Chapter 41

On the mantelpiece there were many photographs. Most of them were of Glory and some were very beautiful, with their gleaming and glistening eyes and their curling and waving hair. One looked even voluptuous with its parted lips and smiling mouth; but another was different--it was so sweet, so gay, so artless. He thought it must belong to an earlier period, for the dress was such as she used to wear in the days when he knew her first, a simple jersey and a sailor's stocking cap. Ah, those days that were gone, with their innocence and joy! Glory! His bright, his beautiful Glory!

His emotion was depriving him of the free use of his faculties, and he began to ask himself why he was waiting there. At the next instant came the thought of the awful thing he had come to do and it seemed monstrous and impossible. “I'll go away,” he told himself, and he turned his face toward the door.

On a what-not at the door side of the room another photograph stood in a glass stand. His back had been to it, and the soft light of the lamp left a great part of the room in obscurity, but he saw it now, and something bitter that lay hidden at the bottom of his heart rose to his throat. It was a portrait of Drake, and at the sight of it he laughed savagely and sat down.

How long he sat he never knew. To the soul in torment there is no such thing as time; an hour is as much as, eternity and eternity is no more than an hour. His head was buried in his arms on the table and he was a prey to anguish and doubt. At one time he told himself that God did not send men to commit murder; at the next that this was not murder but sacrifice. Then a mocking voice in his ears seemed to say, “But the world will call it murder and the law will punish you.” To that he answered in his heart: “When I leave this house I will deliver myself up. I will go to the nearest police court and say 'Take me, I have done my duty in the eye of God, but committed a crime in the eye of my country.'” And when the voice replied, “That will only lead to your own death also,” he thought, “Death is a gain to those who die for their cause, and my death will be a protest against the degradation of women, a witness against the men who make them the creatures of their pleasure, their playthings, their victims, and their slaves.” Thinking so, he found a strange thrill in the idea that all the world would hear of what he had done. “But I will say a mass for her soul in the morning,” he told himself, and a chill came over him and his heart grew cold as a stone.

Then he lifted his head and listened. The room was quiet, there was not a sound in the gardens of the Inn, and, through a window which was partly open, he could hear the monotonous murmur of the streets outside. A great silence seemed to have fallen on London--a silence more awful than all the noise and confused clamour of the evening. “It must be late,” he thought; “it must be the middle of the night.” Then the thought came to him that perhaps, Glory would not come home that night at all, and in a sudden outburst of pent-up feeling his heart cried, “Thank God! Thank God!”

He had said it aloud and the sound of his voice in the silent room--awakened all his faculties. Suddenly he was aware of other sounds outside. There was a rumble of wheels and the rattle of a hansom. The hansom came nearer and nearer. It stopped in the outside courtyard. There was the noise of a curb-chain as if the horse were shaking its head. The doors of the hansom opened with a creak and banged back on their spring. A voice, a woman's voice, said “Good-night!” and another voice, a man's voice, answered, “Good-night and thank you, miss!” Then the cab wheels turned and went off. All his senses seemed to have gone into his ears, and in the silence of that quiet place he heard everything. He rose to his feet and stood waiting.

After a moment there was the sound of a key in the lock of the door below; the rustle of a woman's dress coming up the stairs, an odour of perfume in the air, an atmosphere of freshness and health, and then the door of the room which had been ajar was swung open and there on the threshold with her languid and tired but graceful movements was she herself, Glory. Then his head turned giddy and he could neither hear nor see.

When Glory saw him standing by the lamp, with his deadly pale face, she stood a moment in speechless astonishment, and passed her hand across her eyes as if to wipe out a vision. After that she clutched at a chair and made a faint cry.

“Oh, is it you?” she said in a voice which she strove to control. “How you frightened me! Whoever would have thought of seeing you here!”

He was trying to answer, but his tongue would not obey him, and his silence alarmed her.

“I suppose Liza let you in--where _is_ Liza?”

“Gone to bed,” he said in a thick voice.

“And Rosa--have you seen Rosa?”

