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The Christian: A Story

by Sir Hall Caine · English · Gutenberg #8407 · 1,096,515 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Christian: A Story

Author: Sir Hall Caine


        
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8407]
                Most recently updated: March 9, 2018

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHRISTIAN: A STORY ***




Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Tiffany Vergon, Thomas
Berger, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team








THE CHRISTIAN

_A STORY_

By Hall Caine

_Author of The Manxman_

       *       *       *       *       *

_The period of the story is the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
No particular years are intended. The time occupied by the incidents of
the first Book is about six months, of the Second Book about six months,
of the Third Book about six months; then there is an interval of half a
year, and the time occupied by the incidents of the Fourth Book is about
six weeks. An Author's Note will be found at the end._

       *       *       *       *       *




THE CHRISTIAN.




FIRST BOOK.

_THE OUTER WORLD_.




I.

On the morning of the 9th of May, 18--, three persons important to
this story stood among the passengers on the deck of the Isle of Man
steamship _Tynwald_ as she lay by the pier at Douglas getting up steam
for the passage to Liverpool. One of these was an old clergyman of
seventy, with a sweet, mellow, childlike face; another was a young man
of thirty, also a clergyman; the third was a girl of twenty. The older
clergyman wore a white neckcloth about his throat, and was dressed in
rather threadbare black of a cut that had been more common twenty years
before; the younger clergyman wore a Roman collar, a long clerical
coat, and a stiff, broad-brimmed hat with a cord and tassel. They stood
amidships, and the captain, coming out of his room to mount the bridge,
saluted them as he passed.

“Good morning, Mr. Storm.”

The young clergyman returned the salutation with a slight bow and the
lifting of his hat.

“Morning to you, Parson Quayle.”

The old clergyman answered cheerily, “Oh, good morning, captain; good
morning.”

There was the usual inquiry about the weather outside, and drawing up to
answer it, the captain came eye to eye with the girl.

“So this is the granddaughter, is it?”

“Yes, this is Glory,” said Parson Quayle. “She's leaving the old
grandfather at last, captain, and I'm over from Peel to set her off, you
see.”

“Well, the young lady has got the world before her--at her feet, I
ought to say.--You're looking as bright and fresh as the morning, Miss
Quayle.”

The captain carried off his compliment with a breezy laugh, and went
along to the bridge. The girl had heard him only in a momentary flash
of consciousness, and she replied merely with a side glance and a smile.
Both eyes and ears, and every sense and every faculty, seemed occupied
with the scene before her.

It was a beautiful spring morning, not yet nine o'clock, but the sun
stood high over Douglas Head, and the sunlight was glancing in the
harbour from the little waves of the flowing tide. Oars were rattling up
the pier, passengers were trooping down the gangways, and the decks fore
and aft were becoming thronged.

“It's beautiful!” she was saying, not so much to her companions as to
herself, and the old parson was laughing at her bursts of rapture over
the commonplace scene, and dropping out in reply little driblets of
simple talk--sweet, pure nothings--the innocent babble as of a mountain
stream.

She was taller than the common, and had golden-red hair, and magnificent
dark-gray eyes of great size. One of her eyes had a brown spot, which
gave at the first glance the effect of a squint, at the next glance a
coquettish expression, and ever after a sense of tremendous power
and passion. But her most noticeable feature was her mouth, which was
somewhat too large for beauty, and was always moving nervously. When she
spoke, her voice startled you with its depth, which was a kind of soft
hoarseness, but capable of every shade of colour. There was a playful
and impetuous raillery in nearly all she said, and everything seemed
to be expressed by mind and body at the same time. She moved her body
restlessly, and while standing in the same place her feet were always
shuffling. Her dress was homely--almost poor--and perhaps a little
careless. She appeared to smile and laugh continually, and yet there
were tears in her eyes sometimes.

The young clergyman was of a good average height, but he looked taller
from a certain distinction of figure. When he raised his hat at the
captain's greeting he showed a forehead like an arched wall, and a
large, close-cropped head. He had a well-formed nose, a powerful chin,
and full lips--all very strong and set for one so young. His complexion
was dark--almost swarthy--and there was a certain look of the gipsy in
his big golden-brown eyes with their long black lashes. He was clean
shaven, and the lower part of his face seemed heavy under the splendid
fire of the eyes above it. His manner had a sort of diffident restraint;
he stood on the same spot without moving, and almost without raising his
drooping head; his speech was grave and usually slow and laboured; his
voice was bold and full.

The second bell had rung, and the old parson was making ready to go
ashore.

“You'll take care of this runaway, Mr. Storm, and deliver her safely at
the door of the hospital?”

“I will.”

“And you'll keep an eye on her in that big Babylon over there?”

“If she'll let me, sir.”

“Yes, indeed, yes; I know she's as unstable as water and as hard to hold
as a puff of wind.”

The girl was laughing again. “You might as well call me a tempest
and have done with it, or,” with a glance at the younger man, “say a
storm--Glory St---- Oh!”

With a little catch of the breath she arrested the name before it
was uttered by her impetuous tongue, and laughed again to cover her
confusion. The young man smiled faintly and rather painfully, but the
old parson was conscious of nothing.

“Well, and why not? A good name for you too, and you richly deserve
it.--But the Lord is lenient with such natures, John. He never tries
them beyond their strength. She hasn't much leaning to religion, you
know.”

The girl recalled herself from the busy scene around and broke in again
with a tone of humour and pathos mixed.

“There, call me an infidel at once, grandfather. I know what you mean.
But just to show you that I haven't exactly registered a vow in heaven
never to go to church in London because you've given me such a dose of
it in the Isle of Man, I'll promise to send you a full and particular
report of Mr. Storm's first sermon. Isn't that charming of me?”

The third bell was ringing, the blast of the steam whistle was echoing
across the bay, and the steamer was only waiting for the mails. Taking a
step nearer to the gangway, the old parson talked faster.

“Did Aunt Anna give you money enough, child?”

“Enough for my boat fare and my train.”

“No more! Now Anna is so----”

“Don't trouble, grandfather. Woman wants but little here below--Aunt
Anna excepted. And then a hospital nurse----”

“I'm afraid you'll feel lonely in that great wilderness.”

“Lonely with five millions of neighbours?”

“You'll be longing for the old island, Glory, and I half repent me
already----”

“If ever I have the blue-devils, grandpa, I'll just whip on my cape and
fly home again.”

“To-morrow morning I'll be searching all over the house for my runaway.”

Glory tried to laugh gaily. “Upstairs, downstairs, and in my lady's
chamber.”

“'Glory,' I'll be crying, 'Where's the girl gone at all? I haven't heard
her voice in the house to-day. What's come over the old place to strike
it so dead?'”

The girl's eyes were running over, but in a tone of gentle raillery and
heart's love she said severely: “Nonsense, grandfather, you'll forget
all about Glory going to London before the day after to-morrow. Every
morning you'll be making rubbings of your old runes, and every night
you'll be playing chess with Aunt Rachel, and every Sunday you'll be
scolding old Neilus for falling asleep in the reading desk, and--and
everything will go on just the same as ever.”

The mails had come aboard, one of the gangways had been drawn ashore,
and the old parson, holding his big watch in his left hand, was diving
into his fob-pocket with the fingers of the right.

“Here”--panting audibly, as if he had been running hard--“is your
mother's little pearl ring.”

The girl drew off her slack, soiled glove and took the ring in her
nervous fingers.

“A wonderful talisman is the relic of a good mother, sir,” said the old
parson.

The young clergyman bent his head.

“You're like Glory herself in that though--you don't remember your
mother either.”

“No-no.”

“I'll keep in touch with your father, John, trust me for that. You and
he shall be good friends yet. A man can't hold out against his son for
nothing worse than choosing the Church against the world. The old man
didn't mean all he said; and then it isn't the thunder that strikes
people dead, you know. So leave him to me; and if that foolish old
Chalse hasn't been putting notions into his head----”

The throbbing in the steam funnel had ceased and in the sudden hush a
voice from the bridge cried, “All ashore!”

“Good-bye, Glory! Good-bye, John! Good-bye both!”

“Good-bye, sir,” said the young clergyman with a long hand-clasp.

But the girl's arms were about the old man's neck. “Good-bye, you dear
old grandpa, and I'm ashamed I--I'm sorry I--I mean it's a shame of me
to--good-bye!”

“Good-bye, my wandering gipsy, my witch, my runaway!”

“If you call me names I'll have to stop your mouth, sir.
Again--another----”

A voice cried, “Stand back there!”

The young clergyman drew the girl back from the bulwarks, and the
steamer moved slowly away.

“I'll go below--no, I won't; I'll stay on deck. I'll go ashore--I can't
bear it; it's not too late yet. No, I'll go to the stern and see the
water in the wake.”

The pier was cleared and the harbour was empty. Over the white churning
water the sea gulls were wheeling, and Douglas Head was gliding slowly
back. Down the long line of the quay the friends of the passengers were
waving adieus.

“There he is, on the end of the pier! That's grandpa waving his
handkerchief! Don't you see it? The red-and-white cotton one! God bless
him! How _wae_ his little present made me! He has been keeping it all
these years. But my silk handkerchief is too damp--it won't float at
all. Will you lend me----Ah, thank you! Good-bye! good-bye! good----”

The girl hung over the stern rail, leaning her breast upon it and waving
the handkerchief as long as the pier and its people were in sight, and
when they were gone from recognition she watched the line of the land
until it began to fade into the clouds, and there was no more to be seen
of what she had looked upon every day of her life until to-day.

“The dear little island! I never thought it was so beautiful! Perhaps I
might have been happy even there, if I had tried. Now, if I had only had
somebody for company! How silly of me! I've been five years wishing and
praying to get away, and now! ... It _is_ lovely, though, isn't it? Just
like a bird on the water! And when you've been born in a place ... the
dear little island! And the old folks, too! How lonely they'll be, after
all! I wonder if I shall ever.... I'll go below. The wind's freshening,
and this water in the wake is making my eyes... Good-bye, little birdie!
I'll come back--I'll.... Yes, never fear, I'll----”

The laughter and impetuous talking, the gentle humour and pathos,
had broken at length into a sob, and the girl had wheeled about and
disappeared down the cabin stairs. John Storm stood looking after her.
He had hardly spoken, but his great brown eyes were moist.




II.

Her father had been the only son of Parson Quayle, and chaplain to the
bishop at Bishopscourt. It was there he had met her mother, who
was lady's maid to the bishop's wife. The maid was a bright young
Frenchwoman, daughter of a French actress, famous in her day, and of
an officer under the Empire, who had never been told of her existence.
Shortly after their marriage the chaplain was offered a big mission
station in Africa, and, being a devotee, he clutched at it without
fear of the fevers of the coast. But his young French wife was about to
become a mother, and she shrank from the perils of his life abroad, so
he took her to his father's house at Peel, and bade her farewell for
five years.

He lived four, and during that time they exchanged some letters. His
final instructions were sent from Southampton: “If it's a boy, call him
John (after the Evangelist); and if it's a girl, call her Glory.” At the
end of the first year she wrote: “I have shortened our darling, and you
never saw anything so lovely! Oh, the sweetness of her little bare arms,
and her neck, and her little round shoulders! You know she's red--I've
really got a red one--a curly red one! Such big beaming eyes, too! And
then her mouth, and her chin, and her tiny red toes! I don't know how
you can live without seeing her!” Near the end of the fourth year he
sent his last answer: “Dear Wife--This separation is bitter; but God has
willed it, and we must not forget that the probabilities are that we may
pass our lives apart.” The next letter was from the English consul on
the Gaboon River, announcing the death of the devoted missionary.

Parson Quayle's household consisted only of himself and two maiden
daughters, but that was too much for the lively young Frenchwoman. While
her husband lived, she suffocated under the old-maid _régime_; and when
he was gone she made no more fight with destiny, but took some simple
ailment, and died suddenly.

A bare hillside frowned down on the place where Glory was born; but the
sun rose over it, and a beautiful river hugged its sides. A quarter of
a mile down the river there was a harbour, and beyond the harbour a bay,
with the ruins of an old castle standing out on an islet rock, and then
the broad sweep of the Irish Sea-the last in those latitudes to “parley
with the setting sun.” The vicarage was called Glenfaba, and it was half
a mile outside the fishing town of Peel.

Glory was a little red-headed witch from the first, with an air of
general uncanniness in everything she did and said. Until after she
was six there was no believing a word she uttered. Her conversation was
bravely indifferent to considerations of truth or falsehood, fear or
favour, reward or punishment. The parson used to say, “I'm really afraid
the child has no moral conscience--she doesn't seem to know right from
wrong.” This troubled his religion, but it tickled his humour, and it
did not disturb his love. “She's a perfect pagan--God bless her innocent
heart!”

She had more than a child's genius for make-believe. In her hunger for
child company, before the days when she found it for herself, she made
believe that various versions of herself lived all over the place, and
she would call them out to play. There was Glory in the river, under the
pool where the perches swam, and Glory down the well, and Glory up in
the hills, and they answered when she spoke to them. All her dolls were
kings and queens, and she had a gift for making up in strange and grand
disguises. It was almost as if her actress grandmother had bestowed on
her from her birth the right to life and luxury and love.

She was a born mimic, and could hit off to a hair an eccentricity or an
affectation. The frown of Aunt Anna, who was severe, the smile of Aunt
Rachel, who was sentimental, and the yawn of Cornelius Kewley, the clerk
who was always sleepy, lived again in the roguish, rippling face. She
remembered some of her mother's French songs, and seeing a street-singer
one day, she established herself in the market-place in that character,
with grown people on their knees around her, ready to fall on her and
kiss her and call her Phonodoree, the fairy. But she did not forget to
go round for the ha'pennies either.

At ten she was a tomboy, and marched through the town at the head of an
army of boys, playing on a comb between her teeth and flying the vicar's
handkerchief at the end of his walking-stick. In these days she climbed
trees and robbed orchards (generally her own) and imitated boys' voices,
and thought it tyranny that she might not wear trousers. But she wore
a sailor's blue stocking-cap, and it brightened existence when, for
economy's sake and for the sake of general tidiness, she was allowed to
wear a white woollen jersey. Then somebody who had a dinghy that he did
not want asked her if she would like to have a boat. Would she like to
have paradise, or pastry cakes, or anything that was heavenly! After
that she wore a sailor's jacket and a sou'wester when she was on the
sea, and tumbled about the water like a duck.

At twelve she fell in love--with love. It was a vague passion interwoven
with dreams of grandeur. The parson being too poor to send her to the
girls' college at Douglas, and his daughters being too proud to send her
to the dame's school at Peel, she was taught at home by Aunt Rachel,
who read the poetry of Thomas Moore, knew the birthdays of all the royal
family, and was otherwise meekly romantic. From this source she gathered
much curious sentiment relating to some visionary world where young
girls were held aloft in the sunshine of luxury and love and happiness.
One day she was lying on her back on the heather of the Peel hill, with
her head on her arms, thinking of a story that Aunt Rachel had told her.
It was of a mermaid who had only to slip up out of the sea and say
to any man, “Come,” and he came--he left everything and followed her.
Suddenly the cold nose of a pointer rubbed against her forehead, a
strong voice cried, “Down, sir!” and a young man of two and twenty, in
leggings and a shooting-jacket, strode between her and the cliffs. She
knew him by sight. He was John Storm, the son of Lord Storm, who had
lately come to live in the mansion house at Knockaloe, a mile up the
hill from Glenfaba.

For three weeks thereafter she talked of nobody else, and even began to
comb her hair. She watched him in church, and told Aunt Rachel she was
sure he could see quite well in the dark, for his big eyes seemed to
have the light inside of them. After that she became ashamed, and if
anybody happened to mention his name in her hearing she flushed up to
the forehead and fled out of the room. He never once looked at her,
and after a while he went away to Canada. She set the clock on the back
landing to Canadian time, so that she might always know what he was
doing abroad, and then straightway forgot all about him. Her moods
followed each other rapidly, and were all of them overpowering and all
sincere, but it was not until a year afterward that she fell in love, in
the church vestry, with the pretty boy who stood opposite to her in the
catechism class.

He was an English boy of her own age, and he was only staying in the
island for his holidays. The second time she saw him it was in the
grounds at Glenfaba, while his mother was returning a call indoors. She
gave him a little tap on the arm and he had to run after her--down a
bank and up a tree, where she laughed and said. “Isn't it nice?” and he
could see nothing but her big white teeth.

His name was Francis Horatio Nelson Drake, and he was full of great
accounts of the goings-on in the outer world, where his school was, and
where lived the only “men” worth talking about. Of course he spoke of
all this familiarly and with a convincing reality which wrapped Glory in
the plumage of dreams. He was a wonderful being, altogether, and in due
time (about three days) she proposed to him. True, he did not jump at
her offer with quite proper alacrity, but when she mentioned that it
didn't matter to her in the least whether he wanted her or not, and that
plenty would be glad of the chance, he saw things differently, and
they agreed to elope. There was no particular reason for this drastic
measure, but as Glory had a boat, it seemed the right thing to do.

She dressed herself in all her Confirmation finery, and stole out to
meet him under the bridge where her boat lay moored. He kept her half an
hour waiting, having sisters and other disadvantages, but “once aboard
her lugger,” he was safe. She was breathless, and he was anxious, and
neither thought it necessary to waste any time in kissing.

They slipped down the harbour and out into the bay, and then ran up the
sail and stood off for Scotland. Being more easy in mind when this
was done, they had time to talk of the future. Francis Horatio was for
work--he was going to make a name for himself. Glory did not see it
quite in that light. A name, yes, and lots of triumphal processions, but
she was for travel--there were such lots of things people could see if
they didn't waste so much time working.

“What a girl you are!” he said derisively; whereupon she bit her lip,
for she didn't quite like it. But they were nearly half an hour
out before he spoiled himself utterly. He had brought his dog, a
she-terrier, and he began to call her by her kennel name and to say what
a fine little thing she was, and what a deal of money they would make
by her pups. That was too much for Glory. She couldn't think of eloping
with a person who used such low expressions.

“What a girl you are!” he said again; but she did not mind it in the
least. With a sweep of her bare arm she had put the tiller hard aport,
intending to tack back to Peel, but the wind had freshened and the sea
was rising, and by the swift leap of the boat the boom was snapped, and
the helpless sail came napping down upon the mast. Then they tumbled
into the trough, and Glory had not strength to pull them out of it, and
the boy was of no more use than a tripper. She was in her white muslin
dress, and he was nursing his dog, and the night was closing down on
them, and they were wobbling about under a pole and a tattered rag. But
all at once a great black yacht came heaving up in the darkness, and a
grown-up voice cried, “Trust yourself to me, dear.”

It was John Storm. He had already awakened the young girl in her, and
thereafter he awakened the young woman as well. She clung to him like a
child that night, and during the four years following she seemed always
to be doing the same. He was her big brother, her master, her lord, her
sovereign. She placed him on a dizzy height above her, amid a halo
of goodness and grandeur. If he smiled on her she flushed, and if he
frowned she fretted and was afraid. Thinking to please him, she tried to
dress herself up in all the colours of the rainbow, but he reproved her
and bade her return to her jersey. She struggled to comb out her red
curls until he told her that the highest ladies in the land would give
both ears for them, and then she fondled them in her fingers and admired
them in a glass.

He was a serious person, but she could make him laugh until he screamed.
Excepting Byron and “Sir Charles Grandison,” out of the vicar's library,
the only literature she knew was the Bible, the Catechism, and the
Church Service, and she used these in common talk with appalling freedom
and audacity. The favourite butt of her mimicry was the parish clerk
saying responses when he was sleepy.

The parson: “O Lord, open thou our lips” (no response). “Where are you,
Neilus?”

The clerk (awakening suddenly in the desk below): “Here I am, your
reverence--and our mouth shall show forth thy praise.”

When John Storm did laugh he laughed beyond all control, and then Glory
was entirely happy. But he went away again, his father having sent him
to Australia, and all the light of her world went out.

It was of no use bothering with the clock on the back landing, because
things were different by this time. She was sixteen, and the only tree
she climbed now was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that
tore her terribly. John Storm was the son of a lord, and he would be
Lord Something himself some day. Glory Quayle was an orphan, and her
grandfather was a poor country clergyman. Their poverty was sweet,
but there was gall in it, nevertheless. The little forced economies in
dress, the frocks that had to be turned, the bonnets that were beauties
when they were bought, but had to be worn until the changes of fashion
made them frights, and then the mysterious parcels of left-off clothing
from goodness knows where--how the independence of the girl's spirit
rebelled against such humiliations!

The blood of her mother was beginning to boil over, and the old-maid
_régime_, which had crushed the life out of the Frenchwoman, was
suffocating the Manx girl with its formalism. She was always forgetting
the meal times regulated by the sun, and she could sleep at any time
and keep awake until any hour. It tired her to sit demurely like a young
lady, and she had a trick of lying down on the floor. She often laughed
in order not to cry, but she would not even smile at a great lady's
silly story, and she did not care a jot about the birthdays of the royal
family. The old aunts loved her body and soul, but they often said,
“Whatever is going to happen to the girl when the grandfather is gone?”

