Chapter 33

“You mean” (she was leaning on the other end, and speaking falteringly), “you mean that I ought to give it all up. But it's too late for that now. It was too late when I came to know. Besides, it would do no good; you would be in the same position still, and as for me--well, somebody else would have the theatre, so where's the use?”

“I was thinking of the future, Glory, not the past. People who deceive us once are capable of doing so again.”

“True--that's true--only--only----”

She was breaking down, and he turned his eyes away from her, saying, “Well, it's all over now, and there's no help for it.”

“No, there's no help for it.”

He tried to think what he had come to say, but do what he would he could not remember. The moment he looked at her the thread of his thoughts was lost, and the fragrance of her presence, so sweet, so close, made him feel as if he wanted to touch her. There was an awkward silence, and then he fidgeted with his hat and moved.

“Are you going so soon?”

“I'm busy, and----”

“Yes, you must be busy now.”

“And then why--why should we prolong a painful interview, Glory?”

She shot up a look under her eyebrows. His eyes had a harassed expression, but there was a gleam in them that set her heart beating.

“Is it so painful? Is it?”

“Glory, I meant to tell you I could not come again.”

“No! You're not so busy as all that, are you? Surely” (the Manx again, only she seemed to be breathless now)--“surely you're not so ter'ble busy but you can just put a sight on a girl now and again for all?”

He made a gesture with his hand. “It disturbs, it distracts----”

“Oh, is that all? Then,” with a forced laugh, “I'll come to see you instead. Yes, I will, though.”

“No, you mustn't do that, Glory. It would only torment----”

“Torment! Gough bless me! Why torment?” and a fugitive flame shot up at him.

“Because”--he stammered, and she could see that his lips quivered; then calmly, very calmly, pronouncing the words slowly, and in a voice as cold as ice--“because I love you!”

“You!”

“Didn't you know that?” His voice was guttural. “Haven't you known it all along? What's the use of pretending? You've dragged it out of me. Was that only to show your power over me?”

“Oh!”

She had heard what her heart wanted to hear, and not for worlds would she have missed hearing it, yet she was afraid, and trembling all over.

“We two are of different natures, Glory, that's the trouble between us--now, and always has been. We have nothing in common, absolutely nothing. You have chosen your path in life, and it is not my path. I have chosen mine, and it is not yours. Your friends are not my friends. We are two different beings altogether, and yet--and yet I love you! And that's why I can not come again.”

It was sweet, but it was terrible. So different from what she had dreamed of: “I love you!--you are my soul!--I can not live without you!” Yet he was right. She had slain his love before it was born to her--it was born dead. In an unsteady voice, which had suddenly become husky, she said:

“No doubt you are right. I must leave you to judge. Perhaps you have thought it all out.”

“Don't suppose it will be easy for me, Glory. I've suffered a good deal, and I dare say I shall suffer more yet. If so, I'll bear it. But for the sake of my work----”

“Ah!--But of course I can't expect--Naturally you love your work also----”

“I _do_ love my work also, and therefore it's no use trifling. 'If thine eye offend--'”

She was stung. “Well, since there's no help for it, I suppose we must shake hands and part.”

Not until then--not until he had pronounced his doom and she had accepted it did he realize how beautiful she seemed to him. He felt as if something in his throat wanted to cry out.

“It isn't what I expected, Glory--what I dreamed of for years.”

“But it's best--it seems best.”

“I tried to make a place for you, too, but you wouldn't have it--you let it go; you preferred this other lot in life.”

She remembered Josephs, and Sefton, and the newspaper, and the part, and she covered her face with her hands.

“How can I go on, Glory, to the peril of my--It's dangerous, even dangerous.”

“Yes, you are a clergyman and I am an actress. You must think of that. People are so ignorant, so cruel, and I dare say they are talking already.”

“Do you think I should care for that, Glory?” Her hands came down from her face. “Do you think I should care one jot if all the miserable scandal-mongering world thought----”

“You'll think the best of me, then?”

