Jesus, lover of my soul,Let me to thy bosom fly.
He stood by the porch and listened. The street was very quiet; hardly anybody was passing.
Hide me, O my Saviour hide,Till the storms of life be past.
His heart surged up to his throat, and he could scarcely bear the pain of it. Yes, yes, yes! Other refuge had he none!
Suddenly a new thought smote him, and he felt like a man roused from a deep sleep. Glory! He had been thinking only of his own soul and his soul's salvation, and had forgotten his duty to others. He had his duty to Glory above all others and lie could not and must not escape from it. He must take his place by her side, and if that included the abandonment of his ideals, so be it! He had been proved unworthy of a life of holiness; he must lower his flag, he must be content to live the life of a man.
But he could not think what he ought to do next, and when night fell he was still wandering aimlessly through the streets. He had turned eastward again, and even in the tumultuous thoroughfares of the Mile End he could not help seeing that something unusual was going on. People in drink were rolling about the streets, and shouting and singing as if it had been a public holiday. “Glad you ain't in kingdom-come to-night, old gal!” “Well, what doyouthink?”
At twelve o'clock he went into a lodging-house and asked if he could have a bed. The keeper was in the kitchen talking with two men who were cooking a herring for their supper, and he looked up at his visitor in astonishment.
“Can I sleep you, sir? We ain't got no accommodation for gentlemen——” and then he stopped, looked more attentively, and said:
“Are you from the Settlement, sir?”
John Storm made some inarticulate reply.
“Thort ye might be, sir. We often 'as 'em 'ere sempling the cawfee, but blessed if they ever wanted to semple a bed afore. Still, ifyoudown't mind——”
“It will be better than I deserve, my man. Can you give me a cup of coffee before I turn in?”
“With pleasure, sir! Set down, sir! Myke yourself at 'ome. Me and my friends were just talkin' of a gentleman of your cloth, sir—the pore feller as 'as got into trouble acrost Westminster way.”
“Oh, you were talking of him, were you?”
“Sem 'ere says the biziness pize.”
“Itmustpy, or people wouldn't do it,” said the man leaning over the fire.
“Down't you believe it. That little gime down't py. Cause why? Look at the bloomin' stoo the feller's in now. If they ketch 'im 'e'll get six months 'ard.”
“Then what's 'e been doin' it for? I down't see nothink in it if it down't py.”.
“Cause he believes in it, thet's why!—What do you think, sir?”
“I think the man has come by a just fall,” said John. “God will never use him again, having brought him to shame.”
“Must hev been a wrong un certingly,” said the man over the fire.
When John Storm awoke in his cubicle next morning he saw his way clearer. He would deliver himself up to the warrant that was issued for his arrest, and go through with it to the end. Then he would return to Glory a free man, and God would find work for him even yet, after this awful lesson to his presumption and pride.
“That feller as was took ter the awspital is dead,” said somebody in the kitchen, and then there was the crinkling of a newspaper.
“Is 'e?” said another. “The best thing the Father can do is to 'ook it then. Cause why? Whether 'e done it or not they'll fix it on ter 'im, doncher know!”
John's head spun round and round. He remembered what Brother Andrew had said of Charlie Wilkes, and his heart, so warm a moment ago, felt benumbed as by frost. Nevertheless, at nine o'clock he was going westward in the Underground. People looked at him when he stepped into the carriage. He thought everybody knew him, and that the world was only playing with him as a cat plays with a mouse. The compartment was full of young clerks smoking pipes and reading newspapers.
“Most extraordinary!” said one of them. “The fellow has disappeared as absolutely as if he had been carried up into a cloud.”
“Why extraordinary?” said another in a thin voice. This one was not smoking, and he had the startled eyes of the enthusiast. “Elijah was taken up to heaven in the body, wasn't he? And why not Father Storm?”
“What?” cried the first, taking his pipe out of his mouth.
“Some people believe that,” said the thin voice timidly.
“Oh, you want a dose of medicine, you do,” said the first speaker, shaking out his ash and looking round with a knowing air. The young men got out in the City; John went on to Westminster Bridge.
It was terrible. Why could he not take advantage of the popular superstition and disappear indeed, taking Glory with him! But no, no, no!