And the grandfather--good man--would have laid down his life to save her
a pain in her toe, but he had not a notion of the stuff she was made of.
His hobby was the study of the runic crosses with which the Isle of Man
abounds, and when she helped him with his rubbings and his casts he was
as merry as an old sand-boy. Though they occupied the same house, and
her bedroom that faced the harbour was next to his little musty study
that looked over the scullery slates, he lived always in the tenth
century and she lived somewhere in the twentieth.

The imprisoned linnet was beating at the bars of its cage. Before she
was aware of it she wanted to escape from the sleepy old scene, and had
begun to be consumed with longing for the great world outside. On summer
evenings she would go up Peel Hill and lie on the heather, where she had
first seen John Storm, and watch the ships weighing anchor in the bay
beyond the old dead castle walls, and wish she were going out with
them--out to the sea and the great cities north and south. But existence
closed in ever-narrowing circles round her, and she could see no way
out. Two years passed, and at eighteen she was fretting that half her
life had wasted away. She watched the sun until it sank into the sea,
and then she turned back to Glenfaba and the darkened region of the sky.

It was all the fault of their poverty, and their poverty was the fault
of the Church. She began to hate the Church; It had made her an orphan;
and when she thought of religion as a profession it seemed a selfish
thing anyway. If a man was really bent on so lofty an aim (as her own
father had been) he could not think of himself; he had to give up life
and love and the world, and then these always took advantage of him. But
people had to live in the world for all that, and what was the good of
burying yourself before you were dead?

Somehow her undefined wishes took shape in visions of John Storm, and
one day she heard he was home again. She went out on the hill that
evening and, being seen only by the gulls, she laughed and cried and
ran. It was just like poetry, for there he was himself lying on the
edge of the cliff near the very spot where she had been used to lie. On
seeing him she went more slowly, and began to poke about in the
heather as if she had seen nothing. He came up to her with both hands
outstretched, and then suddenly she remembered that she was wearing her
old jersey, and she flushed up to the eyes and nearly choked with shame.
She got better by-and-bye and talked away like a mill-wheel, and then
fearing he might think it was from something quite different, she began
to pull the heather and to tell him why she had been blushing. He did
not laugh at all. With a strange smile he said something in his deep
voice that made her blood run cold.

“But I'm to be a poor man myself in future, Glory. I've quarrelled with
my father. I'm going into the Church.”

It was a frightful blow to her, and the sun went down like a shot. But
it burst open the bars of her cage for all that. After John Storm had
found a curacy in London and taken Orders, he told them at Glenfaba that
among his honorary offices was to be that of chaplain to a great West
End hospital. This suggested to Glory the channel of escape. She would
go out as a hospital nurse. It was easier said than done, for hospital
nursing was fashionable, and she was three years too young. With great
labour she secured her appointment as probationer, and with greater
labour still overcame the fear and affection of her grandfather. But the
old parson was finally appeased when he heard that Glory's hospital was
the same that John Storm was to be chaplain of, and that they might go
up to London together.




III.

“Dear Grandfather Of Me, And Everybody At Glenfaba: Here I am at last,
dears, at the end of my Pilgrim's Progress, and the evening and the
morning' are the first day. It is now eleven o'clock at night, and I
am about to put myself to bed in my own little room at the hospital of
Martha's Vineyard, Hyde Park, London, England.

“The captain was quite right; the morning was as fresh as his flattery,
and before we got far beyond the Head most of the passengers were spread
out below like the three legs of Man. Being an old sea-doggie myself, I
didn't give it the chance to make me sick, but went downstairs and lay
quiet in my berth and deliberated great things. I didn't go up again
until we got into the Mersey, and then the passengers were on deck,
looking like sour buttermilk spilt out of the churn.

“What a glorious sight! The ships, the docks, the towers, the town! I
couldn't breathe for excitement until we got up to the landing-stage.
Mr. Storm put me into a cab, and for the sake of experience I insisted
on paying my own way. Of course he tried to trick me, but a woman's a
woman for a' that. As we drove up to Lime Street station there befell--a
porter. He carried my big trunk on his head (like a mushroom), and when
I bought my ticket he took me to the train while Mr. Storm went for
a newspaper. Being such a stranger, he was very kind, so I flung the
responsibility on Providence and gave him sixpence.

“There were two old ladies in the carriage beside ourselves, and the
train we travelled by was an express. It was perfectly delightful, and
for all the world like plunging into a stiff sou'wester off the rocks
at Contrary. But the first part of the journey was terrible. That tunnel
nearly made me shriek. It was a misty day too at Liverpool, and all the
way to Edge Hill they let off signals with a noise like battering-rams.
My nerves were on the rack; so taking advantage of the darkness of the
carriage, I began to sing. That calmed me, but it nearly drove the old
ladies out of their wits. _They_ screamed if I didn't; and just as I was
summoning the Almighty to attend to me a little in the middle of that
inferno, out we came as innocent as a baby. There was another of these
places just before getting into London. I suppose they are purgatories
through which you have to pass to get to these wonderful cities. Only
if I had been consulted in the making of the Litany ['from sudden death,
good Lord, deliver us') I should have made an exception for people in
tunnels.

“You never knew what an absolute ninny Glory is! I was burning with
such impatience to see London that when we came near it I couldn't see
anything for water under the brain. Approaching a great and mighty city
for the first time must be like going into the presence of majesty. Only
Heaven save me from such palpitation the day I become songstress to the
Queen!

“Mercy! what a roar and boom--a deep murmur as of ten hundred million
million moths humming away on a still evening in autumn! On a nearer
view it is more like a Tower-of-Babel concern, with its click and
clatter. The explosion of voices, the confused clamour, the dreadful
disorder--cars, wagons, omnibuses--it makes you feel religious and
rather cold down the back. What a needle in a haystack a poor girl must
be here if there is nobody above to keep track of her!

“Tell Aunt Rachel they are wearing another kind of bonnet in
London--more pokey in front--and say if I see the Queen I'll be sure to
tell her all about it.

“We didn't get to the hospital until nine, so I've not seen much of it
yet. The housekeeper gave me tea and told me I might go over the house,
as I wouldn't be wanted to begin duty before morning. So for an hour I
went from ward to ward like a female Wandering Jew. Such silence! I'm
afraid this hospital nursing is going to be a lockjaw business. And now
I'm going to bed--well, not homesick, you know, but just 'longing a lil
bit for all.' To-morrow morning I'll waken up to new sounds and sights,
and when I draw my blind I'll see the streets where the cars are forever
running and rattling. Then I'll think of Glenfaba and the birds singing
and rejoicing.

“Dispense my love throughout the island. Say that I love everybody just
the same now I'm a London lady as when I was a mere provincial girl, and
that when I'm a wonderful woman, and have brought the eyes of England
upon me, I'll come back and make amends. I can hear what grandfather is
saying: 'Gough bless me, what a girl, though!' Glory.

“P. S.--I've not said much about Mr. Storm. He left me at the door of
the hospital and went on to the house of his vicar, for that is where
he is to lodge, you know. On the way up I expended much beautiful poetry
upon him on the subject of love. The old girlies having dozed off, I
chanced to ask him if he liked to talk of it, but he said no, it was a
profanation. Love was too sacred, it was a kind of religion. Sometimes
it came unawares, sometimes it smouldered like fire under ashes,
sometimes it was a good angel, sometimes a devil, making you do things
and say things, and laying your life waste like winter. But I told
him it was just charming, and as for religion, there was nothing under
heaven like the devotion of a handsome and clever man to a handsome and
clever woman, when he gave up all the world for her, and his body and
his soul and everything that was his. I think he saw there was something
in that, for though he said nothing, there came a wonderful light
into his splendid eyes, and I thought if he wasn't going to be a
clergyman--but no matter. So long, dear!”




IV.

John Storm was the son of Lord Storm (a peer in his own right), and
nephew of the Prime Minister of England, the Earl of Erin. Two years
before John's birth the brothers had quarrelled about a woman. It was
John's mother. She had engaged herself to the younger brother, and
afterward fallen in love with the elder one. The voice of conscience
told her that it was her duty to carry out her engagement, and she did
so. Then the voice of conscience took sides with the laws of life and
told the lovers that they must renounce each other, and they both did
that as well. But the poor girl found it easier to renounce life than
love, and after flying to religion as an escape from the conflict
between conjugal duty and elemental passion she gave birth to her child
and died. She was the daughter of a rich banker, who had come from the
soil, and she had been brought up to consider marriage distinct from
love. Exchanging wealth for title, she found death in the deal.

Her husband had never stood in any natural affinity to her. On his
part, their marriage had been a loveless and selfish union, based on the
desire for an heir that he might found a family and cancel the unfair
position of a younger son. But the sin he committed against the
fundamental law, that marriage shall be founded only in love, brought
its swift revenge.

On hearing that the wife was dead, the elder brother came to attend the
funeral. The night before that event the husband felt unhappy about the
part he had played. He had given no occasion for scandal, but he had
never disguised, even from the mother of his son, the motives of his
marriage. The poor girl was gone; he had only trained himself for the
pursuit of her dowry, and the voice of love had been silent. Troubled by
such thoughts, he walked about his room all night long, and somewhere
in the first dead gray of dawn he went down to the death chamber that he
might look upon her face again. Opening the door, he heard the sound of
half-stifled sobs. Some one was leaning over the white face and weeping
like a man with a broken heart. It was his brother.

From that time forward Lord Storm considered himself the injured person.
He had never cared for his brother, and now he designed to wipe him out.
His son would do it. He was the heir to the earldom, for the earl had
never married. But a posthumous revenge was too trivial. The earl had
gone into politics and was making a name. Lord Storm had missed his own
opportunities, though he had got himself called to the Upper House, but
his son should be brought up to eclipse everything.

To this end the father devoted his life to the boy's training. All
conventional education was wrong in principle. Schools and colleges and
the study of the classics were drivelling folly, with next to nothing to
do with life. Travel was the great teacher. “You shall travel as far
as the sun,” he said. So the boy was taken through Europe and Asia
and learned something of many languages. He became his father's daily
companion, and nowhere the father went was it thought wrong for the boy
to go also. Conventional morality was considered mawkish. The chief
aim of home training was to bring children up in total ignorance, if
possible, of the most important facts and functions of life. But it was
_not_ possible, and hence suppression, dissimulation, lying, and, under
the ban of secret sin, one half the world's woe. So the boy was taken to
the temples of Greece and India, and even to Western casinos and dancing
gardens. Before he was twenty he had seen something of nearly everything
the world has in it.

When the time came to think of his career England was in straits about
her colonial empire. The vast lands over sea wanted to take care of
themselves. It was the moment of the “British North America Act,” and
that gave the father his cue for action. While his brother the earl was
fiddling the country to the tune of limited self-government for Crown
colonies, the father of John Storm conceived the daring idea of breaking
up the entire empire, including the United Kingdom, into self-governing
states. They were to be the “United States of Great Britain.”

This was to be John Storm's policy, and to work it out Lord Storm set up
a house in the Isle of Man where he might always look upon his plan in
miniature. There he established a bureau for the gathering of the data
that his son would need to use hereafter. Newspapers came to him in his
lonely retreat from all quarters of the globe, and he cut out everything
relating to his subject. His library was a dusty room lined all around
with brown-paper pockets, which were labelled with the names of colonies
and counties.

“It will take us two generations to do it, my boy, but we'll alter the
history of England.”

At fifty he was iron-gray, and had a head like a big owl.

Meanwhile the object of these grand preparations, the offspring of that
loveless union, had a personality all his own. It seemed as if he had
been built for a big man every way, and Nature had been arrested in the
making of him. When people looked at his head they felt he ought to have
been a giant, but he was far from rivalling the children of Anak. When
they listened to his conversation they thought he might turn out to be a
creature of genius, but perhaps he was only a man of powerful moods. The
best strength of body and mind seemed to have gone into his heart. It
may be that the sorrowful unrest of his mother and her smothered passion
had left their red stream in John Storm's soul.

When he was a boy he would cry at a beautiful view in Nature, at a
tale of heroism, or at any sentimental ditty sung excruciatingly in the
streets. Seeing a bird's nest that had been robbed of its eggs he burst
into tears; but when he came upon the bleeding, broken shells in the
path, the tears turned to fierce wrath and mad rage, and he snatched
up a gun out of his father's room and went out to take the life of the
offender.

On coming to the Isle of Man he noticed as often as he went to church
that a little curly red-headed girl kept staring at him from the vicar's
pew. He was a man of two-and-twenty, but the child's eyes tormented him.
At any time of day or night he could call up a vision of their
gleaming brightness. Then his father sent him to Canada to watch the
establishment of the Dominion, and when he came back he brought a
Canadian canoe and an American yacht, and certain democratic opinions.

The first time he sailed the yacht in Manx waters he sighted a disabled
boat and rescued two children. One of them was the girl of the vicar's
pew, grown taller and more winsome. She nestled up to him when he lifted
her into the yacht, and, without knowing why, he kept his arms about
her.

After that he called his yacht the _Gloria_, in imitation of her
name, and sometimes took the girl out on the sea. Notwithstanding the
difference of the years between them, they had their happy boy and girl
days together. In her white jersey and stocking-cap she looked every
inch a sailor. When the wind freshened and the boat plunged she stood to
the tiller like a man, and he thought her the sweetest sight ever seen
in a cockpit. And when the wind saddened and the boom came aboard she
was the cheeriest companion in a calm. She sang, and so did he, and
their voices went well together. Her favourite song was “Come, Lasses
and Lads”; his was “John Peel”; and they would sing them off and on for
an hour at a spell. Thus on a summer evening, when the bay was lying
like a tired monster asleep, and every plash of an oar was echoing on
the hills, the people on the land would hear them coming around the
castle rock with their--

  “D'ye ken John Peel, with his coat so gay?
  D'ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
  D'ye ken John P-e-e-l....”

For two years he amused himself with the child, and then realized that
she was a child no longer. The pity of the girl's position took hold
of him. This sunny soul with her sportfulness, her grace of many gifts,
with her eyes that flashed and gleamed like lightning, with her voice
that was like the warble of a bird, this golden-headed gipsy, this
witch, this fairy--what was the life that lay before her? Pity gave
place to a different feeling, and then he was aware of a pain in the
breast when he thought of the girl. As often as her eyes lasted upon
him he felt his face tingle and burn. He began to be conscious of an
imprisoned side to his nature, the passionate side, and he drew back
afraid. This wild power, this tempest, this raging fire within, God
only knew whither it was to lead him. And then he had given a hostage to
fortune, or his father had for him.

From his father's gloomy house at Knockaloe, where the winds were ever
droning in the trees, he looked over to Glenfaba, and it seemed to him
like a little white cloud lit up by the sunshine. His heart was forever
calling to the sunny spot over there, “Glory! Glory!” The pity of it was
that the girl seemed to understand everything, and to know quite well
what kept them apart. She flushed with shame that he should see her
wearing the same clothes constantly, and with head aside and furtive
glances she talked of the days when he would leave the island for good,
and London would take him and make much of him, and he would forget
all about his friends in that dead old place. Such talk cut him to the
quick. Though he had seen a deal of the world, he did not know much
about the conversation of women.

The struggle was brief. He began to wear plainer clothes--an Oxford
tweed coat and a flannel shirt--to talk about fame as an empty word, and
to tell his father that he was superior to all stupid conventions.

His father sent him to Australia. Then the grown-up trouble of his life
began.

He passed through the world now with eyes open for the privations of the
poor, and he saw everything in a new light. Unconsciously he was doing
in another way what his mother had done when she flew to religion
from stifled passion. He had been brought up as a sort of imperialist
democrat, but now he bettered his father's instructions. England did not
want more Parliaments, she wanted more apostles. It was not by giving
votes to a nation, but by strengthening the soul of a nation, that it
became great and free. The man for the hour was not he who revolved
schemes for making himself famous, but he who was ready to renounce
everything, and if he was great was willing to become little, and if he
was rich to become poor. There was room for an apostle--for a thousand
apostles--who, being dead to the world's glory, its money or its calls,
were prepared to do all in Christ's spirit, and to believe that in the
renunciation, which was the “secret” of Jesus, lay the only salvation
remaining for the world.

He tramped through the slums of Melbourne and Sydney, and afterward
through the slums of London, returned to the Isle of Man a Christian
Socialist, and announced to his father his intention of going into the
Church.

The old man did not fume and fly out. He staggered back to his room like
a bullock to its pen after it has had its death-blow in the shambles.
In the midst of his dusty old bureau, with its labelled packets full of
cuttings, he realized that twenty years of his life had been wasted. A
son was a separate being, of a different growth, and a father was only
the seed at the root that must decay and die.

Then he made some show of resistance.

“But with your talents, boy, surely you are not going to throw away your
chances of a great name?”

“I care nothing for a great name, father,” said John. “I shall win a
greater victory than any that Parliament can give me.”

“But, my boy, my dear boy! one must either be the camel or the
camel-driver; and then society----”

“I hate society, and society would hate me. It is only for the sake of
the few godly men that God spares it as he spared Sodom for Lot's sake.”

Having braved this ordeal and nearly broken the heart of his old father,
he turned for his reward to Glory. He found her at her usual haunt on
the headlands.

“I was blushing when you came up, wasn't I?” she said. “Shall I tell you
why?”

“Why?”

“It was this,” she said, with a sweep of her hand across her bosom.

He looked puzzled.

“Don't you understand? This old rag--it's the one I was wearing before
you went away.”

He wanted to tell her how well she looked in it--better than ever now
that her bosom showed under its seamless curves, and her figure had
grown so lithe and shapely. But though she was laughing he saw she was
ashamed of her poverty, and he thought to comfort her.

“I'm to be a poor man myself in future, Glory. I've quarrelled with my
father. I'm going to take Orders.”

Her face fell. “Oh, I didn't think anybody would be poor who could help
it. To be a clergyman is all right for a poor man, perhaps, but I hate
to be poor; it's horrid.”

Then darkness fell upon his eyes and he felt sad and sick. Glory had
disappointed him. She was vain, she was worldly, she was incapable of
the higher things; she would never know what a sacrifice he had made
for her; she would think nothing of him now; but he would go on all the
same, the more earnestly because the devil had drawn a bow at him and
the arrow had gone in up to the feathers.

“With God's help I shall nail my colours to the mast,” he said.

Thus he made up his mind to follow the unrolling of the scroll. He had
the strength called character. The Church had been his beacon before,
but now it was to be his refuge.

He found no difficulty in making the necessary preparations. For a year
he read the Anglican divines--Jeremy Taylor, Hooker, Butler, Waterland,
Pearson, and Pusey--and when the time came for his ordination his uncle,
the Earl of Erin, who was now Prime Minister, obtained him a title to
a curacy under the popular and influential Canon Wealthy of All Saints,
Belgravia. The Bishop of London gave letters dimissory to the Bishop of
Sodor and Man, by whom he was examined and ordained.

On the morning of his departure for London his father, with whom there
had in the meantime been trying scenes, left him this final word of
farewell: “As I understand that you intend to lead the life of poverty,
I presume that you do not need your mother's dowry, and I shall hold
myself at liberty to dispose of it elsewhere, _unless_ you require it
for the use of the young lady who is, I hear, to go up with you.”




V.

“I will be a poor man among poor men,” said John Storm to himself as he
drove to his vicar's house in Eaton Place, but he awoke next morning
in a bedroom that did not answer to his ideas of a life of poverty. A
footman came with hot water and tea, and also a message from the canon
overnight saying he would be pleased to see Mr. Storm in the study after
breakfast.

The study was a sumptuous apartment immediately beneath, with soft
carpets on which his feet made no noise, and tiger-skins over the
backs of chairs. As he entered it a bright-faced man in middle life,
clean-shaven, wearing a gold-mounted _pince-nez_, and bubbling over with
politeness, stepped forward to receive him.

“Welcome to London, my dear Mr. Storm. When the letter came from
the Prime Minister I said to my daughter Felicity--you will see her
presently--I trust you will be good friends--I said, 'It is a privilege,
my child, to meet any wish of the dear Earl of Erin, and I am proud
to be in at the beginning of a career that is sure to be brilliant and
distinguished.'”

John Storm made some murmur of dissent.

“I trust you found your rooms to your taste, Mr. Storm?”

John Storm had found them more than he expected or desired.

“Ah, well, humble but comfortable, and in any case please regard them as
your own, to receive whom you please therein, and to dispense your own
hospitalities. This house is large enough. We shall not meet oftener
than we wish, so we can not quarrel. The only meal we need take together
is dinner. Don't expect too much. Simple but wholesome--that's all we
can promise you in a clergyman's family.”

John Storm answered that food was an indifferent matter to him, and that
half an hour after dinner he never knew what he had eaten. The canon
laughed and began again.

