"Until the man came back for her."

He thought her face was glowing duskily in the twilight.

"I wonder--wonder about so many things," she said softly.

"I believe you're a sleeping rebel yourself, Nance. If ever you do eat from that tree, there'll be no holding you. You won't wait to be driven forth!"

"And you are, a wicked young man--that kind never comes back in the stories."

"That may be no jest, Nance. I should surely be wicked, if I thought it brings the happiness it's said to. Under this big sky I am free from any moral law that doesn't come from right here inside me. Can you realize that? Do I seem bad for saying it? What they call the laws of G.o.d are nothing. I suspect them all, and I'll make every one of them find its authority in me before I obey it."

"It sounds--well--unpromising, Bernal."

"I told you it was serious, Nance. I see but one law clearly--I am bound to want happiness. Every man is bound always to want happiness, Nance. No man can possibly want anything else. That's the only thing under heaven I'm sure of at this moment--the one universal law under which we all make our mistakes--good people and bad alike?"

"But, Bernal, you wouldn't be bad--not really bad?"

"Well, Nance, I've a vague, loose sort of notion that one isn't really compelled to be bad in order to be happy right here on earth. I know the Church rather intimates this, but I suspect that vice is not the delicious thing the Church implies it to be."

"You make me afraid, Bernal--"

"But if I do come back, Nance, having toiled?"

"--and you make me wonder."

"I think that's all either of us can do, Nance, and I must go. I have to say good-bye to Clytie yet. The poor soul is convinced that I have become a Unitarian and that there's a conspiracy to keep the horrible truth from her. She says grandad evaded her questions about it. She doesn't dream there are depths below Unitarianism. I must try to convince her that I'm not _that_ bad--that I may have a weak head and a defective heart, but not that. Nance--girl!"

He sat forward in the chair, reaching toward her. She turned her face away, but their hands trembled toward each other, faltering fearfully, tremulously, into a clasp that became at once firm and knowing when it felt itself--as if it opened their blind eyes to a world of life and light without end, a world in which they two were the first to live.

Lingeringly, with slow, regretting fingers, the hands fell apart, to tighten eagerly again into the clasp that made them one flesh.

When at last they were put asunder both arose. The girl patted from her skirts the hammock's little disarranging touches, while the youth again made the careful folds in his hat. Then they shook hands very stiffly, and went opposite ways out of a formal garden of farewell; the youth to sate that beautiful, crude young l.u.s.t for living--too fierce to be tamed save by its own failures, hearing only the sagas of action, of form and colour and sound made one by heat--the song Nature sings unendingly--but heard only by young ears.

The girl went back to the Crealock piazza to hear of one better set in the grace of faith.

"That elder young Linford," began Aunt Bell, ceasing to rock, "has a future. You know I talked to him about the Episcopal Church, strongly advising him to enter it. For all my broad views"--Aunt Bell sighed here--"I really and truly believe, child, that no one not an Episcopalian is ever thoroughly at ease in this world."

Aunt Bell was beautifully, girlishly plump, with a sophisticated air of smartness--of coquetry, indeed--as to her exquisitely small hands and feet; and though a certain suggestion of melancholy in her tone harmonised with the carefully dressed gray hair and with her apparent years, she nevertheless breathed airs of perfect comfort.

"Of course this young chap could see at once," she went on, "what immensely better form it is than Calvinism. _Dear_ me! Imagine one being a Presbyterian in this day!" It seemed here that the soul of Aunt Bell poised a disdainful lorgnette before its eyes, through which to survey in a fitting manner the unmodish spectacle of Calvinism.

"And he tells me that he has his grandfather's consent. Really, my dear, with his physique and voice and manner that fellow undoubtedly has a future in the Episcopal Church. I dare say he'll be wearing the lawn sleeves and rochet of a bishop before he's forty."

"Did it ever occur to you, Aunt Bell, that he is--well, just the least trifle--I was going to say, vain of his appearance--but I'll make it 'self-conscious'?"

"Child, don't you know that a young man, really beautiful without being effeminate, is bound to be conscious of it. But vain he is not. It mortifies him dreadfully, though he pretends to make light of it."