Through all the torment of his soul his religion had remained the same, and now it rose up before him like a pillar of cloud and fire. He would do as he had intended, whatever the consequences, and if he was charged with crimes he had not committed, if he was accused of the offences of his followers, he would make no defence; if need be he would allow himself to be convicted, and being innocent in this instance God would accept his punishment as an atonement for his other sins! Glorious sacrifice! He would make it! He would make it! And Glory herself would be proud of it some day.
With the glow of this resolution upon him he turned into Scotland Yard and stepped boldly up to the office. The officer in charge received him with a deferential bow, but went on talking in a low voice to an inspector of police who was also standing at the other side of a counter.
“Strange?” he was saying. “I thought he was seen getting into the train at Euston.”
“Don't know that he wasn't either, in spite of all he says.”
“Thinking of the dog.”
“Well, the dog, too,” said the inspector, and then seeing John, “Hello! Who's here?”
The officer stepped up to the counter. “What can I do for you, sir?” he asked.
John knew that the supreme moment had come, and he felt proud of himself that his resolution did not waver. Lifting his head, he said in a low and rapid voice, “I understand that you have a warrant for the arrest of Father Storm.”
“Wehad, sir,” the officer answered.
John looked embarrassed. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that Father Storm is now in custody.”
John stared at the man with a feeling of stupefaction. “In custody! Did you say in custody?”
“Precisely! He has just given himself up.”
John answered impetuously, “But that is impossible.”
“Why impossible, sir? Are you interested in this case?”
A certain quivering moved John's mouth. “I am Father Storm himself.”
The officer was silent for a moment. Then he turned to the inspector with a pitying smile. “Another of them,” he said significantly. The psychology of criminals had been an interesting study to this official.
“Wait a minute,” said the inspector, and he went hurriedly through an inner doorway. The officer asked John some questions about his movements since yesterday. John answered vaguely in broken and rather bewildering sentences. Then the inspector returned.
“You are Father Storm?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know of anybody who might wish to personate you?”
“God forbid that any one should do that!”
“Still, there is some one here who says——”
“Let me see him.”
“Come this way quietly,” said the inspector, and John followed him to the inner room. His pride was all gone, his head was hanging low, and he was a prey to extraordinary agitation.
A man in a black cassock was sitting at a table making a statement to another officer with an open book before him. His back was to the door, but John knew him in a moment. It was Brother Andrew.
“Then why have you given yourself up?” the officer asked, and Brother Andrew began a rambling and foolish explanation. He had seen it stated in an evening paper that the Father had been traced to the train at Euston, and he thought it a pity—a pity that the police—that the police should waste their time——
“Take care!” said the officer. “You are in a position that should make you careful of what you say.”
And then the inspector stepped forward, leaving John by the door.
“You still say you are Father Storm?”
“Of course I do,” said Brother Andrew indignantly. “If I was anybody else, do you think I should come here and give myself up——”
“Then who is this standing behind you?”
Brother Andrew turned and saw John with a start of surprise and a cry of terror. He seemed hardly able to believe in the reality of what was before him, and his restless eyeballs rolled fearfully. John tried to speak, but he could only utter a few inarticulate sounds.
“Well?” said the inspector. And while John stood with head down and heaving breast, Brother Andrew began to laugh hysterically and to say:
“Don't you know who this is? This is my lay brother! I brought him out of the Brotherhood six months ago, and he has been with me ever since.”
The officers looked at each other. “Good heavens!” cried Brother Andrew in an imperious voice, “don't you believe me? You mustn't touch this man. He has done nothing—nothing at all. He is as tender as a woman and wouldn't hurt a fly. What's he doing here?”
The officers also were dropping their heads, and the heartrending voice went on: “Have you arrested him? You'll do very wrong if you arrest——But perhaps he has given himself up! That would be just like him. He is devoted to me and would tell you any falsehood if he thought it would——But you must send him away. Tell him to go back to his old mother—that's the proper place for him. Good God! do you think I'm telling you lies?”
There was silence for a moment. “My poor lad, hush, hush!” said John in a tone full of tenderness and authority. Then he turned to the inspector with a pitiful smile of triumph. “Are you satisfied?” he asked.