“I thought it best you should come to us, being a stranger in London,
though I confess I have never had but one of my clergy residing with
me before. He is here now. You'll see him by-and-bye. His name is
Golightly, a simple, worthy young man, from one of the smaller colleges,
I believe. Useful, you know, devoted to me and to my daughter, but of
course a different sort of person altogether, and--er----”

It was a peculiarity of the canon that whatever he began to talk about,
he always ended by talking of himself.

“I sent for you this morning, not having had the usual opportunity of
meeting before, that I might tell you something of our organization and
your own duties.... You see in me the head of a staff of six clergy.”

John Storm was not surprised; a great preacher must be followed by
flocks of the poor; it was natural that they should wish him to help
them and to minister to them.

“We have no poor in my parish, Mr. Storm.”

“No poor, sir?”

“On the contrary, her Majesty herself is one of my parishioners.”

“That must be a great grief to you, sir?”

“Oh, the poor! Ah, yes, certainly. Of course, we have our associated
charities, such as the Maternity Home, founded in Soho by Mrs.
Callender--a worthy old Scotswoman--odd and whimsical, perhaps, but
rich, very rich and influential. My clergy, however, have enough to do
with the various departments of our church work. For instance, there is
the Ladies' Society, the Fancy Needlework classes, and the Decorative
Flower Guild, not to speak of the daughter churches and the ministration
in hospitals, for I always hold--er----”

John Storm's mind had been wandering, but at the mention of the hospital
he looked up eagerly.

“Ah, yes, the hospital. Your own duties will be chiefly concerned with
our excellent hospital of Martha's Vineyard. You will have the spiritual
care of all patients and nurses--yes, nurses also--within its precincts,
precisely as if it were your parish. 'This is my parish,' you will say
to yourself, and treat it accordingly. Not yet being in full Orders,
you will be unable to administer the sacrament, but you will have one
service daily in each of the wards, taking the wards in rotation. There
are seven wards, so there will be one service in each ward once a week,
for I always say that fewer----”

“Is it enough?” said John. “I shall be only too pleased----”

“Ah, well, we'll see. On Wednesday evenings we have service in the
church, and nurses not on night duty are expected to attend. Some fifty
of them altogether, and rather a curious compound. Ladies among them?
Yes, the daughters of gentlemen, but also persons of all classes. You
will hold yourself responsible for their spiritual welfare. Let me
see--this is Friday--say you take the sermon on Wednesday next, if that
is agreeable. As to views, my people are of all shades of colour, so I
ask my clergy to take strictly _via media_ views--strictly _via media_.
Do you intone?”

John Storm had been wandering again, but he recovered himself in time to
say he did not.

“That is a pity; our choir is so excellent--two violins, a viola,
clarinet, 'cello, double bass, the trumpets and drums, and of course the
organ. Our organist himself----”

At that moment a young clergyman came into the room, making apologies
and bowing subserviently.

“Ah, this is Mr. Golightly--the-h'm--Hon. and Rev. Mr. Storm.--You will
take charge of Mr. Storm and bring him to church on Sunday morning.”

Mr. Golightly delivered his message. It was about the organist. His
wife had called to say that he had been removed to the hospital for
some slight operation, and there was some difficulty about the singer of
Sunday morning's anthem.

“Most irritating! Bring her up.” The curate went out backward. “I shall
ask you to excuse me, Mr. Storm. My daughter, Felicity--ah, here she
is.”

A tall young woman in spectacles entered.

“This is our new housemate, Mr. Storm, nephew of dear Lord Erin.
Felicity, my child, I wish you to drive Mr. Storm round and introduce
him to our people, for I always say a young clergyman in London----”

John Storm mumbled something about the Prime Minister.

“Going to pay your respects to your uncle now? Very good and proper.
Next week will do for the visits. Yes, yes. Come in, Mrs. Koenig.”

A meek, middle-aged woman had appeared at the door. She was dark, and
had deep luminous eyes with the moist look to be seen in the eyes of a
tired old terrier.

“This is the wife of our organist and choir master. Good day! Kindest
greetings to the Prime Minister.... And, by the way, let us say Monday
for the beginning of your chaplaincy at the hospital.”

The Earl of Erin, as First Lord of the Treasury, occupied the narrow,
unassuming brick house which is the Treasury residence in Downing
Street. Although the official head of the Church, with power to appoint
its bishops and highest dignitaries, he was secretly a sceptic, if not
openly a derider of spiritual things. For this attitude his early love
passage had been chiefly accountable. That strife between duty and
passion which had driven the woman he loved to religion had driven him
in the other direction and left a broad swath of desolation in his soul.
He had seen little of his brother since that evil time, and nothing
whatever of his brother's son. Then John had written, “I am soon to
be bound by the awful tie of the priesthood,” and he had thought it
necessary to do something for him. When John was announced he felt a
thrill of tender feeling to which he had long been a stranger. He got
up and waited. The young man with his mother's face and the eyes of an
enthusiast was coming down the long corridor.

John Storm saw his uncle first in the spacious old cabinet room which
looks out on the little garden and the Park. He was a gaunt old man
with, meagre mustache and hair, and a face like a death's head. He
held out his hand and smiled. His hand was cold and his smile was half
tearful and half saturnine.

“You are like your mother, John.”

John never knew her.

“When I saw her last you were a child in arms and she was younger than
you are now.”

“Where was that, uncle?”

“In her coffin, poor girl.”

The Prime Minister shuffled some papers and said, “Well, is there
anything you wish for?”

“Nothing. I've come to thank you for what you've done already.”

The Prime Minister made a deprecatory gesture.

“I almost wish you had chosen another career, John. Still, the Church
has its opportunities and its chances, and if I can ever----”

“I am satisfied; more than satisfied,” said John. “My choice is based, I
trust, on a firm vocation. God's work is great, sir; the greatest of all
in London. That is why I am so grateful to you. Think of it, sir----”

John was leaning forward in his chair with one arm stretched out.

“Of the five millions of people in this vast city, not one million cross
the threshold of church or chapel. And then remember their condition. A
hundred thousand live in constant want, slowly starving to death, every
day and hour, and a quarter of the old people of London die as paupers.
Isn't it a wonderful scene, sir? If a man is willing to be spiritually
dead to the world--to leave family and friends--to go forth never to
return, as one might go to his execution----”

The Prime Minister listened to the ardent young man who was talking to
him there with his mother's voice, and then said--

“I'm sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“I'm afraid I've made a mistake.”

John Storm looked puzzled.

“I've sent you to the wrong place, John. When you wrote, I naturally
supposed you were thinking of the Church as a career, and I tried to put
you in the way of it. Do you know anything of your vicar?”

John knew that fame spoke of him as a great preacher--one of the few
who had passed through their Pentecost and come out with the gift of
tongues.

“Precisely!” The Prime Minister gave a bitter little laugh. “But let me
tell you something about him. He was a poor curate in the country where
the lord of the manor chanced to be a lady. He married the lady of the
manor. His wife died and he bought a London parish. Then, by the help
of an old actor who gave lessons in elocution, he--well, he set up his
Pentecost. Since then he has been a fashionable preacher and frequents
the houses of great people. Ten years ago he was made an honorary
canon, and, when he hears of an appointment to a bishopric, he says in a
tearful voice, 'I don't know what the dear Queen has got against me.'”

“Well, sir?”

“Well, if I had known you felt like that I should scarcely have sent you
to Canon Wealthy. And yet I hardly know where else a young man of your
opinions ... I'm afraid the Church has a good many Canon Wealthys in
it.”

“God forbid!” said John. “No doubt there are Pharisees in these days
just as in the days of Christ, but the Church is still the pillar of the
State----”

“The caterpillar, you mean, boy--eating out its heart and its vitals.”

The Prime Minister gave another bitter little laugh, then looked quickly
into John's flushed face and said:

“But it's poor work for an old man to sap away a young man's
enthusiasm.”

“You can't do that, uncle,” said John, “because God is the absolute
ruler of all things, good and bad, and he governs both to his glory. Let
him only give us strength to endure our exile----”

“I don't like to hear you talk like that, John. I think I know what the
upshot will be. There's a gang of men about--Anglican Catholics they
call themselves; well, remember the German proverb, 'Every priestling
hides a popeling.' ... And if you _are_ to be in the Church, John, is
there any reason why you shouldn't marry and be reasonable? To tell you
the truth, I'm rather a lonely old man, whatever I may seem, and if your
mother's son would give me a sort of a grandson--eh?”

The Prime Minister was pretending to laugh again.

“Come, John, come, it seems a pity--a fine young fellow like you, too.
Are there no sweet young girls about in these days? Or are they all dead
and gone since I was a young fellow? I could give you a wide choice, you
know, for when a man stands high enough ... in fact, you would find
me reasonable--you might have anybody you liked, rich or poor, dark or
fair.----”

John Storm had been sitting in torment, and now he rose to go. “No,
uncle,” he said, in a thicker voice, “I shall never marry. A clergyman
who is married is bound to life by too many ties. Even his affection for
his wife is a tie. And then there is her affection for the world, its
riches, its praise, its honours.----”

“Well, well, we'll say no more. After all, it's better than running
wild, and that's what most young men seem to be doing nowadays. But
then your long education abroad--and your poor father left to look after
himself! Good-day to you. Come and see me now and then. How like your
mother you are sometimes! Good-day!”

When the door of the cabinet room closed on John Storm the Prime
Minister thought, “Poor boy, he's laying up for himself a big heartache
one of these fine days!”

And John Storm, going down the street with uncertain step, said to
himself: “How strange he should talk like that! But, thank God, he
didn't produce a flicker in me. I died to all that a year ago.”

Then he lifted his head and his footstep lightened, and deep in some
secret place the thought came proudly, “She shall see that to renounce
the world is to possess the world--that a man may be poor and have all
the kingdom of the world at his feet.”

He went back by the Underground from Westminster Bridge. It was midday,
and the train was crowded. His spirits were high and he talked with
every one near him. Getting out at Victoria, he came upon his vicar on
the platform and saluted him rather demonstratively. The canon responded
with some restraint and then stepped into a first-class carriage.

On turning into Eaton Place he came upon a group of people standing
around something that lay on the pavement. It was an old woman, a
tattered, bedraggled creature with a pinched and pallid face. “Is it
an accident?” a gentleman was saying, and somebody answered, “No,
sir, she's gorn off in a faint.” “Why doesn't some one take her to the
hospital?” said the gentleman, and then, like the Levite, he passed
by on the other side. The butcher's cart drew up at the curb, and the
butcher jumped down, saying, “There never _is_ no p'lice about when
they're wanted for anythink.”

“But they aren't wanted here, friend,” said somebody from the outside.
It was John Storm, and he was pushing his way through the crowd.

“Will somebody knock at that door, please?” He lifted the old thing in
his arms and carried her toward the canon's house. The footman looked
aghast. “Let me know when the canon returns,” said John, and then
marched up the carpeted stairs to his rooms.

An hour afterward the old woman opened her eyes and said: “Anythink gorn
wrong? Wot's up? Is it the work'us?”

It was a clear case of destitution and collapse. John Storm began to
feed the old creature with the chicken and milk sent up for his own
lunch.

Some time in the afternoon he heard the voice and step of the vicar in
the room below. Going down to the study, he was about to knock; but the
voice continued in varying tones, now loud, now low. During a pause he
rapped, and then, with noticeable irritation, the voice cried, “Come
in!”

He found the vicar, with a manuscript in hand, rehearsing his Sunday's
sermon. It was a shock to John, but it helped him to understand what his
uncle had said about the canon's Pentecost.

The canon's brow was clouded. “Ah, is it you? I was sorry to see you
getting out of a third-class carriage to-day, Mr. Storm.”

John answered that it was the poor man's class, and therefore, he
thought, it ought to be his.

“You do yourself an injustice, Mr. Storm. Besides, to tell you the
truth, I don't choose that my assistant clergy----”

John looked ashamed. “If that is your view, sir,” he said, “I don't know
what you'll say to what I've been doing since.”

“I've heard of it, and I confess I'm not pleased. Whatever your old
_protégée_ may be, my house is no place for her. I help to maintain
charitable institutions for such cases, and I will ask you to lose no
time in having her removed to the hospital.”

John was crushed. “Very well, sir, if that is your wish; only I thought
you said my rooms----Besides, the poor old thing fills her place as well
as Queen Victoria, and perhaps the angels are watching the one as much
as the other.”

Next day John Storm called to see the old woman at Martha's Vineyard,
and he saw the matron, the house doctor, and a staff nurse as well.
His adventure was known to everybody at the hospital. Once or twice he
caught looks of amused compassion, and heard a twitter of laughter. As
he stood by the bed, the old woman muttered: “I knoo ez it wuzn't the
work'us, my dear. He spoke to me friendly and squeedged my 'and.”

Coming through the wards he had looked for a face he could not see; but
just then he was aware of a young woman, in the print dress and white
apron of a nurse, standing in silence at the bed-head. It was Glory, and
her eyes were wet with tears.

“You mustn't do such things,” she said hoarsely; “I can't bear it,” and
she stamped her foot. “Don't you see that these people----”

But she turned about and was gone before he could reply. Glory was
ashamed for him. Perhaps she had been taking his part! He felt the blood
mounting to his face, and his cheeks tingling. Glory! His eyes were
swimming, and he dared not look after her; but he could have found it in
his heart to kiss the old bag of bones on the bed.

That night he wrote to the parson in the island: “Glory has left off
her home garments, and now looks more beautiful than ever in the white
simplicity of the costume of the nurse. Her vocation is a great one.
God grant she may hold on to it!” Then something about the fallacy
of ceremonial religion and the impossibility of pleasing God by such
religious formalities. “But if we have publicans and Pharisees now, even
as they existed in Christ's time, all the more service is waiting for
that man for whom life has no ambitions, death no terrors. I thank God I
am in a great measure dead to these things.... I will fulfil my promise
to look after Glory. My constant prayer is against Agag. It is so easy
for him to get a foothold in a girl's heart here. This great new world,
with its fashions, its gaieties, its beauty, and its brightness--no
wonder if a beautiful young girl, tingling with life and ruddy health,
should burn with impatience to fling herself into the arms of it. Agag
is in London, and as insinuating as ever.”




VI.

On Sunday morning his fellow-curate came to his room to accompany him
to church. The Rev. Joshua Golightly was a little man with a hook nose,
small keen eyes, scanty hair, and a voice that was something between
a whisper and a whistle. He bowed subserviently, and made meek little
speeches.

“I do trust you will not be disappointed with our church and service. We
do all we can to make them worthy of our people.”

As they walked down the streets he talked first of the church
officers--there were honorary wardens, gentlemen sidesmen, and lady
superintendents of floral decorations; then of the choir, which
consisted of organist and choir master, professional members, voluntary
members, and choir secretary. The anthem was sung by a professional
singer, generally the tenor from the opera; the canon could always
get such people--he was a great favourite with artistes and “the
profession.” Of course, the singers were paid, and the difficulty this
week had been due to the exorbitant fee demanded by the Italian barytone
from Covent Garden.

Disappointment and disenchantment were falling on John Storm at every
step.

All Saints' was a plain, dark structure with a courtyard in front.
The bells were ringing, and a line of carriages was drawing up at the
portico as at the entrance to a theatre, discharging their occupants
and passing on. Vergers in yellow and buff, with knee-breeches, silk
stockings, and powdered wigs, were receiving the congregation at the
doors.

“Let us go in by the west door--I should like you to see the screen to
advantage,” said Mr. Golightly.

The inside of the church was gorgeous. As far up as the clerestory
every wall was frescoed, and every timber of the roof was gilded. At the
chancel end there was a wrought-iron screen of delicate tracery, and the
altar was laden with gold candlesticks. Above the altar and at either
side of it were stained glass windows. The morning sun was shining
through them and filling the chancel with warm splashes of light. Ladies
in beautiful spring dresses were following the vergers up the aisles.

“This way,” the curate whispered, and John Storm entered the sacristy by
a low doorway like the auditorium entrance to a stage. There he met
some six others of his fellow-curates. They nodded to him and went
on arranging their surplices. The choir were gathering in their own
quarters, where the violins were tuning up and the choir boys were
laughing and behaving after their kind.

The bell slackened and stopped, and the organ began to play. When all
were ready they stepped into a long corridor and formed in line with
their faces to the chancel and their backs to a little door, at which a
verger in blue stood guard.

“The canon's room,” whispered Mr. Golightly.

A prayer was said by some one, the choir sang the response, and then
they walked in procession to their places in the chancel, the choir
boys first, the canon last. Seen through the tracery of the screen, the
congregation appeared to fill every sitting in the church with a blaze
of light and colour, and the atmosphere was laden with delicate perfume.

The service was choral. An anthem was sung at the close of the sermon,
the collection being made during the hymn before it. The professional
singer looked like any other chorister in his surplice, save for his
swarthy face and heavy mustache.

The canon preached. He wore his doctor's hood of scarlet cloth. His
sermon was eloquent and literary, and it was delivered with elocutionary
power. There were many references to great writers, painters, and
musicians, including a panegyric on Michael Angelo and a quotation
from Browning. The sermon concluded with a passage from Dante in the
original.

John Storm was dazed and perplexed. When the service was over he came
out alone, returning down the nave, which was now empty but still
fragrant. Among other notices pasted on a board in the porch he found
this one: “The vicar and wardens, having learned with regret that purses
have been lost on leaving the church, recommend the congregation to
bring only such money as they may need for the offertory.”

Had he been to the house of God? No matter! God ruled the world in
righteousness and wrought out everything to his own glory.

Next morning he began duty as chaplain at the hospital, and when he had
finished the reading of his first prayers he could see that he had lived
down some of the derision due to his adventure with the old woman. That
poor old bag of bones was sinking and could not last much longer.

Going out by way of the dispensary, he saw Glory again, and heard that
she had been at church the day before. It was lovely. All those hundreds
of nice-looking people in gay colours, with the rustle of silk and the
hum of voices--it was beautiful--it reminded her of the sea in summer.
He asked her what she thought of the sermon, and she said, “Well,
it wasn't religion exactly--not what I call religion--not a 'reg'lar
rousing rampage for sowls,' as old Chalse used to say, but----”

“Glory,” he said impetuously, “I'm to preach my first sermon on
Wednesday.”

He did not ask her to come, but inquired if she was on night duty. She
answered No, and then somebody called her.

“She'll be there,” he told himself, and he walked home with uplifted
head. He would look for her; he would catch her eye; she would see that
it was not necessary to be ashamed of him again.

And then close behind, very close, came recollections of her appearance.
He could reconstruct her new dress by memory--her face was easy to
remember. “After all, beauty is a kind of virtue,” he thought. “And all
natural friendship is good for the progress of souls if it is built upon
the love of God.”

He wrote nothing and learned nothing by heart. The only preparation he
made for his sermon was thought and prayer. When the Wednesday night
came he was very nervous. But the church was nearly empty, and the
vergers, who were in their everyday clothes, had only partially lit
up the nave. The canon had done him the honour to be present; his
fellow-curates read the prayers and lessons.

As he ascended the pulpit he thought he saw the white bonnets of a group
of nurses in the dim distance of one of the aisles, but he did not see
Glory and he dared not look again. His text was, “My kingdom is not
of this world.” He gave it out twice, and his voice sounded strange to
himself--so weak and thin in that hollow place.

When he began to speak his sentences seemed awkward and difficult. The
things of the world were temporal and the nations of the world were out
of harmony with God. Men were biting and devouring each other who ought
to live as brothers. “Cheat or be cheated” was the rule of life, as
the modern philosopher had said. On the one side were the many dying of
want, on the other side the few occupied with poetry and art, writing
addresses to flowers, and peddling--in the portraiture of the moods
and methods of love, living lives of frivolity, taking pleasure in mere
riches and the lusts of the eye, while thousands of wretched mortals
were grovelling in the mire.... Then where was our refuge? ...
The Church was the refuge of God's people ... from Christ came the
answer--the answer--the----

His words would not flow. He fought hard, threw out another passage,
then stammered, began again, stammered again, felt hot, made a fresh
effort, flagged, rattled out some words he had fixed in his mind,
perspired, lost his voice, and finally stopped in the middle of a
sentence and said, “And now to God the Father--” and came down from the
pulpit.

His sermon had been a failure, and he knew it. On going back to the
sacristy the Reverend Golightly congratulated him with a simper and a
vapid smile. The canon was more honest but more vain. He mingled lofty
advice with gentle reproof. Mr. Storm had taken his task too lightly.
Better if he had written his sermon and read it. Whatever might
serve for the country, congregations in London--at All Saints'
especially--expected culture and preparation.

“For my own part I confess--nay, I am proud to declare--my watchword is
Rehearse! Rehearse! Rehearse!”

As for the doctrine of the sermon it was not above question. It was
necessary to live in the _nineteenth_ century, and it was impossible to
apply to its conditions the rules of life that had been proper to the
first.

