The Christian Part 76

"Yes sir--certainly, Father. Four-wheel-er!"

"Where do you live, Aggie?" said Glory; but the girl, now sobbing drunk, was too far gone to follow her.

"She lives in Brown's Square, sir," said the woman who had spoken before, and when the cab came up she was asked to get in with the other three.

It was a tenement house, fronting to one facade of St. Jude's, and Aggie's room was on the second story. She was helpless, and John carried her up the stairs. The place was in hideous disorder, with clothing lying about on chairs, underclothing scattered on the floor, the fire out, many cigarette ends in the fender, a candle stuck in a beer bottle, and a bunch of withered roses on the table.

As John laid the girl on the bed she muttered, "Lemme alone!" and when he asked what was to happen to her when she grew old if she behaved like this when young, she mumbled: "Don't want to be old. Who's goin' to like me then, d'ye think?"

Half an hour afterward Glory and John were pa.s.sing through the gates into Clement's Inn, with its moonlight and silence, its odour of moistened gra.s.s, its glimpse of the stars, and the red and white blinds of its windows lit up round about. John was still talking rapturously.

He was now picturing the part which Glory was to play in the life they were to live together. She was to help and protect their younger sisters, the child-women, the girls in peril, to enlist their loyalty and filial tenderness for the hour of temptation.

"Won't it be glorious? To live the life, the real life of warfare with the world's wickedness and woe! Won't it be magnificent? You'll do it too! You'll go down into those slums and sloughs which I've shown you to-night--they are the cradle of shame and sin, Glory, and this wicked London rocks it!--you'll go down into them like a ministering angel to raise the fallen and heal the wounded! You'll live in them, revel in them, rejoice in them, they'll be your battlefield. Isn't that better, far better, a thousand times better, than _playing_ at life, and all its fas.h.i.+ons and follies and frivolities?"

Glory struggled to acquiesce, and from time to time in a trembling voice she said "Yes," and "Oh, yes," until they came to the door of the Garden House, and then a strange thing happened. Somebody was singing in the drawing-room to the music of the piano. It was Drake. The window was open and his voice floated over the moonlit gardens;

Du liebes Kind, komm' geh mit mir!

Gar schone Spiele spiel' ich mit dir.

Suddenly it seemed to Glory that two women sprang into life in her--one who loved John Storm and wished to live and work beside him, the other who loved the world and felt that she could never give it up. And these two women were fighting for her heart, which should have it and hold it and possess it forever.

She looked up at John, and he was smiling triumphantly, "Are you happy?"

she asked.

"Happy! I know a hundred men who are a hundred times as rich as I, but not one who is a hundredth part as happy!"

"Darling!" she whispered, holding back her tears. Then looking away from him she said, "And do you really think I'm good enough for a life of such devotion and self-sacrifice?"

"Good enough!" he cried, and for a moment his merry laughter drowned the singing overhead.

"But will the world think so?"

"a.s.suredly. But who cares what the world thinks?"

"We do, dear--we must!"

And then, while the song went on, she began to depreciate herself in a low voice and with a creeping sense of hypocrisy--to talk of her former life in London as a danger, of the tobacco-shop, the foreign clubs, the music hall, and all the mire and slime with which she had been besmirched. "Everything is known now, dear. Have you never thought of this? It is your duty to think of it."

But he only laughed again with a joyous voice. "What's the odds?" he said. "The world is made up for the most part of low, selfish, sensual beings, incapable of belief in n.o.ble aims. Every innovator in such a world exposes himself to the risk of being slandered or ridiculed, or even shut up in a lunatic asylum. But who wouldn't rather be St. Theresa in her cell than Catharine of Russia on her throne? And in your case, what does it come to anyway? Only that you've gone through the fiery furnace and come out unscathed. All the better--you'll be a living witness, a proof that it is possible to pa.s.s through this wicked Babylon unharmed and untouched."

"Yes, if I were a man--but with a woman it is so different! It is an honour to a man to have conquered the world, but a disgrace to a woman to have fought with it. Yes, believe me, I know what I'm saying. That's the cruel tragedy in a woman's life, do what you will to hide it. And then you are so much in the eye of the world; and besides your own position there is your family's, your uncle's. Think what it would be if the world pointed the finger of scorn at your--at your mission--at your high and n.o.ble aims--and all on account of me! You would cease to love me-and I--I----"

"Listen!" He had been shuffling restlessly on the pavement before her. "Here I stand! Here are you! Let the waves of public opinion dash themselves against us--we stand or fall together!" "Oh, oh, oh!"