“No.”

“Of course not! How could you? She must be at the office, and won't be back for hours. So you see we are quite alone!”

She did not know why she said that, and, in spite of the voice which she tried to render cheerful, her lip trembled. Then she laughed, though there was nothing to laugh at, and down at the bottom of her heart she was afraid. But she began moving about, trying to make herself easy and pretending not to be alarmed.

“Well, won't you help me off with my cloak? No? Then I must do it for myself I suppose.”

Throwing off her outer things, she walked across the room and sat down on the sofa near to where he stood.

“How tired I am! It's been such a day! Once is enough for that sort of thing, though! Now where do you think I've been?”

“I know where you've been, Glory--I saw you there.”

“You? Really? Then perhaps it _was_ you who----Was it you in the hollow?”

“Yes.”

He had moved to avoid contact with her, but now, standing by the mantelpiece looking into her face, he could not help recognising in the fashionable woman at his feet the features of the girl once so dear to him, the brilliant eyes, the long lashes, the twitching of the eyelids, and the restless movement of the mouth. Then the wave of tenderness came sweeping over him again and he felt as if the ground were slipping beneath his feet.

“Will you say your prayers to-night. Glory?” he said,

“Why not?” she answered, trying to laugh.

“Then why not say them now, my child?”

“But why?”

He had made her tremble all over, but she got up, walked straight across to him, looked intently into his face for a moment, and then said: “What is the matter? Why are you so pale? You are not well, John!”

“No, I'm not well either.” he answered.

“John, John, what does it all mean? What are you thinking of? Why have you come here to-night?”

“To save your soul, my child. It is in great, great peril.”

At first she took this for the common, everyday language of the devotee, but another look into his face banished that interpretation, and her fear rose to terror. Nevertheless she talked lightly, hardly knowing what she said. “Am I, then, so very wicked? Surely Heaven doesn't want me yet, John. Some day I trust--I hope----”

“To-night, to-night--_now!_”

Then her cheeks turned pale and her lips became white and bloodless. She had returned to the sofa, and half rose from it, then sat back, stretching out one hand as if to ward off a blow, but still keeping her eyes riveted on his face. Once she looked round to the door and tried to cry out, but her voice would not answer her.

This speechless fright lasted only a moment. Then she was herself again, and looked fearlessly up at him. She had the full use of her intellect, and her quick instinct went to the root of things. “This is the madness of jealousy,” she thought. “There is only one way to deal with it. If I cry out--if I show that I am afraid--if I irritate him, it will soon, be over.” She told herself in a moment that she must try gentleness, tenderness, reason, affection, love.

Trembling from head to foot, she stepped up to him again, and began softly and sweetly trying to explain herself. “John, dear John, if you see me with certain people and in certain places you must not think from that----”

But he broke in upon her with a torrent of words. “I can't think of it at all, Glory. When I look ahead I see nothing but shame and misery and degradation for you in the future. That man is destroying you body and soul. He is leading you on to the devil and hell and damnation, and I can not stand by and see it done!”

“Believe me, John, you are mistaken, quite mistaken.” But, with a look of sombre fury, he cried, “Can you deny it?”

“I can protect and care for myself, John.”

“With that man's words in your ears, still can you deny it?”

Suddenly she remembered Drake's last whisper as she got into the hansom, and she covered her face with her hands.

“You can't! It is the truth! The man is following you to ruin you, and you know it. You've known it from the first, therefore you deserve all that can ever come to you. Do you know what you are guilty of? You are guilty of soul-suicide. What is the suicide of the body to the suicide of the soul? What is the crime of the poor broken creature who only chooses death and the grave before starvation or shame, compared to the sin of the wretched woman who murders her soul for sake of the lusts and vanities of the world? The law of man may punish, the one, but the vengeance of God is waiting for the other.”

She was crying behind her hands, and, in spite of the fury into which he had lashed himself, a great pity took hold of him. He felt as if everything were slipping away from him, and he was trying to stand on an avalanche. But he told himself that he would not waver, that he would hold to his purpose, that he would stand firm as a rock. Heaving a deep sigh, he walked to and fro across the room.

