The Christian Part 70

"Hold your tongue, Glory! n.o.body wants your tea! Let us hear the story,"

said Rosa.

"Why, yes, certainly," said Lord Robert, and everybody laughed again.

"She was all for travel and triumphal processions in those days----"

Glory stopped her ears and began to sing:

w.i.l.l.y, w.i.l.l.y Wilkin, Kissed the maid a-milkin'!

Fa, la la!

"There were so many things people could do if they wouldn't waste so much time working----"

w.i.l.l.y, w.i.l.l.y Wilkin Kissed the maid----

"Glory, if you don't be quiet we'll turn you out!" and Rosa got up and nourished her proofs.

"I had brought my dog, and when I called her a----"

But Glory had leaped to her feet and fled from the room. Drake had leaped up also, and now, putting his back against the door, he raised his voice and went on with his story.

"Somebody saved us, though, and she lay in his arms and kissed him all the way home again."

Glory was strumming on the door and singing to drown his voice. When the story was ended and she was allowed to come back she was panting and gasping with laughter, but there were tears in her eyes for all that, and Lord Robert was saying, with a sidelong look toward John Storm, "Really, this ought to be a scene in the new Sigurdsen, don't you know!"

John had retired within himself during this nonsense. He had been feeling an intense hatred of the two men, and was looking as gloomy as deep water. "All acting, sheer acting," he thought, and then he told himself that Glory was only worthy of his contempt. What could attract her in the society of such men? Only their wealth, and their social station. Their intellectual and moral atmosphere must weary and revolt her.

Rosa had to go to her newspaper office, and Drake saw her to the door.

John rose at the same time, and Glory said, "Going already?" but she did not try to detain him. She would see him again; she had much to say to him. "I suppose you were surprised to hear that I had returned to London?" she said, looking up at his knitted brows.

He did not answer immediately, and Lord Robert, who was leaning against the chimney-piece, said in his cold drawl, "Your friend ought to be happy that you have returned to London, seems to me, my dear, instead of wasting your life in that wilderness."

John drew himself up. "It's not London I object to," he said; "that was inevitable, I dare say."

"What then?"

"The profession she has come back to follow."

"Why, what's amiss with the profession?" said Lord Robert, and Drake, who returned to the room at the moment, said: "Yes, what's amiss with it? Some of the best men in the world have belonged to it, I think."

"Tell me the name of one of them, since the world began, who ever lived an active Christian life."

Lord Robert made a kink of laughter, and, turning to the window, began to play a tune with his finger tips on the gla.s.s of a pane. Drake struggled to keep a straight face, and answered, "It is not their role, sir."

"Very well, if that's too much to ask, tell me how many of them have done anything in real life, anything for the world, for humanity--anything whatever, I don't care what it is."

"You are unreasonable, sir," said Drake, "and such objections could as properly apply to the professions of the painter and the musician. These are the children of joy. Their first function is to amuse. And surely amus.e.m.e.nt has its place in real life, as you say."

"On the contrary," said John, following his own thought, for he had not listened, "how many of them have lived lives of reckless abandonment, self-indulgence, and even scandalous license!"

"Those are abuses that apply equally to other professions, sir. Even the Church is not free from them. But in the view of reasonable beings one clergyman of evil life--nay, one hundred--would not make the profession of the clergy bad."

"A profession," said John, "which appeals above all to the senses, and lives on the emotions, and fosters jealousy and vanity and backbiting, and develops duplicity, and exists on lies, and does nothing to encourage self-sacrifice or to help suffering humanity, is a bad profession and a sinful one!"

"If a profession is sinful," said Drake, "in proportion as it appeals to the senses, and lives on the emotions, and develops duplicity, then the profession of the Church is the most sinful in the world, for it offers the greatest temptations to lying, and produces the worst hypocrites and impostors!"

"That," said John, with eyes flashing and pa.s.sion vibrating in his voice--"that, sir, is the great Liar's everlasting lie--and you know it!"