She was crying on his breast, but with what mixed and conflicting feelings! Joy, pain, delight, dread, hope, disappointment. She had tried to dishonour herself in his eyes, and it would have broken her heart if she had succeeded. But she had failed and he had triumphed, and that was harder still to bear.

From overhead they heard the last lines of the song:

Erreicht den Hof mit Muh und Noth In seinen Armen das Kind war todt.

"Good-night," she whispered, and fled into the house. The lights in the dining-room were lowered, but she found a telegram that was waiting on the mantelpiece. It was from Sefton, the manager: "Author arrived in London today. Hopes to be at rehearsal Monday. Please be there certain."

The world was seizing her again, the imaginary Gloria was dragging her back with visions of splendour and success. But she crept upstairs and went by the drawing-room on tip-toe. "Not to-night," she thought. "My face is not fit to be seen to-night."

There was a dying fire in her bedroom, and her evening gown had been laid out on a chair in front of it. She put the gown away in a drawer, and out of a box which she drew from beneath the bed she took a far different costume. It was the nurse's outdoor cloak, which she had bought for use at the hospital. She held it a moment by the tips of her fingers and looked at it, and then put it back with a sigh.

"Gloria! is that you?" Rosa called up the stairs; and Drake's cheery voice cried, "Won't our nightingale come down and give us a stave before I go?"

"Too late! Just going to bed. Good-night," she answered. Then she lit a candle and sat down to write a letter.

"It's no use, dear John, I can not! It would be like putting bad money into the offertory to put me into that holy work. Not that I don't admire it, and love it, and wors.h.i.+p it. It is the greatest work in the world, and last week I thought I could count everything else as dross, only remembering that I loved you and that nothing else mattered. But now I know that this was a vain and fleeting sentiment, and that the sights and scenes of your work repel me on a nearer view, just as the hospital repelled me in the early mornings when the wards were being cleaned and the wounds dressed, and before the flowers were laid about.

"Oh, forgive me, forgive me! But if I am fit to join your life at all it can not be in London. That 'old serpent called the devil and Satan'

would be certain to torment me here. I could not live within sight and sound of London and go on with the life you live. London would drag me back. I feel as if it were an earlier lover, and I must fly away from it. Is that possible? Can we go elsewhere? It is a monstrous demand, I know. Say you can not agree to it. Say so at once--it will serve me right."

The stout watchman of the New Inn was calling midnight when Glory stole out to post her letter. It fell into the letter-box with a thud, and she crept back like a guilty thing.

XVI.

Next morning Mrs. Callender heard John Storm singing to himself before he left his bedroom, and she was standing at the bottom of the stairs when he came down three steps at a time.

"Bless me, laddie," she said, "to see your face s.h.i.+ning a body would say that somebody had left ye a legacy or bought ye a benefice instead of taking your church frae ye!"

"Why, yes, and better than both, and that's just what I was going to tell you."

"You must be in a hurry to do it, too, coming downstairs like a cataract."

"You came down like a cataract yourself once on a time, auntie; I'll lay my life on that."

"Aye, did I, and not sae lang since neither. And fools and prudes cried 'Oh!' and called me a tomboy. But, hoots; I was nought but a body born a wee before her time. All the la.s.ses are tomboys now, bless them, the bright heart-some things!"

"Auntie," said John softly, seating himself at the breakfast table, "what d'ye think?"

She eyed him knowingly. "Nay, I'm ower thrang working to be bothered thinking. Out with it, laddie."

He looked wise. "Don't you remember saying--that work like mine wanted a woman's hand in it?"

Her old eyes blinked. "Maybe I did, but what of it?"

"Well, I've taken your advice, and now a woman's hand is coming into it to guide it and direct it."

"It must be the right hand, though, mind that."

"It _will_ be the right hand, auntie."

"Weel, that's grand," with another twinkle. "I thought it might be the _left_, ye see, and ye might be putting a wedding-ring on it!" And then she burst into a peal of laughter.