“Quite satisfied, Father,” the officer answered in a broken voice, and then Brother Andrew began to cry.
When Glory awoke on the morning after the Derby and thought of John she felt no remorse. A sea of bewildering difficulty lay somewhere ahead, but she would not look at it. He loved her, she loved him, and nothing else mattered. If rules and vows stood between them, so much the worse for such enemies of love.
She was conscious that a subtle change had come over her. She was not herself any longer, but somebody else as well; not a woman merely, but in some sort a man; not Glory only, but also John Storm. Oh, delicious mystery! Oh, joy of joys! His arms seemed to be about her waist still, and his breath to linger about her neck. With a certain tremor, a certain thrill, she reached for a hand-glass and looked at herself to learn if there was any difference in her face that the rest of the world would see. Yes, her eyes had another lustre, a deeper light, but she lay back in the cool bed with a smile and a long-drawn sigh. What matter whatever happened! Gone were the six cruel months in which she had awakened every morning with a pain at her breast. She was happy, happy, happy!
The morning sun was streaming across the room when Liza came in with the tea.
“Did ye see the Farver last night, Miss Gloria?”
“Oh, yes; that was all right, Liza.”
The day's newspaper was lying folded on the tray. She took it up and opened it, remembering the Derby, and thinking for the first time of Drake's triumph. But what caught her eye in glaring head-lines was a different matter: “The Panic Terror—Collapse of the Farce.”
It was a shriek of triumphant derision. The fateful day had come and gone, yet London stood where it did before. Last night's tide had flowed and ebbed, and the dwellings of men were not submerged. No earthquake had swallowed up St. Paul's; no mighty bonfire of the greatest city of the world had lit up the sky of Europe, and even the thunderstorm which had broken over London had only laid the dust and left the air more clear.
“London is to be congratulated on the collapse of this panic, which, so far as we can hear, has been attended by only one casualty—an assault in Brown's Square, Westminster, on a young soldier, Charles Wilkes, of the Wellington Barracks, by two of the frantic army of the terror-stricken. The injured man was removed to St. Thomas's Hospital, while his assailants were taken to Rochester Row police station, and we have only to regret that the clerical panic-maker himself has not yet shared the fate of his followers. Late last night the authorities, recovering from their extraordinary supineness, issued a warrant for his arrest, but up to the time of going to press he had escaped the vigilance of the police.”
Glory was breathing audibly as she read, and Liza, who was drawing up the blind, looked back at her with surprise.
“Liza, have you mentioned to anybody that Father Storm was here last night?”
“Why, no, miss, there ain't nobody stirring yet, and besides——”
“Then don't mention it to a soul. Will you do me that great, great kindness?”
“Down't ye know I will, mum?” said Liza, with a twinkle of the eye and a wag of the head.
Glory dressed hurriedly, went down to the drawing-room, and wrote a letter. It was to Sefton, the manager. “Do not expect me to play to-night. I don't feel up to it. Sorry to be so troublesome.”
Then Rosa came in with another newspaper in her hand, and, without saying anything, Glory showed her the letter. Rosa read it and returned it in silence. They understood each other.
During the next few hours Glory's impatience became feverish, and as soon as the first of the evening papers appeared she sent out for it. The panic was subsiding, and the people who had gone to the outskirts were returning to the city in troops, looking downcast and ashamed. No news of Father Storm. Inquiry that morning at Scotland Yard elicited the fact that nothing had yet been heard of him. There was much perplexity as to where he had spent the previous night.
Glory's face tingled and burned. From hour to hour she sent out for new editions. The panic itself was now eclipsed by the interest of John Storm's disappearance. His followers scouted the idea that he had fled from London. Nevertheless, he had fallen. As a pretender to the gift of prophecy his career was at an end, and his crazy system of mystical divinity was the laughing-stock of London.
“It does not surprise us that this second Moses, this mock Messiah, has broken down. Such men always do, and must collapse, but that the public should ever have taken seriously a movement which——” and then a grotesque list of John's followers—one pawnbroker, one waiter, one “knocker-up,” two or three apprentices, etc.
As she read all this, Glory was at the same time glowing with shame, trembling with fear, and burning with indignation. She dined with Rosa alone, and they tried to talk of other matters. The effort was useless. At last Rosa said:
“I have to follow this thing up for the paper, dear, and I'm going to-night to see if they hold the usual service in his church.”
