The Christian Part 16

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 t.i.tle, 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 l.u.s.tre.

"I heard your sermon on Sunday, Mr. Storm, and I felt as if there were n.o.body 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 gla.s.ses.

"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 gla.s.ses 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.