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 of his mother and her smothered passion
had left their red stream in John Storm's soul.
When he was a boy he would cry at a beautiful view in Nature, at a
tale of heroism, or at any sentimental ditty sung excruciatingly in the
streets. Seeing a bird's nest that had been robbed of its eggs he burst
into tears; but when he came upon the bleeding, broken shells in the
path, the tears turned to fierce wrath and mad rage, and he snatched
up a gun out of his father's room and went out to take the life of the
offender.
On coming to the Isle of Man he noticed as often as he went to church
that a little curly red-headed girl kept staring at him from the vicar's
pew. He was a man of two-and-twenty, but the child's eyes tormented him.
At any time of day or night he could call up a vision of their
gleaming brightness. Then his father sent him to Canada to watch the
establishment of the Dominion, and when he came back he brought a
Canadian canoe and an American yacht, and certain democratic opinions.
The first time he sailed the yacht in Manx waters he sighted a disabled
boat and rescued two children. One of them was the girl of the vicar's
pew, grown taller and more winsome. She nestled up to him when he lifted
her into the yacht, and, without knowing why, he kept his arms about
her.
After that he called his yacht the _Gloria_, in imitation of her
name, and sometimes took the girl out on the sea. Notwithstanding the
difference of the years between them, they had their happy boy and girl
days together. In her white jersey and stocking-cap she looked every
inch a sailor. When the wind freshened and the boat plunged she stood to
the tiller like a man, and he thought her the sweetest sight ever seen
in a cockpit. And when the wind saddened and the boom came aboard she
was the cheeriest companion in a calm. She sang, and so did he, and
their voices went well together. Her favourite song was “Come, Lasses
and Lads”; his was “John Peel”; and they would sing them off and on for
an hour at a spell. Thus on a summer evening, when the bay was lying
like a tired monster asleep, and every plash of an oar was echoing on
the hills, the people on the land would hear them coming around the
castle rock with their--
“D'ye ken John Peel, with his coat so gay?
D'ye ken John Peel at the break of day?
D'ye ken John P-e-e-l....”
For two years he amused himself with the child, and then realized that
she was a child no longer. The pity of the girl's position took hold
of him. This sunny soul with her sportfulness, her grace of many gifts,
with her eyes that flashed and gleamed like lightning, with her voice
that was like the warble of a bird, this golden-headed gipsy, this
witch, this fairy--what was the life that lay before her? Pity gave
place to a different feeling, and then he was aware of a pain in the
breast when he thought of the girl. As often as her eyes lasted upon
him he felt his face tingle and burn. He began to be conscious of an
imprisoned side to his nature, the passionate side, and he drew back
afraid. This wild power, this tempest, this raging fire within, God
only knew whither it was to lead him. And then he had given a hostage to
fortune, or his father had for him.
From his father's gloomy house at Knockaloe, where the winds were ever
droning in the trees, he looked over to Glenfaba, and it seemed to him
like a little white cloud lit up by the sunshine. His heart was forever
calling to the sunny spot over there, “Glory! Glory!” The pity of it was
that the girl seemed to understand everything, and to know quite well
what kept them apart. She flushed with shame that he should see her
wearing the same clothes constantly, and with head aside and furtive
glances she talked of the days when he would leave the island for good,
and London would take him and make much of him, and he would forget
all about his friends in that dead old place. Such talk cut him to the
quick. Though he had seen a deal of the world, he did not know much
about the conversation of women.
The struggle was brief. He began to wear plainer clothes--an Oxford
tweed coat and a flannel shirt--to talk about fame as an empty word, and
to tell his father that he was superior to all stupid conventions.
His father sent him to Australia. Then the grown-up trouble of his life
began.
He passed through the world now with eyes open for the privations of the
poor, and he saw everything in a new light. Unconsciously he was doing
in another way what his mother had done when she flew to religion
from stifled passion. He had been brought up as a sort of imperialist
democrat, but now he bettered his father's instructions. England did not
want more Parliaments, she wanted more apostles. It was not by giving
votes to a nation, but by strengthening the soul of a nation, that it
became great and free. The man for the hour was not he who revolved
schemes for making himself famous, but he who was ready to renounce
everything, and if he was great was willing to become little, and if he
was rich to become poor. There was room for an apostle--for a thousand
apostles--who, being dead to the world's glory, its money or its calls,
were prepared to do all in Christ's spirit, and to believe that in the
renunciation, which was the “secret” of Jesus, lay the only salvation
remaining for the world.
He tramped through the slums of Melbourne and Sydney, and afterward
through the slums of London, returned to the Isle of Man a Christian
Socialist, and announced to his father his intention of going into the
Church.
The old man did not fume and fly out. He staggered back to his room like
a bullock to its pen after it has had its death-blow in the shambles.
In the midst of his dusty old bureau, with its labelled packets full of
cuttings, he realized that twenty years of his life had been wasted. A
son was a separate being, of a different growth, and a father was only
the seed at the root that must decay and die.
Then he made some show of resistance.
“But with your talents, boy, surely you are not going to throw away your
chances of a great name?”
“I care nothing for a great name, father,” said John. “I shall win a
greater victory than any that Parliament can give me.”
“But, my boy, my dear boy! one must either be the camel or the
camel-driver; and then society----”
“I hate society, and society would hate me. It is only for the sake of
the few godly men that God spares it as he spared Sodom for Lot's sake.”
Having braved this ordeal and nearly broken the heart of his old father,
he turned for his reward to Glory. He found her at her usual haunt on
the headlands.
“I was blushing when you came up, wasn't I?” she said. “Shall I tell you
why?”
“Why?”
“It was this,” she said, with a sweep of her hand across her bosom.
He looked puzzled.
“Don't you understand? This old rag--it's the one I was wearing before
you went away.”
He wanted to tell her how well she looked in it--better than ever now
that her bosom showed under its seamless curves, and her figure had
grown so lithe and shapely. But though she was laughing he saw she was
ashamed of her poverty, and he thought to comfort her.
“I'm to be a poor man myself in future, Glory. I've quarrelled with my
father. I'm going to take Orders.”
Her face fell. “Oh, I didn't think anybody would be poor who could help
it. To be a clergyman is all right for a poor man, perhaps, but I hate
to be poor; it's horrid.”
Then darkness fell upon his eyes and he felt sad and sick. Glory had
disappointed him. She was vain, she was worldly, she was incapable of
the higher things; she would never know what a sacrifice he had made
for her; she would think nothing of him now; but he would go on all the
same, the more earnestly because the devil had drawn a bow at him and
the arrow had gone in up to the feathers.
“With God's help I shall nail my colours to the mast,” he said.
Thus he made up his mind to follow the unrolling of the scroll. He had
the strength called character. The Church had been his beacon before,
but now it was to be his refuge.
He found no difficulty in making the necessary preparations. For a year
he read the Anglican divines--Jeremy Taylor, Hooker, Butler, Waterland,
Pearson, and Pusey--and when the time came for his ordination his uncle,
the Earl of Erin, who was now Prime Minister, obtained him a title to
a curacy under the popular and influential Canon Wealthy of All Saints,
Belgravia. The Bishop of London gave letters dimissory to the Bishop of
Sodor and Man, by whom he was examined and ordained.
On the morning of his departure for London his father, with whom there
had in the meantime been trying scenes, left him this final word of
farewell: “As I understand that you intend to lead the life of poverty,
I presume that you do not need your mother's dowry, and I shall hold
myself at liberty to dispose of it elsewhere, _unless_ you require it
for the use of the young lady who is, I hear, to go up with you.”