“May I go with you?”
“If you wish to, but it will be useless—he won't be there.”
“Why not?”
“The Prime Minister left London last night—I can't help thinking there is something in that.”
“He will be there, Rosa. He's not the man to run away. I know him,” said Glory proudly.
The church was crowded, and it was with difficulty they found seats. John's enemies were present in force—all the owners of vested interests who had seen their livelihood threatened by the man who declared war on vice and its upholders. There was a dangerous atmosphere before the service began, and, notwithstanding her brave faith in him, Glory found herself praying that John Storm might not come. As the organ played and the choir and clergy entered the excitement was intense, and some of the congregation got on to their seats in their eagerness to see if the Father was there. He was not there. The black cassock and biretta in which he had lately preached were nowhere to be seen, and a murmur of disappointment passed over friends and enemies alike.
Then came a disgraceful spectacle. A man with a bloated face and a bandage about his forehead rose in his place and cried, “No popery, boys!” Straightaway the service, which was being conducted by two of the clerical brothers from the Brotherhood, was interrupted by hissing, whistling, shouting, yelling, and whooping indescribable. Songs were roared out during the lessons, and cushions, cassocks, and prayer-books were flung at the altar and its furniture. The terrified choir boys fled downstairs to their own quarters, and the clergy were driven out of the church.
John's own people stole away in terror and shame, but Glory leaped to her feet as if to fling herself on the cowardly rabble. Her voice was lost in the tumult, and Rosa drew her out into the street.
“Is there no law in the land to prevent brawling like this?” she cried, but the police paid no heed to her.
Then the congregation, which had broken up, came rushing out of the church and round to the door leading to the chambers beneath it.
“They've found him,” thought Glory, pressing her hand over her heart. But no, it was another matter. Immediately afterward there rose over the babel of human voices the deep music of the bloodhound in full cry. The crowd shrieked with fear and delight, then surged and parted, and the dog came running through with its stern up, its head down, its forehead wrinkled, and the long drapery of its ears and flews hanging in folds about its face. In a moment it was gone, its mellow note was dying away in the neighbouring streets, and a gang of ruffians were racing after it. “That'll find the feller if he's in London!” somebody shouted; it was the man with the bandaged forehead—and there were yells of fiendish laughter.
Glory's head was going round, and she was holding on to Rosa's arm with a convulsive grasp.
“The cowards!” she cried. “To use that poor creature's devotion to its master for their own inhuman ends—it's cowardly, it's brutal, it's——Oh, oh, oh!”
“Come, dear,” said Rosa, and she dragged Glory away.
They went back through Broad Sanctuary. Neither spoke, but both were thinking: “He has gone to the monastery. He intends to stay there until the storm is over.” At Westminster Bridge they parted. “I have somewhere to go,” said Rosa, turning down to the Underground. “She is going to Bishopsgate Street,” thought Glory, and they separated with constraint.
Returning to Clement's Inn, Glory found a letter from Drake:
“Dear Glory: How can I apologize to you for nay detestable behaviour of last night? The memory of what passed has taken all the joy out of the success upon which everybody is congratulating me. I have tried to persuade myself that you would make allowances for the day and the circumstances and my natural excitement. But your life has been so blameless that it fills me with anguish and horror to think how I exposed you to misrepresentation by allowing you to go to that place, and by behaving to you as I did when you were there. Thank God, things went no farther, and some blessed power prevented me from carrying out my threat to follow you. Believe me, you shall see no more of men like Lord Robert Ure and women like his associates. I despise them from my heart, and wonder how I can have tolerated them so long. Do let me beg the favour of a line consenting to allow me to call and ask your forgiveness. Yours most humbly,
“F. H. N. Drake.”
Glory slept badly that night, and as soon as Liza was stirring she rang for the newspaper.
“Didn't ye 'ear the dorg, mum?” said Liza.
“What dog?”
“The Farver's dorg. It was scratching at the front dawer afore I was up this morning. 'It's the milk,' sez I. But the minute I opened the dawer up it came ter the drawerin' room and went snuffling rahnd everywhere.”
