Part 61 (2/2)
The house was still and the streets were quiet, not even a cab going along.
”Good-bye! I've realized--a dog! It's a pug, and therefore, like somebody else, it always looks black at me, though I suspect its father married beneath him, for it talks a good deal, and evidently hasn't been brought up in a Brotherhood. Therefore, being a 'female,' I intend to call it Aunt Anna--except when the original is about. Aunt Anna has been hopping up and down the room at my heels for the last hour, evidently thinking that a rational woman would behave better if she went to bed.
Perhaps I shall take a leaf out of your book and 'comb her hair,' when I get her all alone in the train to-morrow, that she may be prepared for the new sphere to which it has pleased Providence to call her.
”Good-bye again! I see the lamps of Euston running after each other, only it's the _other_ way this time. I find there is something that seizes you with a fiercer palpitation than coming _into_ a great and wonderful city, and that is going out of one. Dear old London! After all, it has been very good to me. No one, it seems to me, loves it as much as I do. Only somebody thinks--well, never mind! Goodbye 'for all!'
Glory.”
At seven next morning, on the platform at Euston, Glory was standing with melancholy eyes at the door of a first-cla.s.s compartment watching the people sauntering up and down, talking in groups and hurrying to and fro, when Drake stepped up to her. She did not ask what had brought him--she knew. He looked fresh and handsome, and was faultlessly dressed.
”You are doing quite right, my dear,” he said in a cheerful voice.
”Koenig telegraphed, and I came to see you off. Don't bother about the theatre; leave everything to me. Take a rest after your great excitement, and come back bright and well.”
The locomotive whistled and began to pant, the smoke rose to the roof, the train started, and before Glory knew she was going she was gone.
Then Drake walked to his club and wrote this postscript to a letter to Lord Robert Ure, at the Grand Hotel, Paris: ”The Parson has drawn first blood, and Gloria has gone home!”
VI.
On the Sunday evening after Glory's departure John Storm, with the bloodhound running by his side, made his way to Soho in search of the mother of Brother Andrew. He had come to a corner of a street where the walls of an ugly brick church ran up a narrow court and turned into a still narrower lane at the back. The church had been for some time disused, and its facade was half covered with boardings and plastered with placards: ”Brighton and Back, 3_s_.”; ”_Lloyd's News_”; ”Coals, 1_s_. a cwt.”; and ”Barclay's Sparkling Ales.”
There was a tumult in the court and lane. In the midst of a close-packed ring of excited people, chiefly foreigners, shouting in half the languages of Europe, a tall young c.o.c.kney, with bloated face and eyes aflame with drink, was writhing and wrestling and cursing. Sometimes he escaped from the grasp of the man who held him, and then he flung himself against the closed door of a shop which stood opposite, with the three b.a.l.l.s of the p.a.w.nbroker suspended above it. Somebody within the shop was howling for help. It was a woman's voice, and the louder she screamed the more violent were the man's efforts to beat down the door between them.
As John Storm stood a moment looking on, some one on the street beside him said, ”It's a d---- shyme.” It was a man with a feeble, ineffectual face and the appearance of a waiter. Seeing he had been overheard, the man stammered: ”Beg parding, sir; but they may well say 'when the Devil can't come hisself 'e sends 'is brother Drink.'” Having said this he began to move along, but stopped suddenly on seeing what the clergyman with the dog was doing.
John Storm was pus.h.i.+ng his way through the crowd, and his black figure in that writhing ring of undersized foreigners looked big and commanding. ”What's this?” he was saying in a husky voice that rose clear above the clamour. The shouting and swearing subsided, all save the howling from the inside of the shop, and the tumult settled down in a moment to mutterings and gnas.h.i.+ngs and a broken and irregular silence.
Then somebody said, ”It's nothink, sir.” And somebody else said, ”'Es on'y drunk, and wantin' to pench 'is mother.” Without listening to this explanation John Storm had laid hold of the young man by the collar and was dragging him, struggling and fuming, from the door.
”What's going on?” he demanded. ”Will n.o.body speak?”
Then a poor swaggering imitation of a man came up out of the cellar of a house that stood next to the disused church, and a comely young woman carrying a baby followed close behind him. He had a gin bottle in his hands, and with a wink he said: ”A christenin'--that's what's going on.
'Ave a kepple o' pen'orth of 'ollands, old gel?”
At this sally the crowd recovered its audacity and laughed, and the drunken man began to say that he could ”knock spots out of any bloomin'
parson, en' now bloomin' errer.”
But the young fellow with the gin bottle broke in again. ”What's yer gime, mister? Preach the gawspel? Give us trecks? This is my funeral, down't ye know, and I'd jest like to hear.”
The little foreigners were enjoying the parson-baiting, and the drunken man's courage was rising to fever heat. ”I'll give 'im one-two between the eyes if 'e touches me again.” Then he flung himself on the p.a.w.nshop like a battering ram, the howling inside, which had subsided, burst out afresh, and finally the door was broken down.
Half a minute afterward the crowd was making a wavering dance about the two men. ”Look out, ducky!” the young fellow shouted to John. The warning came too late--John went reeling backward from a blow.
”Now, my lads, who says next?” cried the drunken ruffian. But before the words were out of his mouth there was a growl, a plunge, a snarl, and he was full length on the street with the bloodhound's muzzle at his throat.
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