Complete Works of Hall Caine, page 284
“So soon? When shall I see you again?”
“God knows! — I mean — I don’t know,” he answered in a helpless way.
He was looking around, as if taking a mental farewell of everything.
“But we can not part like this,” she said. “I think you like me a little still, and — —”
Her supplicating voice made him look up into her face for a moment. Then he turned away, saying, “Good-bye, Glory.” And with a look of utter exhaustion he went out of the room.
Glory walked to a window at the end of the corridor that she might see him when he crossed the street. There was just a glimpse of his back as he turned the corner with a slow step and his head on his breast. She went back crying.
“I could fancy a fresh herring for supper, dear,” said Polly. “What do you say, housekeeper?”
John Storm went back to the canon’s house a crushed and humiliated man. “I can do no more,” he thought. “I will give it up.” His old influence with Glory must have been lost. Something had come between them — something or some one. “Anyhow it is all over and I must go away somewhere.”
To go on seeing Glory would be useless. It would also be dangerous. As often as he was face to face with her he wanted to lay hold of her and say, “You must do this and this, because it is my wish and direction and command, and it is I that say so!” In the midst of God’s work how subtle were the temptations of the devil!
But with every step that he went plodding home there came other feelings. He could see the girl quite plainly, her fresh young face, so strong and so tender, so full of humour and heart’s love, and all the sweet beauty of her form and figure. Then the old pain in his breast came back again and he began to be afraid.
“I will take refuge in the Church,” he thought. In prayer and penance and fasting he would find help and consolation. The Church was peace — peace from the noise of life, and strength to fight and to vanquish. But the Church must be the Church of God — not of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
“Ask the canon if he can see me immediately,” said John Storm to the footman, and he stood in the hall for the answer.
The canon had taken tea that day in the study with his daughter Felicity. He was reclining on the sofa, propped up with velvet cushions, and holding the teacup and saucer like the wings of a butterfly in both hands.
“We have been deceived, my dear” (sip, sip), “and we must pay the penalty of the deception. Yet we have nothing to blame ourselves for — nothing whatever. Here was a young man, from Heaven knows where, bent on entering the diocese. True, he was merely the son of a poor lord who had lived the life of a hermit, but he was also the nephew, and presumably the heir, of the Prime Minister of England” (sip, sip, sip). “Well, I gave him his title. I received him into my house. I made him free of my family — and what is the result? He has disregarded my instructions, antagonized my supporters, and borne himself toward me with an attitude of defiance, if not disdain.”
Felicity poured out a second cup of tea for her father, sympathized with him, and set forth her own grievances. The young man had no conversation, and his reticence was quite embarrassing. Sometimes when she had friends, and asked him to come down, his silence — well, really ——
“We might have borne with these little deficiencies, my dear, if the Prime Minister had been deeply interested. But he is not. I doubt if he has ever seen his nephew since that first occasion. And when I called at Downing Street, about the time of the sermon, he seemed entirely undisturbed. ‘The young man is in the wrong place, my dear canon; send him back to me.’ That was all.”
“Then why don’t you do it?” said Felicity.
“It is coming to that, my child; but blood is thicker than water, you know, and after all — —”
It was at this moment the footman entered the room to ask if the canon could see Mr. Storm.
“Ah, the man himself!” said the canon, rising. “Jenkyns, remove the tray.” Dropping his voice: “Felicity, I will ask you to leave us together. After what occurred this morning at the hospital anything like a scene — —” Then aloud: “Bring him in, Jenkyns. — Say something, my dear. Why don’t you speak? — Come in, my dear Storm. — You’ll see to that matter for me, Felicity. Thanks, thanks! Sorry to send you off, but I’m sure Mr. Storm will excuse you. Good-bye for the present.”
Felicity went out as John Storm came in. He looked excited, and there was an expression of pain in his face.
“I am sorry to disturb you, but I need not detain you long,” he said.
“Sit down, Mr. Storm, sit down,” said the canon, returning to the sofa.
But John did not sit. He stood by the chair vacated by Felicity, and kept beating his hat on the back of it.
“I have come to tell you, sir, that I wish to resign my curacy.”
The canon glanced up with a stealthy expression, and thought: “How clever of him! To resign before he is told plainly that he has to go — that is very clever.”
Then he said aloud: “I am sorry, very sorry. I’m always sorry to part with my clergy. Still — you see I am entirely frank with you — I have observed that you have not been comfortable of late, and I think you are acting for the best. When do you wish to leave me?”
“As soon as convenient — as early as I can be spared.”
The canon smiled condescendingly. “That need not trouble you at all. With a staff like mine, you see —— Of course, you are aware that I am entitled to three months’ notice?”
“Yes.”
“But I will waive it; I will not detain you. Have you seen your uncle on the subject?”
“No.”
“When you do so please say that I always try to remove impediments from a young man’s path if he is uncomfortable — in the wrong place, for example.”
“Thank you,” said John Storm, and then he hesitated a moment before stepping to the door.
The canon rose and bowed affably. “Not an angry word,” he thought. “Who shall say that blood does not count for something?”
