Читать книгу The Christian - Sir Hall Caine - Страница 18

Table of Contents

When Glory learned that all nurses eligible to attend the ball were to wear hospital uniform, being on day duty she decided to go to it. But then came John Storm's protest against the company of Polly Love, and she felt half inclined to give it up. As often as she remembered his remonstrance she was disturbed, and once or twice when alone she shed tears of anger and vexation.

Meantime Polly was full of arrangements, and Glory found herself day by day carried along in the stream of preparation. When the night came the girls dressed in the same cubicle. Polly was prattling like a parrot, but Glory was silent and almost sad.

By help of the curling tongs and a candle Polly did up her dark hair into little knowing curls that went in and out on her temples and played hide-and-seek around the pretty shells of her pink-and-white ears. Glory was slashing the comb through her golden-red hair by way of preliminary ploughing, when Polly cried: “Stop! Don't touch it any more, for goodness' sake! It's perfect! Look at yourself now.”

Glory stood off from the looking glass and looked. “Am I really so nice?” she thought; and then she remembered John Storm again, and had half a mind to tear down her glorious curls and go straight away to bed.

She went to the ball instead, and, being there, she forgot all about her misgivings. The light, the colour, the brilliance, the perfume transported her to an enchanted world which she had never entered before. She could not control her delight in it. Everything surprised her, everything delighted her, everything amused her—she was the very soul of girlish joy. The dark-brown spot on her eye shone out with a coquettish light never seen in it until now, and the warble in her voice was like the music of a happy bird. Her high spirits were infectious—her lighthearted gaiety communicated itself to everybody. The men who might not dance with her were smiling at the mere sight of the sunshine in her face, and it was even whispered about that the President of the College of Surgeons, who opened the ball, had said that her proper place was not there—a girl like that young Irish nurse would do honour to a higher assembly.

In that enchanted world of music and light and bright and happy faces Glory lost all sense of time; but two hours had passed when Polly Love, whose eyes had turned again and again to the door, tugged at her sleeve and whispered: “They've come at last! There they are—there—directly opposite to us. Keep your next dance, dear. They'll come across presently.”

Glory looked where Polly had directed, and, seeing again the face she had seen in the window of the Foreign Office, something remote and elusive once more stirred in her memory. But it was gone in a moment, and she was back in that world of wonders, when a voice which she knew and yet did not know, like a voice that called to her as she was awakening out of a sleep, said:

“Glory, don't you remember me? Have you forgotten me, Glory?”

It was her friend of the catechism class—her companion of the adventure in the boat. Their hands met in a long hand-clasp with the gallop of feeling that is too swift for thought.

“Ah, I thought you would recognise me! How delightful!” said Drake.

“And you knew me again?” said Glory.

“Instantly—at first sight almost.”

“Really! It's strange, though. Such a long, long time—ten years at least! I must have changed since then.”

“You have,” said Drake; “you've changed very much.”

“Indeed now! Am I really so much changed for all? I've grown older, of course.”

“Oh, terribly older,” said Drake.

“How wrong of me! But you have changed a good deal, too. You were only a boy in jackets then.”

“And you were only a girl in short frocks.”

They both laughed, and then Drake said, “I'm so glad we've changed together!”

“Are you?” said Glory.

“Why, yes,” said Drake; “for if you had changed and I hadn't——”

“But what nonsense we're talking!” said Glory; and they both laughed again.

Then they told each other what had happened in that infinite cycle of time which had spun round since they parted. Glory had not much to narrate; her life had been empty. She had been in the Isle of Man all along, had come to London only recently, and was now a probationer-nurse at Martha's Vineyard. Drake had gone to Harrow and thence to Oxford, and, being a man of artistic leanings, had wished to take up music, but his father had seen no career in it; so he had submitted—he had entered the subterranean catacombs of public life, and was secretary to one of the Ministers. All this he talked of lightly, as became a young man of the world to whom great things were of small account.

“Glory,” said Polly, at her elbow, “the waltz is going to begin.”

The band was preluding. Drake claimed the dance, and Glory was astonished to find that she had it free (she had kept it expressly).

When the waltz was over he gave her his arm and led her into the circular corridor to talk and to cool. His manners were perfect, and his voice, so soft and yet so manly, increased the charm. In passing out of the hot dancing room she threw her handkerchief over her head, and, with the hand that was at liberty, held its ends under her chin. She wished him to look at her and see what change this had made; so she said, quite innocently:

“And now let me look at you again, sir!”

He recognised the dark-brown spot on her eye, and he could feel her arm through her thin print dress.

“You've told me a good deal,” he said, “but you haven't said a syllable about the most important thing of all.”

“And pray what is that?” said she.

“How many times have you fallen in love since I saw you last?”

“Good gracious, what a question!” said Glory.

His audacity was delightful. There was something so gracious and yet so masterful about him.

“Do you remember the day you carried me off—eloped with me, you know?” said Drake.

“I? How charming of me! But when was that, I wonder?” said Glory.

“Never mind; say, do you remember?”

“Well, if I do? What a pair of little geese we must have been in those days!”

“I'm not so sure of that—now,'” said he.

“You didn't seem very keen about me then, as far as I can remember,” said she.

“Didn't I?” said he. “What a silly young fool I must have been!”