“O Glory, Glory! Can't you understand what it is to me to be the messenger of God's judgment?”

She gasped for breath, and what had been a vague surmise became a certainty--thinking he was God's avenger, yet with nothing but a poor spasm of jealousy in his heart, he had come with a fearful purpose to perform.

“I did what I could in other ways and it was all in vain. Time after time I tried to save you from these dangers, but you would not listen. I was ready for any change, any sacrifice. Once I would have given up all the world for you, Glory--you know that quite well--friends, kinsmen, country, everything, even my work and my duty, and, but for the grace of God, God himself!”

But his tenderness broke again into a headlong torrent of reproach. “You failed me, didn't you? At the last moment, too--the very last! Not content with the suicide of your own soul, you must attempt to murder the soul of another. Do you know what that is? That is the unpardonable sin! You are crying, aren't you? Why are you crying?” But even while he said this something told him that all he was waiting for was that her beautiful eyes should be raised and their splendid light flash upon him again.

“But that is all over now. It was a blunder, and the breach between us is irreparable. I am better as I am--far, far better. Without friends or kin or country, consecrated for life, cut off from the world, separate, alone!”

She knew that her moment had come, and that she must vanquish this man and turn him from his purpose, whatever it was, by the only weapon a woman could use--his love of her. “I do not deny that you have a right to be angry with me,” she said, “but don't think that I have not given up something too. At the time you speak of, when I chose this life and refused to go with you to the South Seas, I sacrificed a good deal--I sacrificed love. Do you think I didn't realize what that meant? That whatever the pleasure and delight my art might bring me, and the flattery, and the fame, and the applause, there were joys I was never to know--the happiness that every poor woman may feel, though she isn't clever at all, and the world knows nothing about her--the happiness of being a wife and a mother, and of holding her place in life, however humble she is and simple and unknown, and of linking the generations each to each. And, though the world has been so good to me, do you think I have ever ceased to regret that? Do you think I don't remember it sometimes when the house rises at me, or when I am coming home, or perhaps when I awake in the middle of the night? And notwithstanding all this success with which the world has crowned me, do you think I don't hunger sometimes for what success can never buy--the love of a good man who would love me with all his soul and his strength and everything that is his?”

Out of a dry and husky throat John Storm answered: “I would rather die a thousand, thousand deaths than touch a hair of your head, Glory.... But God's will is his will!” he added, quivering and trembling. The compulsion of a great passion was drawing him, but he struggled hard against it. “And then this success--you cling to it nevertheless!” he cried, with a forced laugh.

“Yes, I cling to it,” she said, wiping away the tears that had begun to fall. “I can not give it up, I can not, I can not!”

“Then what is the worth of your repentance?”

“It is not repentance--it is what you said it was--in this room--long ago.... We are of different natures, John--that is the real trouble between us, now and always has been. But whether we like it or not, our lives are wrapped up together for all that. We can't do without each other. God makes men and women like that sometimes.”

There was a piteous smile on his face. “I never doubted your feeling for me, Glory. No, not even when you hurt me most.”

“And if God made us so----”

“I shall never forgive myself, Glory, though Heaven itself forgives me!”

“If God makes us love each other in spite of every barrier that divides us----”

“I shall never know another happy hour in this life. Glory--never!”

“Then why should we struggle? It is our fate and we can not conquer it. You can't give up your life, John, and I can't give up mine; but our hearts are one.”

Her voice sang like music in his ears, and something in his aching heart was saying: “What are the laws we make for ourselves compared to the laws God makes for us?” Suddenly he felt something warm. It was Glory's breath on his hand. A fragrance like incense seemed to envelop him. He gasped as if suffocating, and sat down on the sofa.

