The Christian. Sir Hall Caine
her lord, her sovereign. She placed him on a dizzy height above her, amid a halo of goodness and grandeur. If he smiled on her she flushed, and if he frowned she fretted and was afraid. Thinking to please him, she tried to dress herself up in all the colours of the rainbow, but he reproved her and bade her return to her jersey. She struggled to comb out her red curls until he told her that the highest ladies in the land would give both ears for them, and then she fondled them in her fingers and admired them in a glass.
He was a serious person, but she could make him laugh until he screamed. Excepting Byron and “Sir Charles Grandison,” out of the vicar's library, the only literature she knew was the Bible, the Catechism, and the Church Service, and she used these in common talk with appalling freedom and audacity. The favourite butt of her mimicry was the parish clerk saying responses when he was sleepy.
The parson: “O Lord, open thou our lips” (no response). “Where are you, Neilus?”
The clerk (awakening suddenly in the desk below): “Here I am, your reverence—and our mouth shall show forth thy praise.”
When John Storm did laugh he laughed beyond all control, and then Glory was entirely happy. But he went away again, his father having sent him to Australia, and all the light of her world went out.
It was of no use bothering with the clock on the back landing, because things were different by this time. She was sixteen, and the only tree she climbed now was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that tore her terribly. John Storm was the son of a lord, and he would be Lord Something himself some day. Glory Quayle was an orphan, and her grandfather was a poor country clergyman. Their poverty was sweet, but there was gall in it, nevertheless. The little forced economies in dress, the frocks that had to be turned, the bonnets that were beauties when they were bought, but had to be worn until the changes of fashion made them frights, and then the mysterious parcels of left-off clothing from goodness knows where—how the independence of the girl's spirit rebelled against such humiliations!
The blood of her mother was beginning to boil over, and the old-maid régime, which had crushed the life out of the Frenchwoman, was suffocating the Manx girl with its formalism. She was always forgetting the meal times regulated by the sun, and she could sleep at any time and keep awake until any hour. It tired her to sit demurely like a young lady, and she had a trick of lying down on the floor. She often laughed in order not to cry, but she would not even smile at a great lady's silly story, and she did not care a jot about the birthdays of the royal family. The old aunts loved her body and soul, but they often said, “Whatever is going to happen to the girl when the grandfather is gone?”
And the grandfather—good man—would have laid down his life to save her a pain in her toe, but he had not a notion of the stuff she was made of. His hobby was the study of the runic crosses with which the Isle of Man abounds, and when she helped him with his rubbings and his casts he was as merry as an old sand-boy. Though they occupied the same house, and her bedroom that faced the harbour was next to his little musty study that looked over the scullery slates, he lived always in the tenth century and she lived somewhere in the twentieth.
The imprisoned linnet was beating at the bars of its cage. Before she was aware of it she wanted to escape from the sleepy old scene, and had begun to be consumed with longing for the great world outside. On summer evenings she would go up Peel Hill and lie on the heather, where she had first seen John Storm, and watch the ships weighing anchor in the bay beyond the old dead castle walls, and wish she were going out with them—out to the sea and the great cities north and south. But existence closed in ever-narrowing circles round her, and she could see no way out. Two years passed, and at eighteen she was fretting that half her life had wasted away. She watched the sun until it sank into the sea, and then she turned back to Glenfaba and the darkened region of the sky.
It was all the fault of their poverty, and their poverty was the fault of the Church. She began to hate the Church; It had made her an orphan; and when she thought of religion as a profession it seemed a selfish thing anyway. If a man was really bent on so lofty an aim (as her own father had been) he could not think of himself; he had to give up life and love and the world, and then these always took advantage of him. But people had to live in the world for all that, and what was the good of burying yourself before you were dead?
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 passengers 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 passengers were on deck, looking like sour buttermilk 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