“Where is it now?”
“Gorn, mum.”
“Did anybody else see it? No? You say no? You're sure? Then say nothing about it, Liza—nothing whatever—that's a good girl.”
The newspaper was full of the mysterious disappearance. Not a trace of the Father had yet been found. The idea had been started that he had gone into seclusion at the Anglican monastery with which he was associated, but on inquiry at Bishopsgate Street it was found that nothing had been seen of him there. Since yesterday the whole of London had been scoured by the police, but not one fact had been brought to light to make clearer the mystery of his going away. With the most noticeable face and habit in London he had evaded scrutiny and gone into a retirement which baffled discovery. No master of the stage art could have devised a more sensational disappearance. He had vanished as though whirled to heaven in a cloud, and that was literally what the more fanatical of his followers believed to have been his fate. Among these persons there were wild-eyed hangers-on telling of a flight upward on a fiery chariot, as well as a predicted disappearance and reappearance after three days. Such were the stories being gulped down by the thousands who still clung with an indefinable fascination to the memory of the charlatan. Meantime the soldier Wilkes had died of his injuries, and the coroner's inquiry was to be opened that day.
“Unfeeling brutes! The bloodhound is an angel of mercy compared to them,” thought Glory, but the worst sting was in the thought that John had fled out of fear and was now in hiding somewhere.
Toward noon the newsboys were rushing through the Inn, crying their papers against all regulations, and at the same moment Rosa came in to say that John Storm had surrendered.
“I knew it!” cried Glory; “I knew he would!”
Then Rosa told her of Brother Andrew's attempt to personate his master, and with what pitiful circumstances it had ended.
“Only a lay brother, you say, Rosa?”
“Yes, a poor half-witted soul apparently—must have been, to imagine that a subterfuge like that would succeed in London.”
Glory's eyes were gleaming. “Rosa,” she said, “I would rather have done what he did than play the greatest part in the world.”
She wished to be present at the trial, and proposed to Rosa that she should go with her.
“But dare you, my child? Considering your old friendship, dare you see him——”
“Dare I?” said Glory. “Dare I stand in the dock by his side!”
But when she got to Bow Street and saw the crowds in the court, the line of distinguished persons of both sexes allowed to sit on the bench, the army of reporters and newspaper artists, and all the mass of smiling and eager faces, without ruth or pity, gathered together as for a show, her heart sickened and she crept out of the place before the prisoner was brought into the dock.
Walking to and fro in the corridor, she waited the result of the trial. It was not a long one. The charge was that of causing people unlawfully to assemble to the danger of the public peace. There was no defence. A man with a bandaged forehead was the first of the witnesses. He was a publican, who lived in Brown's Square and had been a friend of the soldier Wilkes. The injury to his forehead was the result of a blow from a stick given by the prisoner's lay brother on the night of the Derby, when, with the help of the deceased, he had attempted to liberate the bloodhound. He had much to say of the Father's sermons, his speeches, his predictions, his slanders, and his disloyalty. Other witnesses were Pincher and Hawkins. They were in a state of abject fear at the fate hanging over their own heads, and tried to save their own skins by laying the blame of their own conduct upon the Father. The last witness was Brother Andrew, and he broke down utterly. Within an hour Rosa came out to say that John Storm had been committed for trial. Bail was not asked for, and the prisoner, who had not uttered a word from first to last, had been taken back to the cells.
Glory hurried home and shut herself in her room. The newsboys in the street were shouting, “Father Storm in the dock!” and filling the air with their cries. She covered her ears with her hands, and made noises in her throat that she might not hear.
John Storm's career was at an end. It was all her fault. If she had yielded to his desire to leave London, or if she had joined him there, how different everything must have been! But she had broken in upon his life and wrecked it. She had sinned against him who had given her everything that one human soul can give another.
Liza came up with, red eyes, bringing the evening papers and a letter. The papers contained long reports of the trial and short editorials reproving the public for its interest in such a poor impostor. Some of them contained sketches of the prisoner and of the distinguished persons recognised in court. “The stage was represented by——,” and then a caricature of herself.
