"Well, sir, she outs with it one evening, six months or so ago it was. Says she's going to be received into the Church—those were her very words. Going to be received into the Church! It made me very hot, Mr. Kestern, it did. No member of our family has ever been a Catholic, thank God, and I said as I wouldn't have a child of mine a Catholic in a good church-going evangelical house like this. Said it out plain and straight, I did. And she ups and walks out of the door that very night."
"You mean you turned her out, I suppose."
"Well, sir, I was hot, I admit. She provoked me, too, knowing better'n her father. 'If you can't go to my church, out you go,' I said. 'You mean that, father?' she asks. 'Yes,' I said, standing on my dignity, and she just walks off. Her mother in tears, too. 'You go to communion with me, or you're no daughter of mine,' that was what I said, Mr. Kestern, and your father, he supported me in it afterwards."
"And you turned her out that night, as she was?"
"As she was, she walked out, Mr. Kestern. Went straight to the Catholic Convent, I believe. Her mother saw her there once. And where she is now, I don't know. No, I don't know. She was going to be a nun, she said, and it seems, she being over-age, nobody can't stop her. If there was a law in this so-called Christian land, Mr. Kestern——"
Paul got up. The look on his face checked the photographer. "I understand, Mr. Thornton," he said, "despite your words. Your Christianity was such that you drove your daughter from your house for the sake of her new faith. I should hardly have thought it possible, but I fear I understand only too well. And I will tell you what I think of it, Mr. Thornton. It was a cowardly, mean, base, unchristian thing of you to do, and that Jesus, in whose name you did it, would never have lent his authority to any such thing. It is utterly foreign to his gospel. As for Edith, I hope to God she knows her own mind, that is all, and in my own sorrow, I can only find heart to be glad that at least she is not here. Good-day." And Paul, not waiting for the other to recover, walked out of the shop.
At the corner of Edward Street and Wellington Road, scarcely reasoning as to what he was about to do, he hailed a cab and drove to the convent. He had bearded the nun who opened the door and was in the parlour waiting to see the Reverend Mother before he realised the futility of his action. Still, he was there now, and he looked curiously about him. It was while he waited in that parlour that he came to a realisation of how far from the religion it represented he had moved. Plainly furnished with a table, a few stiff chairs, a foreign-looking so-called couch with an antimacassar, and a cheap bookshelf with old-fashioned books in it, an oleograph of Pius IX. hung over the mantelpiece, beaming blandly, half a crucifix behind him. A Madonna in coloured plaster stood on a shelf, and on the mantel-piece at one end a cast of Christ pointing to his bleeding dripping heart, and at the other another of St. Theresa gazing seraphically upwards. A crucifix stood between them, the Christ meeting St. Theresa's gaze with agonised eyes, white girt about the waist with a heavy plaster loin-cloth. The table was covered with a faded red cloth. It held an inkstand and a blotter. In the corner a prie-Dieu was tucked out of the way.
The Reverend Mother was kind and polite. Did he come from the family? No, and Paul hardly cared to explain. Well, of course, he could not, in any case, see Sister Edith. Nor was she there in fact. She had been admitted to the novitiate, and, during training, the rules were strict. She could not promise that a letter would be given; it depended on the letter. Paul understood that it would be read. The sister was very happy, however, much happier than she had been on the night she arrived alone and in tears, turned out from her father's house....
That was all, of course. He might have known it. But one thing after another.... Paul Kestern suddenly took stock of his own heart.
Where, indeed, was he even to sleep that night? In the street, he turned the question over. And afterwards, what was he to do? Manning was at Cambridge; well, Fordham.... But suddenly he hated Fordham. He saw it, proud, aloof, and utterly failing to understand such troubles as were his. Tressor, too, would be there, and Paul shrank from Tressor's dignified quiet kindliness. He suddenly knew himself to be alone. He knew himself to be beaten, bruised, lonely; yes, he, with the morning's paper full of his triumph. Apples of Sodom.... For this he had made the great exchange. This was what it all came to: he was down and out and alone. Ursula?