They laughed again. She could not keep her arm still, and he could almost feel its dimpled elbow.

“And do you remember the gentleman who rescued us?” she said.

“You mean the tall, dark young man who kept hugging and kissing you in the yacht?”

“Did he?”

“Do you forget that kind of thing, then?”

“It was very sweet of him. But he's in the Church now, and the chaplain of our hospital.”

“What a funny little romantic world it is, to be sure!”

“Yes; it's like poetry, isn't it?” she answered.

Lord Robert came up to introduce Drake to Polly (who was not looking her sweetest), and he claimed Glory for the next dance.

“So you knew my friend Drake before?” said Lord Robert.

“I knew him when he was a boy,” said Glory.

And then he began to sing his friend's praises—how he had taken a brilliant degree at Oxford, and was now private secretary to the Home Secretary, and would go into public life before long; how he could paint and act, and might have made a reputation as a musician; how he went into the best houses, and was a first-rate official; how, in short, he had the promised land before him, and was just on the eve of entering it.

“Then I suppose you know he is rich—enormously rich?” said Lord Robert.

“Is he?” said Glory, and something great and grand seemed to shimmer a long way off.

“Enormously,” said Sir Robert; “and yet a man of the most democratic opinions.”

“Really?” said Glory.

“Yes,” said Lord Robert; “and all the way down in the hansom he has been trying to show me how impossible it is for him to marry a lady.”

“Now why did you tell me that I wonder?” said Glory, and Lord Robert began to fidget with his eye-glass.

Drake returned with Polly. He proposed that they should take the air in the quadrangle, and they went off for that purpose, the girls arm-in-arm some paces ahead.

“There's a dash of Satan himself in that red-headed girl,” said Lord Robert. “She understands a man before he understands himself.”

“She's as natural as Nature,” said Drake. “And what lips—what a mouth!”

“Irish, isn't she? Oh, Manx! What's Manx, I wonder?”

The night was very warm and close, and there was hardly more air in the courtyard. The sound of the band came to them there, and Glory, who had danced with nearly everybody within, must needs dance by herself without, because the music was more sweet and subdued out there, and dancing in the darkness was like a dream.

“Come and sit down on the seat, Glory,” said Polly fretfully; “you are getting on my nerves, dear.”

“Glory,” said Drake, “how do the Londoners strike you?”

“Much like other mortals,” said Glory; “no better, no worse—only funnier.”

The men laughed at that description, and Glory proceeded to give imitations of London manners—the high handshake, the “Ha-ha” of the mumps, the mouthing of the canon, and the mincing of Mr. Golightly.

Drake bellowed with delight; Lord Robert drawled out a long owlish laugh; Polly Love said spitefully, “You might give us your friend, the new curate, next, dearest,” and then Glory went down like a shot.

“Really,” began Drake, “it's not hospital nursing, you know——”

But there were low murmurings of thunder and some large splashes of rain, and they returned to the ballroom. The doctors and the matrons were gone by this time; only the nurses and the students remained, and the fun was becoming furious. One young student was pulling down a girl's hair, and another was waltzing with his partner carried bodily in his arms. Somebody lowered the lights, and they danced in a shadow-land; somebody began to sing, and they all sang in chorus; then somebody began to fling about paper bags full of tiny white wafers, and the bags burst in the air like shells, and their contents fell like stars from a falling rocket, and everybody was covered as with flakes of snow.

Meantime the storm had broken, and above the clash and clang of the instruments of the band and the rhythmic shuffle of the feet of the dancers and the clear, joyous notes of their happy singing, there was the roar of the thunder that rolled over London, and the rattle of the rain on the glass dome overhead.

Glory was in ecstasies; it was like a mist on Peel Bay at night with the moon shining through it and the waves dancing to a northwest breeze. It was like a black and stormy sea outside Contrary, with the gale coming down from the mountains. And yet it was a world of wonder and enchantment and beauty, and bright and happy faces.

It was morning when the ball broke up, and then the rain had abated, though the thunder was still rumbling. The men were to see the girls back to the hospital, and Glory and Drake sat in a hansom-cab together.

“So you always forget that kind of thing, do you?” he said.

“What kind of thing?” she asked.

“Never mind; you know!”

She had put up the hood of her outdoor cape, but he could still see the gleam of her golden hair.

“Give me that rose,” he said; “the white one that you put in your hair.”

“It's nothing,” she answered.

“Then give it to me. I'll keep it forever and ever.”

She put up her hand to her head.

“Ah! how sweet of you! And what a lovely little hand! But no; let me take it for myself.”

He reached one arm around her shoulder, put his hand under her chin, tipped up her face, and kissed her on the lips.

“Darling!” he whispered.

Then in a moment she awoke from her world of wonder and enchantment, and the intoxication of the evening left her. She did not speak; her head dropped; she felt her cheeks burn red, and she hid her face in her hands. There was a momentary sense of dishonour, almost of outrage. Drake treated her lightly, and she was herself to blame.

“Forgive me, Glory!” he was saying, in a voice tremulous and intense. “It shall never happen again—never—so help me God!”

The day was dawning, and the last raindrops were splashing on the wet and empty pavement. The great city lay asleep, and the distant thunder was rolling away from it.