The Christian | Page 6

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
régime, 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