When he reached home he found all the family at supper, except Harry, who after a fortnight’s doubtful virtue had, on his brother’s last night at home, escapaded off with two young Sindens from Little Worge. Mrs. Beatup was inclined to be tearful about it. “Wot we’ll do when you’re agone, Tom, Lord only knows.” Of late she had taken to treating Tom’s departure as a voluntary, not to say capricious, act, and her frequent lamentations were gabbled with reproach, vague hints that if [49] he had liked he could have prevented the catastrophe—precisely how, she never told him.

Mus’ Beatup was not drunk. Only a negative statement could describe him, for neither was he sober. An alcoholic Laodicean, neither hot nor cold, he lolled over the head of the table, and argued with Nell, the pupil-teacher, on the utter futility of the Church of England, or, indeed, any sort of Church. It was characteristic of Nell that she would argue with her father, drunk or sober. She had championed her causes against a far less responsible adversary than she had before her to-day. Her cheeks were pink with refutation, and her little sighs and exclamations and chipped beginnings of phrases popped like corks round Mus’ Beatup’s droning eloquence—that eloquence which so filled Tom with admiration and made him boast of his father’s book-learning among the farms.

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face, and has all bin proved over and over again as there wuren’t no such persons as Adam and Eve. There’s a chap called Darwin’s proved as we’re the offsprings of monkeys, and a chap called Bradlaugh ’s proved as we all come out of stuff called prottoplasm—so where are your Adam and Eve, I’d lik to know?”

“But, father, as if it mattered. The Church....”

“The Church is there to prove as the world was maade in six days, when it’s bin proved over and over again as it hasn’t.”

“The Church is there for no such thing—it’s——”

“I tell you it’s bin proved as it’s there for that very purpose.”

“Who’s proved it?”

“Darwin and Huxley and Bradlaugh, and a lot more clever chaps.”

[50]

“But they lived years ago, and it’s——”

“Not so many years ago as your Adam and Eve, and yet you go and believe in them....”

“I don’t. Not............