Her face fell. “Oh, I didn't think anybody would be poor who could help it. To be a clergyman is all right for a poor man, perhaps, but I hate to be poor; it's horrid.”
Then darkness fell upon his eyes and he felt sad and sick. Glory had disappointed him. She was vain, she was worldly, she was incapable of the higher things; she would never know what a sacrifice he had made for her; she would think nothing of him now; but he would go on all the same, the more earnestly because the devil had drawn a bow at him and the arrow had gone in up to the feathers.
“With God's help I shall nail my colours to the mast,” he said.
Thus he made up his mind to follow the unrolling of the scroll. He had the strength called character. The Church had been his beacon before, but now it was to be his refuge.
He found no difficulty in making the necessary preparations. For a year he read the Anglican divines—Jeremy Taylor, Hooker, Butler, Waterland, Pearson, and Pusey—and when the time came for his ordination his uncle, the Earl of Erin, who was now Prime Minister, obtained him a title to a curacy under the popular and influential Canon Wealthy of All Saints, Belgravia. The Bishop of London gave letters dimissory to the Bishop of Sodor and Man, by whom he was examined and ordained.
On the morning of his departure for London his father, with whom there had in the meantime been trying scenes, left him this final word of farewell: “As I understand that you intend to lead the life of poverty, I presume that you do not need your mother's dowry, and I shall hold myself at liberty to dispose of it elsewhere, unless you require it for the use of the young lady who is, I hear, to go up with you.”
V.
“I will be a poor man among poor men,” said John Storm to himself as he drove to his vicar's house in Eaton Place, but he awoke next morning in a bedroom that did not answer to his ideas of a life of poverty. A footman came with hot water and tea, and also a message from the canon overnight saying he would be pleased to see Mr. Storm in the study after breakfast.