The letter was from Aunt Rachel:
“My Dear, My Best-Beloved Glory: I know how much your kindheartwill be lowered by the painful tidings I have to write to you. Lord Storm died on Monday and was buried to-day. To the last he declared he would never consent to make peace with John, and he has left nothing to him but his title, so that our dear friend is now a nobleman without an estate. Everybody about the old lord at the end was unanimous in favour of his son, but he would not listen to them, and the scene at the deathbed was shocking. It seems that with his dying breath and many bursts of laughter he read aloud his will, which ordered that his effects should be sold and the proceeds given to some society for the protection of the Established Church. And then he told old Chaise that as soon as he was gone a coffin was to be got and he was to be screwed down at once, 'for,' said he, 'my son would not come to see meliving, and he sha'n't stand grinning at medead.' The funeral was at Kirkpatrick this morning, andfewcame to see the last of one who had left none to mourn him; but just as the remains were being deposited in the dark vault a carriage drove up and an elderly gentleman got out. No one knew him, and he stood and looked down with his impassive face while the service was being read, and then, without speaking to any one, he got back into the carriage and drove away. Theminutehe was gone I told Anna he was somebody of consequence; and then everybody said it must be Lord Storm's brother and no less a person than the Prime Minister of England. It seems that the sale is to come off immediately, so that Knockaloe will be a waste, as if sown with salt; and, so far as this island is concerned, all trace of the Storms, father and son, will be gone for good. I ever knew it must end thus! But I will more particularly tell you everything when we meet again, which I hope may besoon. Meantime I need not say how much I am, my dear child, your ever fond—nay, more than fond—devotedauntie.
“Rachel.”
“Yes,” said Rosa, across the dinner table, “the sudden fall of a man who has filled a large space in the public eye is always pitiful. It is like the fall of a great tree in the forest. One never realized how big it was until it was down.”
“It's awful! awful!” said Glory.
“Whether one liked the man or not, such a downfall seems hard to reconcile with the idea of a beneficent Providence.”
“Hard? Impossible, you mean!”
“Glory!”
“Oh, I'm only a pagan, and always have been; but I can't believe in a God that does nothing—I won't, I won't!”
“Still, we can't see the end yet. After the cross the resurrection, as the Church folks say; and who knows but out of all this——”
“What's to become of his church?”
“Oh, there'll be people enough to see to that, and if the dear Archdeacon—but he's busy with Mrs. Macrae, bless him! She has gone to wreck at last, and is living hidden away in a farmhouse somewhere, that she may drink herself to death without detection and interruption. But the Archdeacon and Lord Robert have found her out, and there they are hovering round like two vultures, waiting for the end.”
“And his orphanage?”
“Ah, that's another pair of shoes altogether, dear. Being an institution that asks for an income instead of giving one, there'll be nobody too keen to take it over.”
“O God! O God! What a world it is!” cried Glory.
After dinner she went off to Westminster in search of the orphanage. It stood on a corner of the church square. The door was closed, and the windows of the ground floor were shuttered. With difficulty she obtained admission and access to the person in charge. This was an elderly lady in a black silk dress and with snow-white hair.
“I'm no the matron, miss,” she said. “The matron's gone—fled awa' like a' the lave o' the grand Sisters, thinking sure the mob would mak' this house their next point of attack.”
“Then I know whomyouare—you're Mrs. Callender,” said Glory.
“Jane Callender I am, young leddy. And who may ye be yersel'?”
“I'm a friend of John's, and I want to know if there's anything——”
“You're no the lassie hersel', are ye? You are, though; I see fine you are! Come, kiss me—again, lassie! Oh, dear! oh, dear! And to think we must be meeting same as this! For a' the world it's like clasping hands ower the puir laddie's grave!”
They cried in each other's arms, and then both felt better.
“And the children,” said Glory, “who's looking after them if the matron and Sisters are gone?”
“Just me and the puir bairns theirsel's, and the wee maid of all wark that opened the door til ye. But come your ways and look at them.”
The dormitory was in an upper story. Mrs. Gallender had opened the door softly, and Glory stepped into a large dark room in which fifty children lay asleep. Their breathing was all that could be heard, and it seemed to fill the air as with the rustle of a gentle breeze. But it was hard to look upon them and to think of their only earthly father in his cell. With full hearts and dry throats the two women returned to a room below.
