All Roads Lead to Calvary Part 13

She forced him gently back into his chair, and seated herself upon the floor between his knees. "What were you thinking of when I came in?" she asked. "You weren't asleep, were you?"

"No," he answered. "Not that sort of sleep." She could not see his face. But she guessed his meaning.

"Am I very like her?" she asked.

"Yes," he answered. "Marvellously like her as she used to be: except for just one thing. Perhaps that will come to you later. I thought, for the moment, as you stood there by the door . . . " He did not finish the sentence.

"Tell me about her," she said. "I never knew she had been an actress."

He did not ask her how she had learnt it. "She gave it up when we were married," he said. "The people she would have to live among would have looked askance at her if they had known. There seemed no reason why they should."

"How did it all happen?" she persisted. "Was it very beautiful, in the beginning?" She wished she had not added that last. The words had slipped from her before she knew.

"Very beautiful," he answered, "in the beginning."

"It was my fault," he went on, "that it was not beautiful all through. I ought to have let her take up her work again, as she wished to, when she found what giving it up meant to her. The world was narrower then than it is now; and I listened to the world. I thought it another voice."

"It's difficult to tell, isn't it?" she said. "I wonder how one can?"

He did not answer; and they sat for a time in silence.

"Did you ever see her act?" asked Joan.

"Every evening for about six months," he answered. A little flame shot up and showed a smile upon his face.

"I owe to her all the charity and tenderness I know. She taught it to me in those months. I might have learned more if I had let her go on teaching. It was the only way she knew."

Joan watched her as gradually she shaped herself out of the shadows: the poor, thin, fretful lady of the ever restless hands, with her bursts of jealous pa.s.sion, her long moods of sullen indifference: all her music turned to waste.

"How did she come to fall in love with you?" asked Joan. "I don't mean to be uncomplimentary, Dad." She laughed, taking his hand in hers and stroking it. "You must have been ridiculously handsome, when you were young. And you must always have been strong and brave and clever. I can see such a lot of women falling in love with you. But not the artistic woman."

"It wasn't so incongruous at the time," he answered. "My father had sent me out to America to superintend a contract. It was the first time I had ever been away from home, though I was nearly thirty; and all my pent-up youth rushed out of me at once. It was a harum-scarum fellow, mad with the joy of life, that made love to her; not the man who went out, nor the man who came back. It was at San Francisco that I met her. She was touring the Western States; and I let everything go to the wind and followed her. It seemed to me that Heaven had opened up to me. I fought a duel in Colorado with a man who had insulted her. The law didn't run there in those days; and three of his hired gunmen, as they called them, held us up that night in the train and gave her the alternative of going back with them and kissing him or seeing me dead at her feet. I didn't give her time to answer, nor for them to finish. It seemed a fine death anyhow, that. And I'd have faced h.e.l.l itself for the chance of fighting for her. Though she told me afterwards that if I'd died she'd have gone back with them, and killed him."

Joan did not speak for a time. She could see him grave--a little pompous, in his Sunday black, his footsteps creaking down the stone-flagged aisle, the silver-edged collecting bag held stiffly in his hand.

"Couldn't you have saved a bit, Daddy?" she asked, "of all that wealth of youth--just enough to live on?"

"I might," he answered, "if I had known the value of it. I found a cable waiting for me in New York. My father had been dead a month; and I had to return immediately."

"And so you married her and took her drum away from her," said Joan. "Oh, the thing G.o.d gives to some of us," she explained, "to make a little noise with, and set the people marching."

The little flame died out. She could feel his body trembling.

"But you still loved her, didn't you, Dad?" she asked. "I was very little at the time, but I can just remember. You seemed so happy together. Till her illness came."

"It was more than love," he answered. "It was idolatry. G.o.d punished me for it. He was a hard G.o.d, my G.o.d."

She raised herself, putting her hands upon his shoulders so that her face was very close to his. "What has become of Him, Dad?" she said. She spoke in a cold voice, as one does of a false friend.

"I do not know," he answered her. "I don't seem to care."

"He must be somewhere," she said: "the living G.o.d of love and hope: the G.o.d that Christ believed in."

"They were His last words, too," he answered: "'My G.o.d, my G.o.d, why hast Thou forsaken me?'"

"No, not His last," said Joan: "'Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.' Love was Christ's G.o.d. He will help us to find Him."

Their arms were about one another. Joan felt that a new need had been born in her: the need of loving and of being loved. It was good to lay her head upon his breast and know that he was glad of her coming.

He asked her questions about herself. But she could see that he was tired; so she told him it was too important a matter to start upon so late. She would talk about herself to-morrow. It would be Sunday.

"Do you still go to the chapel?" she asked him a little hesitatingly.

"Yes," he answered. "One lives by habit."

"It is the only Temple I know," he continued after a moment. "Perhaps G.o.d, one day, will find me there."

He rose and lit the gas, and a letter on the mantelpiece caught his eye.

"Have you heard from Arthur?" he asked, suddenly turning to her.

"No. Not since about a month," she answered. "Why?"

"He will be pleased to find you here, waiting for him," he said with a smile, handing her the letter. "He will be here some time to-morrow."

Arthur Allway was her cousin, the son of a Nonconformist Minister. Her father had taken him into the works and for the last three years he had been in Egypt, helping in the laying of a tramway line. He was in love with her: at least so they all told her; and his letters were certainly somewhat committal. Joan replied to them--when she did not forget to do so--in a studiously sisterly vein; and always reproved him for unnecessary extravagance whenever he sent her a present. The letter announced his arrival at Southampton. He would stop at Birmingham, where his parents lived, for a couple of days, and be in Liverpool on Sunday evening, so as to be able to get straight to business on Monday morning.

Joan handed back the letter. It contained nothing else.

"It only came an hour or two ago," her father explained. "If he wrote to you by the same post, you may have left before it arrived."

"So long as he doesn't think that I came down specially to see him, I don't mind," said Joan.

They both laughed. "He's a good lad," said her father.

They kissed good night, and Joan went up to her own room. She found it just as she had left it. A bunch of roses stood upon the dressing-table.

Her father would never let anyone cut his roses but himself.

Young Allway arrived just as Joan and her father had sat down to supper.

A place had been laid for him. He flushed with pleasure at seeing her; but was not surprised.

"I called at your diggings," he said. "I had to go through London. They told me you had started. It is good of you."

"No, it isn't," said Joan. "I came down to see Dad. I didn't know you were back." She spoke with some asperity; and his face fell.

"How are you?" she added, holding out her hand. "You've grown quite good- looking. I like your moustache." And he flushed again with pleasure.

He had a sweet, almost girlish face, with delicate skin that the Egyptian sun had deepened into ruddiness; with soft, dreamy eyes and golden hair.

He looked lithe and agile rather than strong. He was shy at first, but once set going, talked freely, and was interesting.