“I'll think of both of us as we used to be, my child, before the world came between us, before you----”

She was fighting against an impulse to fling herself into his arms, but she only said in a soft voice: “You are quite right, quite justified. I have chosen my lot in life, and must make the best of it.”

“Well----” He was holding out his hand.

But nevertheless she put her hand behind her, thinking: “No; if I shake hands with him it will be the end of everything.”

“Good-bye!” and with an expression of utter despair he left her.

She did not cry, and when Rosa came down immediately afterward she was smiling and her eyes were very bright.

“Was that your friend Mr. Storm? Yes? You must beware of him, my dear. He would stop your career and think he was doing God's service.”

“There's no danger of that, Rosa. He only came to say he would come no more,” and then something flashed in her eyes and died away, and then flashed again.

“Yes,” thought Rosa, “there's an extraordinary attraction about her that makes all other women seem tame.” And then Rosa remembered somebody else, and sighed.

* * * * *

John Storm went back to Soho by way of Clare Market, and when people saluted him in the streets with “Good-morning, Father,” he did not answer because he did not see them. On going to church that night he came upon a group of Charlie's cronies betting six to one against his getting off, and a girl in gay clothes was waiting to speak to him. It was Aggie. She had come to plead for Charlie.

“It's the drink, sir. 'E's a good boy when 'e's not drinking. But I ask pardon for 'im; and if you would only not prosecute----”

John was ashamed of himself at sight of the girl's fidelity to her unworthy lover.

“And you, my child--what about you?”

“Oh, I'm all right. What's broken can't be mended.”

And meanwhile the church bells were ringing and the cabs were running to the theatres.

XIV.

The rehearsals began early in the morning and usually lasted until late in the afternoon. Glory found them wearisome, depressing, and often humiliating. The body of the theatre was below the level of the street, and in the daytime was little better than a vast vault. If she entered by the front she stumbled against seats and saw the figures of men and women silhouetted in the distance, and heard the echo of cavernous voices. If by the back, she came upon the prompter's table set midway across the stage, with a twin gas-bracket shooting up behind it like a geyser, and an open space of some twenty feet by twenty in front whereon the imaginary passions were to disport themselves at play.

Glory found real ones among them, and they were sometimes in hideous earnest. Jealousy, envy, uncharitableness, and all the rancour of life where the struggle for it is bitterest, attempts to take advantage of her inexperience, to rob her of the best positions on the stage, to cut out her lines which “scored”--these, with the weary waits, the half darkness, the chill atmosphere, the void in front, with its seats in linen covers, suggesting an audience of silent ghosts, and then the sense of the bright, busy, bustling, rattling, real world above, sent her home day after day with a headache, a heartache, and tears bubbling out of her eyes.

And when she had conquered these conditions, or settled down to them, and had made such progress with her part as to throw away her scrip, the old horror of the woman she was to make herself into, came back as a new terror. The visionary Gloria was very proud and vain and selfish, and trampled everything under foot that she might possess the world and the things of the world.

Meantime the real Gloria had a far different part to play. Every morning, with a terrible reality at her heart, she glanced over the newspapers for news of John Storm. She had not far to look. A sort of grotesque romance had gathered about him, as of a modern Don Quixote tilting at windmills. His name was the point of a pun; there were cartoons, caricatures, and all other forms of the joke that is not a joke because it is an insult.

Sometimes she took stolen glances at his work. On Sunday morning she walked through Soho, past the people sitting on their doorsteps reading the sporting intelligence in the Sunday papers, with their larks in cages hung on nails, overhead, until she came to the church, and heard the singing inside, and saw chalked up on the walls the legend, “God bless the Farver!”

“Strange charge against a clergyman!” It was a low-class paper, and the charge was a badge of honour. A young ruffian (it was Charles Wilkes) had been brought up on remand on a charge of assaulting Father Storm, and being sentenced to a week's imprisonment, notwithstanding the Father's appeal and offer of bail, he had accused the clergyman of relations with his sweetheart (it was Agatha Jones).

