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The Christian. Sir Hall Caine
Читать онлайн.Название The Christian
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isbn 4057664588043
Автор произведения Sir Hall Caine
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
“You never knew what an absolute ninny Glory is! I was burning with such impatience to see London that when we came near it I couldn't see anything for water under the brain. Approaching a great and mighty city for the first time must be like going into the presence of majesty. Only Heaven save me from such palpitation the day I become songstress to the Queen!
“Mercy! what a roar and boom—a deep murmur as of ten hundred million million moths humming away on a still evening in autumn! On a nearer view it is more like a Tower-of-Babel concern, with its click and clatter. The explosion of voices, the confused clamour, the dreadful disorder—cars, wagons, omnibuses—it makes you feel religious and rather cold down the back. What a needle in a haystack a poor girl must be here if there is nobody above to keep track of her!
“Tell Aunt Rachel they are wearing another kind of bonnet in London—more pokey in front—and say if I see the Queen I'll be sure to tell her all about it.
“We didn't get to the hospital until nine, so I've not seen much of it yet. The housekeeper gave me tea and told me I might go over the house, as I wouldn't be wanted to begin duty before morning. So for an hour I went from ward to ward like a female Wandering Jew. Such silence! I'm afraid this hospital nursing is going to be a lockjaw business. And now I'm going to bed—well, not homesick, you know, but just 'longing a lil bit for all.' To-morrow morning I'll waken up to new sounds and sights, and when I draw my blind I'll see the streets where the cars are forever running and rattling. Then I'll think of Glenfaba and the birds singing and rejoicing.
“Dispense my love throughout the island. Say that I love everybody just the same now I'm a London lady as when I was a mere provincial girl, and that when I'm a wonderful woman, and have brought the eyes of England upon me, I'll come back and make amends. I can hear what grandfather is saying: 'Gough bless me, what a girl, though!' Glory.
“P.S.—I've not said much about Mr. Storm. He left me at the door of the hospital and went on to the house of his vicar, for that is where he is to lodge, you know. On the way up I expended much beautiful poetry upon him on the subject of love. The old girlies having dozed off, I chanced to ask him if he liked to talk of it, but he said no, it was a profanation. Love was too sacred, it was a kind of religion. Sometimes it came unawares, sometimes it smouldered like fire under ashes, sometimes it was a good angel, sometimes a devil, making you do things and say things, and laying your life waste like winter. But I told him it was just charming, and as for religion, there was nothing under heaven like the devotion of a handsome and clever man to a handsome and clever woman, when he gave up all the world for her, and his body and his soul and everything that was his. I think he saw there was something in that, for though he said nothing, there came a wonderful light into his splendid eyes, and I thought if he wasn't going to be a clergyman—but no matter. So long, dear!”
IV.
John Storm was the son of Lord Storm (a peer in his own right), and nephew of the Prime Minister of England, the Earl of Erin. Two years before John's birth the brothers had quarrelled about a woman. It was John's mother. She had engaged herself to the younger brother, and afterward fallen in love with the elder one. The voice of conscience told her that it was her duty to carry out her engagement, and she did so. Then the voice of conscience took sides with the laws of life and told the lovers that they must renounce each other, and they both did that as well. But the poor girl found it easier to renounce life than love, and after flying to religion as an escape from the conflict between conjugal duty and elemental passion she gave birth to her child and died. She was the daughter of a rich banker, who had come from the soil, and she had been brought up to consider marriage distinct from love. Exchanging wealth for title, she found death in the deal.
Her husband had never stood in any natural affinity to her. On his part, their marriage had been a loveless and selfish union, based on the desire for an heir that he might found a family and cancel the unfair position of a younger son. But the sin he committed against the fundamental law, that marriage shall be founded only in love, brought its swift revenge.
On hearing that the wife was dead, the elder brother came to attend the funeral. The night before that event the husband felt unhappy about the part he had played. He had given no occasion for scandal, but he had never disguised, even from the mother of his son, the motives of his marriage. The poor girl was gone; he had only trained himself for the pursuit of her dowry, and the voice of love had been silent. Troubled by such thoughts, he walked about his room all night long, and somewhere in the first dead gray of dawn he went down to the death chamber that he might look upon her face again. Opening the door, he heard the sound of half-stifled sobs. Some one was leaning over the white face and weeping like a man with a broken heart. It was his brother.
From that time forward Lord Storm considered himself the injured person. He had never cared for his brother, and now he designed to wipe him out. His son would do it. He was the heir to the earldom, for the earl had never married. But a posthumous revenge was too trivial. The earl had gone into politics and was making a name. Lord Storm had missed his own opportunities, though he had got himself called to the Upper House, but his son should be brought up to eclipse everything.
To this end the father devoted his life to the boy's training. All conventional education was wrong in principle. Schools and colleges and the study of the classics were drivelling folly, with next to nothing to do with life. Travel was the great teacher. “You shall travel as far as the sun,” he said. So the boy was taken through Europe and Asia and learned something of many languages. He became his father's daily companion, and nowhere the father went was it thought wrong for the boy to go also. Conventional morality was considered mawkish. The chief aim of home training was to bring children up in total ignorance, if possible, of the most important facts and functions of life. But it was not possible, and hence suppression, dissimulation, lying, and, under the ban of secret sin, one half the world's woe. So the boy was taken to the temples of Greece and India, and even to Western casinos and dancing gardens. Before he was twenty he had seen something of nearly everything the world has in it.
When the time came to think of his career England was in straits about her colonial empire. The vast lands over sea wanted to take care of themselves. It was the moment of the “British North America Act,” and that gave the father his cue for action. While his brother the earl was fiddling the country to the tune of limited self-government for Crown colonies, the father of John Storm conceived the daring idea of breaking up the entire empire, including the United Kingdom, into self-governing states. They were to be the “United States of Great Britain.”
This was to be John Storm's policy, and to work it out Lord Storm set up a house in the Isle of Man where he might always look upon his plan in miniature. There he established a bureau for the gathering of the data that his son would need to use hereafter. Newspapers came to him in his lonely retreat from all quarters of the globe, and he cut out everything relating to his subject. His library was a dusty room lined all around with brown-paper pockets, which were labelled with the names of colonies and counties.
“It will take us two generations to do it, my boy, but we'll alter the history of England.”
At fifty he was iron-gray, and had a head like a big owl.
Meanwhile the object of these grand preparations, the offspring of that loveless union, had a personality all his own. It seemed as if he had been built for a big man every way, and Nature had been arrested in the making of him. When people looked at his head they felt he ought to have been a giant, but he was far from rivalling the children of Anak. When they listened to his conversation they thought he might turn out to be a creature of genius, but perhaps he was only a man of powerful moods. The best strength of body and mind seemed to have gone into his heart. It may be that the sorrowful unrest