The Christian Part 11

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-gla.s.s.

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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 gla.s.s 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.