, 'the fatal ar' in which they sinned, and the 'shar of tars' with which Eve lamented her fall.
"No," she said bluntly, "I don't think I believe in God at all now, though it sometimes seems as though there must be Somebody behind things!--Somebody who punishes--Somebody who laughs! As for a religion, I don't suppose I've ever had one. Oh, yes!--my religion is Aunt Lynette!"
A mental picture of Lynette, years ago in the Harley Street nursery, teaching a curly-headed baby Bawne to say his evening prayer, while a great galumphing girl stood in the doorway and looked and listened, rose up and brought with it the horrible choking sensation. She fought with it as Sherbrand said:
"I think you are speaking of Mrs. Saxham? Well, one must have a star to hitch one's waggon to. And she is a star--if ever I saw one! A woman with a face like a Donatello Madonna, or a tall lily growing in the garden-cloisters of some Italian mountain-convent, and who has the Faith,--ought to be able to teach you to believe in God! Why not ask her? I once knelt in a Church near her, and saw her praying. She seemed--very close to what Norman or someone else called the Eternal Verities."
"She will be nearer still," said Patrine with sudden, savage roughness, "if anything happens--if Bawne is killed! She will die of a broken heart!"
"Then why not pray," argued Sherbrand, "that she may get him back again? Why not try it? There's nothing else that helps so well!"
"Pray!" The tall girl stopped short and swung round on him, facing him. A moment since they had walked like lovers. Now the spell was broken--at all events, for the time.
"Pray--pray!" she mocked. "Am I a sneak?--to pray when I don't believe in prayer! And if I did believe, God--if He exists--would not hear me. Even the parsons own He has His favourites. I am not one of them.... I am one of His forgets!"
*CHAPTER XL*
*MACROMBIE IS SACKED*
Tall, lithe, vigorous, masterful, they confronted each other across the gulf that suddenly opened between them--the bottomless chasm that yawns between Faith and Unbelief.
In the fitful uncanny light, the darker side of Patrine started into sinister prominence. Her defiant face was masked by shadow, but the fierce vibrating voice and towering shape had something of the fallen angel. Had wide sable pinions sprung and bannered from her shoulders, Sherbrand would hardly have been surprised.
"Let us draw the line at that. If we are to be friends--and I would like us to be!--agree to it! But since you have what I have not--you would call it Faith, no doubt," he guessed the wide mouth curving in a jeering smile, "there is nothing to prevent _you_ from praying for Aunt Lynette and for Bawne too! Unless you are the kind of physician who draws the line at taking his own drugs!"
If she had thought to disconcert Sherbrand she erred. He said instantly:
"I give you my word of Honour that I will pray for them! But there is one other person much dearer to me than either. You don't ask me for _her_, but all the same..."
"You kind, dear boy! Pray for me all you want to!"
She was his big, smiling girl of the Milles Plaisirs, and the Pat young Bawne worshipped, as she stretched out her beautiful, massive arm and offered him a cordial hand.
"Shake, Mister! Making love to me one minute and bally-ragging me the next! ... Great Scott! Ah!--I've said it again--and I gave you my word I'd not!"
He took the hand in a close grasp, sought for the other and took it also....
"Thank you! Why, how you're shivering! You have nothing but that feather thing over your thin gown! Wait half a minute--I'll get you a wrap!"
He was gone in an instant, leaving her standing on the border-line of one of the oases of black-velvet shadow, swayed by the violence of her emotion as some tall young birch might have been shaken by the fury of a south-west gale.
His touch.... She had not dreamed.... Her head drooped, and a long sigh went fluttering after him into the darkness, like some night-moth whose wings are wrought of hues more gorgeous than the peacock butterfly's, whose scent is on the alert, and whose diamond eyes pierce the blackest midnight in search of the partner of its kind.
A footstep she knew approached. A familiar voice called her:
"Uncle Owen." The spell broke. Her mind leaped up alert and quivering. "Have you any news--of Bawne?"
"I have news!"
"Not----"
"Not the worst news," said Saxham's harsh voice, "but not--hopeful!"
"They are not coming back?" She strove to set her heel on the treacherous hope that he would say No! For how could she bring herself to desire the enemy's return. And yet the thought of Bawne was a stab of anguish in her bosom. What was the Doctor saying?
"The last definite intelligence received of them confirms the certainty that Captain von Herrnung is now over the North Sea. He alighted nowhere; that we have positively learned from many different news-centres. A tractor-monoplane answering to the description and carrying two-passengers passed the Bull Light on Spurn Head, at a few minutes before eight. The lighthouse-keeper signalled that bad weather might be expected. The pilot paid no attention. And later on----"
As Saxham spoke, with that strange hoarseness, Patrine took his arm tremblingly. Her heart plunged as though it would burst its prison as the Doctor went on:
"An hour or more later a Wireless came in. It had been sent on to Sir Roland from the Admiralty!--I will not puzzle you with technical details. But at 8.30 the officer on duty on the upper-bridge of the second-in-line of a Battle Squadron steaming through Northern Waters on the way to a Southern rendezvous, reported having heard an aeroplane pass overhead, crossing the course of the Squadron diagonally--apparently flying due east----"
Saxham added:
"The aviator made no signal for assistance. But the engine-beat told of trouble developing.... There is nothing to do but wait and hope!"
What had really happened on board H.M.S. _Rigasamos_, maintaining her appointed speed of fifteen knots, and her statutory two-cable-lengths from the stern of the Flagship ahead, and the bows of the sister-ship following her, had been that as the ship's band struck into _The Roast Beef of Old England_, and the Owner took his place at the head of the Ward-room mess-table, his Second in Command on the fore-bridge got a speaking-tube message from the Navigating Lieutenant on the upper-bridge, to say that the drone of an aeroplane, flying at about four hundred overhead, had been picked up by Warrant Officer So-and-So, of the gun and searchlight control, _per_ medium of the microphone.
The Second in Command called back through the voice-tube:
"An aeroplane.... You're sure? Could hear her racket myself, without assistance. But put it down to a Fleet Seaplane taking a flip round the Squadron for exercise, or one of the Goody-Two-Shoes from the R.N.A.S. Station at Rosforth, blown out to sea doing Coast Patrol."
An answer rumbled down the pipe:
"It was an aero all right, sir! The rattle of her floats 'ud have given away a Goody.... Travelling east against the side-drive of a forty-mile-an-hour north-west gale.... And with engine trouble well developed. Missing and back-firing like the gayest kind of hell!"
The Second in Command took his ear from the mouth of the speaking-tube, and with a glance that included the figures of his Sub-Lieutenant, the Midshipman, signalmen, and lookouts at their posts swung into the chart-house and logged the occurrence in the plain language of the sea. The clock told 8.35 P.M. as he finished, capped his fountain pen, and slipped it in an inside pocket, soliloquising: