The Christian | Page 4

a boy, call him
John (after the Evangelist); and if it's a girl, call her Glory." At the end
of the first year she wrote: "I have shortened our darling, and you never
saw anything so lovely! Oh, the sweetness of her little bare arms, and

her neck, and her little round shoulders! You know she's red--I've really
got a red one--a curly red one! Such big beaming eyes, too! And then
her mouth, and her chin, and her tiny red toes! I don't know how you
can live without seeing her!" Near the end of the fourth year he sent his
last answer: "Dear Wife--This separation is bitter; but God has willed it,
and we must not forget that the probabilities are that we may pass our
lives apart." The next letter was from the English consul on the Gaboon
River, announcing the death of the devoted missionary.
Parson Quayle's household consisted only of himself and two maiden
daughters, but that was too much for the lively young Frenchwoman.
While her husband lived, she suffocated under the old-maid régime;
and when he was gone she made no more fight with destiny, but took
some simple ailment, and died suddenly.
A bare hillside frowned down on the place where Glory was born; but
the sun rose over it, and a beautiful river hugged its sides. A quarter of
a mile down the river there was a harbour, and beyond the harbour a
bay, with the ruins of an old castle standing out on an islet rock, and
then the broad sweep of the Irish Sea-the last in those latitudes to
"parley with the setting sun." The vicarage was called Glenfaba, and it
was half a mile outside the fishing town of Peel.
Glory was a little red-headed witch from the first, with an air of general
uncanniness in everything she did and said. Until after she was six
there was no believing a word she uttered. Her conversation was
bravely indifferent to considerations of truth or falsehood, fear or
favour, reward or punishment. The parson used to say, "I'm really
afraid the child has no moral conscience--she doesn't seem to know
right from wrong." This troubled his religion, but it tickled his humour,
and it did not disturb his love. "She's a perfect pagan--God bless her
innocent heart!"
She had more than a child's genius for make-believe. In her hunger for
child company, before the days when she found it for herself, she made
believe that various versions of herself lived all over the place, and she
would call them out to play. There was Glory in the river, under the
pool where the perches swam, and Glory down the well, and Glory up

in the hills, and they answered when she spoke to them. All her dolls
were kings and queens, and she had a gift for making up in strange and
grand disguises. It was almost as if her actress grandmother had
bestowed on her from her birth the right to life and luxury and love.
She was a born mimic, and could hit off to a hair an eccentricity or an
affectation. The frown of Aunt Anna, who was severe, the smile of
Aunt Rachel, who was sentimental, and the yawn of Cornelius Kewley,
the clerk who was always sleepy, lived again in the roguish, rippling
face. She remembered some of her mother's French songs, and seeing a
street-singer one day, she established herself in the market-place in that
character, with grown people on their knees around her, ready to fall on
her and kiss her and call her Phonodoree, the fairy. But she did not
forget to go round for the ha'pennies either.
At ten she was a tomboy, and marched through the town at the head of
an army of boys, playing on a comb between her teeth and flying the
vicar's handkerchief at the end of his walking-stick. In these days she
climbed trees and robbed orchards (generally her own) and imitated
boys' voices, and thought it tyranny that she might not wear trousers.
But she wore a sailor's blue stocking-cap, and it brightened existence
when, for economy's sake and for the sake of general tidiness, she was
allowed to wear a white woollen jersey. Then somebody who had a
dinghy that he did not want asked her if she would like to have a boat.
Would she like to have paradise, or pastry cakes, or anything that was
heavenly! After that she wore a sailor's jacket and a sou'wester when
she was on the sea, and tumbled about the water like a duck.
At twelve she fell in love--with love. It was a vague passion interwoven
with dreams of grandeur. The parson being too poor to send her to the
girls' college at Douglas, and