By this time the square, which before had only shown people standing in doorways and lounging at street corners, was crowded with a noisy rabble. They were shouting out indecent jokes about “monks,” “his reverend lordship,” and “doctors of diwinity”; and a small gang of them had got a rope which they were trying to throw as a lasso round a figure of the Virgin in a niche over the porch. The figure came down at length amid shrieks of delight, and when the police charged the mob they flung stones which broke the church windows.
Again Glory felt an impulse to throw herself on the cowardly rabble, but she only crouched at the window by the side of Mrs. Callender, and looked down at the sea of faces below with their evil eyes and cruel mouths.
“Oh, what a thing it is to be a woman!” she moaned.
“Aye, lassie, aye, there's mair than one of us has felt that,” said Mrs. Callender.
Glory did not speak again as long as they knelt by the window, holding each other's hands, but the tears that had sprung to her eyes at the thought of her helplessness dried up of themselves, and in their place came the light of a great resolution. She knew that her hour had struck at last—that this was the beginning of the end.
The theatres were emptying and carriages were rolling away from them as she drove home by way of the Strand. She saw her name on omnibuses and her picture on boardings, and felt a sharp pang. But she was in a state of feverish excitement and the pain was gone in a moment.
Another letter from Drake was waiting for her at the Inn:
“I feel, my dear Glory, that you are entirely justified in your silence, but to show you how deep is my regret, I am about to put it in my power to atone, as far as I can, for the conduct which has quite properly troubled and hurt you. You will put me under an eternal obligation to you if you will consent to become my wife. We should be friends as well as lovers, Glory, and in an age distinguished for brilliant and beautiful women, it would be the crown of my honour that my wife was above all a woman of genius. Nothing should disturb the development of your gifts, and if any social claims conflicted with them, they, and not you, would suffer. For the rest I can bring you nothing, dear, but—thanks to the good father who was born before me—such advantages as belong to wealth. But so far as these go there is no pleasure you need deny yourself, and if your sympathies are set on any good work for humanity there is no opportunity you may not command. With this I can only offer you the love and devotion of my whole heart and soul, which now wait in fear and pain for your reply.”
Glory read this letter with a certain quivering of the eyelids, but she put it away without a qualm. Nevertheless, the letter was hard to reply to, and she made many attempts without satisfying herself in the end. There was a note of falsehood in all of them, and she felt troubled and ashamed:
“When I remember how good you have been to me from the first, I could cry to think of the answer I must give you. But I can't help it—oh, I can't, I can't! Don't think me ungrateful, and don't suppose I am angry or in any way hurt or offended, but to do what you desire is impossible—quite, quite impossible. Oh, if you only knew what it is to deny myself the future you offer me, to turn my back on the gladness with which life has come to me, to strip all these roses from my hair, you would believe it must be a far, far higher call than to worldly rank and greatness that I am listening to at last. And it is. A woman may trifle with her heart, while the one she loves is well and happy or great and prosperous, but when he is down and the cruel world is trampling on him, there can be no paltering with it any longer—-Yes, I must go tohimif I go to anybody. Besides, you can do without me and he can not. You have all the world, and he has nothing but me. If you were a woman you would understand all this, but you are loyal and brave and true, and when I look at your letter and remember how often you have spoken up for a fallen man my heart quivers and my eyes grow dim, and I know what it means to be an English gentleman.”
After writing this letter she went up to her bedroom and busied herself about for an hour, making up parcels of her clothing and jewellery, and labelling them with envelopes bearing names. The plainer costumes she addressed to Aunt Anna, a fur-lined coat to Aunt Rachel, an opera cloak to Rosa, and a quantity of underclothing to Liza. All her jewels, and nearly all the silver trinkets from the dressing-table, were made up in a parcel by themselves and addressed back to the giver—Sir Francis Drake.
The clock of St. Clement's Danes was chiming midnight when this was done, and she stood a moment and asked herself, “Is there anything else?” Then there was a slippered foot on the stair, and somebody knocked.
“It's only me, miss, and can I do anythink for ye?”
Glory opened the door and found Liza there, half dressed and looking as if she had been crying.
“Nothing, Liza, nothing, thank you! But why aren't you in bed?”