"But why speak of it so often? He was telling me to-day of an elderly Englishman who addressed him on the train, telling him what a striking resemblance he bore to the Prince of Wales when he was a youth."

"Quite so; and he told me yesterday of hearing a lady in the drug-store ask the clerk who 'that handsome stranger' was. But, my dear, he tells them as jokes on himself, and he's so sheepish about it. And he's such a splendid orator. I persuaded him to-day to read me one of his college papers. I don't seem to recall much of the substance, but it was full of the most beautiful expressions. One, I remember, begins, 'Oh, of all the flowers that swing their golden censers in the parterre of the human heart, none so rich, so rare as this one flower of--' you know I've forgotten what it was--Civilisation or Truth or something. Anyway, whatever it was, it had like a giant engine rolled the car of Civilisation out from the maze of antiquity, where she now waits to be freighted with the precious fruits of living genius, and so on."

"That seems impressive and--mixed, perhaps?"

"Of course I can't remember things in their order, but it was about the essential nature of man being gregarious, and truth is a potent factor in civilisation, and something would be a tear on the world's cold cheek to make it burn forever--isn't that striking? And Greece had her Athens and her Corinth, but where now is Greece with her proud cities? And Rome, Imperial Rome, with all her pomp and splendour. Of course I can't recall his words. There was a beautiful reference to America, I remember, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the lakes of the frozen North to the ever-tepid waters of the sunny South--and a perfectly splendid pa.s.sage about the world is and ever has been illiberal. Witness the lonely lamp of Erasmus, the cell of Galileo, the dying bed of Pascal, the scaffold of Sidney--Sidney who, I wonder?"

"Has it taken you that way, Aunt Bell?"

"And France, the saddest example of a nation without a G.o.d, and succeeding generations will only add a new l.u.s.tre to our present resplendent glory, bound together by the most sacred ties of goodwill; independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, and it was fraught with vital interest to every thinking man--"

"Spare me, Aunt Bell--it's like Coney Island, with all those carrousels going around and five bands playing at once!"

"But his peroration! I can't pretend to give you any idea of its beauties--"

"Don't!"

"Get him to declaim it for you. It begins in the most impressive language about his standing on top of the Rocky Mountains one day and placing his feet upon a solid rock, he saw a tempest gathering in the valley far below. So he watches the storm--in his own language, of course--while all around him is sunshine. And such should be our aim in life, to plant our feet on the solid rock of--how provoking! I can't remember what the rock was--anyway, we are to bid those in the valley below to cease their bickerings and come up to the rock--I think it was Intellectual Greatness--No!--Unselfishness--that's it. And the t.i.tle of the paper was a sermon in itself--'The Temporal Advantage of the Individual No Norm of Morality.' Isn't that a beautiful thought in itself? Nancy, that chap will waste himself until he has a city parish."

There was silence for a little time before Aunt Bell asked, as one having returned to baser matters:

"I wonder if the jacket of my gray suit came back from that clumsy tailor.

I forgot to ask Ellen if an express package came."

And Nancy, whose look was bent far into the dusk, answered:

"Oh, I wonder if he will come back!"

BOOK THREE

The Age of Faith

[Ill.u.s.tration]

CHAPTER I

THE PERVERSE BEHAVIOUR OF AN OLD MAN AND A YOUNG MAN

When old Allan Delcher slept with his fathers--being so found in the big chair, with the worn, leather-bound Bible open in his lap--the revived but still tender faith of Aunt Bell Hardwick was bitten as by frost. And this though the Bible had lain open at that psalm in which David is said to describe the corruption of a natural man--a psalm beginning, "The fool hath said in his heart, 'There is no G.o.d.'"

For it straightway appeared that the dead man had in life done a perverse and inexplicable thing, to the bitter amazement of those who had learned to trust him. On the day after he sent a blasphemous grandson from his door he had called for Squire c.u.mpston, announcing to the family his intention to make an entirely new will--a thing for which there seemed to be a certain sad necessity.

When he could no longer be reproached it transpired that he had left "to Allan Delcher Linford, son of one Clayton Linford," a beggarly pittance of five thousand dollars; and "to my beloved grandson, Bernal Linford, I give, devise and bequeath the residue of my estate, both real and personal."