Glory's anger at the world's treatment of John Storm deepened to a great love of the misunderstood and downtrodden man. She saw an announcement of his last service, and determined to go to it. The church was crowded, chiefly by the poor, and the air was heavy with the smell of oranges and beer. It was a week-day evening, and when the choir came in, followed by John Storm in his black cassock, Glory could not help a thrill of physical joy at being near him.

The text was, “Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outside, but are within full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness!” The first half of the, sermon was a denunciation of the morality of men. We made clean the outside of the platter, but the so-called purity of England was a smug sham built upon rottenness and sin! There were men among us, damned sensualists, left untouched by the idleness of the public conscience, who did not even know where their children were to be found. Let them go down into the gutters of life and look for their own faces, and--God forgive them!--their mothers' faces, among the outcast and the criminal. The second half was a defence of woman. The sins of the world against women were the most crying wrongs of the time. Had they ever reflected on the heroism of women, on their self-denying, unrewarded labour? Oh, why was woman held so cheap as in this immoral London of to-day? There had been scarcely a breach of the law of Nature by women, and not one that men were not chiefly to blame for. Men tempted them by love of dress, of ease, of money, and of fame, to forget their proper vocation; but every true woman came right in the end, and preferred to the false and fictitious labour for worldly glory, a mother's silent and unseen devotion, counting it no virtue at all. “Yes, women, mothers, girls, in your hands lies the salvation of England. May you live in this prospect, and may God and his ever-blessed Mother be your reward all through this weary life and in glory everlasting!”

There was a procession with banners, cross, stars, green and blue fleur-de-lis, but Glory saw none of it. She was kneeling with her head down and heart choked with emotion. The next she knew the service was over, the congregation was gone; only one old woman in widow's weeds was left, jingling a bunch of keys.

“Has the Father gone?”

“No, ma'am; he is still in the sacristy.”

“Show me to it.”

At the next moment, with fluttering throat and a look of mingled love and awe, she was standing eye to eye with John Storm in the little bare chamber off the church.

“Glory, why do you come here?”

“I can't help it.”

“But we said good-bye and parted.”

“You did. I didn't. It was not so easy----”

“Easy? I told you it wouldn't be easy, my child, and it hasn't been. I said I should suffer, and I have suffered. But I've borne it--you see I've borne it. Don't ask me at what cost.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” and she covered her face.

“Yes, the devil tortured me with love first. I was seeing you and hearing you everywhere and in everything, Glory. But I got over that, and then he tortured me with remorse. I had left you to the mercy of the world. It was my duty to watch over you. I did it, too.”

She glanced up quickly.

“Ah, you never knew that, but no matter! It's all over now, and I'm a different man entirely. But why do you come and torment me again? It's nothing to you, nothing at all. You can shake it off in a moment. That's your nature, Glory; you can't help it. But have you no pity? You find me here, trying to help the helpless--the brave girls who have the virtue to be poor, and the strength to be weak, and the courage to be friendless. Why can't you leave me alone? What am I to you? Nothing at all! You care nothing for me--nothing whatever.”

She glanced up again, and the look of love in her eyes was stronger now than the look of awe. He saw it and could not help knowing how strongly it worked upon his feelings.

“Go back to your own world, unhappy girl! You love it--you must; you have sacrificed the best impulses of your heart to it!”

She was smiling now. It was the old radiant smile, but with a gleam of triumph in it that he had never seen before. It worked like madness upon him, and he tried to insult her again.

“Go back to your own company, to the people who _play_ at real life, and build toy houses, and give themselves away body and soul for the clapping of hands in a theatre! Go back to the lies and hypocrisies of society, and the brainless, mashers who adorn it! They dance superbly, and are at home in drawing-rooms, and know all about sporting matters and theatrical affairs! I know none of these things, and I am kicked and cuffed and ridiculed and hounded down as an indecent man or shunned as a moral leper I Why do you come to me?” he cried, hoarse and husky.

But she only stretched out her hands to him and said, “Because I love you!”

