The Christian: A Story

by Sir Hall Caine

Feeling anxious about the dog, he drew up the cab for a moment. The faithful creature was running under the driver's seat. Before the cab could start again a line of sandwich men had passed in front of it. Their boards contained a single word. The word was “GLORIA.”

He saw it, yet it barely arrested his consciousness. Somehow it seemed like an echo from the existence he had left behind.

The noises of life were as wine in his veins now. He was burning with impatience to overtake his arrears of knowledge, to see what the world had gone through in his absence. Leaning over the door of the hansom, he read the names of the streets and the signs over the shops, and tried to identify the houses which had been rebuilt and the thoroughfares which had been altered. But the past was the past, and the clock would turn back for no man. These men and women in the streets knew all that had happened. The poorest beggar on the pavement knew more than he did. Nearly a year of his life was gone—in prayer, in penance, in fasting, in visions, in dreams—dropped out, left behind, and lost forever.

Going by the Bank, the cab drew up again to allow a line of omnibuses to pass into Cheapside. Every omnibus had its board for advertisements, and nearly every board contained the word he had seen before—“GLORIA.”

“Only the name of some music-hall singer,” he told himself. But the name had begun to trouble him. It had stirred the fibres of memory, and made him think of the past—of his yacht, of Peel, of his father, and finally of Glory—and again of Glory—and yet again of Glory.

He saw that flags were flying on the Mansion House and on the Bank, and, pushing up the trap of the hansom, he asked if anything unusual was going on.

“Lawd, down't ye know what day it is terday, sir? It's the dear ole laidy's birthday. That's why all the wimming's going abart in their penny carridges. Been through a hillness, sir?”

“Yes, something of that sort.”

“Thort so, sir.”

When the cab started afresh he began to tell himself what he was going to do in the future. He was going to work among the poor and the outcast, the oppressed and the fallen. He was going to search for them and find them in their haunts of sin and misery. Nothing was to be too mean for him. Nothing was to be common or unclean. No matter about his own good name! No matter if he was only one man in a million! The kingdom of heaven was like a grain of mustard seed.