His tone, and the use of the girl's name, braced Mrs. Kestern. "Oh, Paul," she cried, "you knew of it, don't pretend you didn't! How you could have acted so behind our backs I can't think. Poor, poor girl! Oh, you had better go now. It would be better for us all. May our Father have mercy on us, and may you be spared the agony that your parents know."
His mother's action brought Paul to his senses. He looked from one to the other of them in consternation. "You don't mean it," he cried, "surely you don't mean it!"
"Don't go like that, Paul," sobbed Mrs. Kestern, breaking down again, "I can't bear it."
Paul pulled himself together. "But, mother, father," he said, "this is sheer madness. We are not living in the Middle Ages. This isn't melodrama. I—I differ from you in religion, I know; I can't help it; I must do what seems right to me. But surely, because of that——"
His father opened the study door. Broken and old, there was a certain dignity now in his face. "Paul," he said, "we talk different tongues, but nothing alters the fact that you have turned utterly from the religion of your parents to serve another. 'As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.' You have no place here. Go now, lest we say in our anger what ought not to be said."
Paul looked again heavily round the room. "You have said it already," he replied, and left the house.
(3)
Paul walked down the street like a man in a dream. Once he stopped, turned, and walked a few paces back, telling himself that it could not be true, that it was too theatrical to be true. But his father's face rose before him as he went, and still more the terror of his mother's tears. He recalled the history of a friend of his in training for the Baptist ministry, who had decided he could not accept the doctrine of the deity of Christ and had been cursed by his widowed mother and turned into the street with eighteenpence in his pocket. Somehow it had never seemed possible that it could happen to him. Yet, in the throes of the Catholic stage of his soul's pilgrimage, it had been plain enough that something of that sort would happen if he made his submission to the Church. Once more, the horror of his parents' grief as he had seen it when he knelt in Father Vassall's chapel gripped his heart. And now, and now, suddenly, so ironically, so futilely, so childishly, this thing had swept down upon him. He, Paul Kestern, had been turned from his father's house. The thing was true.
Then, into the stream of his thoughts, drifted the memory of what had been said of Edith Thornton. Of all the incredible happenings of an incredible morning, that, perhaps, was ultimately one of the most incredible. Edith a Catholic! He thought of her face under the lamplight in Lambeth Court—oh, incredible! But one moment: he thought of her prayer under the pines at Keswick, of her answer to his dilemma after his return from Thurloe End. Gradually he began to piece together the mosaic of her simple reasoning, her resolute faith, her ardent love; it was exactly of such souls that Catholic saints are made. That, then, had been the inner meaning of her sorrow over his going to Fordham and of her silence thereafter. This resolution, this terrible domestic retribution, had come crashing down on her head, and she, too, had been driven out alone.
Once more the flame of anger flickered in his heart. As he thought it over, his indignation grew. He pictured her, as he loved best to do, in the quiet neat simplicity of that brown dress of hers, with her clear, trustful eyes. And they had turned her out, had they, to what, he should like to know? Good God, and this was in England to-day! He saw Mr. Thornton, rotund, bald, very respectable, and realised that if, at bottom, he was as bigoted a Protestant as any of them, business was mixed up with religion. The man had never really loved his daughter, Paul thought, he, with his commercial soul, his respectable tradesman's boot-licking servility, his front pew in the side aisle never empty on a Sunday. And as he thought of it all, he came to a resolution. He gripped his stick more firmly and turned off to Edward Street.