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The Christian, a novel by Hall Caine |
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Book 1. The Outer World - Chapter 2 |
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_ FIRST BOOK. THE OUTER WORLD CHAPTER II Her father had been the only son of Parson Quayle, and chaplain to the bishop at Bishopscourt. It was there he had met her mother, who was lady's maid to the bishop's wife. The maid was a bright young Frenchwoman, daughter of a French actress, famous in her day, and of an officer under the Empire, who had never been told of her existence. Shortly after their marriage the chaplain was offered a big mission station in Africa, and, being a devotee, he clutched at it without fear of the fevers of the coast. But his young French wife was about to become a mother, and she shrank from the perils of his life abroad, so he took her to his father's house at Peel, and bade her farewell for five years. He lived four, and during that time they exchanged some letters. His final instructions were sent from Southampton: "If it's a boy, call him John (after the Evangelist); and if it's a girl, call her Glory." At the end of the first year she wrote: "I have shortened our darling, and you never saw anything so lovely! Oh, the sweetness of her little bare arms, and her neck, and her little round shoulders! You know she's red--I've really got a red one--a curly red one! Such big beaming eyes, too! And then her mouth, and her chin, and her tiny red toes! I don't know how you can live without seeing her!" Near the end of the fourth year he sent his last answer: "Dear Wife--This separation is bitter; but God has willed it, and we must not forget that the probabilities are that we may pass our lives apart." The next letter was from the English consul on the Gaboon River, announcing the death of the devoted missionary. Parson Quayle's household consisted only of himself and two maiden daughters, but that was too much for the lively young Frenchwoman. While her husband lived, she suffocated under the old-maid _regime_; and when he was gone she made no more fight with destiny, but took some simple ailment, and died suddenly. A bare hillside frowned down on the place where Glory was born; but the sun rose over it, and a beautiful river hugged its sides. A quarter of a mile down the river there was a harbour, and beyond the harbour a bay, with the ruins of an old castle standing out on an islet rock, and then the broad sweep of the Irish Sea-the last in those latitudes to "parley with the setting sun." The vicarage was called Glenfaba, and it was half a mile outside the fishing town of Peel. Glory was a little red-headed witch from the first, with an air of general uncanniness in everything she did and said. Until after she was six there was no believing a word she uttered. Her conversation was bravely indifferent to considerations of truth or falsehood, fear or favour, reward or punishment. The parson used to say, "I'm really afraid the child has no moral conscience--she doesn't seem to know right from wrong." This troubled his religion, but it tickled his humour, and it did not disturb his love. "She's a perfect pagan--God bless her innocent heart!" She had more than a child's genius for make-believe. In her hunger for child company, before the days when she found it for herself, she made believe that various versions of herself lived all over the place, and she would call them out to play. There was Glory in the river, under the pool where the perches swam, and Glory down the well, and Glory up in the hills, and they answered when she spoke to them. All her dolls were kings and queens, and she had a gift for making up in strange and grand disguises. It was almost as if her actress grandmother had bestowed on her from her birth the right to life and luxury and love. She was a born mimic, and could hit off to a hair an eccentricity or an affectation. The frown of Aunt Anna, who was severe, the smile of Aunt Rachel, who was sentimental, and the yawn of Cornelius Kewley, the clerk who was always sleepy, lived again in the roguish, rippling face. She remembered some of her mother's French songs, and seeing a street-singer one day, she established herself in the market-place in that character, with grown people on their knees around her, ready to fall on her and kiss her and call her Phonodoree, the fairy. But she did not forget to go round for the ha'pennies either. At ten she was a tomboy, and marched through the town at the head of an army of boys, playing on a comb between her teeth and flying the vicar's handkerchief at the end of his walking-stick. In these days she climbed trees and robbed orchards (generally her own) and imitated boys' voices, and thought it tyranny that she might not wear trousers. But she wore a sailor's blue stocking-cap, and it brightened existence when, for economy's sake and for the sake of general tidiness, she was allowed to wear a white woollen jersey. Then somebody who had a dinghy that he did not want asked her if she would like to have a boat. Would she like to have paradise, or pastry cakes, or anything that was heavenly! After that she wore a sailor's jacket and a sou'wester when she was on the sea, and tumbled about the water like a duck. At twelve she fell in love--with love. It was a vague passion interwoven with dreams of grandeur. The parson being too poor to send her to the girls' college at Douglas, and his daughters being too