“You are wrong, dear, if you think I care for the man you speak of. He has been very good to me and helped me in my career, but he is nothing to me--nothing whatever--But we are such old friends, John? It seems impossible to remember a time when we were not old chums, you and I! Sometimes I dream of those dear old days in the 'lil oilan'! Aw, they were ter'ble--just ter'ble! Do you remember the boat--the _Gloria_--do you remember her?” (He clinched his hands as though to hold on to his purpose, but it was slipping through his fingers like sand.) “What times they were! Coming round the castle of a summer evening when the bay and the sky were like two sheets of silvered glass looking into each other, and you and I singing 'John Peel'” (in a quavering voice she sang a bar or two): “'D'ye ken John Peel with his coat so gay? D'ye ken John Peel'---Do you remember it, John?”

She was sobbing and laughing by turns. It was her old self, and the cruel years seemed to roll back. But still he struggled. “What is the love of the body to the love of the soul?” he told himself.

“You wore flannels then, and I was in a white jersey--like this, see,” and she snatched up from the mantelpiece the photograph he had been looking at. “I got up my first act in imitation of it, and sometimes in the middle of a scene--such a jolly scene, too--my mind goes back to that sweet old time and I burst out crying.”

He pushed the photograph away. “Why do you remind me of those days?” he said. “Is it only to make me realize the change in you?” But even at that moment the wonderful eyes pierced him through and through.

“Am I so much changed, John? Am I? No, no, dear! It is only my hair done differently. See, see!” and with trembling fingers she tore her hair from its knot. It fell in clusters over her shoulders and about her face. He wanted to lay his hand on it, and he turned to her and then turned away, fighting with himself as with an enemy.

“Or is it this old rag of lace that is so unlike my jersey? There--there!” she cried, tearing the lace from her neck, and throwing it on the floor and trampling upon it. “Look at me now, John--look at me? Am I not the same as ever? Why don't you look?”

She was fighting for her life. He started to his feet and came to her with his teeth set and his pupils fixed. “This is only the devil tempting me. Say your prayers, child!”

He grasped her left hand with his right. His grip almost overtaxed her strength and she felt faint. In an explosion of emotion the insane frenzy for destroying had come upon him again. He longed to give his feelings physical expression.

“Say them, say them!” he cried, “God sent me to kill you, Glory!”

A sensation of terror and of triumph came over her at once. She half closed her eyes and threw her other arm around his neck. “No, but to love me!--Kiss me, John!”

Then a cry came from him like that of a man flinging himself over a precipice. He threw his arms about her, and her disordered hair fell over his face.

IX.

“I thought it was God's voice--it was the devil's!”

John Storm was creeping like a thief through the streets of London in the dark hours before the dawn. It was a peaceful night after the thunderstorm of the evening before. A few large stars had come out, a clear moon, was shining, and the air was quiet after the cries, the crackling tumult, and all the fury of human throats. There was only the swift rattling of mail cars running to the Post Office, the heavy clank of country carts crawling to Covent Garden, the measured tread of policemen, and the muddled laughter of drunken men and women by the coffee stands at the street corners. “'Ow's the deluge, myte? Not come off yet? Well, give us a cup of cawfee on the strength of it.”

It seemed as if eyes looked down on him from the dark sky and pierced him through and through. His whole life had been an imposture from the first--his quarrel with his father, his taking Orders, his entering the monastery and his leaving it, his crusade in Soho, his intention of following Father Damien, his predictions at Westminster--all, all had been false, and the expression of a lie! He was a sham, a mockery, a whited sepulchre, and had grossly sinned against the light and against God.

But the spiritual disillusion had come at last, and it had revealed him to himself at an awful depth of self-deception. Thinking in his pride and arrogance he was the divine messenger, the avenger, the man of God, he had set out to shed blood like any wretched criminal, any jealous murderer who was driven along by devilish passion. How the devil had played with him too!--with him, who was dedicated by the most solemn and sacred vows! And he had been as stubble before the wind--as chaff that the storm carrieth away!

