The Christian | Page 9

fire under ashes,
sometimes it was a good angel, sometimes a devil, making you do
things and say things, and laying your life waste like winter. But I told
him it was just charming, and as for religion, there was nothing under
heaven like the devotion of a handsome and clever man to a handsome
and clever woman, when he gave up all the world for her, and his body
and his soul and everything that was his. I think he saw there was
something in that, for though he said nothing, there came a wonderful
light into his splendid eyes, and I thought if he wasn't going to be a
clergyman--but no matter. So long, dear!"

IV.
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