Read Theirs Was The Kingdom for Free Online

and plunged all England into a welter of doubt, but for himself he did not give a damn about the authenticity of the Scriptures, or whether he was cast in the image of God or an equatorial ape. His watchword, now and always, had been “sufficient unto the day…,” and the only parable that made commercial sense to him was that one about the steward who buried his talents. Life was for living and money was there to be made and spent on comfort and material progress. And after comfort and progress, he supposed, compassion, so that he saw himself as occupying a halfway house between the advocates of laissez-faire and the swarm of clamant reformers in which his adopted daughter had enlisted. Change was inevitable but it would stem from capital, not consciences. Recent history proved as much. Shaftesbury, crusader extraordinare, wouldn’t have saved a single seven-year-old from slow death in the mines and factories if he had not been able to launch his crusades from a base of privilege and wealth.
    The Guard of Honour’s volley, when it came, startled everyone but Adam, whose eye had been on the angled carbines and contemplating—of all things— the curious phenomenon of smokeless powder. A volley like that, fired over a grave twenty years ago, would have produced six puff-clouds of sulphurous gas. Now there was nothing to be seen above the raised barrels but a thin film of impurity that hung for a matter of seconds in the keen, frosty air. He saw the massed ranks of the mourners waver and then the gleaming barrels came down in concert, and the chaplain folded the Union Jack and tucked it under his surplice, as though he feared it might be mislaid in the dispersal and he would be asked to account for it by his quartermaster at Hythe. He looked at Henrietta again, surprised to find her dry-eyed, and then at George and Giles, standing close together, looking down into the open grave. Their dissimilarity struck him again, the older boy relaxed but absorbed, as though witnessing an interesting bit of pageantry, his younger brother caught up in the glum finality of the ritual. He thought, idly, “What the devil do any of us know about the chemistry of the body? Two lads, with common parents and common ancestors going back to the year dot, but they come from different planets”; and then his daughter Stella touched his elbow, and his sense of detachment left him to make room for sympathy, for she was shedding the tears he had expected of her mother and seemed, indeed, devastated by the ordeal.
    He remembered then that she too had been very close to the old man before she realised she was pretty and had a flair for fine clothes and twittery small talk, so that she learned to think of herself as the most eligible filly in the county. Well, that was all behind her now, he supposed, taking some satisfaction in the fact that she had turned instinctively to him for comfort, instead of drooping on the arm of that sulky-mouthed husband she had cornered. He experienced a fleeting, insignificant qualm as he looked over her shoulder at Lester Moncton-Price, noting an impassivity amounting almost to boredom in the young coxcomb’s expressionless eyes, and the immobility of the fleshy red lips—woman’s lips, he thought of them—but then Henrietta was patting her, and George was piloting mother and sister to the path leading to the lych-gate, and he heard Henrietta say, in a tightly controlled voice, “He wouldn’t want you to feel sad, Stella… I confess I don’t, although I thought I should. He had a good life, and a very happy one with us. Thanks to Papa…”
    It was generous of her to say that, he thought, especially when it was she rather than he who had done the fussing over the last few years. Then he understood her line of reasoning. Comfort and security, of the kind the old man had relished, would have been denied him in his old age had his only son lacked the initiative to slough off that fusty Swann military tradition and