With such feelings of poignant anguish he plodded through the echoing streets. Mechanically he made his way back to Westminster. By the time he got there the moon and stars had gone and the chill of daybreak was in the air. He saw and heard nothing, but as he crossed Broad Sanctuary a line of mounted police trotted past him with their swords clanking.

It was not yet daylight when he knocked at the door of his chambers under the church.

“Who's there?” came in a fierce whisper.

“Open the door,” he said in a spiritless voice.

The door was opened, and Brother Andrew, with the affectionate whine of a dog who has been snarling at his master in the dark, said: “Oh, is it you, Father? I thought you were gone. Did you meet them? They've been searching for you everywhere all night long.”

He still spoke in whispers, as if some one had been ill. “I can't light up. They'd be sure to see and perhaps come back. They'll come in the morning in any case. Oh, it's terrible! Worse than ever now! Haven't you heard what has happened? Somebody has been killed!”

John was struggling to listen, but everything seemed to be happening a long way off.

“Well, not killed exactly, but badly hurt, and taken to the hospital.”

It was Charlie Wilkes. He had insulted the name of the Father, and Pincher, the pawnbroker, had knocked him down. His head had struck against the curb, and he had been picked up insensible. Then the police had come and Pincher had been taken off to the police station.

“But it's my mother I'm thinking of,” said Brother Andrew, and he brushed his sleeve across his eyes. “You must get away at once, Father. They'll lay everything on you. What's to be done? Let me think! Let me think! How my head is going round and round! There's a train from Euston to the north at five in the morning, isn't there? You must catch that. Don't speak, Father! Don't say you won't.”

“I will go,” said John with a look of utter dejection.

The change that had come over him since the night before startled the lay brother. “But I suppose you've been out all night. How tired you look! Can I get you anything?”

John did not answer, and the lay brother brought some brown bread and coaxed him to eat a little of it. The day was beginning to dawn.

“Now you must go, Father.”

“And you, my lad?”

“Oh, I can take care of myself.”

“Go back to the Brotherhood; take the dog with you----”

“The dog!” Brother Andrew seemed to be about to say something; but he checked himself, and with a wild look he muttered: “Oh, I know what _I'll_ do. Good-bye!”

“Good-bye!” said John, and then the broken man was back in the streets.

His nervous system had been exhausted by the events of the night, and when he entered the railway station he could scarcely put one foot before another. “Looks as if _he'd_ had enough,” said somebody behind him. He found an empty carriage and took his seat in the corner. A kind of stupor had come over his faculties and he could neither think nor feel.

Three or four young men and boys were sorting and folding newspapers at a counter that stood on trestles before the closed-up bookstall. A placard slipped from the fingers of one of them and fell on to the floor. John saw his own name in monster letters, and he began to ask himself what he was doing. Was he running away? It was cowardly, it was contemptible! And then it was so useless! He might go to the ends of the earth, yet he could not escape the only enemy it was worth while to fly from. That enemy was himself.

Suddenly he remembered that he had not taken his ticket, and he got out of the train. But instead of going to the ticket office he stood aside and tried to think what he ought to do. Then there was confusion and noise, people were hurrying past him, somebody was calling to him, and finally the engine whistled and the smoke rose to the roof. When he came to himself the train was gone and he was standing on the platform alone.

“But what am I to do?” he asked himself.

It was a lovely summer morning and the streets were empty and quiet. Little by little they became populous and noisy, and at length he was walking in a crowd. It was nine o'clock by this time, and he was in the Whitechapel road, going along with a motley troop of Jews, Polish Jews, Germans, German Jews, and all the many tribes of Cockneydom. Two costers behind him were talking and laughing.

“Lor' blesh you, it's jest abart enneff to myke a corpse laugh.”

“Ain't it? An acquyntince uv mine--d'ye know Jow 'Awkins? Him as kep' the frahd fish shop off of Flower and Dean. Yus? Well, he sold his bit uv biziness lahst week for a song, thinkin' the world was acomin' to a end, and this mornin' I meets 'im on the 'Owben Viadeck lookin' as if 'e'd 'ad the smallpox or semthink!”