proud to send her to the dame's school at Peel, she was taught at home by Aunt Rachel, who read the poetry of Thomas Moore, knew the birthdays of all the royal family, and was otherwise meekly romantic. From this source she gathered much curious sentiment relating to some visionary world where young girls were held aloft in the sunshine of luxury and love and happiness. One day she was lying on her back on the heather of the Peel hill, with her head on her arms, thinking of a story that Aunt Rachel had told her. It was of a mermaid who had only to slip up out of the sea and say to any man, "Come," and he came--he left everything and followed her. Suddenly the cold nose of a pointer rubbed against her forehead, a strong voice cried, "Down, sir!" and a young man of two and twenty, in leggings and a shooting-jacket, strode between her and the cliffs. She knew him by sight. He was John Storm, the son of Lord Storm, who had lately come to live in the mansion house at Knockaloe, a mile up the hill from Glenfaba. For three weeks thereafter she talked of nobody else, and even began to comb her hair. She watched him in church, and told Aunt Rachel she was sure he could see quite well in the dark, for his big eyes seemed to have the light inside of them. After that she became ashamed, and if anybody happened to mention his name in her hearing she flushed up to the forehead and fled out of the room. He never once looked at her, and after a while he went away to Canada. She set the clock on the back landing to Canadian time, so that she might always know what he was doing abroad, and then straightway forgot all about him. Her moods followed each other rapidly, and were all of them overpowering and all sincere, but it was not until a year afterward that she fell in love, in the church vestry, with the pretty boy who stood opposite to her in the catechism class. He was an English boy of her own age, and he was only staying in the island for his holidays. The second time she saw him it was in the grounds at Glenfaba, while his mother was returning a call indoors. She gave him a little tap on the arm and he had to run after her--down a bank and up a tree, where she laughed and said. "Isn't it nice?" and he could see nothing but her big white teeth. His name was Francis Horatio Nelson Drake, and he was full of great accounts of the goings-on in the outer world, where his school was, and where lived the only "men" worth talking about. Of course he spoke of all this familiarly and with a convincing reality which wrapped Glory in the plumage of dreams. He was a wonderful being, altogether, and in due time (about three days) she proposed to him. True, he did not jump at her offer with quite proper alacrity, but when she mentioned that it didn't matter to her in the least whether he wanted her or not, and that plenty would be glad of the chance, he saw things differently, and they agreed to elope. There was no particular reason for this drastic measure, but as Glory had a boat, it seemed the right thing to do. She dressed herself in all her Confirmation finery, and stole out to meet him under the bridge where her boat lay moored. He kept her half an hour waiting, having sisters and other disadvantages, but "once aboard her lugger," he was safe. She was breathless, and he was anxious, and neither thought it necessary to waste any time in kissing. They slipped down the harbour and out into the bay, and then ran up the sail and stood off for Scotland. Being more easy in mind when this was done, they had time to talk of the future. Francis Horatio was for work--he was going to make a name for himself. Glory did not see it quite in that light. A name, yes, and lots of triumphal processions, but she was for travel--there were such lots of things people could see if they didn't waste so much time working. "What a girl you are!" he said derisively; whereupon she bit her lip, for she didn't quite like it. But they were nearly half an hour out before he spoiled himself utterly. He had brought his dog, a she-terrier, and he began to call her by her kennel name and to say what a fine little thing she was, and what a deal of money they would make by her pups. That was too much for Glory. She couldn't think of eloping with a person who used such low expressions. "What a girl you are!" he said again; but she did not mind it in the least. With a sweep of her bare arm she had put the tiller hard aport, intending to tack back to Peel, but the wind had freshened and the sea was rising, and by the swift leap of the boat the boom was snapped, and the helpless sail came napping down upon the mast. Then they tumbled into the trough, and Glory had not strength to pull them out of it, and the boy was of no more use than a tripper. She was in her white muslin dress, and he was nursing his dog, and the night was closing down on them, and they were wobbling about under a pole and a tattered rag. But all at once a great black yacht came heaving up in the darkness, and a grown-up voice cried, "Trust yourself to me, dear." It was John Storm. He had already awakened the young girl in her, and thereafter he awakened the young woman as well. She clung to him like a child that night, and during the four years following she seemed always to be doing the same. He was her big brother, her master, 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 _regime_, 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. _ |
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