"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