“Letter for you, nurse,” said the porter as she entered the hospital. It was from John Storm.
“Dear Glory: I have at length decided to enter the Brotherhood at Bishopsgate Street, and I am to go into the monastery this evening. It is not as a visitor that I am going this time, but as a postulant or novice and in the hope of becoming worthy in due course to take the vows of lifelong consecration. Therefore I am writing to you probably for the last time, and parting from you perhaps forever.
“Since we came up to London together I have suffered many shocks and disappointments, and I seem to have been torn in ribbons. My cherished dreams have proved to be delusions; the palaces I had built up for myself have turned out to be pasteboard, gilt, and rubbish; I have been robbed of all my jewels, or they have shown themselves to be shingle stones. In this condition of shame and disillusionment I am now resolved to escape at the same time from the world and from myself, for I am tired of both alike, and already I feel as if a great weight had been lifted off me.
“But I wish to speak of you. You must have thought me cantankerous, and so I have been sometimes, but always by conviction and on principle. I could not countenance the fashionable morality that is corrupting the manhood of the laity, or endure the toleration that is making the clergy thoroughly wicked; I could not without a pang see you cater to the world's appetites or be drawn into its gaieties and frivolities; and it was agony to me to fear that a girl of your pure if passionate nature might perhaps fall a victim to a gamester in life's follies—an actor indulging a pastime—a mere cheat.
“And what you tell me of your friend's altered circumstances does not relieve me of such anxieties. The man who has deceived a girl once is likely to deceive her again. Short of marriage itself, such connections should be cut off entirely, whatever the price. When they are maintained in relations of liberty the victim is sure to be further victimized, and her last state is always worse than the first.
“However, I do not wish to blame anybody, least of all you, who have done everything for the best, and especially now when I am parting from you forever. You have never realized how much you have been to me, and I doubt if I knew it myself until to-day. You know how I was brought up—with a solitary old man—God be with him!—who tried to be good to me for the sake of his ambitions, and to love me for the sake of his revenge. I never knew my mother, I never had a sister, and I can never have a wife. You were all three to me and yourself besides. There were no women in our household, and you stood for woman in my life. I have never told you this before, but now I tell it as a dying man whispers his secret with his parting breath.
“I have written my letters of farewell—one to my father, asking his forgiveness if I have done him any wrong; one to my uncle, with my love and thanks; and one to your good old grandfather, giving up my solemn and sacred trust of you. My conduct will of course be condemned as weak and foolish from many points of view, but by my departure some difficulties will be removed, and for the rest I have come to see that everything is done by the spirit and nothing by the flesh, and that by prayer and fasting I can help and protect you more than by counsel and advice. Thus everything is for the best.
“The rule under which the Brothers live in community forbids them to write and receive letters without special permission, or even to think too constantly of the world outside; and now that I am on the eve of that new life, memories of the old one keep crowding on me as on a drowning man. But they are all of one period—the days when we were at Peel in your sweet little island, before the vain and cruel world came in between us, when you were a simple, merry girl, and I was little more than a happy boy, and we went plunging and laughing through your bright blue sea together.
“But earth's joys grow very dim and its glories are fading. That also is for the best. I have my Koh-i-noor—my desire to depart and surrender my life to God. John Storm.”
“Anything wrong, nurse? Feeling ill, ain't ye? Only dizzy a bit? Unpleasant news from home, perhaps?”