do you thank God? Do you think, too, that I should have been unhappy with Stephen?"
Stéphanie gazed at her with an almost fanatical horror in her pale eyes.
"That you can ask the question, even, poor child! I knew well that you realized in no way the peril encompassing you, but for that very reason it was the greater. Zella, three years ago you were admitted into the Church. Did it then mean nothing to you?"
Zella was confounded. It shot through her mind with an unescapable conviction that in those three years her Catholicism had become an element which counted for nothing in her life.
"But—mixed marriages are allowed," she faltered.
"Allowed! Yes; but would it have mattered to you had they been forbidden, child? I do not judge you— how can I?—but how can I not have seen, during these months I have lived with you, that your faith is nothing to you? And yet, Zella, it is the only thing in this world that is real—the only thing that will matter to you when you come to die. God snowed His love for your soul when He called you into His Church: have you forgotten it already?"
"No—no," stammered Zella, hardly knowing what she said. "I know I am not very pious; but indeed— indeed "Her voice died away, in the utter lack of conviction that overwhelmed her.
Stéphanie gazed at her with sorrowful eyes that grew tender.
"Poor little Zella! But it is never too late for le bon Dieu, and He understands you very well, even though no one else should do so. See all that He has done for you already, and now He has saved you from a marriage that might have risked the loss of your faith altogether! There can be no despair when He is there—always the same, always ready for you."
Zella heard without understanding. The words were present to her mind, but awoke no response in her. She gazed dumbly at Stéphanie.
"Forgive me for speaking to you so," said Stéphanie humbly. "There are others to advise or help you far better, should you wish it. What can I do but pray for you, dearest?"
The unwonted term of endearment suddenly touched Zella profoundly. She rose to her feet..
"Oh, pray for me, Tante Stéphanie."
"I do—I do, daily and nightly."
Stéphanie rose too, wiping a most unaccustomed moisture from her glasses.
"Maman would have reproached me for making you a scene when you are already tired and distressed," she remarked in tones that strove to be matter-of-fact. "I do not wish too vividly to recall your good Aunt Marianne, Zella, but would it not, in truth, be as well if you were now to rest for a little while?"
"I think I am going out, perhaps," said Zella, gazing wistfully into the garden, where the afternoon shadows were already lengthening across the grass.
"Au revoir, then," said Stéphanie, achieving the smile that proclaimed an end to all deeper significances between them.
But Zella still looked at her with young, despairing eyes.
"You are going on praying for me always?"
"But always," said Stéphanie, still smiling, but with gentle conviction in her tones. "See how I have always been answered. It was certainly my poor prayers," she added simply, "that helped to save you from a Protestant marriage."
Zella passed quietly through the open French window on to the terrace.
She went down the steps where she had sat with Stephen, and reached the shade of a great ilex-tree at the bottom of the lower terrace.
She leant against it, physically tired out, and closed her eyes. Slowly the remembrance came to her of days that seemed infinitely remote. Her childhood, when she and James and Muriel had played together under the ilex-tree, and she had often and often quarrelled with the others, and rushed away, angry and miserable, to cry by herself. She remembered vaguely that her mother had always taken her part and comforted her, and she reflected dreamily, "Mother always understood. Would everything have been different if she had not died?" and then told herself that the very question was part of a pose.
She remembered the days after her mother's death, days when she had learnt and despised the standard of values that stood for reality in the Lloyd-Evans household, and had yet held fast to them in a passionate desire to conform. Then the longing for escape had become too strong for her, and she had sought a refuge with her father, only to find that the gaze he turned upon her was as unseeing as it was loving. She was not, never had been, his reality. A memory stood for that, and a philosophy of which she knew nothing.
She had measured time, then, by her precocious sense of the dramatic and by indulgence in the crude emotionalism of the beginner.
Then had come her convent days. Alien standards again, and a passionate attempt to contort her vision to the level of her surroundings. It was not religion that she had craved, not the faith that was the whole solution to the riddle of life for those who held it; but the personal sympathy, and the human comfort of affection from those with whom her path had lain for such a very little way.
Had it been worth while?
She remembered the eagerness with which she had acclaimed a new point of view of which Alison St. Craye had been the herald, and sought for a means of self-expression, playing with all those things which the world has agreed to call Art. But it was not Art that she had sought, after all, only the friendship of Alison St. Craye, which she had ceased to desire, and had derided herself for desiring, when Stephen Pontisbury had become a factor in her life.
But, even as she remembered, Zella knew that already Stephen had become unreal, and formed part of her living consciousness only as the vague gain of a new experience lying behind her.
"Will nothing ever be real to me?"
She thought with a bewilderment that at least was wholly sincere, "What is Truth?"
She thought of James Lloyd-Evans, to whom Truth had become a mere question of relative values, until much that makes life endurable had been eliminated from his rigid philosophy. Strangely dispassionate and impersonal, he would watch with understanding eyes that, though they might not condemn, were as yet not awakened to the compassion that alone can draw the weak into the way of strength.
She thought of the old Baronne, with her curt "(Je ne se fait pas "—the principle which had guided her through a life of seventy odd years, and which had been only the expression of the unfailing instinct left by the bravest and noblest blood of France in the generations behind her.
She thought of Stéphanie, mild and colourless, yet awakened to a fanatical ardour at the touch of her childlike and incredibly narrow creed. God was Truth, and Truth was the Catholic Church, for Stéphanie, and only the things of this world were unreal.
They had, one and all, Conviction at the back of them. Zella, afraid and alone, had none. The only equipment that could lend her courage for the encounter that was to come had been denied her.
For a moment she knew it, and a despairing tremor seized her.
What was it?
Again and again she had tampered with something real, and to her it had not been real.
Friendship, faith, work, love—the things that stood for Truth