John Storm made no resistance. He slept badly that night. As often as he
dozed off he dreamed that he was trying to do something he could not do,
and when he awoke he became hot as with the memory of a disgrace. And
always at the back of his shame was the thought of Glory.

Next morning he was alone in his room and fumbling the toast on his
breakfast table, when the door opened and a cheery voice cried, “May I
no come in, laddie?”

An elderly lady entered. She was tall and slight and had a long, fine
face, with shrewd but kindly eyes, and nearly snow-white hair.

“I'm Jane Callender,” she said, “and I couldna wait for an introduction
or sic bother, but must just come and see ye. Ay, laddie, it was a
bonnie sermon yon! I havena heard the match of it since I came frae
Edinburgh and sat under the good Doctor Guthrie. Now _he_ was nae
slavish reader neither--none of your paper preachers was Thomas. My
word, but you gave us the right doctrine, too! They're given over to
the worship of Beelzebub--half these church-going folks! Oh, these
Pharisees! They are enough to sour milk. I wish they had one neck and
somebody would just squeeze it. Now, where did ye hear that, Jane? But
no matter! And the lasses are worse than the men, with their fashions
and foldololls. They love Jesus, but they like him best in heaven, not
bothering down in Belgravia. But I must be going my ways. I left James
on the street, and there's nae living with the man if you keep his
horses waiting. Good-morning til ye! But eh, laddie, I'm afraid for ye!
I'm thinking--I'm thinking ... but come and see me at Victoria Square.
Good-morning!”

She had rattled this off at a breath, and had hardly given time for a
reply, when her black silk was rustling down the stairs.

John Storm remembered that the canon had spoken of her. She was the good
woman who kept the home for girls at Soho.

“The good creature only came to comfort me,” he thought. But Glory! What
was Glory thinking? That morning after prayers at the hospital he went
in search of her in the out-patient department, but she pretended to be
overwhelmed with work, and only nodded and smiled and excused herself.

“I haven't got a moment this morning either for the king or his dog. I'm
up to my eyes in bandages, and have fourteen plasters on my conscience,
and now I must run away to my little boy whose leg was amputated on
Saturday.”

He understood her, but he came back in the evening and was resolved to
face it out.

“What did you think of last night, Glory?” Then she put on a look of
blank amazement.

“Why, what happened? Oh, of course, the sermon! How stupid of me! Do you
know I forgot all about it?”

“You were not there, then?”

“Don't ask me. Really, I'm ashamed; after my promise to grandfather,
too! But Wednesday doesn't count anyway, does it? You'll preach on
Sunday--and then!”

His feeling of relief was followed by a sense of deeper humiliation.
Glory had not even troubled herself to remember. Evidently he was
nothing to her, nothing; while she----

He walked home through St. James's Park, and under the tall trees the
peaceful silence of the night came down on him. The sharp clack of the
streets was deadened to a low hum as of the sea afar off. Across the
gardens he could see the clock in the tower of Westminster, and hear
the great bell strike the quarters. London! How little and selfish all
personal thoughts were in the contemplation of the mighty city! He had
been thinking only of himself and his own little doings. It was all so
small and pitiful!

“Did my shame at my failure in the pulpit proceed solely from fear of
losing the service of God, or did it proceed from wounded ambition, from
pride, from thoughts of Glory----”

But the peaceful stars were over him. It was a majestic night.




VII.

“Martha's Vineyard.

“Dear Auntie Rachel: Tell grandpa, to begin with, that John Storm
preached his first sermon on Wednesday last, and, according to
programme, I was there to hear it. Oh, God bless me! What a time I had
of it! He broke down in the middle, taking stage fright or pulpit fright
or some such devilry, though there was nothing to be afraid of except a
bandboxful of chattering girls who didn't listen, and a few old
fogies with ear-trumpets. I was sitting in the darkness at the back,
effectually concealed from the preacher by the broad shoulders of Ward
Sister Allworthy, who is an example of 'delicate femaleism' just verging
on old-maidenism. They tell me the 'discoorse' was a short one, but
I never got so many prayers into the time in all my born days, and my
breath was coming and going so fast that the Sister must have thought
they had set up a pumping-engine in the pew behind her. Our poor,
heavy-laden Mr. Storm has been here since then with his sad and eager
face, but I hadn't the stuff in me to tell him the truth about the
sermon, so I told him I had forgotten to go and hear it, and may the
Lord have mercy on my soul!

“You want to know how I employ my time? Well, lest you should think I
give up my days to dreams and my nights to idleness, I hasten to tell
that I rise at 6, breakfast at 6.30, begin duty at 7, sup at 9.30 P.M.,
gossip till 10, and then go into my room and put myself to bed; and
there I am at the end of it. Being only a probationer, I am chiefly in
the out-patient department, where my duties are to collect the things
wanted at the dispensary, make the patients ready to see the surgeon,
and pass them on to the dressers. My patients at present are the
children, and I love them, and shall break my heart when I have to leave
them. They are not always too well looked after by the surgeon, but
that doesn't matter in the least, because, you see, they are constantly
watched by the best and most learned doctor in the world--that's me.

“Last Saturday I had my first experience of the operating theatre.
Gracious goodness! I thought I shouldn't survive it. Fortunately, I had
my dressings and sponges to look after, so I just stiffened my back with
a sort of imaginary six-foot steel bar, and went on 'like blazes.' But
some of these staff nurses are just 'ter'ble'; they take a professional
pleasure in descending to that inferno, and wouldn't miss a 'theatre'
for worlds. On Saturday it was a little boy of five who had his leg
amputated, and now when you ask the white-faced darling where he's going
to he says he's going to the angels, and he'll get lots of gristly pork
up there. He _is_ too.

“The _personnel_ of our vineyard is abundant, but there are various sour
grapes growing about. We have a medical school (containing lots of nice
boys, only a girl may not speak to them even in the corridors), and a
full staff of honorary and visiting physicians and surgeons. But the
only doctor we really have much to do with is the house surgeon, a young
fellow who has just finished his student's course. His name is Abery,
and since Saturday he has so much respect for Glory that she might even
swear in his presence (in Manx), but Sister Allworthy takes care that
she doesn't, having designs on his celibacy herself. He must have sung
his _Te Deum_ after the operation, for he got gloriously drunk and
wanted to inject morphia in a patient recovering from trouble of the
kidney. It was an old hippopotamus of a German musician named Koenig,
and he was in a frantic terror. So I whispered to him to pretend to go
to sleep, and then I told the doctor I had lost the syringe. But--'Gough
bless me sowl!'--what a dressing the Sister gave me!

“Yesterday was visiting-day, and when the friends of the patients come
even an hospital can have its humours. They try to sneak in little
dainties which may be delicious in themselves, but are deadly poison
to the people they are intended for. Then we have to search under the
bedclothes of the patients, and even feel the pockets of their visitors.
The mother of my little boy came yesterday, and I noticed such a large
protuberance at her bosom under her ulster that I began to foresee
another operation. It was only a brick of currant cake, paved with
lemon peel. I hauled it out and moved round like a cloud of thunder and
lightning. But she began to cry and to say she had made it herself for
Johnnie, and then--well, didn't I just get a wigging from the Sister,
though!

“But I don't mind what happens here, for I am in London, and to be in
London is to live, and to live is to be in London. I've not seen much
of it yet, having only two hours off duty every day--from ten to
twelve--and then all I can do is to make little dips into the park and
the district round about, like a new pigeon with its wings clipped.
But I watch the great new world from my big box up here, and see the
carriages in the park and the people riding on horseback. They have
a new handshake in London. You lift your hand to the level of your
shoulder, and then waggle horizontally as if you had put your elbow out;
and when you begin to speak you say, 'I--er--' as if you had got the
mumps. But it is beautiful! The sound of the traffic is like music, and
I feel like a war-horse that wants to be marching to it. How delightful
it is to be young in a world so full of loveliness! And if you are not
very ugly it's none the worse.

“All hospital nurses are just now basking in the sunshine of a
forthcoming ball. It is to be given at Bartimaeus's Hospital, where they
have a lecture theatre larger than the common, and the dancing there is
for once to be to a happier tune. All the earth is to be present--all
the hospital earth--and if I could afford to array myself in the
necessary splendour, I should show this benighted London what an
absolute angel Glory is! But then my first full holiday is to be on the
24th, when I expect to be out from 10 A. M. until 10 P. M. I am nearly
crazy whenever I think of it, and when the time comes to make my first
plunge into London, I know I shall hold my breath exactly as if I were
taking a header off Creg Malin rocks.... Glory.”




VIII.

On the morning of the 24th Glory rose at five, that she might get
through her work and have the entire day for her holiday. At that hour
she came upon a rough-haired nurse wearing her cap a little on one side
and washing a floor with disinfectants. Being in great spirits, Glory
addressed her cheerfully.

“Are you off to-day too?” she said.

The nurse gave her a contemptuous glance and answered: “I'm not one of
your paying probationers, Miss--playing probationers _I_ call them. We
nurses are hard-working women, whose life spells duty; and we've got no
time for sight-seeing and holiday-making.”

“No, but you are one of those who ruin the profession altogether,” said
a younger woman who had just come up. “They will expect everybody to do
the same. This is my day off, but I have to do the grate, and sweep the
ward, and make the bed, and tidy the Sister's room--and it's all through
people like you. Small thanks you get for it either, for a girl may not
even wear her hair in a fringe, and she is always expecting to hear the
matron's 'You're not fit for nursing, Miss.'”

Glory looked at her. She was an exquisitely pretty girl, with dark hair,
pink and ivory cheeks, and light-gray eyes; but her hands were coarse,
and her finger nails flat and square, and when you looked again there
was a certain blemished appearance about her beauty as of a Sèvres vase
that is cracked somewhere.

“Do you say you are off to-day?” said Glory,

“Yes, I am; are you?”

“Yes, but I'm strange to London. Could you take me with you--if you are
going nowhere in particular?”

“Certainly, dear. I've noticed you before and wanted to speak to you.
You're the girl with the splendid name--Glory, isn't it?”

“Yes; what is yours?”

“Polly Love.”

At ten o'clock that morning the two girls set out for their long day's
jaunt.

“Now where shall we go?” said Polly.

“Let's go where we can see a great many people,” said Glory.

“That's easy enough, for this is the Queen's birthday, and----”

Glory thought of Aunt Rachel and made a cry of delight.

“And now that I think of it,” said Polly, as if by a sudden memory,
“I've got tickets for the trooping of the colours--the Queen's colours,
you know.”

“Shall we see her?” said Glory.

“What a question! Why, no, but we'll see the soldiers, and the generals,
and perhaps the Prince. It's at ten-thirty, and only across the park.”

“Come along,” said Glory, and she began to drag at her companion and to
run.

“My gracious, what a girl you are, to be sure!”

But they were both running in another minute, and laughing and
chattering like children escaped from school. In a quarter of an hour
they were at the entrance to the Horse Guards. There was a crowd at the
gates, and a policeman was taking tickets. Polly dived into her pocket.

“Where are mine? Oh, here they are. A great friend gave me them,” she
whispered. “He has a chum in one of those offices.”

“A gentleman,” said Glory with studied politeness; but they were
crushing through the gate by that time, and thereafter she had eyes and
ears for nothing but the pageant before her.

It was a beautiful morning, and the spring foliage of the park was
very green and fresh. Three sides of the great square were lined with
redcoats; the square itself was thronged with people, and every window
and balcony looking over it was filled. There were soldiers, sentries,
policemen, the generals in cocked hats, and the Prince himself in a
bearskin, riding by with the jingle of spurs and curb-chain. Then the
ta-ra-ta-ta-ra of the bugle, the explosive voice crying, “Escort for
the colour!” the officer carrying it, the white gloves of the staff
fluttering up the salute, the flash of bayonets, the march round, and
the band playing The British Grenadiers. It was like a dream to Glory.
She felt her bosom heaving, and was afraid she was going to cry.

Polly was laughing and prattling merrily. “Ha, ha, ha! see that soldier
chasing a sunshade? My! he has caught it with his sword.”

“I suppose these are all great people,” whispered Glory.

“I should think so,” said Polly. “Do you see that gentleman in the
window opposite?--that's the Foreign Office.”

“Which?” said Glory, but her eyes were wandering.

“The one in the frock-coat and the silk hat, talking to the lady in the
green lawn and the black lace fichu and the spring bonnet.”

“You mean beside that plain girl wearing the jungle of rhododendrons?”

“Yes; that's the gentleman that gave my friend the tickets.”

Glory looked at him for a moment, and something very remote seemed to
stir in her memory; but the band was playing once more, and she was
wafted away again. It was God save the Queen this time, and when it
ended and everybody cried “All over!” she took a long, deep breath and
said, “_Well!_”

Polly was laughing at her, and Glory had to laugh also. They set each
other off laughing, and people began to look at them, and then they had
to laugh again and run away.

“This Glory is the funniest girl,” said Polly; “she is surprised at the
simplest thing.”

They went to look at the shops, passing up Regent Street, across the
Circus and down Oxford Street toward the City, laughing and talking
nonsense all the time. Once when they made a little purchase at a shop
the shopwoman looked astonished at the freedom with which they carried
themselves, and after that they felt inclined to go into every shop in
the street and behave absurdly everywhere. In the course of two
hours they had accomplished all the innocent follies possible to the
intoxication of youth, and were perfectly happy.

By this time they had reached the Bank and were feeling the prickings
of hunger, so they looked out a restaurant in Cheapside and went in for
some dinner. The place was full of men, and several of them rose at
once when the two girls entered. They were in their out-door hospital
costume, but there was something showy about Polly's toilet, and the men
kept looking their way and smiling. Glory looked back boldly and said in
an audible voice, “What fun it must be to be a barmaid, and to have the
gentlemen wink at you, and be laughing back at them!” But Polly nudged,
her and told her to be quiet. She looked down herself, but nevertheless
contrived to use her eyes as a kind of furtive electric battery in the
midst of the most innocent conversation. It was clear that Polly had
flown farthest in the ways of the world, and when you looked at her
again you could see that the balance of her life had been deranged by
some one.

After dinner the girls got into an omnibus and went still farther east,
sitting at opposite sides of the car, and laughing and talking loudly to
each other, amid the astonishment of the other occupants. But when
they came to mean and ugly streets with green-grocers' barrows by the
curbstone, and weird and dreary cemeteries in the midst of gaunt, green
sticks that were trying to look like trees, Glory thought they had
better return.

They went back by the Thames steamboat from some landing stage among the
docks. The steamer picked up passengers at every station on the river,
and at London Bridge a band came aboard. As they sailed under St. Paul's
the boat was crowded with people going west to see the celebrations in
honour of the birthday, and the band was playing And her Golden Hair was
hanging down her Back.

At one moment Glory was wild with delight, and at the next her gaiety
seemed to be suddenly extinguished. The sun was setting behind the
towers of Westminster in a magnificent lake of fire, and it seemed
like the sun going down at Peel, except that the lights beneath, which
glistened and flashed, were windows, not waves, and the deep hum was not
the noise of the mighty sea, but the noise of mighty millions.

They landed at Westminster Bridge and went to a tearoom for tea. When
they came out it was quite dark, and they got on to the top of an
omnibus. But the town was now ablaze with gas and electric lights that
were flinging out the initials of the Queen, and Whitehall was dense
with carriages going to the official receptions. Glory wanted to be in
the midst of so much life, so the girls got down and walked arm in arm.

As they passed through Piccadilly Circus they were laughing again, for
the oppression of the crowds made them happy. The throng was greatest
at that point and they had to push their way through. Among others there
were many gaily-dressed women, who seemed to be waiting for omnibuses.
Glory noticed that two of these women, who were grimacing and lisping,
had spoken to a man who was also lounging about. She tugged at Polly's
arm.

“That's strange! Did you see that?” she said.

“That! Oh, that's nothing. It's done every day,” said Polly.

“What does it mean?” said Glory.

“Why, you don't mean to say--well, this, Glory---- Really your friends
ought to take care of you, my dear, you are so ignorant of the world.”

And then suddenly, as by a flash of lightning, Glory had her first
glimpse of the tragic issues of life.

“Oh, my gracious! Come along,” she whispered, and dragged Polly after
her.

They were panting past the end of St. James's Street when a man with
an eye-glass and a great shield of shirt-front collided with them and
saluted them. Glory was for forging ahead, but Polly had drawn up.

“It's only my friend,” said Polly in another voice.--“This is a new
nurse. Her name is Glory.”

The man said something about a glorious name and a glorious pleasure to
be nursed by such a nurse, and then both the girls laughed. He was glad
they had found his tickets useful, but sorry he could not see them
back to the hospital, being dragged away to the bally Foreign Office
reception in honour of the Queen's birthday.

“But I'm coming to the ball, you know, and,” with a glance at Glory,
“I've half a mind to bring my chum along with me!”

“Oh, do,” said Polly, partly covering the pupils of her eyes with her
eyelids.

The man lowered his voice and said something about Glory which Glory did
not catch, then waved his white-kid glove, saying “Ta-ta,” and was gone.

“Is he married?” said Glory.

“Married! Good gracious, no; what ridiculous ideas you've got!”

It was ten minutes after ten as the girls turned in at a sharp trot at
the door of the hospital, still prattling and chattering and bringing
some of the gaiety and nonsense of their holiday into the quiet
precincts of the house of pain. The porter shook his finger at them with
mock severity, and a ward Sister going through the porch in her white
silence stopped to say that a patient had been crying out for one of
them.

“It's me--I know it's me,” said Polly. “I've got a brother here out of
a monastery, and he can't do with anybody else about him. It makes me
tired of my life.”

But it was Glory who was wanted. The woman whom John Storm had picked
up out of the streets was dying. Glory had helped to nurse her, and the
poor old thing had kept herself alive that she might deliver to Glory
her last charge and message. She could see nobody, so Glory leaned over
the bed and spoke to her.

“I'm here, mammie; what is it?” she said, and the flushed young face
bent close above the withered and white one.

“He spoke to me friendly and squeedged my 'and, he did. S'elp me never,
it's true. Gimme a black cloth on the corfin, my dear, and mind yer tell
'im to foller.”

“Yes, mammie, yes. I will-be sure I--I--Oh!”

It was Glory's first death.




IX.

John Storm had been through his first morning call that afternoon. For
this ordeal he had presented himself in a flannel shirt in the hall,
where the canon was waiting for him in patent-leather boots and kid
gloves, and his daughter Felicity in cream silk and white feathers.
After they had seated themselves in the carriage the canon, said: “You
don't quite do yourself justice, Mr. Storm. Believe me, to be well
dressed is a great thing to a young man making his way in London.”

The carriage stopped at a house that seemed to be only round the corner.

“This is Mrs. Macrae's,” the canon whispered. “An American lady-widow
of a millionaire. Her daughter--you will see her presently--is to marry
into one of our best English families.”

They were walking up the wide staircase behind the footman in blue.
There was a buzz of voices coming from a room above.

“Canon--er--Wealthy, Miss Wealthy, and--er--the--h'm--Rev. Mr. Storm!”

The buzz of voices abated, and a bright-faced little woman, showily
dressed, came forward and welcomed them with a marked accent. There were
several other ladies in the room, but only one gentleman. This person,
who was standing, with teacup and saucer in hand, at the farther side,
screwed an eyeglass in his eye, looked across at John Storm, and then
said something to the lady in the chair beside him. The lady tittered
a little. John Storm looked back at the man, as if by an instinctive
certainty that he must know him when he saw him again. He was engulfed
in a high, stiff collar, and was rather ugly; tall, slender, a
little past thirty; fair, with soft, sleepy eyes, and no life in his
expression, but agreeable; fit for good society, with the stamp of good
breeding, and capable of saying little humorous things in a thin “roofy”
 voice.

“I was real sorry I didn't hear Mr. Storm Wednesday evening,” Mrs.
Macrae was saying, with a mincing smile. “My daughter told me it was
just too lovely.--Mercy, this is your great preacher. Persuade him to
come to my 'At Home' Tuesday.”

A tall, dark girl, with gentle manners and a beautiful face, came slowly
forward, put her hand into John's, and looked steadily into his eyes
without speaking. Then the gentleman with the eyeglass said suavely,
“Have you been long in London, Mr. Storm?”

“Two weeks,” John answered shortly, and half turned his head.

“How--er--interesting!” with a prolonged drawl and a little cold titter.

“Oh, Lord Robert Ure--Mr. Storm,” said the hostess.

“Mr. Storm has done me the honour to become one of my assistant clergy,
Lord Robert,” said the canon, “but he is not likely to be a curate
long.”

“That is charming,” said Lord Robert. “It is always a relief to hear
that I am likely to have one candidate the less for my poor perpetual
curacy in Pimlico. They're at me like flies round a honey-pot, don't you
know. I thought I had made the acquaintance of all the perpetual curates
in Christendom. And what a sweet team they are, to be sure! The last of
them came yesterday. I was out, and my friend Drake--Drake of the Home
Office, you know--couldn't give the man the living, so he gave him
sixpence instead, and the creature went away quite satisfied.”