“Believe me, my dear Storm,” he said aloud, “I shall always remember with pride and pleasure our early connection. Perhaps I think you are acting unwisely, even foolishly, but it will continue to be a source of satisfaction to me that I was able to give you your first opportunity, and if your next curacy should chance to be in London, I trust you will allow us to maintain the acquaintance.”
John Storm’s face was twitching and his pulses were beating violently, but he was trying to control himself.
“Thank you,” he said; “but it is not very likely — —”
“Don’t say you are giving up Orders, dear Mr. Storm, or perhaps that you are only leaving our church in order to unite yourself to another. Ah! have I touched on a tender point? You must not be surprised that rumours have been rife. We can not silence the tongues of busybodies and mischief-makers, you know. And I confess, speaking as your spiritual head and adviser, it would be a source of grief to me if a young clergyman, who has eaten the bread of the Establishment, and my own as well, were about to avow himself the subject and slave of an Italian bishop.”
John Storm came back from the door.
“What you are saying, sir, requires that I should be plain spoken. In giving up my curacy I am not leaving the Church of England; I am only leaving you.”
“I am so glad, so relieved!”
“I am leaving you because I can not live with you any longer, because the atmosphere you breathe is impossible to me, because your religion is not my religion, or your God my God!”
“You surprise me. What have I done?”
“A month ago I asked you to set your face as a clergyman against the shameful and immoral marriage of a man of scandalous reputation, but you refused; you excused the man and sided with him. This morning you thought it necessary to investigate in public the case of one of that man’s victims, and you sided with the man again — you denied to the girl the right even to mention the scoundrel’s name!”
“How differently we see things! Do you know I thought my examination of the poor young thing was merciful to the point of gentleness! And that, I may tell you — notwithstanding the female volcano who came down on me — was the view of the board and of his lordship the chairman.”
“Then I am sorry to differ from them. I thought it unnecessary and unmanly and brutal, and even blasphemous!”
“Mr. Storm! Do you know what you are saying?”
“Perfectly, and I came to say it.”
His eyes were wild, his voice was hoarse; he was like a man breaking the bonds of a tyrannical slavery.
“You called that poor child a prostitute because she had wasted the good gifts which God had given her. But God has given good gifts to you also — gifts of intellect and eloquence with which you might have raised the fallen and supported the weak, and defended the downtrodden and comforted the broken-hearted — and what have you done with them? You have bartered them for benefices, and peddled them for popularity; you have given them in exchange for money, for houses, for furniture, for things like this — and this — and this! You have sold your birthright for a mess of pottage, therefore you are the prostitute!”
“You’re not yourself, sir; leave me,” and, crossing the room, the canon touched the bell.
“Yes, ten thousand times more the prostitute than that poor fallen girl with her taint of blood and will! There would be no such women as she is to fall victims to evil companionship if there were no such men as you are to excuse their betrayers and to side with them. Who is most the prostitute — the woman who sells her body, or the man who sells his soul?”
“You’re mad, sir! But I want no scene — —”
“You are the worst prostitute on the streets of London, and yet you are in the Church, in the pulpit, and you call yourself a follower of the One who forgave the woman and shamed the hypocrites, and had not where to lay his head!”
But the canon had faced about and fled out of the room.
The footman came in answer to the bell, and, finding no one but John Storm, he told him that a lady was waiting for him in a carriage at the door.
It was Mrs. Callender. She had come to say that she had called at the hospital for Polly Love, and the girl had refused to go to the home at Soho.
“But whatever’s amiss with ye, man?” she said. “You might have seen a ghost!”
He had come out bareheaded, carrying his hat in his hand.
“It’s all over,” he said. “I’ve waited weeks and weeks for it, but it’s over at last. It was of no use mincing matters, so I spoke out.”
His red eyes were ablaze, but a great load seemed to be lifted off his mind, and his soul seemed to exult.
“I have told him I must leave him, and I am to go, immediately. The disease was dire, and the remedy had to be dire also.”
The old lady was holding her breath and watching his flushed face with strained attention.
“And what may ye be going to do now?”
“To become a religious in something more than the name; to leave the world altogether with its idleness and pomp and hypocrisy and unreality.”
“Get yoursel’ some flesh on your bones first, man. It’s easy to see ye’ve no been sleeping or eating these days and days together.”
“That’s nothing — nothing at all. God can not take half your soul. You must give yourself entirely.”
“Eh, laddie, laddie, I feared me this was what ye were coming til. But a man can not bury himself before he is dead. He may bury the half of himself, but is it the better half? What of his thoughts — his wandering thoughts? Choose for yoursel’, though, and if you must go — if you must hide yoursel’ forever, and this is the last I’m to see of ye — ye may kiss me, laddie — I’m old enough, surely. — Go on, James, man, what for are ye sitting up there staring?”