Glory was between them with uplifted hands. "Peace, peace! Blessed is the peacemaker! But tea! Will n.o.body take more tea? Oh, dear! oh, dear!

Why can't we have tea over again?"

"I know what you mean, sir," said Drake. "You mean that I have brought Glory back to a life of danger and vanity, and sloth and sensuality.

Very well. I deny your definition. But call it what you will, I have brought her back to the only life her talents are fit for, and if that's all----"

"Would you have done the same for your own sister?"

"How dare you introduce my sister's name in this connection?"

"And how dare you resent it? What's good for one woman is good for another."

Glory was turning aside, and Drake was looking ashamed. "Of course--naturally--all I meant," he faltered--"if a girl has to earn her living, whatever her talents, her genius--that is one thing. But the upper cla.s.ses, I mean the leisured cla.s.ses----"

"d.a.m.n the leisured cla.s.ses, sir!" said John, and in the silence that followed the men looked round, but Glory was gone from the room.

Lord Robert, who had been whistling at the window, said to Drake in a cynical undertone: "The man is hipped and sore. He has lost his challenge, and we ought to make allowances for him, don't you know."

Drake tried to laugh. "I'm willing to make allowances," he said lightly; "but when a man talks to me as if--as if I meant to----" but the light tone broke down, and he faced round upon John and burst out pa.s.sionately: "What right have you to talk to me like this? What is there in my character, in my life, that justifies it? What woman's honour have I betrayed? What have I done that is unworthy of the character of an English gentleman?"

John took a stride forward and came face to face and eye to eye with him. "What have you done?" he said. "You have used a woman as your decoy to win your challenge, as you say, and you have struck me in the face with the hand of the woman I love! That's what you've done, sir, and if it's worthy of the character of an English gentleman, then G.o.d help England!"

Drake put his hand to his head and his flushed face turned pale. But Lord Robert Ure stepped forward and said with a smile: "Well, and if you've lost your church so much the better. You are only an outsider in the ecclesiastical stud anyway. Who wants you? Your rector doesn't want you; your Bishop doesn't want you. n.o.body wants you, if you ask me."

"I don't ask you, Lord Robert," said John. "But there's somebody who does want me for all that. Shall I tell you who it is? It's the poor and helpless girl who has been deceived by the base and selfish man, and then left to fight the battle of life alone, or to die by suicide and go shuddering down to h.e.l.l! That's who wants me, and, G.o.d willing, I mean to stand by her."

"Damme, sir, if you mean _me_, let me tell you what _you_ are," said Lord Robert, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up his eyegla.s.s. "You"--shaking his head right and left--"you are a man who takes delicately nurtured ladies out of sheltered homes and sends them into holes and hovels in search of abandoned women and their misbegotten children! Why"--turning to Drake-"what do you think has happened? My wife has fallen under this gentleman's influence--the poor simpleton!--and not one hour before I left my house she brought home a child which he had given her to adopt.

Think of it!--out of the shambles of Soho, and G.o.d knows whose brat and b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

The words were hardly out of the man's mouth when John Storm had taken him by both shoulders. "G.o.d _does_ know," he said, "and so do I! Shall I tell you whose child that is? Shall I? It's yours!" The man saw it coming and turned white as a ghost. "Yours! and your wife has taken up the burden of your sin and shame, for she's a good woman, and you are not fit to live on the earth she walks upon!"

He left the two men speechless and went heavily down the stairs. Glory was waiting for him at the door. Her eyes were glistening after recent tears.

"You will come no more?" she said. She could read him like a book. "I can see that you intend to come no more."

He did not deny it, and after a moment she opened the door and he pa.s.sed out with a look of utter weariness. Then she went back to her room and flung herself on the bed, face downward.

The men in the drawing-room were beginning to recover themselves. Lord Robert was humming a tune, Drake pacing to and fro.

"Buying up his church to make a theatre for Glory was the very refinement of cruelty!" said Drake. "Good heavens! what possessed me?"