The Christian Part 2

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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.sengers were on deck, looking like sour b.u.t.termilk 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 pa.s.s 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 n.o.body 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 pa.s.sion 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 t.i.tle, 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 cla.s.sics 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 pa.s.sion 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 sh.e.l.ls in the path, the tears turned to fierce wrath and mad rage, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 c.o.c.kpit. 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, La.s.ses 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 pa.s.sionate side, and he drew back afraid. This wild power, this tempest, this raging fire within, G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sion. 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 G.o.dly men that G.o.d 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.