Everybody seemed to laugh except John, who only stared into the air, and
the loudest laughter came from the canon. But suddenly an incisive voice
said:

“But why sharpen your teeth on the poor curates? Is there no a canon or
a bishop handy that's better worth a bite?”

It was Mrs. Callender.

“I tell ye a story too, only _mine_ shall be a true one.”

“Jane! Jane!” said the hostess, shaking her fan as a weapon; and Lord
Robert stretched his neck over his collar and made an amiable smile.

“A girl of eighteen came to me this morning at Soho, and she was in the
usual trouble. The father was a wicked rector. He died last year
leaving thirty-one thousand pounds; and the mother of his unfortunate
child--that is to say, his mistress--is now in the Union.”

It was the first sincere word that had been spoken, where every tone
had been wrong, every gesture false, and it fell on the company like a
thunderclap. John Storm drew his breath hard, looked up at Lord Robert
by a strange impulse, and felt himself avenged.

“What a beautiful day it has been!” said somebody. Everybody looked up
at the maker of this surprising remark. It was a lady, and she blushed
until her cheeks burned again.

A painful silence followed, and then the hostess turned to Lord Robert
and said:

“You spoke of your friend Drake, didn't you? Everybody is talking of
him, and as for the girls, they seem to be crazy about the man. So
handsome, they say; so natural, and such a splendid talker. But then,
girls are so quick to take fancies to people. You really must take care
of yourself, my dear.” (This to Felicity.) “Who is he? Lord Robert will
tell you--an official of some kind, and son of Sir something Drake, of
one of the northern counties. He knows the secret of getting on in the
world, though he doesn't go about too much. But I've determined not to
live any longer without making the acquaintance of this wonderful being,
so Lord Robert must just bring him along Tuesday evening, or else----”

John Storm escaped at last, without promising to come to the “At Home.”
 He went direct to the hospital and learned that Glory was out for the
day. Where she could have gone, and what she could be doing, puzzled him
grievously. That she had not put herself under his counsel and direction
on her first excursion abroad hurt his pride and wounded his sense of
responsibility. As the night fell his anxiety increased. Though he knew
she would not return until ten, he set out at nine to meet her.

At a venture he took the eastward course, and passed slowly down
Piccadilly. The façade of nearly every club facing the park was flaming
with electric light. Young men in evening dress were standing on the
steps, smoking and taking the air after dinner, and pretty girls in
showy costumes were promenading leisurely in front of them. Sometimes,
as a girl passed, she looked sharply up and the corner of her mouth
would be raised a little, and when she had gone by there would be a
general burst of laughter.

John's blood boiled, and then his heart sank; he felt so helpless, his
pity and indignation were so useless and unnecessary. All at once he saw
what he had been looking for. As he went by the corner of St. James's
Street he almost ran against Glory and another nurse in the costume of
their hospital. They did not observe him; they were talking to a man; it
was the man he had met in the afternoon--Lord Robert Ure.

John heard the man say, “Your Glory is such a glorious----” and then he
lowered his voice, and appeared to say something that was very amusing,
for the other girl laughed a great deal.

John's soul was now fairly in revolt, and he wanted to stop, to order
the man off and to take charge of the two nurses as his duty seemed to
require of him. But he passed them, then looked back and saw the group
separate, and as the man went by he watched the girls going westward.
There was a glimpse of them under the gas-lamp as they crossed the
street, and again a glimpse as they passed into the darkness under the
trees of the park.

He could not trust himself to return to the hospital that night, and
his indignation was no less in the morning. But there was a letter from
Glory saying that his poor old friend was dead, and had begged that he
would bury her. He dressed himself in his best (“We can't take liberties
with the poor,” he thought) and walked across to the hospital at once.
There he asked for Glory, and they went downstairs together to that
still chamber underground which has always its cold and silent occupant.
It is only a short tenancy that anybody can have there, so the old woman
had to be buried the same morning. The parish was to bury her, and the
van was at the door.

He was standing with Glory in the hall, and his heart had softened to
her.

“Glory,” he said, “you shouldn't have gone out yesterday without telling
me, the dangers of London are so great.”

“What dangers?” she asked.

“Well, to a young girl, a beautiful girl----”

Glory peered up under her long eyelashes.

“I mean the dangers from--I'm ashamed in my soul to say it--the dangers
from men.”

She shot up a quick glance into his face and said in a moment, “You saw
us, didn't you?”

“Yes, I saw you, and I didn't like your choice of company.”

She dropped her head demurely and said, “The man?”

John hesitated. “I was speaking of the girl. I don't like the freedom
with which she carries herself in this house. Among these good and
devoted women is there no one but this--this----?”

Glory's lower lip began to show its inner side. “She's bright and
lively, that's all I care.”

“But it's not all _I_ care, Glory, and if such men as that are her
friends outside----”

Glory's head went up. “What is it to me who are her friends outside?”

“Everything, if you allow yourself to meet them again.”

“Well,” doggedly, “I am going to meet them again. I'm going to the
Nurses' Ball on Tuesday.”

John answered with deliberation, “Not in that girl's company.”

“Why not?”

“I say _not_ in that girl's company.”

There was a short pause, and then Glory said with a quivering mouth:
“You are vexing me, and you will end by making me cry. Don't you see you
are degrading me too? I am not used to being degraded. You see me with
a weak silly creature who hasn't an idea in her head and can do nothing
but giggle and laugh and make eyes at men, and you think I'm going to be
led away by her. Do you suppose a girl can't take care of herself?”

“As you will, then,” said John, with a fling of his hand, going off down
the steps.

“Mr. Storm--Mr. Storm--Jo--Joh----”

But he was out on the pavement and getting into the workhouse van.

“Ah!” said a mincing voice beside her. “How jolly it is when anybody is
suffering for your sake!” It was Polly Love, and again her eyelids were
half covering her eyes.

“I'm sure I don't know what you mean,” said Glory. Her own eyes were
swimming in big tear-drops.

“Don't you? What a funny girl you are! But your education has been
neglected, my dear.”

It was a combination van and hearse with the coffin under the driver's
box, and John Storm (as the only discoverable mourner) with the
undertaker on the seat inside.

“Will ye be willin' ter tyke the service at the cimitery, sir?” said the
undertaker, and John answered that he would.

The grave was on the paupers' side, and when the undertaker, with his
man, had lowered the coffin to its place, he said, “They've gimme abart
three more funerals this morning, so I'll leave ye now, sir, to finish
'er off.”

At the next moment John Storm in his surplice was alone with the dead,
and had opened his book to read the burial service which no other human
ear was to hear.

He read “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” and then the bitter loneliness
of the pauper's doom came down on his soul and silenced him.

But his imprisoned passion had to find a vent, and that night he wrote
to the Prime Minister: “I begin to understand what you meant when you
said I was in the wrong place. Oh, this London, with its society, its
worldly clergy, its art, its literature, its luxury, its idle life,
all built on the toil of the country and compounded of the sweat of the
nameless poor! Oh, this 'Circe of cities,' drawing good people to it,
decoying them, seducing them, and then turning them into swine! It seems
impossible to live in the world and to be spiritually-minded. When I try
to do so I am torn in two.”




X.

On the following Tuesday evening two young men were dining in their
chambers in St. James's Street. One of them was Lord Robert Ure; the
other was his friend and housemate, Horatio Drake. Drake was younger
than Lord Robert by some seven or eight years, and also beyond
comparison more attractive. His face was manly and handsome, its
expression was open and breezy; he was broad-shouldered and splendidly
built, and he had the fair hair and blue eyes of a boy.

Their room was a large one, and it was full of beautiful and valuable
things, but the furniture was huddled about in disorder. A large
chamber-organ, a grand piano, a mandolin, and two violins, pictures
on the floor as well as on the walls, many photographs scattered
about everywhere, and the mirror over the mantelpiece fringed with
invitation-cards, which were stuck between the glass and the frame.

Their man had brought in the coffee and cigarettes. Lord Robert was
speaking in his weary drawl, which had the worn-out tone of a man who
had made a long journey and was very sleepy.

“Come, dear boy, make up your mind, and let us be off.”

“But I'm tired to death of these fashionable routs.”

“So am I.”

“They're so unnatural--so unnecessary.”

“My dear fellow, of course they're unnatural--of course they're
unnecessary; but what would you have?”

“Anything human and natural,” said Drake. “I don't care a ha'p'orth
about the morality of these things--not I--but I am dead sick of their
stupidity.”

Lord Robert made languid puffs of his cigarette, and said, in a tearful
drawl: “My dear Drake, of course it is exactly as you say. Who doesn't
know it is so? It has always been so and always will be. But what refuge
is there for the poor leisured people but these diversions which you
despise? And as for the poor titled classes--well, they manage to make
their play their business sometimes, don't you know. Confess that they
do sometimes, now, eh?”

Lord Robert was laughing with an awkward constraint, but Drake looked
frankly into his face and said:

“How's that matter going on, Robert?”

“Fairly, I think, though the girl is not very hot on it. The thing came
off last week, and when it was over I felt as if I had proposed to the
girl and been accepted by the mother, don't you know. I believe this
rout to-night is expressly in honour of the event, so I mustn't run away
from my bargain.”

He lay back, sent funnels of smoke to the ceiling, and then said, with
a laugh like a gurgle: “I'm not likely to, though. That eternal dun was
here again to-day. I had to tell him that the marriage would come off in
a year certain. That was the only understanding on which he would agree
to wait for his money. Bad? Of course it's bad; but what would you have,
dear boy?”

The men smoked in silence for a moment, and then Lord Robert said again:
“Come, old fellow, for friendship's sake, if nothing else. She's a
decent little woman, and dead bent on having you at her house to-night.
And if you're badly bored we'll not stay long. We'll come away early
and--listen--we'll slip across to the Nurses' Ball at Bartimaeus's
Hospital; there'll be fun enough there, at all events.”

“I'll go,” said Drake.

Half an hour later the two young men were driving up to the door of
Mrs. Macrae's house in Belgrave Square. There was a line of carriages
in front of it, and they had to wait their turn to approach the gate.
Footmen in gorgeous livery were ready to open the cab door, to help the
guests across the red baize that lay on the pavement, to usher them into
the hall, to lead them to the little marble chamber where they entered
their names in a list intended for the next day's _Morning Post_, and
finally to direct them to the great staircase where the general crush
moved slowly up to the saloon above.

In the well of the stairs, half hidden behind a little forest of palms
and ferns, a band in yellow and blue uniform sat playing the people in.
On the landing the hostess stood waiting to receive, and many of the
guests, by a rotary movement like the waters of a maelstrom, moved past
her in a rapid and babbling stream, twisted about her, and came down
again. She welcomed Lord Robert effusively, and motioned to him to stand
by her side. Then she introduced her daughter to Drake and sent them
adrift through the rooms.

The rooms were large ones with parquet flooring from which all furniture
had been removed, except the palms and ferns by the walls and the heavy
chandeliers overhead. It was not yet ten o'clock, but already the house
was crowded, and every moment there were floods of fresh arrivals.
First came statesmen and diplomatists, then people who had been to
the theatres, and toward the end of the evening some of the actors
themselves. The night was close and the atmosphere hot and oppressive.
At the farther end of the suite there was a refreshment-room with its
lantern lights pulled open; and there the crush was densest and the
commotion greatest. The click-clack of many voices cut the thick air
as with a thousand knives, and over the multitudinous clatter there was
always the unintelligible boom of the band downstairs.

Most of the guests looked tired. The men made some effort to be
cheerful, but the women were frankly jaded and fagged. Bedizened with
diamonds, coated with paint and powder, laden with rustling silks, they
looked weary and worn out. When spoken to they would struggle to smile,
but the smiles would break down after a moment into dismal looks of
misery and oppression.

“Had enough?” whispered Lord Robert to Drake.

Drake was satisfied, and Lord Robert began to make their excuses.

“Going already!” said Mrs. Macrae. “An official engagement, you
say?--Mr. Drake, is it? Oh, don't tell me! I know--_I_ know! Well,
you'll be married and settled one of these days--and then!”

They were in a hansom cab driving across London in the direction of
Bartimaeus's Hospital. Drake was bare-headed and fanning himself with
his crush hat. Lord Robert was lighting a cigarette.

“Pshaw! What a stifling den! Did you ever hear such a clitter-clatter?
A perfect Tower of Babel building company! What in the name of common
sense do people suppose they're doing by penning themselves up like that
on a night like this? What are they thinking about?”

“Thinking about, dear boy? You're unreasonable! Nobody wants to think
about anything in such scenes of charming folly.”

“But the women! Did you _ever_ see such faded, worn-out dummies for the
display of diamonds? Poor little women in their splendid misery! I was
sorry for your _fiancée_, Robert. She was the only woman in the house
without that hateful stamp of worldliness and affectation.”

“My dear Drake, you've learned many things, but there's one thing you
have not yet learned--you haven't learned how to take serious things
as trifles, and trifles as serious things. Learn it, my boy, or you'll
embitter existence. You are not going to alter the conditions of
civilization by any change in your own particular life; so just look out
the prettiest, wittiest, wealthiest little woman who is a dummy for the
display of diamonds----”

“Me? Not if I know it, old fellow! Give me a little nature and
simplicity, if it hasn't got a second gown to its back.”

“All right--as you like,” said Lord Robert, flinging out the end of his
cigarette. “You've got the pull of some of us--you can please yourself.
And here we are at old Bartimaeus's, and this is a very different pair
of shoes!”

They were driving out of one of London's main thoroughfares, through a
groined archway, into one of London's ancient buildings with its quiet
quadrangle where trees grow and birds sing. Every window of the square
was lighted up, and there was a low murmur of music being played
within.

“Listen!” said Lord Robert. “I am here ostensibly as the guest of the
visiting physician, don't you know, but really in the interests of the
little friend I told you of.”

“The one I got the tickets for last week?”

“Precisely.”

At the next moment they were in the ballroom. It was the lecture theatre
for the students of the hospital school--a building detached from the
wards and of circular shape, with a gallery round its walls, which were
festooned with flags and roofed with a glass dome. Some two hundred
girls and as many men were gathered there; the pit was their dancing
ring and the gallery was their withdrawing room. The men were nearly all
students of the medical schools; the girls were nearly all nurses, and
they wore their uniform: There was not one jaded face among them, not
one weary look or tired expression. They were in the fulness of youth
and the height of vigour. The girls laughed with the ring of joy, their
eyes sparkled with the light of happiness, their cheeks glowed with the
freshness of health.

The two men stood a moment and looked on.

“Well, what do you think of it?” said Lord Robert.

Drake's wide eyes were ablaze, and his voice came in gusts.

“Think of it!” he said. “It's wonderful! It's glorious!”

Lord Robert's glass had dropped from his eye, and he was laughing in his
drawling way.

“What are you laughing at? Women like these are at least natural, and
Nature can not be put on.”

The mazurka had just finished, and the dancers were breaking into
groups.

“Robert, tell me who is that girl over there--the one looking this way?
Is it your friend?”

Lord Robert readjusted his glass.

“The pretty dark girl with the pink-and-white cheeks, like a doll?”

“Yes; and the taller one beside her--all hair, and eyes, and bosom.
She's looking across now. I've seen that girl before somewhere. Now,
where have I seen her? Look at her--what fire, and life, and movement!
The dance is over, but she can't keep her feet still.”

“I see--I see. But let me introduce you to the matron and doctors first,
and then----”

“I know now--I know where I've seen her! Be quick, Robert, be quick!”

Lord Robert laughed again in his tired drawl. He was finding it very
amusing.




XI.

When Glory learned that all nurses eligible to attend the ball were to
wear hospital uniform, being on day duty she decided to go to it. But
then came John Storm's protest against the company of Polly Love, and
she felt half inclined to give it up. As often as she remembered his
remonstrance she was disturbed, and once or twice when alone she shed
tears of anger and vexation.

Meantime Polly was full of arrangements, and Glory found herself day by
day carried along in the stream of preparation. When the night came the
girls dressed in the same cubicle. Polly was prattling like a parrot,
but Glory was silent and almost sad.

By help of the curling tongs and a candle Polly did up her dark hair
into little knowing curls that went in and out on her temples and played
hide-and-seek around the pretty shells of her pink-and-white ears. Glory
was slashing the comb through her golden-red hair by way of preliminary
ploughing, when Polly cried: “Stop! Don't touch it any more, for
goodness' sake! It's perfect! Look at yourself now.”

Glory stood off from the looking glass and looked. “Am I really so
nice?” she thought; and then she remembered John Storm again, and had
half a mind to tear down her glorious curls and go straight away to bed.

She went to the ball instead, and, being there, she forgot all about
her misgivings. The light, the colour, the brilliance, the perfume
transported her to an enchanted world which she had never entered
before. She could not control her delight in it. Everything surprised
her, everything delighted her, everything amused her--she was the very
soul of girlish joy. The dark-brown spot on her eye shone out with a
coquettish light never seen in it until now, and the warble in her
voice was like the music of a happy bird. Her high spirits were
infectious--her lighthearted gaiety communicated itself to everybody.
The men who might not dance with her were smiling at the mere sight
of the sunshine in her face, and it was even whispered about that the
President of the College of Surgeons, who opened the ball, had said that
her proper place was not there--a girl like that young Irish nurse would
do honour to a higher assembly.

In that enchanted world of music and light and bright and happy faces
Glory lost all sense of time; but two hours had passed when Polly Love,
whose eyes had turned again and again to the door, tugged at her sleeve
and whispered: “They've come at last! There they are--there--directly
opposite to us. Keep your next dance, dear. They'll come across
presently.”

Glory looked where Polly had directed, and, seeing again the face she
had seen in the window of the Foreign Office, something remote and
elusive once more stirred in her memory. But it was gone in a moment,
and she was back in that world of wonders, when a voice which she
knew and yet did not know, like a voice that called to her as she was
awakening out of a sleep, said:

“Glory, don't you remember me? Have you forgotten me, Glory?”

It was her friend of the catechism class--her companion of the adventure
in the boat. Their hands met in a long hand-clasp with the gallop of
feeling that is too swift for thought.

“Ah, I thought you would recognise me! How delightful!” said Drake.

“And you knew me again?” said Glory.

“Instantly--at first sight almost.”

“Really! It's strange, though. Such a long, long time--ten years at
least! I must have changed since then.”

“You have,” said Drake; “you've changed very much.”

“Indeed now! Am I really so much changed for all? I've grown older, of
course.”

“Oh, terribly older,” said Drake.

“How wrong of me! But you have changed a good deal, too. You were only a
boy in jackets then.”

“And you were only a girl in short frocks.”

They both laughed, and then Drake said, “I'm so glad we've changed
together!”

“Are you?” said Glory.

“Why, yes,” said Drake; “for if you had changed and I hadn't----”

“But what nonsense we're talking!” said Glory; and they both laughed
again.

Then they told each other what had happened in that infinite cycle
of time which had spun round since they parted. Glory had not much to
narrate; her life had been empty. She had been in the Isle of Man all
along, had come to London only recently, and was now a probationer-nurse
at Martha's Vineyard. Drake had gone to Harrow and thence to Oxford,
and, being a man of artistic leanings, had wished to take up music, but
his father had seen no career in it; so he had submitted--he had entered
the subterranean catacombs of public life, and was secretary to one of
the Ministers. All this he talked of lightly, as became a young man of
the world to whom great things were of small account.

“Glory,” said Polly, at her elbow, “the waltz is going to begin.”

The band was preluding. Drake claimed the dance, and Glory was
astonished to find that she had it free (she had kept it expressly).

When the waltz was over he gave her his arm and led her into the
circular corridor to talk and to cool. His manners were perfect, and his
voice, so soft and yet so manly, increased the charm. In passing out of
the hot dancing room she threw her handkerchief over her head, and, with
the hand that was at liberty, held its ends under her chin. She wished
him to look at her and see what change this had made; so she said, quite
innocently:

“And now let me look at you again, sir!”

He recognised the dark-brown spot on her eye, and he could feel her arm
through her thin print dress.

“You've told me a good deal,” he said, “but you haven't said a syllable
about the most important thing of all.”

“And pray what is that?” said she.

“How many times have you fallen in love since I saw you last?”

“Good gracious, what a question!” said Glory.

His audacity was delightful. There was something so gracious and yet so
masterful about him.

“Do you remember the day you carried me off--eloped with me, you know?”
 said Drake.

“I? How charming of me! But when was that, I wonder?” said Glory.

“Never mind; say, do you remember?”

“Well, if I do? What a pair of little geese we must have been in those
days!”

“I'm not so sure of that--_now_,'” said he.

“You didn't seem very keen about me _then_, as far as I can remember,”
 said she.

“Didn't I?” said he. “What a silly young fool I must have been!”

They laughed again. She could not keep her arm still, and he could
almost feel its dimpled elbow.

“And do _you_ remember the gentleman who rescued us?” she said.

“You mean the tall, dark young man who kept hugging and kissing you in
the yacht?”