“What are you saying?” He was quivering with pain.

“I love you, and have always loved you, and you love me--you know you do--you love me still!”

“Glory!”

“John!”

“For God's sake! Glory!”

With a wild shout of joy he rushed upon her, flung his arms about her, and covered her face and hands with kisses. After a moment he whispered, “Not here, not here!” and she felt too that the room was suffocating them, and they must go out into the open air, the fields, the park.

Somebody was knocking at the door. It was Mrs. Pincher. A man was waiting to speak to the Father. They found him in the lane. It was Jupe, the waiter. His simple face wore a strange expression of joy and fear, as if he wished to smile and dare not.

“My pore missis 'as got off and wants to come 'ome, sir, and I thought as you'd tell me what I oughter do.”

“Take her back and forgive her, my man, that's the Christian course.”

His love was now boundless; his large charity embraced everything, and going off he saluted everybody. “Good-evening, Mrs. Pincher.--Good-night, Lydia.”

“Well, 'e _is_ a Father, too, and no mistake!” somebody was saying behind him as he went away with Glory.

The moon was at the full, and while they were passing through the streets it struggled with the gas from the shop windows as the flame of a fire struggles with the sunshine, but when they passed under the trees it shone out in its white splendour like a bride. The immeasurable vault above was silvered with stars, too, through depth on depth of space, and all the glorious earth and heaven seemed to smile the smile of love. A strong south breeze was blowing, and as it shook the trees of the park, that blessed patch of Nature in the midst-of the toiling city seemed to sing the song of love!

Their hands found each other and they walked along almost in silence, afraid to break the spell of their dream lest they should awake and find it gone. It seemed wonderful to him that they were together, and he could hardly believe it was reality, though the touch of her hand filled him with a strange physical exultation which he had never felt before. He seemed to be walking on the clouds, and she too was swaying by his side as if her blood was dancing. Sometimes she dried her glistening eyes, and once she stopped and swung in front of him and looked long at him and then raised her face to his and kissed him.

“Whether you like it or not your life is bound up with mine for ever and ever!” she whispered.

“It had to be,” he answered. “I know it now. I can no longer deceive myself.”

“And we shall be happy? In spite of all you said we shall be very happy, eh?”

“Yes, that will be quite forgotten, Glory.”

“And forgiven,” she said, and then between a sigh and a blush she asked him to kiss her again.

“My love!”

“My soul!”

The wind swept the hood of her cape about her head and he could smell the fragrance of her hair.

He tried to think what he had done to deserve such happiness, but all the suffering he had gone through seemed as nothing compared to a joy like this. The great clock of Westminster swung its hollow sounds into the air, which went riding by on the wind like the notes of an organ, now full and now as soft as a baby's whisper. They could hear the far-off rumble of the vast city which fringed their blessed island like a mighty sea, and through the pulse of their clasped hands it seemed as if they felt the pulse of the world. An angel had come down and breathed on the face of the waters, and it was God's world, after all.

He took her home, and they parted at the door. “Don't come in to-night,” she whispered. She wished to be alone, that she might think it all out and go over it again, every word, every look. There was a lingering hand-clasp and then she was gone.

He returned through the park and tried to step over the very places where her feet had trod. On reaching Buckingham Gate he turned back and walked round the park, and again round it, and yet again. The bells tolled out the hours, the cabs went westward with ladies in evening wraps going home from theatres, the tide of traffic ebbed farther and farther and died down, but still he walked and the wind sang to him.

“God can not blame us,” he thought. “We were made to love each other.” He uncovered his head to let the wind comb through his hair, and he was happy, happy, happy! Sometimes he shut his eyes, and then it was hard to believe that she was not walking by his side, a fragrant presence in the moonlight, going step by step with him.

When the day was near the wind had gone, the little world of wood was silent, and his footsteps crunched on the gravel. Then a yellow gleam came in the sky to the east, and a chill gust swept up as a scout before the dawn, the trees began to shiver, the surface of the lake to creep, the birds to call, and the world to stretch itself and yawn.

