“But this is like hitting a cripple with his crutch, John being gone and
past all defending himself, and when I think of it in the streets I have
to run to keep myself from doing something silly, and then people think
I'm chasing an omnibus, when I'm really only chasing my tears. I can't
tell you much about the Brotherhood. It looks like a cross between a
palace and a penitentiary, and it appears that ritualism has gone one
better than High-Churchmanship, and is trying to introduce the monastic
system, which, to an ordinary woman of the world, seems well enough for
the man in the moon, though the man in the moon might have a different
way of looking at things. They say the brothers are all celibates and
live in cells, but I think I've seen a look in John Storm's eyes that
warns me that he wasn't intended for 'the lek o' that' exactly. To
tell you the truth, I half blame myself for what has happened, and I
am ashamed when I remember how jauntily I took matters all the time our
poor John was fighting with beasts at Ephesus. But I am vexed with him
too; and if only he had waited patiently before taking such a serious
step in order to hear _my_ arguments---- But no matter. A jackdaw isn't
to be called a religious bird because it keeps a-cawing on the steeple,
and John Storm won't make himself into a monk by shutting himself up in
a cell. Good-night.”
IV.
The house to which Glory had fled out of the fog was a little dingy
tobacconist's shop opening on a narrow alley that runs from Holborn into
Lincoln's-Inn Fields. It was kept by the baby farmer whom she had met at
the house of Polly Love, and the memory of the address thrust upon her
there had been her only resource on that day of crushing disappointment
and that night of peril. Mrs. Jupe's husband, a waiter at a West End
club, was a simple and helpless creature, very fond of his wife,
much deceived by her, and kept in ignorance of the darker side of her
business operations. Their daughter, familiarly called “Booboo,” a
silent child with cunning eyes and pasty cheeks, was being brought up to
help in the shop and to dodge the inspector of the school board.
On coming downstairs next morning to the close and dingy parlour at the
back, Glory had looked about her as one who had expected something she
did not see, whereupon Mrs. Jupe, who was at breakfast with her husband,
threw up her little twinkling eyes and said:
“Now I know what she's a-lookin' for; it's the byeby.”
“Where is it?” said Glory.
“Gorn, my dear.”
“Surely you don't mean----”
“No, not dead, but I 'ad to put it out, pore thing!”
“Ye see, miss,” said Mr. Jupe with his mouth full, “my missus couldn't
nurse the byeby and 'tend to the biziniss as well, so as reason was----”
“It brikes my 'eart to think it; but it made such a n'ise, pore
darling!”
“Does the mother know?” said Glory.
“That wasn't necessary, my dear. It's gorn to a pusson I can trust to
tyke keer of it, and I'm trooly thenkful----”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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