“Did he?”

“Do you forget that kind of thing, then?”

“It was very sweet of him. But he's in the Church now, and the chaplain
of our hospital.”

“What a funny little romantic world it is, to be sure!”

“Yes; it's like poetry, isn't it?” she answered.

Lord Robert came up to introduce Drake to Polly (who was not looking her
sweetest), and he claimed Glory for the next dance.

“So you knew my friend Drake before?” said Lord Robert.

“I knew him when he was a boy,” said Glory.

And then he began to sing his friend's praises--how he had taken a
brilliant degree at Oxford, and was now private secretary to the Home
Secretary, and would go into public life before long; how he could paint
and act, and might have made a reputation as a musician; how he went
into the best houses, and was a first-rate official; how, in short, he
had the promised land before him, and was just on the eve of entering
it.

“Then I suppose you know he is rich--enormously rich?” said Lord Robert.

“Is he?” said Glory, and something great and grand seemed to shimmer a
long way off.

“Enormously,” said Sir Robert; “and yet a man of the most democratic
opinions.”

“Really?” said Glory.

“Yes,” said Lord Robert; “and all the way down in the hansom he has been
trying to show me how impossible it is for him to marry a lady.”

“Now why did you tell me that I wonder?” said Glory, and Lord Robert
began to fidget with his eye-glass.

Drake returned with Polly. He proposed that they should take the air in
the quadrangle, and they went off for that purpose, the girls arm-in-arm
some paces ahead.

“There's a dash of Satan himself in that red-headed girl,” said Lord
Robert. “She understands a man before he understands himself.”

“She's as natural as Nature,” said Drake. “And what lips--what a mouth!”

“Irish, isn't she? Oh, Manx! What's Manx, I wonder?”

The night was very warm and close, and there was hardly more air in the
courtyard. The sound of the band came to them there, and Glory, who
had danced with nearly everybody within, must needs dance by herself
without, because the music was more sweet and subdued out there, and
dancing in the darkness was like a dream.

“Come and sit down on the seat, Glory,” said Polly fretfully; “you are
getting on my nerves, dear.”

“Glory,” said Drake, “how do the Londoners strike you?”

“Much like other mortals,” said Glory; “no better, no worse--only
funnier.”

The men laughed at that description, and Glory proceeded to give
imitations of London manners--the high handshake, the “Ha-ha” of the
mumps, the mouthing of the canon, and the mincing of Mr. Golightly.

Drake bellowed with delight; Lord Robert drawled out a long owlish
laugh; Polly Love said spitefully, “You might give us your friend, the
new curate, next, dearest,” and then Glory went down like a shot.

“Really,” began Drake, “it's not hospital nursing, you know----”

But there were low murmurings of thunder and some large splashes of
rain, and they returned to the ballroom. The doctors and the matrons
were gone by this time; only the nurses and the students remained,
and the fun was becoming furious. One young student was pulling down a
girl's hair, and another was waltzing with his partner carried bodily in
his arms. Somebody lowered the lights, and they danced in a shadow-land;
somebody began to sing, and they all sang in chorus; then somebody began
to fling about paper bags full of tiny white wafers, and the bags
burst in the air like shells, and their contents fell like stars from a
falling rocket, and everybody was covered as with flakes of snow.

Meantime the storm had broken, and above the clash and clang of the
instruments of the band and the rhythmic shuffle of the feet of the
dancers and the clear, joyous notes of their happy singing, there was
the roar of the thunder that rolled over London, and the rattle of the
rain on the glass dome overhead.

Glory was in ecstasies; it was like a mist on Peel Bay at night with the
moon shining through it and the waves dancing to a northwest breeze. It
was like a black and stormy sea outside Contrary, with the gale
coming down from the mountains. And yet it was a world of wonder and
enchantment and beauty, and bright and happy faces.

It was morning when the ball broke up, and then the rain had abated,
though the thunder was still rumbling. The men were to see the girls
back to the hospital, and Glory and Drake sat in a hansom-cab together.

“So you always forget that kind of thing, do you?” he said.

“What kind of thing?” she asked.

“Never mind; _you_ know!”

She had put up the hood of her outdoor cape, but he could still see the
gleam of her golden hair.

“Give me that rose,” he said; “the white one that you put in your hair.”

“It's nothing,” she answered.

“Then give it to me. I'll keep it forever and ever.”

She put up her hand to her head.

“Ah! how sweet of you! And what a lovely little hand! But no; let me
take it for myself.”

He reached one arm around her shoulder, put his hand under her chin,
tipped up her face, and kissed her on the lips.

“Darling!” he whispered.

Then in a moment she awoke from her world of wonder and enchantment, and
the intoxication of the evening left her. She did not speak; her head
dropped; she felt her cheeks burn red, and she hid her face in her
hands. There was a momentary sense of dishonour, almost of outrage.
Drake treated her lightly, and she was herself to blame.

“Forgive me, Glory!” he was saying, in a voice tremulous and intense.
“It shall never happen again--never--so help me God!”

The day was dawning, and the last raindrops were splashing on the wet
and empty pavement. The great city lay asleep, and the distant thunder
was rolling away from it.




XII.

The chaplain of Martha's Vineyard had not been to the hospital ball.
Before it came off he had thought of it a good deal, and as often as he
remembered that he had protested to Glory against the company of Polly
Love he felt hot and ashamed. Polly was shallow and frivolous, and had a
little crab-apple of a heart, but he knew no harm of her. It was hardly
manly to make a dead set at the little thing because she was foolish and
fond of dress, and because she knew a man who displeased him.

Then she was Glory's only companion, and to protest against Glory going
in her company was to protest against Glory going at all. That seemed a
selfish thing to do. Why should he deny her the delights of the ball?
He could not go to it himself--he would not if he could; but girls liked
such things--they loved to dance, and to be looked at and admired, and
have men about them paying court and talking nonsense.

There was a sting in that thought, too; but he struggled to be
magnanimous. He was above all mean and unmanly feelings--he would
withdraw his objection.

He did not withdraw it. Some evil spirit whispered in his heart that
Glory was drifting away from him. This was the time to see for certain
whether she had passed out of the range of his influence. If she
respected his authority she would not go. If she went, he had lost his
hold of her, and their old relations were at an end.

On the night of the ball he walked over to the hospital and asked for
her. She had gone, and it seemed as if the earth itself had given way
beneath his feet.

He could not help feeling bitterly about Polly Love, and that caused
him to remember a patient to whom her selfish little heart had shown no
kindness. It was her brother. He was some nine or ten years older,
and very different in character. His face was pale and thin--almost
ascetic--and he had the fiery and watery eyes of the devotee. He had
broken a blood-vessel and was threatened with consumption, but his
case was not considered dangerous. When Polly was about, his eyes would
follow her round the ward with something of the humble entreaty of a
dog. It was clear that he loved his sister, and was constantly thinking
of her. But she hardly ever looked in his direction, and when she spoke
to him it was in a cold or fretful voice.

John Storm had observed this. It had brought him close to the young
man, and the starved and silent heart had opened out to him. He was a
lay-brother in an Anglican Brotherhood that was settled in Bishopsgate
Street. His monastic name was Brother Paul. He had asked to be sent to
that hospital because his sister was a nurse there. She was his only
remaining relative. One other sister he had once had, but she was
gone--she was dead--she died---- But that was a sad and terrible story;
he did not like to talk of it.

To this broken and bankrupt creature John Storm found his footsteps
turning on that night when his own heart lay waste. But on entering the
ward he saw that Brother Paul had a visitor already. He was an elderly
man in a strange habit--a black cassock which buttoned close at the neck
and fell nearly to his feet, and was girded about the waist by a black
rope that had three great knots at its suspended ends. And the habit
was not more different from the habit of the world than the face of the
wearer was unlike the worldly face. It was a face full of spirituality,
a face that seemed to invest everything it looked upon with a holy
peace--a beautiful face, without guile or craft or passion, yet not
without the signs of internal strife at the temples and under the eyes;
but the battles with self had all been fought and won.

As John Storm stepped up, the old man rose from his chair by the
patient's bed.

“This is the Father Superior, sir,” said Brother Paul.

“I've just been hearing of you,” said the Father in a gentle voice. “You
have been good to my poor brother.”

John Storm answered with some commonplace--it had been a pleasure,
a happiness; the brother would soon leave them; they would all miss
him--perhaps himself especially.

The Father resumed his chair and listened with an earnest smile. “I
understand you, dear friend,” he said. “It is so much more blessed to
give than to receive! Ah, if the poor blind world only knew! How it
fights for its pleasures that perish, and its pride of life that passes
away! Yet to succour a weaker brother, or protect a fallen woman, or
feed a little child will bring a greater joy than to conquer all the
kingdoms of the earth.”

John Storm sat down on the end of the bed. Something had gone out to
him in a moment, and he was held as by a spell. The Father talked of the
love of the world--how strange it was, how difficult to understand, how
tragic, how pitiful! The lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eye--how
mean, how delusive, how treacherous! To think of the people of that
mighty city day by day and night by night making themselves miserable in
order that they might make themselves merry; to think of the children
of men scouring the globe for its paltry possessions, that could not add
one inch to the stature of the soul, while all the time the empire of
peace and joy and happiness lay here at hand, here within ourselves,
here in the little narrow compass of the human heart! To give, not to
get, that was the great blessedness, and to give of yourself, of your
heart's love, was the greatest blessedness of all.

John Storm was stirred. “The Church, sir,” he said, “the Church itself
has to learn that lesson.”

And then he spoke of the hopes with which he had come up to London,
and how they were being broken down and destroyed; of his dreams of the
Church and its mission, and how they were dying or dead already.

“What liars we are, sir! How we colour things to justify ourselves! Look
at our sacraments--are they a lie, or are they a sacrilege? Look at
our charities--are we Pharisees or are we hypocrites? And our clergy,
sir--our fashionable clergy! Surely some tremendous upheaval will shake
to its foundations the Church wherein such things are possible--a Church
that is more worldly than the world! And then the woman-life of the
Church, see how it is thrown away. That sweetest and tenderest and
holiest power, how it goes to waste under the eye and with the sanction
of the Church in the frivolities of fashion--in drawing-rooms, in
gardens, in bazars, in theatres, in balls----”

He stopped. His last word had arrested him. Had he been thinking only
of himself and of Glory? His head fell and he covered his face with his
hand.

“You are right, my son,” said the Father quietly, “and yet you are
wrong, too. The Church of God will not be shaken to its foundations
because of the Pharisees who stand in its public places, or because
of the publicans who haunt its purlieus. Though the axe be laid to the
rotten tree, yet the little seed will save its kind alive.”

Then with an earnest smile and in a gentle voice he spoke of their
little brotherhood in Bishopsgate Street; how ten years ago they had
founded it for detachment from earthly cares and earthly aims, and for
hiddenness with God; how they had established it in the midst of the
world's, busiest highway, in the heart of the world's greatest market,
to show that they despised gold and silver and all that the blind and
cheated world most prizes, just as St. Philip and St. Ignatius had
established the severest of modern rules in a profane and self-indulgent
century, to show that they could stamp out every suggestion of the flesh
as a spark from the fires of hell.

And then he lifted his cord and pointed to the knots at the end of it,
and told what they were--symbols of the three bonds by which he was
bound--the three vows he had taken: the vow of poverty, because Christ
chose it for himself and his friends; the vow of obedience, because he
had said, “He that heareth you heareth Me”; and the vow of chastity,
because it was our duty to guard the gates of the senses, and to keep
our eyes and ears and tongue from all inordinateness.

“But the lawful love of home and kindred,” said John; “what of that?”

“We convert it into what is spiritual,” said the Father. “All human
love must be based on the love of God if it is to be firm and true
and enduring, and the reason of so much failure of love in natural
friendship is that the love of the creature is not built upon the love
of the Creator.”

“But the love--say of mother and son--of brother and sister?”

“Ah, we have placed ourselves above the ordinary conditions of life
that none may claim our affections in the same way as Christ. Man has
to contend with two sets of enemies--those from within and those from
without; and no temptations are more subtle than those which come in the
name of our holiest affections. But the sword of the spirit must keep
the tempter away. There is the Judas in all of us, and he will betray us
with a kiss if he can.”

John Storm's breast was heaving. He could scarcely conceal his
agitation; but the Father had risen to go.

“It is eight o'clock, and I must be back to Compline,” he said. And
then he laughed and added: “We never ride in cabs; but I must needs walk
across the park to-night, for I have given away all my money.”

At that the smile of an angel came into his old face, and lie said, with
a sweet simplicity:

“I love the park. Every morning the children play there, and then it is
the holy Catholic Church to me, and I like to walk in it and to lay my
hands on the heads of the little ones, and to ask a blessing for them,
and to empty my-self. This morning as I was coming here I met a little
boy carrying a bundle. 'And what is _your_ name, my little man?' I said,
and he told me what it was. 'And how old are you?' I asked. 'Twelve
years,' he answered. 'And what have you got in your bundle?' 'Father's
dinner, sir,' he said. 'And what is your father, my son?' 'A carpenter,'
said the boy. And I thought if I had been living in Palestine nineteen
hundred years ago I might have met another little Boy carrying the
dinner of his father, who was also a carpenter, in a little bundle which
Mary had made up for him. So I felt in my pocket, and all I had was my
fare home again, and I gave it to the little man as a thank-offering to
God that he had suffered me to meet a sweet boy of twelve whose father
was a carpenter.”

John Storm's eyes were dim with tears.

“Good-bye, Brother Paul, and God send you back to us soon!--Good-bye to
you, dear friend; and when the world deals harshly with you come to
us for a few days in Retreat, that in the silence of your soul you may
forget its vanities and vexations and fix your thoughts above.”

John Storm could not resist the impulse--he dropped to his knees at the
Father's feet.

“Bless me also, Father, as you blessed the carpenter's boy.”

The Father raised two fingers of his right hand and said:

“God bless you, my son, and be with you and strengthen you, and when he
smiles on you may the frown of man affect you not!--Father in heaven,
look down on this fiery soul and succour him! Help him to cast off every
anchor that holds him to the world, and make him as a voice crying in
the wilderness, 'Come out of her, my people, saith our God.'”

When John rose from his knees the saintly face was gone, and all the air
seemed to be filled with a heavenly calm.

While he had been kneeling for the Father's blessing he had been
aware of a step on the floor behind him. It was his fellow-curate, the
Reverend Golightly, who was still waiting to deliver his message.

The canon had been disappointed in one of his preachers for Sunday, and
being himself engaged to preside over the annual dinner of a dramatic
benevolent fund to be held on the Saturday night, and therefore
incapable of extra preparation, he desired that Mr. Storm should take
the sermon on Sunday morning.

John promised to do so; and then his fellow-curate smiled, bowed,
coughed, and left him. A small room was kept for the chaplain on the
ground floor of the hospital, and he went down to it and wrote a letter.

It was to the parson at Peel.

“No doubt you hear from Glory frequently, and know all about her
progress as a probationer. She seems to be very well, and certainly I
have never seen her look so bright and so cheerful. At the moment of
writing she is out at a ball given by some of the hospital authorities.
Well, it is a perfectly harmless source of pleasure, and with all my
heart I hope she is enjoying herself. No doubt some form of amusement
is necessary to a young girl in the height of her youth and health
and beauty, and he would be only a poor sapless man who could not take
delight in the thought that a good girl was happy. Her fellow-nurses,
too, are noble and devoted women, doing true woman's work, and if there
are some black sheep among them, that is no more than might be expected
of the purest profession in the world.

“As for myself, I have tried to carry out-my undertaking to look after
Glory, but I can not say how long I may be able to continue the task.
Do not be surprised if I am compelled to give it up. You know I am
dissatisfied with my present surroundings, and I am only waiting for the
ruling and direction of the pillar of cloud and fire. God alone can tell
how it will move, but God will guide me. I don't go out more than I can
help, and when I do go I get humiliated and feel foolish. The life of
London has been a great and painful surprise. I had supposed that I knew
all about it, but I have really known nothing until now. Its cruelty,
its deceit, and its treachery are terrible. London is the Judas that
is forever betraying with a kiss the young, the hopeful, the innocent.
However, it helps one to know one's self, and that is better than
lying wrapped in cotton wool. Give my kindest greetings to everybody at
Glenfaba--my love to my father, too, if there are any means of conveying
it.”

The letter took him long to write, and when it was written he went out
into the hall to post it. There he saw that a thunderstorm was coming,
and he concluded to remain until it had passed over. He stepped into the
library and selected a book, and returned to his room to read it. The
book was St. John Chrysostom on the Priesthood, and the subject was
congenial, but he could not keep his mind on the printed page:
He thought of the Father Superior, of the little brotherhood in
Bishopsgate, and then of Glory at the hospital ball, and again of Glory,
and yet again and again of Glory. Do what he would, he could not help
but think of her.

The storm pealed over his head, and when he returned to the hall two
hours later it was still far from spent. He stood at the open door and
watched it. Forks of lightning lit up the park, and floods of black rain
made the vacant pavements like the surface of the sea. A tinkling cab
slid past at intervals, with its driver sheeted in oilskins, and now and
then there was an omnibus, full within and empty without. Only one other
living thing was to be seen anywhere. An Italian organ-man had stationed
himself in front of a mansion to the left and was playing vigorously.

John Storm walked through the hospital. It was now late, and the house
was quiet. The house-doctor had made the last of his rounds and turned
into his chambers across the courtyard, and the night-nurses were
boiling little kettles in their rooms between the wards. The surgical
wards were darkened, and the patients were asleep already. In the
medical wards there were screens about certain of the beds, and weary
moans came from behind them.

It was after midnight when John Storm came round to the hall again, and
then the rain had ceased, but the thunder was still rumbling. He might
have gone home at length, but he did not go; he realized that he was
waiting for Glory. Other nurses returned from the ball, and bowed to him
and passed into the house. He stepped into the porter's lodge, and sat
down and watched the lightning. It began to be terrible to him, because
it seemed to be symbolical. What doom or what disaster did this storm
typify and predict? Never could he forget the night on which it befell.
It was the night of the Nurses' Ball.

He thought he must have slept, for he shook himself and thought: “What
nonsense! Surely the soul leaves the body while we are asleep, and only
the animal remains!”

It was now almost daylight, and two hansom-cabs had stopped before
the portico, and several persons who were coming up the steps were
chattering away like wakened linnets. One voice was saying:

“Mr. Drake proposes that we should all go to the theatre, and if we can
get a late pass I should like it above everything.” It was Glory, and a
fretful voice answered her:

“Very well, if _you_ say so. It's all the same to _me_.” It was Polly;
and then a man's voice said:

“What night shall it be, then, Robert?”

And a second man's voice answered, with a drawl, “Better let the girls
choose for themselves, don't you know.”

John Storm felt his hands and feet grow cold, and he stepped out into
the porch. Glory saw him coming and made a faint cry of recognition.

“Ah, here is Mr. Storm! Mr. Storm, you should know Mr. Drake. He was in
the Isle of Man, you remember----”

“I do _not_ remember,” said John Storm.

“But you saved his life, and you ought to know him----”

“I do _not_ know him,” said John Storm.

She was beginning to say, “Let me introduce----” But she stopped
and stood silent for a moment, while the strange light came into her
gleaming eyes of something no word could express, and then she burst
into noisy laughter.

A superintendent Sister going through the hall at the moment drew up and
said, “Nurse, I am surprised at you! Go to your rooms this instant!” and
the girls whispered their adieus and went off giggling.

“What a glorious night it has been!” said Glory, going upstairs.

“I'm glad you think so,” said Polly. “To tell you the truth, I found it
dreadfully tiresome.”

The two men lit their cigarettes and got back into one of the hansoms
and drove away.

“What a bear that man is!” said Lord Robert.

“Rude enough, certainly,” said Drake; “but I liked his face for all
that; and if the Fates put it into his head to stand between me and
death--well, I'm not going to forget it.”

“Give him a wide berth, dear boy. The fellow is an actor--an affected
fop. I met him at Mrs. Macrae's on Thursday. He is a religious actor and
a poseur. He'll do something one of these days, take my word for it.”

And meanwhile John Storm had buttoned his long coat up to his throat and
was striding home through the echoing streets, with both hands clinched
and his teeth set hard.




XIII.

“Martha's.

“Oh, Lord-a-massy! Oh, Gough bless me sowl! Oh, my beloved grandfather!
John Storm has done for himself at last! That man was never an author
of peace and a lover of concord; but, my gracious, if you had heard his
sermon in church on Sunday morning! Being a holy and humble woman of
heart myself, I altered the Litany the smallest taste possible, and
muttered away from beginning to end, 'O Lord, close thou our lips'; but
the Lord didn't heed me in the least, with the result that everybody on
earth is now screaming and snarling at our poor Mr. Storm exactly as if
he had been picking the pockets of the universe.