When John Storm returned to his room he found a letter from Parson Quayle. It was a good-natured, cackling epistle, full of sweet nothings about Glory and the hospital, about Peel and the discovery of ancient ruins in the graveyards of the treen chapels, but it closed with this postscript:
“You will remember old Chalse, a sort of itinerant beggar and the privileged pet of everybody. The silly old gawk has got hold of your father and has actually made the old man believe that you are bewitched! Some one has put the evil eye on you — some woman it would seem — and that is the reason why you have broken away and behaved so strangely! It is most extraordinary. That such a foolish superstition should have taken hold of a man like your father is really quite astonishing, but if it will only soften his rancour against you and help to restore peace we may perhaps forgive the distrust of Providence and the outrage on common sense. All’s well that ends well, you know, and we shall all be happy.”
XIX.
“Martha’s.
“Lost, stolen, or strayed — a man, a clergyman, answers to the name of John Storm. Or rather he does not answer, having allowed himself to be written to twice without making so much as a yap or a yowl by way of reply. Last seen six days ago, when he was suffering from the sulks, after being in a de’il of a temper, with a helpless and innocent maiden who ‘doesn’t know nothin’,’ that can have given him offence. Any one giving information of his welfare and whereabouts to the said H. and I. M. will be generously and appropriately rewarded.
“But, soberly, my dear John Storm, what has become of you? Where are you, and whatever have you been doing since the day of the dreadful inquisition? Frightful rumours are flying through the air like knives, and they cut and wound a poor girl woefully. Therefore be good enough to reply by return of post — and in person.
“Meantime please accept it as a proof of my eternal regard that after two knock-down blows received in silence I am once more coming up smiling. Know, then, that Mr. Drake has justified all expectations, having compelled Lord Robert to provide for Polly, who is now safely ensconced in her own country castle somewhere in St. John’s Wood, furnished to hand with servants and vassals complete. Thus you will be charmed to observe in me the growth of the prophetic instinct, for you will remember my positive prediction that if a girl were in trouble, and the necessity arose, Mr. Drake would be the first to help her. Of course, he had a great deal to say that was as sweet as syrup on the loyalty of my own friendship also, and he expended much beautiful rhetoric on yourself as well. It seems that you are one of those who follow the impulse of the heart entirely, while the rest of us divide our allegiance with the head; and if you display sometimes the severity of a tyrant of our sex, that is only to be set down as another proof of your regard and of the elevation of the pedestal whereon you desire us to be placed. Thus he reconciles me to the harmony of the universe, and makes all things easy and agreeable.
“This being the case, I have now to inform you that Polly’s baby has come, having hastened his arrival (it is a man, bless it!) owing either to the tears or the terrors of the crocodile. And being on night duty now, and therefore at liberty from 6.30 to 8.30, I intend to pay him my first call of ceremony this evening, when anybody else would be welcome to accompany me who might be willing to come to his shrine of innocence and love in the spirit of the wise men of the East. But, lest anybody should inquire for me at the hospital at the first of the hours aforesaid, this is to give warning that the White Owl has expressly forbidden all intercourse between the members of her staff and the discharged and dishonoured mother. Set it down to my spirit of contradiction that I intend to disregard the mandate, though I am only too well aware that the poor discharged and dishonoured one has no other idea of friendship than that of a loyalty in which she shares but is not sharing. Of course, woman is born to such selfishness as the sparks fly upward; but if I should ever meet with a man who isn’t I will just give myself up to him — body and soul and belongings — unless he has a wife or other encumbrance already and is booked for this world, and in that event I will enter into my own recognisances and be bound over to him for the next. Glory.”
At six-thirty that evening Glory stood waiting in the portico of the hospital, but John Storm did not come. At seven she was ringing at the bell of a little house in St. John’s Wood that stood behind a high wall and had an iron grating in the garden door. The bell was answered by a good-natured, slack-looking servant, who was friendly, and even familiar in a moment.
“Are you the young lady from the hospital? The missis told me about you. I’m Liza, and come upstairs — Yes, doing nicely, thank you, both of ‘em is — and mind your head, miss.”
Polly was in a little bandbox of a bedroom, looking more pink and white than ever against the linen of her frilled pillow slips. By the bedside a woman of uncertain age in deep mourning, with little twinkling eyes and fat cheeks, was rocking the baby on her knee and babbling over it in words of maudlin endearment.
“Bless it, ‘ow it do notice! Boo-loo-loo!”
Glory leaned over the little one and pronounced it the prettiest baby she had ever seen.
“Syme ‘ere miss. There ain’t sech another in all London! It’s jest the sort of baby you can love. Pore little thing, it’s quite took to me already, as if it wanted to enkirridge you, my dear.”
“This is Mrs. Jupe,” said Polly, “and she’s going to take baby to nurse.”
“Boo-loo-loo-boo! And a nice new cradle’s awaiting of it afront of the fire in my little back parlour. Boo-loo!”
“But surely you’re never going to part with your baby!” said Glory.
“Why, what do you suppose, dear? Do you think I’m going to be tied to a child all my days, and never be able to go anywhere or do anything or amuse myself at all?”
“Jest that. It’ll be to our mootual benefit, as I said when I answered your advertisement.”
Glory asked the woman if she was married and had any children of her own.
“Me, miss? I’ve been married eleven years, and I’ve allwiz prayed the dear Lord to gimme childring. Got any? On’y one little girl; but I want to adopt another from the birth, so as to have something to love when my own’s growed up.”