Peace in her chamber, wheresoe'er It be--a holy place.

As he went home by Birdcage Walk the park was still heavy with sleep, and its homeless wanderers had not yet risen from their couches on the seats. A pale mist was lying over London, but the towers of the Abbey stood clear above it, and pigeons were wheeling around them like sea-fowl about rocks in the sea. What a night it had been! A night of dreams, of love, of rapture!

The streets were empty and very quiet--only the slow rattle of the dust-cart and the measured step of policemen changing beats. Long blue vistas and a cemetery silence as of a world under the great hand of the gentle brother of Death, and then the clang of Big Ben striking six.

A letter was waiting for John in the breathless hall. It was from the Bishop of London: “Come and see me at St. James's Square.”

XV.

Suddenly there sprang out to Glory the charm and fascination of the life she was putting away. Trying to be true to her altered relations with John Storm, she did not go to rehearsal the next morning--, but not yet having the courage of her new position, she did not tell Rosa her true reason for staying away. The part was exhausting--it tried her very much; a little break would do no harm. Rosa wrote to apologize for her on the score of health, and thus the first cloud of dissimulation rose up between them.

Two days passed, and then a letter came from the manager: “Trust you are rested and will soon be back. The prompter read your lines, but everything has gone to pieces. Slack, slovenly, spiritless, stupid, nobody acting, and nobody awake, it seems to me. 'All right at night, governor,' and the usual nonsense. Shows how much we want you. But envious people are whispering that you are afraid of the part. The blockheads! If you succeed this time you'll be made for life, my dear. And you _will_ succeed! Yours merrily,” etc.

With this were three letters addressed to the theatre. One of them was from a press-cutting agency asking to be allowed to supply all newspaper articles relating to herself, and inclosing a paragraph as a specimen: “A little bird whispers that 'Gloria,' as 'Gloria,' is to be a startling surprise. Those who have seen her rehearse----But mum's the word--an' we could an' we would,” etc. Another of the letters was from the art editor of an illustrated weekly asking for a sitting to their photographer for a full-page picture; and the third inclosed the card of an interviewer on an evening paper. Only three days ago Glory would have counted all this as nothing, yet now she could not help but feel a thrilling, joyous excitement.

Drake called after the absence of a fortnight. He had come to speak of his last visit. His face was pale and serious, not fresh and radiant as usual, his voice was shaking and his manner nervous. Glory had never seen him exhibit so much emotion, and Rosa looked on in dumb astonishment.

“I was to blame,” he said, “and I have come to say so. It was a cowardly thing to turn the man out of his church, and it was worse than cowardly to use you in doing it. Everything is fair, they say, in----” But he flushed up like a girl and stopped, and then faltered: “Anyhow, I'm sorry--very sorry; and if there is anything I can do----”

Glory tried to answer him, but her heart was beating violently, and she could not speak.

“In fact, I've tried to make amends already. Lord Robert has a living vacant in Westminster, and I've asked him to hand it over to the Bishop, with the request that Father Storm----”

“But will he?”

“I've told him he must. It's the least we can do if we are to have any respect for ourselves. And anyhow, I'm about tired of this anti-Storm uproar. It may be all very well far men like me to object to the man--I deny his authorities, and think him a man out of his century and country--but for these people with initials, who write in the religious papers, to rail at him, these shepherds who live on five thousand a year and pretend to follow One who hadn't a home or a second coat, and whose friends were harlots and sinners, though he was no sinner himself--it's infamous, it's atrocious, it raises my gorge against their dead creeds and paralytic churches. Whatever his faults, he is built on a large plan, he has the Christ idea, and he is a man and a gentleman, and I'm ashamed that I took advantage of him. That's all over now, and there's no help for it; but if I might hope that you will forgive--and forget----”

“Yes,” said Glory in a low voice, and then there was silence, and when she lifted her head Drake was gone and Rosa was wiping her eyes.

“It was all for love of you, Glory. A woman can't hate a man when he does wrong for love of herself.”