“It was all about the morality of men. The text was as innocent as a
baby: 'Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the
flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.' And when he began in the usual way,
the dear old goodies in glasses thought he had been wound up like
the musical box and had just turned on the crank, so they cuddled in
comfortably for forty winks before the anthem. There were two natures
in man, and man's body might be good or bad according as spiritual
or carnal affections swayed it, and all the rest of the good old
change-for-sixpence-and-a-ha'penny-out, you know. But the lesson had
been from Isaiah, where the unreasonable old prophet is indignant with
the ladies of Zion because they don't want to look like dowdies, you
remember: 'Tremble, ye women that are at ease, strip you and make you
bare and gird sackcloth upon your loins.' And off he went like a comet,
with the fashionable woman for his tail. If matrimony nowadays didn't
always mean monogamy, who was chiefly to blame? Men were generally as
pure as women required that they should be; and if the lives of men were
bad it was often because women did not demand that they should be
good. Tremble, ye women, that are at ease, and say why you allow your
daughters to marry men who in fact and effect are married already. Strip
you, and be ashamed for the poor women who were the first wives of your
daughters' husbands, and for the children whom such men abandon and
forget! In leading your innocent daughters to courts and receptions
you are only leading them to the auction-room; and in dressing and
decorating them you are preparing them for the market of base men. Last
week some titled philanthropist had hauled up a woman in the East End
of London for attempting to sell her daughter. How shocking! everybody
said. What a disgrace to the nineteenth century! But the wretched
creature had only been doing the best according to her light for the
welfare of her miserable child; while here--with their eyes open, with
their cultured consciences--the wives of these same philanthropists were
doing the same thing every day--the very same!

“Having gone for the mammies like this, he went for the dear girls
themselves one better. Let them gird sackcloth on their loins and hide
their faces. Why did they suffer themselves to be sold? The woman who
married a man for the sake of his title or his position or any worldly
advantage whatever was no better than an outcast of the streets. Her act
was the same, and in all reason and justice her name should be the same
also.

“Hey, nonny, nonny! I told you how he broke down before; but on Sunday
morning, in spite of mine own amended Litany, I had just as much hope of
the breakdown of the Falls of Niagara, or a nineteen-feet spring tide.
You would have said his face was afire, and those great eyes of his were
lit up like the red lamps on Peel pier.

“Pulpit oratory! I don't know what it is, only I never heard the like
of it in all my born days. I begin to think the real difference between
preachers is the difference of the fire beneath the crust. In some it
burns so low that it doesn't even warm the surface, and you couldn't get
up enough puff to boil the kitchen kettle; but in others--look out! It's
a volcano, and the lava is coming down with a rush.

“Mercy me, how I cried! 'Oh, my daughter, oh, my child, what a ninny you
are!' I told myself; but it was no use talking. His voice was as hoarse
as a raven's, and sometimes you would have thought his very heart was
breaking.

“But the congregation! You should have seen the transformation scene!
They had come in bowing and smiling and whispering softly until the
church was a perfect sheet of sunshine, an absolute aurora borealis; but
they went out like a northeast gale, with mutterings of thunder and one
man overboard.

“And John Storm having put his foot in it, of course Glory Quayle had
to get her toe in too. Coming down the aisle some of the dear ladies
of Zion, who looked as if they wanted to 'swear in their wrath,' were
mumbling all the lamentations of Jeremiah. Who was he, indeed, to talk
to people like that? Nobody had ever heard of him except his mother.
And in the porch they came upon a fat old dump in a velvet dollman
who declared it was perfectly scandalous, and she had come out in the
middle. Whereupon Glory, not being delivered that day from all evil and
mischief, said, 'Quite right, ma'am, and you were not the only one who
had to leave the church in the middle of that sermon.' 'Why, who else
had to go?' said this female Pharisee. 'The devil, ma'am!' said Glory,
and then left her with that bone to gnaw.

“It turns out that the old girlie in the dollman is a mighty patron of
this hospital, so everybody says I am in for nasty weather. But hoot!
My heart's in the Hielan's, my heart is not here; my heart's in the
Hielan's, sae what can I fear!

“John Storm is in for it too, and they say his vicar waited for him
in the vestry, but he looked like forked lightning coming out of the
pulpit, so the good man thought it better to keep his rod in pickle
awhile. It seems that the Lords of the Council and all the nobility were
there, and it is a point of religious etiquette in London that in the
hangman's house nobody speaks of the rope; but our poor John gave them
the gibbet as well. It was a fearful thing to do, but nobody will make
me believe he had not got his reasons. He hasn't been here since, but
I am certain he has his eye on some fine folks, and, whoever they are,
I'll bet 'my bottom dollar' they deserved all they got.

“But heigho! I haven't left myself breath to tell you about the ball. I
was there! You remember I was lamenting that I hadn't got the necessary
finery. In fact, I had put in a bit at the end of my prayers about it.
'O God, be good to me this once and let me look nice.' And he _was_. He
put it into the heads of the nabobs of this vineyard that nurses should
'appear at the Nurses' Ball in regulation uniform only.' So my cloak and
my bonnet and my gray dress and my apron covered a multitude of sins.

“You should have seen Glory that night, grandfather. She was a redder
young lobster than ever somehow, but she put a white rose in her carroty
curls, and, Gough bless me, what a bogh [* Dear] she was, though! Of
course, she made the acquaintance of the 'higher ranks of society,' and
danced with all the earth. The great surgeon of something opened the
ball with the matron of Bartimaeus's, and she went round on his arm like
a dolly in a dolly-tub; but he soon saw what a marvellous and miraculous
being Glory was, and after I had waltzed so beautifully with the ancient
personage I had the hearts of all the young men flying round at the hem
of my white petticoat--it was a nice new one for the occasion.

“But the strangest thing was that somebody from the Isle of Man flopped
down on me there just as if he had descended from the blue. It was that
little English boy Drake, who used to come to the catechism class, only
now he is one of the smartest and handsomest young men in London. When
he came up and announced himself I am sure he expected me to expire on
the spot or else go crazy, and of course I was trembling all over, but
I behaved like a rational person and stood my ground. He looked at me as
much as to say, 'Do you know you've grown to be a very fine young woman,
and I admire you very much?' Whereupon I looked back as much as to
reply, 'That's quite right, my dear young sir, and I should have a poor
opinion of you if you didn't.' So, being of the same opinion on the only
subject worth thinking about (that's me), I behaved charmingly to him,
and even forgave him when he carried off my white rose at the end.

“Mr. Drake has a friend who is always with him. He is a willowy person
who owns sixteen setters and three church livings, they say, and wears
(on week days) a thunder-and-lightning suit of clothes--_you_ know, a
pattern so large that one man can't carry the whole of it and somebody
else goes about with the rest. His name is Lord Robert Ure, and I intend
to call him Lord Bob, for, since he is such a frivolous person himself,
I must make a point of being severe. I danced with him, of course, and
he kept telling me what a wonderful future Mr. Drake had, and how the
Promised Land was before him, and even hinting that it wouldn't be a bad
thing to be Mrs. Joshua. Fancy Glory making a tremendous match with a
leader of society! And if I hadn't gone to that hospital ball no doubt
the history of the nineteenth century would have been different!

“They are going to take me next week to something far, far better than a
ball, only I must not tell you anything about it yet, except that I
keep awake all night sometimes to think of it. But thou sure and firmest
earth, hear not my steps which way they walk!

“It's late, and I'm just going to cuddle in. Good-night! My kisses for
the aunties, and my love to everybody! In fact, you can serve out my
love in ladles this time--being cheap at present, and plenty more where
this is coming from.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you what happened when we returned to the
hospital! It was shockingly late, and the gentlemen had brought us back,
but there was our John Storm with his sad and anxious face waiting up to
see us safely home. He was angry with me, and I didn't mind that in the
least; but when I saw that he liked me well enough to be rude to the
gentlemen I fell a victim to the crafts and assaults of the devil, and
couldn't help laughing out loud; and then Ward Sister Allworthy came
along and lifted her lip and showed me her tusk.

“It was a wonderful night altogether, and I was never so happy in my
life, but all the same I had a good cry to myself alone before going to
bed. Too much water hadst thou, poor Ophelia! Talk about two natures in
one; I've got two hundred and fifty, and they all want to do different
things! Ah me! the 'ould Book' says that woman was taken out of the
rib of a man, and I feel sometimes as if I want to get back to my old
quarters. Glory.

“P.S.--I'll write you a full and particular account of the great event
of next week after it is over. Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest
chuck, till thou applaud the deed. You see I don't want you to eat your
meal in fear--or your porridge either. But I am burning with impatience
for the night to come, and would like to run to it. Oh, if it were done,
when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly! See? I am going
in for a course of Shakespeare!”




XIV.

A week later Glory made her first visit to the theatre. Her companions
were Drake, who was charmed with her _naïveté_; Lord Robert, who was
amused by it; and Polly Love, who was annoyed and ashamed, and uttered
little peevish exclamations.

As they entered the box which they were to occupy, the attendant drew
back the curtain, and at sight of the auditorium she cried, “Oh!” and
then checked herself and coloured deeply. With her eyes down she sat
where directed in one of the three seats in front, Polly being on her
right and Drake on her left, and Lord Robert at the back of the lace
curtain. For some minutes she did not smile or stir, and when she spoke
it was always in whispers. A great awe seemed to have fallen upon her,
and she was behaving as she behaved in church.

Drake began to explain the features of the theatre. Down there were
the stalls, and behind the stalls was the pit. The body? Well, yes--the
body, so to speak. And the three galleries were the dress circle, the
family circle, and the gallery proper. The organ loft? No, there was no
organ, but that empty place below was the well for the orchestra.

“And what is this little vestry?” she said.

“Oh, this is a private box where we can sit by ourselves and talk!” said
Drake.

At every other explanation she had made little whispered cries of
astonishment and delight; but when she heard that conversation was not
forbidden she was entirely happy. She thought a theatre was even more
beautiful than a church, and supposed an actor must have a wonderful
living.

The house was filling rapidly, and as the people entered she watched
them intently.

“What a beautiful congregation!” she whispered--“audience, I mean!”

“Do you think so?” said Polly; but Glory did not hear her.

It was delightful to see so many lovely faces and listen to the low hum
of their conversation. She felt happy among them already and quite kind
to everybody, because they had all come together to enjoy themselves.
Presently she bowed to some one in the stall with a face all smiles, and
then said to Polly:

“How nice of her! A lady moved, to me from the body. How friendly they
are in theatres!”

“But it was to Mr. Drake,” said Polly; and then Glory could have buried
her face in her confusion.

“Never mind, Glory,” said Drake; “that's a lady who will like you the
better for the little mistake.--Rosa,” he added, with a look toward Lord
Robert, who smoothed his mustache and bent his head.

Polly glanced up quickly at the mention of the name; and Drake explained
that Rosa was a friend of his own--a lady journalist, Miss Rosa
Macquarrie, a good and clever woman. Then, turning back to Glory, he
said:

“She has been standing up for your friend Mr. Storm this week. You know
there have been attacks upon him in the newspapers?”

“Has she?” said Glory, recovering herself and looking down again. “Which
pew--stall, I mean----”

But the people were clapping their hands and turning their faces to
the opposite side of the theatre. Some great personage was entering the
royal box.

“My chief, the Home Secretary,” said Drake; and, when the applause
had subsided and the party were seated, the great man recognised his
secretary and bowed to him; whereupon it seemed to Glory that every face
in the theatre turned about and looked at her.

She did not flinch, but bore herself bravely. There was a certain thrill
and a slight twitching of the head, such as a charger makes at the first
volley in battle--nothing more, not even the quiver of an eyelid. This
was the atmosphere in which Drake lived, and she felt a vague gratitude
to him for allowing her to move in it.

“Isn't it beautiful!” she whispered, turning toward Polly; but Polly's
face was hidden behind the curtain.

The orchestra was coming in, and Glory leaned forward and counted the
fiddles, while Drake talked with Lord Robert across her shoulder.

“I found him reading Rosa's article this morning, and it seems he was
present himself and heard the sermon,” said Drake.

“And what's his opinion?” asked Lord Robert.

“Much the same as your own. Affectation--the man is suffering from the
desire to be original--more egotism than love of truth, and so forth.”

“Right, too, dear boy. All this vapouring is as much as to say: 'Look at
me! I am the Hon. and Rev. Mr. Thingamy, nephew of the Prime Minister;
and yet----'”

“I don't at all agree with the chief,” said Drake, “and I told him
so. The man has enthusiasm, and that's the very salt of the earth at
present. We are all such pessimists in these days! Thank God for anybody
who will warm us up with a little faith, say I!”

Glory's bosom heaved, and she was just about to speak, when, there was
a sudden clap as of thunder, and she leaped up in her seat. But it was
only the beginning of the overture, and she sat down laughing. There was
a tender passage in the music; and after it was over she was very quiet
for a while, and then whispered to Polly that she hoped little Johnnie
wasn't worse to-night, and it seemed wicked to enjoy one's self when any
one was so poorly.

“Who is that?” said Drake.

“My little boy whose leg was amputated,” said Glory.

“This Glory is so funny!” said Polly. “Fancy talking of that here!”

“Hush!” said Lord Robert; “the curtain is going up.” And at the next
moment Glory was laughing because they were all in the dark.

The play was Much Ado about Nothing, and Glory whispered to Drake that
she had never seen it before, but she had read Macbeth, and knew all
about Shakespeare and the drama. The first scene took her breath
away, being so large and so splendid. It represented the outside of a
gentleman's house, and she thought what a length of time it must have
taken to build it, considering it was to last only a single night. But
hush! The people were going indoors. No; they preferred to talk in the
street. Oh, we were in Italy? Yes, indeed, that was different.

Leonato delivered his first speeches forcibly, and was rewarded with
applause. Glory clapped her hands also, and said he was a very good
actor for such a very old gentleman.

Then Beatrice made her entrance, and was greeted with cheers, whereupon
Glory looked perplexed.

“It's Terry,” whispered Polly; and Drake said, “Ellen Terry”; but Glory
still looked puzzled.

“They are calling her 'Beatrice,'” she said. Then, mastering the
situation, she looked wise and said: “Of course--the actress--I quite
understand; but why do they applaud her--she has done nothing yet?”

Drake explained that the lady playing Beatrice was a great favourite,
and that the applause of the audience had been of the nature of a
welcome to a welcome guest, as much as to say they had liked her before,
and were glad to see her again. Glory thought that was beautiful, and,
looking at the gleaming eyes that shone out of the darkness, she said:

“How lovely to be an actress!”

Then she turned back to the stage, where all was bright and brilliant,
and said, “What a lovely frock, too!”

“Only a stage costume, my dear,” said Polly.

“And what beautiful diamonds!”

“Paste,” said Lord Robert,

“Hush!” said Drake; and then Benedick entered, and the audience received
him with great cheering. “Irving,” whispered Drake; and Glory looked
more perplexed than before and said:

“But you told me it was Mr. Irving's theatre, and I thought it would
have been his place to welcome----”

The vision of Benedick clapping his hands at his own entrance set Lord
Robert laughing in his cold way: but Drake said, “Be quiet, Robert!”

Glory, like a child, had ears for no conversation except her own, and
she was immersed in the play in a moment. The merry war of Beatrice and
Benedick had begun, and as she watched it her face grew grave.

“Now, that's very foolish of her,” she said; “and if, as you say, she's
a great actress, she shouldn't do such things. To talk like that to a
man is to let everybody see that she likes him better than anybody else,
though she's trying her best to hide it. The silly girl--he'll find her
out!”

But the curtain had gone down on the first act, the lights had suddenly
gone up, and her companions were laughing at her. Then she laughed also.

“Of course, it's only a play,” she said largely, “and I know all about
plays and about acting, and I can act myself, too.”

“I'm sure you can,” said Polly, lifting her lip. But Glory took no
notice.

Throughout the second act she put on the same airs of knowledge,
watching the masked ball intently, but never once uttering a laugh and
hardly ever smiling. The light, the colour, the dresses, the gay young
faces enchanted her; but she struggled to console herself. It was only
her body that was up there, leaning over the front of the box with lips
twitching and eyes gleaming; her soul was down on the stage, clad in a
lovely gown, and carrying a mask and laughing and joking with Benedick;
but she held herself in, and when the curtain fell she began to talk of
the acting.

She was still of the opinion that Leonato was excellent for such an
elderly gentleman, and when Polly praised Claudio she agreed that he was
good too.

“But Benedick is my boy for all,” she said. In some way she had
identified herself with Beatrice, and hardly ever spoke of her.

During the third act this air of wisdom and learning broke down badly.
In the middle of the ballad, “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,” she
remembered Johnnie, and whispered to Drake how ill he had been when they
left the hospital. And when it was over, and Benedick protested that the
song had been vilely sung, she sat back in her seat and said she didn't
know how Mr. Irving could say such a thing, for she was sure the boy had
sung it beautifully.

“But that's the author,” whispered Drake; and then she said wisely:

“Oh, yes, I know--Shakespeare, of course.”

Then came the liming of the two love-birds, and she declared that
everybody was in love in plays of that sort, and that was why she liked
them; but as for those people playing the trick, they were very simple
if they thought Beatrice didn't know she loved Benedick. Claudio fell
woefully in her esteem in other respects also, and when he agreed to spy
on Hero she said he ought to be ashamed of himself anyhow.

“How ridiculous you are!” said Polly. “It's the author, isn't it?”

“Then the author ought to be ashamed of himself, also, for it is unjust
and cruel and unnecessary,” said Glory.

The curtain had come down again by this time, and the men were deep in
an argument about morality in art, Lord Robert protesting that art had
no morality, and Drake maintaining that what Glory said was right, and
there was no getting to the back of it.

But the fourth act witnessed Glory's final vanquishment. When she found
the scene was the inside of a church and they were to be present at a
wedding, she could not keep still on her seat for delight; but when the
marriage was stopped and Claudio uttered his denunciation of Hero,
she said it was just like him, and it would serve him right if nobody
believed him.

“Hush!” said somebody near them.

“But they are believing him,” said Glory quite audibly.

“Hush! Hush!” came from many parts of the theatre.

“Well, that's shameful--her father, too----” began Glory.

“Hush, Glory!” whispered Drake; but she had risen to her feet, and when
Hero fainted and fell she uttered a cry.

“What a girl!” whispered Polly. “Sit down--everybody's looking!”

“It's only a play, you know,” whispered Drake; and Glory sat down and
said:

“Well, yes; of course, it's only a play. Did you suppose----”

But she was lost in a moment. Beatrice and Benedick were alone in the
church now; and when Beatrice said, “Kill Claudio,” Glory leaped up
again and clapped her hands. But Benedick would not kill Claudio, and
it was the last straw of all. That wasn't what she called being a great
actor, and it was shameful to “sit and listen to such plays. Lots of
disgraceful scenes happened in life, but people didn't come to the
theatre to see such things, and she would go.

“How ridiculous you are!” said Polly; but Glory was out in the corridor,
and Drake was going after her.

She came back at the beginning of the fifth act with red eyes and
confused smiles, looking very much ashamed. From that moment onward she
cried a good deal, but gave no other sign until the green curtain came
down at the end, when she said:

“It's a wonderful thing! To make people forget it's not true is the most
wonderful thing in the world!”

Lord Robert, standing behind the curtain at the back of Polly's chair,
had been laughing at Glory with his long owlish drawl, and making
cynical interjections by way of punctuating her enthusiasm; and now he
said, “Would you like to have a nearer view of your wonderful world,
Glory?”

Glory looked perplexed, and Drake muttered, “Hold your tongue, Robert!”
 Then, turning to Glory, he said shortly: “He only asked if you would
like to go behind the scenes; but I don't think----”

Glory uttered a cry of delight. “Like it? Better than anything in the
world!”

“Then I must take you to a rehearsal somewhere,” said Lord Robert; “and
you'll both come to tea at the chambers afterward.”

Drake made some show of dissent; but Polly, with her most voluptuous
look upward, said it would be perfectly charming, and Glory was in
raptures.

The girls, by their own choice, went home without escort by the
Hammersmith omnibus. They sat on opposite sides and hardly talked at
all. Polly was humming idly. “Sigh no more, ladies.”

Glory was in a trance. A great, bright, beautiful world had that night
swum into her view, and all her heart was yearning for it with vague
and blind aspirations. It might be a world of dreams, but it seemed more
real than reality, and when the omnibus passed the corner of Piccadilly
Circus she forgot to look at the women who were crowding the pavement.

The omnibus drew up for them at the door of the hospital, and they took
long breaths as they went up the steps.

In the corridor to the surgical ward they came upon John Storm. His head
was down and his step was long and measured, and he seemed to be trying
to pass them in his grave silence; but Glory stopped and spoke, while
Polly went on to her cubicle.

“You here so late?” she said.

He looked steadily into her face and answered, “I was sent for--some one
was dying.”

“Was it little Johnnie?”

“Yes.”

There was not a tear now, not a quiver of an eyelid.