“I can't sleep a blessed wink to-night somehow, miss,” said Liza. And then, looking into the room, “But are ye goin' away somewhere. Miss Gloria?”
“Yes, perhaps.”
“Thort ye was—I could hear ye downstairs.”
“Not far, though—just a little journey—go back to bed now. Good-night.”
“Good-night, miss,” and Liza went down with lingering footsteps.
Half an hour or so afterward Glory heard Rosa come in from the office and pass up to her bedroom on the floor above. “Dear, unselfish soul!” she thought, and then she sat down to write another letter:
“Darling Rosa: I am going to leave you, but there is no help for it—I must. Don't you remember I used to say if I should ever find a man who was willing to sacrifice all the world for me I would leave everything and follow him? I have found him, dear, and he has not only sacrificed all the world for my sake, but trampled on Heaven itself. I can't go to him now—would to Heaven I could!—but neither can I go on living this present life any longer. So I am turning my back on it all, exactly as I said I would—the world, so sweet and so cruel; art, so beautiful and so difficult, and even 'the clapping of hands in a theatre.' You will say I am a donkey, and so I may be, but it must be a descendant of Balaam's old friend, who knew the way she ought to go.
“Forgive me that I am going without saying good-bye. It is enough to have to resist the battering of one's own doubts without encountering your dear solicitations. And forgive me that I am not telling you where I am going and what is to become of me. You will be questioned and examined, and I feel as much frightened of being overtaken by my old existence as the poor simpleton who took it into his head that he was a grain of barley, and as often as he saw a cock or a hen he ran for his life. Thank you, dearest, for allowing me to share your sweet rooms with you, for the bright hours we have spent in them, and all the merry jaunts we have had together. There will be fewer creature comforts where I am going to, and my feet will not be so quick to do evil, which will at least be a saving of shoe-leather.
“Good-bye, old girl—loyal, unselfish, devoted friend! God will reward you yet, and a good man who has been chasing a Will-o'-the-wisp will open his eyes to see that all the time the star of the morning has been by his side. Tomorrow, when I leave the house, I know I shall want to run up and kiss you as you lie asleep, but I mustn't do that—the little druggeted stairs to your room would be like the road to another but not a better place, which is also paved with good intentions. What a scatter-brain I am! My heart is breaking, too, with all this severing of my poor little riven cords. Your foolish old chummie (the last of her),
“Glory.”
Next morning, almost as soon as it was light, she rose and drew a little tin box from under the bed. It was the box that had brought all her belongings to London when she first came from her island home. Out of this box she took a simple gray costume—the costume she had bought for outdoor wear when a nurse at the hospital. Putting it on, she looked at herself in the glass. The plain gray figure, so unlike what she had been the night before, sent a little stab to her heart, and she sighed.
“But this is Glory, after all,” she thought. “This is the granddaughter of my grandfather, the daughter of my father, and not the visionary woman who has been masquerading in London so long.” But the conceit did not comfort her very much, and scalding tear-drops began to fall.
Tying up some other clothing into a little bundle, she opened the door and listened. There was no noise in the house, and she crept downstairs with a light tread. At the drawing-room she paused and took one last look round at the place where she had spent so many exciting hours, and lived through such various phases of life. While she stood on the threshold there was a sound of heavy breathing. It came from the pug, which lay coiled up on the sofa, asleep. Reproaching herself with having forgotten the little thing, she took it up in her arms and hushed it when it awoke and began to whine. Then she crept down to the front door, opened it softly, passed out, and closed it after her. There was a click of the lock in the silent gardens, and then no sound anywhere but the chirrup of the sparrows in the eaves.
The sun was beginning to climb over the cool and quiet streets as she went along, and some cabmen at the stand looked over at the woman in nurse's dress, with a little bundle in one hand and the dog under the other arm. “Been to a death, p'r'aps. Some uv these nurses, they've tender 'earts, bless 'em, and when I was in the 'awspital——” But she turned her head and hurried on, and the voice was lost in the empty air.
As she dipped into the slums of Westminster the sun gleamed on her wet face, and a group of noisy, happy girls, going to their work in the jam factories of Soho, came toward her laughing.
The girls looked at the Sister as she passed; their tongues stopped, and there was a hush.