Part 34 (2/2)

Scrope looked at the glowing face of the young man.

”Is this taking care of her?” he asked.

”If you hadn't telegraphed--!” she cried with a threat in her voice, and left it at that.

”Perhaps I feel about her--rather as if she was as strong as I am--in those ways. Perhaps I shouldn't. I could hardly endure myself, Sir--cut off from her. And a sort of blank. Nothing said.”

”You want to work out your own salvation,” said Scrope to his daughter.

”No one else can,” she answered. ”I'm--I'm grown up.”

”Even if it hurts?”

”To live is to be hurt somehow,” she said. ”This--This--” She flashed her love. She intimated by a gesture that it is better to be stabbed with a clean knife than to be suffocated or poisoned or to decay....

Scrope turned his eyes to the young man again. He liked him. He liked the modelling of his mouth and chin and the line of his brows. He liked him altogether. He p.r.o.nounced his verdict slowly. ”I suppose, after all,” he said, ”that this is better than the tender solicitude of a safe and prosperous middleaged man. Eleanor, my dear, I've been thinking to-day that a father who stands between his children and hards.h.i.+p, by doing wrong, may really be doing them a wrong. You are a dear girl to me. I won't stand between you two. Find your own salvation.” He got up.

”I go west,” he said, ”presently. You, I think, go east.”

”I can a.s.sure you, Sir,” the young man began.

Scrope held his hand out. ”Take your life in your own way,” he said.

He turned to Eleanor. ”Talk as you will,” he said.

She clasped his hand with emotion. Then she turned to the waiting young man, who saluted.

”You'll come back to supper?” Scrope said, without thinking out the implications of that invitation.

She a.s.sented as carelessly. The fact that she and her lover were to go, with their meeting legalized and blessed, excluded all other considerations. The two young people turned to each other.

Scrope stood for a moment or so and then sat down again.

For a time he could think only of Eleanor.... He watched the two young people as they went eastward. As they walked their shoulders and elbows b.u.mped amicably together.

(10)

Presently he sought to resume the interrupted thread of his thoughts.

He knew that he had been dealing with some very tremendous and urgent problem when Eleanor had appeared. Then he remembered that Eleanor at the time of her approach had seemed to be a solution rather than an interruption. Well, she had her own life. She was making her own life.

Instead of solving his problems she was solving her own. G.o.d bless those dear grave children! They were nearer the elemental things than he was.

That eastward path led to Victoria--and thence to a very probable death.

The lad was in the infantry and going straight into the trenches.

Love, death, G.o.d; this war was bringing the whole world back to elemental things, to heroic things. The years of comedy and comfort were at an end in Europe; the age of steel and want was here. And he had been thinking--What had he been thinking?

He mused, and the scheme of his perplexities reshaped itself in his mind. But at that time he did not realize that a powerful new light was falling upon it now, cast by the tragic illumination of these young lovers whose love began with a parting. He did not see how reality had come to all things through that one intense reality. He reverted to the question as he had put it to himself, before first he recognized Eleanor. Did he believe in G.o.d? Should he go on with this Sunderbund adventure in which he no longer believed? Should he play for safety and comfort, trusting to G.o.d's toleration? Or go back to his family and warn them of the years of struggle and poverty his renunciation cast upon them?

Somehow Lady Sunderbund's chapel was very remote and flimsy now, and the hards.h.i.+ps of poverty seemed less black than the hards.h.i.+p of a youthful death.

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