“I don't think I care for this life,” she said fretfully. “Death is
always about you everywhere, and a girl can never go out to enjoy
herself but----”

“It is true woman's work,” said John hotly, “the truest, noblest work a
woman can have in all the world!”

“Perhaps,” said Glory, swinging on her heel. “All the same----”

“Good-night!” said John, and he turned on his heel also.

She looked after him and laughed. Then with a little hard lump at her
heart she took herself off to bed.

Polly Love, in the next cubicle, was humming as she undressed:

  Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
  Men were deceivers ever.

That night Glory dreamed that she was back at Peel. She was sitting up
on the Peel hill, watching the big ships as they weighed anchor in the
bay beyond the old dead castle walls, and wishing she were going out
with them to the sea and the great cities so far away.




XV.

John Storm was sitting in his room next morning fumbling the leaves of a
book and trying to read, when a lady was announced. It was Miss Macrae,
and she came in with a flushed face, a quivering lip, and the marks of
tears in her eyes. She held his hand with the same long hand-clasp as
before, and said in a tremulous voice:

“I am ashamed of coming, and mother does not know that I am here; but I
am very unhappy, and if you can not help me----”

“Please sit down,” said John Storm.

“I have come to tell you----” she said, and then her sad eyes moved
about the room and came back to his face. “It is about Lord Robert Ure,
and I am very wretched.”

“Tell me everything, dear lady, and if there is anything I can do----”

She told him all. It was a miserable story. Her mother had engaged her
to Lord Robert Ure (there was no other way of putting it) for the sake
of his title, and he had engaged himself to her for the sake of her
wealth. She had never loved him, and had long known that he was a man of
scandalous reputation; but she had been taught that to attach weight to
such considerations would be girlish and sentimental, and she had fought
for a while and then yielded.

“You will reproach me for my feebleness,” she said, and he answered
haltingly:

“No, I do not reproach you--I pity you!”

“Well,” she said, “it is all over now, and if I am ruined, and if my
mother----”

“You have told her you can not marry him!”

“Yes.”

“Then who am I to reproach you?” he said; and rising to his feet, he
threw down his book.

Her dark eyes wandered about the room, and came back to his face again
and shone with a new lustre.

“I heard your sermon on Sunday, Mr. Storm, and I felt as if there were
nobody else in the church, and you were speaking to me alone. And last
night at the theatre----”

“Well?”

He had been tramping the room, but he stopped.

“I saw him in a box with his friend and two--two ladies.”

“Were they nurses from the hospital?”

She made a cry of surprise and said, “Then you know all about it, and
the sermon _was_ meant for me?”

He did not speak for a moment, and then he said with a thick utterance:

“You wish me to help you to break off this marriage, and I will try. But
if I fail--no matter what has happened in the past, or what awaits you
in the future----”

“Oh,” she said, “if I had your strength beside me I should be brave--I
should be afraid of nothing.”

“Good-bye, dear lady,” said John Storm; and before he could prevent her
she had stooped over his hand and kissed it.

John Storm had returned to his book and was clutching it with nervous
fingers, when his fellow-curate came with a message from the canon to
request his presence in the study.

“Tell him I was on the point of going down,” said John. And the Reverend
Golightly coughed and bowed himself out.

The canon had also had a visitor that morning. It was Mrs. Macrae
herself. She sat on a chair covered with a tiger skin, sniffed at her
scented handkerchief, and poured out all her sorrows.

Mercy had rebelled against her authority, and it was entirely the fault
of the new curate, Mr. Storm. She had actually refused to carry out her
engagement with Lord Robert, and it all came of that dreadful sermon on
Sunday. It was dishonourable, it was unprincipled, and it was a pretty
thing to teach girls to indulge their whims without regard to the wishes
of parents!

“Here have I been two years in London, spending a fortune on the girl
and trying to do my best for her, and the moment I fix her in one of the
first English families, this young man--this curate--this---- Upon my
honour, it's real wicked, it's shameful!” And the handkerchief steeped
in perfume went up from the nose to the eyes.

The canon swung his _pince-nez_. “Don't put yourself about, my dear Mrs.
Macrae. Leave the matter to me. Miss Macrae will give up her objections,
and----”

“Oh, you mustn't judge her by her quietness, canon. You don't know her
character. She's real stubborn when her mind's made up. But I'll be
as stubborn as she is--I'll take her back to America--I'll never spend
another penny----”

“And as for Mr. Storm,” continued the canon, “I'll make everything
smooth in that quarter. You mustn't think too much about the unhappy
sermon--a little youthful _esprit fort_--we all go through it, you
know.”

When Mrs. Macrae had gone, he rang twice for Mr. Golightly and said,
“Tell Mr. Storm to come down to me immediately.”

“With pleasure, sir,” said the little man; and then he hesitated.

“What is it?” said the canon, adjusting his glasses.

“I have never told you, sir, how I found him the night you sent me to
the hospital.”

“Well, how?”

“On his knees to a Catholic priest who was visiting a patient.”

The canon's glasses fell from his eyes and his broad face broke into
strange smiles.

“I thought the Sorceress of Rome was at the bottom of it,” he said. “His
uncle shall know of this, and unless I am sadly deceived--but fetch him
down.”

John Storm was wearing his flannel shirt that morning, and he came
downstairs with a heavy tread and swung himself, unasked, into the chair
that had just before been occupied by Mrs. Macrae.

The perpendicular wrinkles came between the canon's eyebrows and he
said: “My dear Mr. Storm, I have postponed as long as possible a
most painful interview. The fact is, your recent sermon has given the
greatest offence to the ladies of my congregation, and if such teaching
were persisted in we should lose our best people. Now, I don't want to
be angry with you, quite the contrary, but I wish to put it to you, as
your spiritual head and adviser, that your idea of religion is by no
means agreeable to the needs and necessities of the nineteenth century.
There is no freedom in such a faith, and St. Paul says, 'Where the
Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.' But the theory of your
religion is not more unscriptural than its application is unwholesome.
Yours is a gloomy faith, my dear Storm, and what did Luther say of a
gloomy faith?--that the devil was very apt to be lurking behind it. As
for himself he married, you may remember; he had children, he played
chess, he loved to see young people dancing----”

“I don't object to the dancing, sir,” said John Storm. “I only object to
the tune.”

“What do you mean?” said the canon, not without insolence, and the
perpendicular wrinkles became large and heavy.

“I mean, sir,” said John Storm, “that half the young people
nowadays--the young women in the west of London especially--are asked to
dance to the Dead March.”

And then he spoke of the infamous case of Mercy Macrae, how she was
being bought and sold, and how scandalous was the reputation of the man
she was required to marry.

“That was what I was coming down to speak about, sir--to ask you to save
this innocent girl from such a mockery of holy wedlock. She is not a
child, and the law can not help her, but you can do so, because the
power of the Church is at your back. You have only to set your face
against this infamy, and say----”

“My dear Mr. Storm,” the canon was smiling condescendingly and swinging
his glasses, “the business of the Church is to solemnize marriages, not
to make them. But if the young lady comes to me I will say: 'My dear
young lady, the conditions you complain of are more common than you
suppose; put aside all foolish, romantic notions, make a nest for
yourself as comfortably as you can, and come back in a year to thank
me.'”

John Storm was on his feet; the blood was mounting to his face and
tingling in his fingers.

“And so these men are to make their wives of the daughters of the poor
first, and then ask the Church to solemnize their polygamy----”

But the canon had lifted his hand to silence him.

“My dear young friend, a policy like yours would decimate the House of
Commons and abolish the House of Lords. Practical religion has a sweet
reasonableness. We are all human, even if we are all gentlemen; and
while silly young things----”

But John Storm was out in the hall and putting on his hat to see Glory.

Glory had not yet awakened from her trance. While others were living
in to-day she was still going about in yesterday. The emotion of the
theatre was upon her, and the world of reality took the tone and colour
of drama. This made her a tender woman, but a bad nurse.

She began the day in the Outpatient Department, and a poor woman came
with a child that had bitten its tongue. Its condition required that it
should remain in the house a day or two. “Let me put the pore thing to
bed; she's allus used to me,” said the woman piteously. “Are you the
mother?” said the Sister. “No, the grandmother.” “The mother is the only
person who can enter the wards except on visiting day.” The poor woman
began to cry. Glory had to carry the child to bed, and she whispered to
the grandmother, “Come this way,” and the woman followed her. When they
came to the surgical ward, she said to the nurse in charge, “This is the
child's mother, and she has come to put the poor little thing to bed.”

Later in the morning she was sent up to help in the same ward. A patient
in great pain called to her and said, “Loosen this bandage for me,
nurse; it is killing me!” And she loosened it.

But the glamour of the theatre was upon her as well as its sentiment and
emotion, and in the space before the bed of one of the patients, at a
moment when the ward Sister was away, she began to make imitations of
Beatrice and Benedick and the singer of “Sigh no more, ladies.” The
patient was Koenig, the choirmaster of “All Saints',” a little fat
German with long mustaches, which he waxed and curled as he lay in
bed. Glory had christened him “the hippopotamus,” and at her mimicry
he laughed so much that he rolled and pitched and dived among the
bedclothes.

“Ach, Gott!” he cried, “vot a girl! Never--I haf never heard any one so
goot on de stage. Vot a voice, too! A leetle vork under a goot teacher,
and den, mein Gott! Vot is it de musicians say?--the genius has a
Cremona inside of him on which he first composes his immortal vorks. You
haf the Cremona, my dear, and I will help you to bring it out. Vot you
tink?”

It was the hour of the morning when the patients who can afford it have
their newspapers brought up to them, but the newspapers were thrown
aside; every eye was on Glory, and there was much noisy laughter and
even some clapping of hands.

Ward Sister Allworthy entered with the house doctor.

“What's the meaning of this?” she demanded. Glory told the truth, and
was reproved.

“Who has loosened this bandage?” said the doctor. The patient tried to
prevaricate, but Glory told the truth again, and was reproved once more.

“And who permitted this woman to come into the ward?” said the nurse.

“I did,” said Glory.

“You're not fit to be a nurse, miss, and I shall certainly report you as
unfit for duty.”

Glory laughed in the Sister's face.

It was at this moment that John Storm arrived after his interview with
the canon. He drew Glory into the corridor and tried to pacify her.

“Oh, don't suppose I'm going to do hospital nursing all my life,” she
said. “It may be good womanly work, but I want to be a human being
with a heart, and not a machine called Duty. How I hate and despise
my surroundings! I'll make an end of them one of these days. Sooner or
later it must come to that.”

“Your life has been deranged, Glory, and that is why you disdain your
surroundings. You were at the theatre last night.”

“Who told you that? Well, what of it? Are you one of those who think the
theatre----”

“I don't object to the theatre, Glory. It is the derangement of your
life I am thinking of; and if anybody is responsible for that he is your
enemy, not your friend.”

“You will make me angry again, as you did before,” and she began to bite
her quivering lip.

“I did not come to make you angry, Glory. I came to ask you--even to
entreat you--to break off this hateful connection.”

“Because you know nothing of this--this connection, as you say--you call
it hateful.”

“I know what I am talking about, my child. The life these men live is
worse than hateful; and it makes my heart bleed to see you falling a
victim to it.”

“You are degrading me again; you are always degrading me. Other men try
to be agreeable to me, but you---- Besides, I can not hear my friends
abused. Yes, they _are_ my friends. I _was_ at the theatre with them
last night, and I am going to take tea at their chambers on my next
holiday. So please----”

“Glory!”

With one plunge of his arm he had gripped her by the wrist.

“You are hurting me.”

“You are never to set foot in the rooms of those men!”

“Let me go!”

“You are as inexperienced as a child, Glory, and it is my duty to
protect you against yourself.”

“Let go, I say!”

“Don't destroy yourself. Think while there's time--think of your good
name, your character!”

“I shall do as I please.”

“Listen! If I have chosen to be a clergyman, it's not because I've lived
all my life in cotton wool. Let me tell you what the lives of such men
really are--the best of them, the very best. He gets up at noon, walks
in the park, takes tea with some one, grunts and groans that he must
go to somebody's dinner party, escapes to the Gaiety Theatre, sups at a
so-called club----”

“You mean Lord Robert. But what right have you to say----”

“The right of one who knows him to be as bad as this, and worse--ten
times worse! Such a man thinks he has a right to play with a girl if she
is poor. She may stake her soul, her salvation, but he risks nothing.
To-day he trifles with her; to-morrow he marries another, and flings her
to the devil!”

“There's something else in this. What is it?”

But John Storm had swung about and left her.

As soon as she was at liberty she went in search of Polly Love,
expecting to find her in her cubicle, but the cubicle was empty. Coming
out of the little room she saw a piece of paper lying on the floor. It
was a letter, carefully folded. She picked it up, unfolded it, and read
it, hardly knowing what she was doing, for her head was dizzy and her
eyes were swimming in unshed tears. It ran:

“You ask, Do I mean to adopt entirely? Yes; to bring up just the same
as if it were born to me. I hope yours will be a strong and healthy boy;
but if it is a girl----”

Glory could not understand what she was reading. Whose letter could it
be? It was addressed “X. Y. Z., Office of _Morning Post_.”

There was a hurried footstep approaching, and Polly came in, with her
eyes on the ground as if looking for something she had dropped. At the
next moment she had snatched the letter out of Glory's hand, and was
saying:

“What are you doing in my room? Has your friend the chaplain told you to
spy upon me?”

The expression on her face was appalling, and Glory, who had flushed up
with shame, turned away without a word.

When John Storm got back to his room he found the following letter from
the canon on his table:


“Since our interview of this morning (so strangely abridged) I have had
the honour to visit your dear uncle, the Prime Minister, and he agrees
with me that the strain of your recent examinations and the anxieties of
a new occupation have probably disturbed your health, and that it
will be prudent of you to take a short vacation. I have therefore the
greatest pleasure in assuring you that you are free from duty for a
week, a fortnight, or a month, as your convenience may determine; and
during your much-regretted absence I will do my best to sustain the
great loss of your invaluable help.”


On reading the message, John Storm flung himself into a chair and burst
into a long peal of bitter laughter. But when the laughter was spent
there came a sense of great loneliness. Then he remembered Mrs.
Callender, and went across to her little house in Victoria Square, and
showed her the canon's letter and told her everything.

“Lies, lies, lies!” she said. “Ah, laddie, laddie! to lie, to know you
lie, to be known to lie, and yet to go on lying--that is the whole art
of life with these fashionable shepherds and their fashionable flock.
As for that woman--ugh! She was separated from her husband for two years
before his death; and he died in a hotel abroad without kith or kin
to comfort him: and now she wears his hair in a gold locket on her
bosom--that's what she is! But all's well that ends well, laddie. The
_holly_ will do ye good, for you were killing yerself with work. You'll
no be spending it in your little island, now, eh?”

John Storm was sitting with one leg across the other, and his head on
his hand and his elbow on his knee.

“I shall spend it,” he said, “in Retreat at the Brotherhood in
Bishopsgate.”

“God bless me, man! is that the change of air ye'll be going to gie
yoursel'? It may be well enough for men with water in their veins; but
you have blood, laddie--blood! Tak' care, tak' care!”




XVI.

“Still at Martha's.

“Quite right, dear Aunt Anna, the terms 'authority' and 'obedience' must
be known and honoured. Only, when it is a case of put a penny in the
slot and out comes the word of command, you can't exactly feel that way.
The board of directors put the penny into the slot of this institution,
and the word of command, so far as I am concerned, comes out of the
mouth of Ward Sister Allworthy. I call her the White Owl. She is five
feet ten, and has big round cheeks which sometimes I should dearly
love to slap--as mothers slap their 'childers' when they administer a
humiliating punishment.

“So you think you notice 'a certain want of aptitude'? Well, I don't
think I am naturally a bad nurse, Aunt Anna. The patients like me,
and they don't die of the dumps when I am about. Only I can't practise
nursing by the rule of three, and as a consequence I get myself
reported. Sister Allworthy has reported me three times, bless her!
Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed, and now she threatens to have me up
before the matron. That dear soul has difficulties of locomotion, being
buried under the Pelion on Ossa of a mountain of fat. She inhabits a
cave of Adullam on the edge of the Inferno--i. e., the 'theatre'--below
stairs, and has a small dog with a bad heart and broken wind always
nagging on her knee. I call her the Chief Broker in Breakages and Head
Dealer in Diseases, and she is only seen once a day when she comes round
to take stock. You have to be nice with her Majesty,' for she can haul
you up at the weekly board, and put a score against you in the black
book, and send you away without a certificate. If that happens, a girl
who expects to earn her living as a nurse has never any particular need
to pray, 'In all time of our wealth, good Lord deliver us.'

“But, oh, my dear grandfather, what do you think of our John Storm
now? After uttering the lamentations of Jeremiah and predicting all the
plagues of Egypt, he has gone off to hold his peace--that is to say, he
has gone to make his 'Retreat,' which, being interpreted, means praying
without ceasing, and also without speaking, eighteen hours a day, six
days at a spell, and sometimes sixty. When he comes back reeking with
all that holiness I shall feel myself such a miserable sinner----

“Soberly, I could cry to think of it, though, and when I remember that
perhaps I was partly to blame----

“It was this way: In that 'ter'ble discoorse' I told you he had
scotched the snake, not killed it, and his vicar (I call him Mr.
Worldly Wiseman), finding that his ladies and nobility went out like the
Pharisees, one by one, told our poor John he was ill and stood in need
of instant rest. It looked like it certainly, and the trouble must have
been a sort of human rabies in which the poor victim bites at his best
friends first. He came here with his lower lip hanging like an old
dog's, and I was so stupid as not to see that he was being hunted like a
dog too, and only told myself how ugly and untidy he had grown of late.
But the Sister had just before been showing me her tusks again, and
being possessed with a fury, I gave it him world without end. He was
very unreasonable though, and seemed to say that I must have no friends
and no amusements that were not of his choosing, and that after spending
my days walking through the inside of this precious hospital I must
spend my nights walking round the outside of it. Being a woman of like
passions with himself, I had a 'ter'ble dust' with him on the subject,
and the next I heard was that he was going to make Retreat in a kind of
English-church monastery somewhere in the city, where he would 'try
to disentangle' himself 'from the world' and see what he 'ought to do
next.' He sent me his blessing with this message, and I sent him back
mine--a less holy one, but he'll make it do.

“I thought you would remember Mr. Drake's mother, dear Auntie Rachel.
Yes, he is fair also, and wears his hair brushed across his forehead,
much as you see in the portraits of Napoleon. In fact, he is a sort of
fair-haired Napoleon in nature as well.

“He took me to the theatre the other evening, and that was the great
event I intended to tell you about. It was quite a proper sort of place,
and nobody behaved badly except Glory, who kept talking and preaching
and going silly with excitement all the evening through, with the result
that everybody was staring mewards and wanting to turn me out.

“Since then Mr. Drake's friend, Lord Bob, who knows all the actors on
earth seemingly, has taken us 'behind,' and we have seen a rehearsal.
Things don't look quite the same behind as before, but nothing in the
world does that, and I wasn't a bit disenchanted. In fact, I found
everything delightfully romantic and amusing, and really I do not think
it _can_ be so very wicked to be an actress. Do you?

“My friend Polly Love was with us. Polly is a probationer also, and
sleeps in the cubicle next to mine, and after the rehearsal we went to
the gentlemen's chambers to tea. I can hear what Aunt Anna is saying:
'Goodness gracious! you didn't do that, girl?' Well, yes, I did though.
In the interest of my sex I wanted to see how two boys could live in
rooms all by themselves, and it's perfectly shocking how well they get
on without a woman. Of course I wasn't such a silly as to let wit about
that, but after I had examined their sitting-room and cross-examined its
owners on its numerous photographs (chiefly feminine) and tried how it
feels to hold their big pipes between one's teeth, I whipped off my hat
at once and began to put things straight for them, and then I made the
tea.

“By this time the gentlemen had changed into their jackets, and I sent
them flying around for cups and saucers and sugar basins. It turned out
that they had only one teaspoon in the place, and when anybody wanted
to stir her tea she said, 'Will you oblige me with _spoon_ please?'
What fun it was! We laughed until we cried--at least one of us did--and
eventually we managed to break the teapot and a slop basin and to
overturn a standing lamp. It was perfectly delightful!

“But the best sport was after tea was over, and Glory was called on
for imitations of the people we had seen at the theatre. Of course she
couldn't imitate a man when she was in a woman's frock, so being as
bright as diamonds that night and twice 'as impudent as a white stone,'
[* A Manx proverb] she actually conceived the idea of dressing up in
man's clothes. Naturally the gentlemen were enchanted, so I hope Auntie
Rachel isn't terribly shocked. Mr. Drake lent me his knickerbockers and
a velvet jacket, and Polly and I went into the bedroom, where she helped
me to find the way to put them on. With my own blouse and my own hat
(I am wearing a felt one now with a broad brim and a feather), and _of
course_ my own slippers and stockings, I made a bogh of a boy, I can
tell you. I thought Poll

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