A meek, middle-aged woman had appeared at the door. She was dark, and had deep luminous eyes with the moist look to be seen in the eyes of a tired old terrier.
“This is the wife of our organist and choir master. Good day! Kindest greetings to the Prime Minister.... And, by the way, let us say Monday for the beginning of your chaplaincy at the hospital.”
The Earl of Erin, as First Lord of the Treasury, occupied the narrow, unassuming brick house which is the Treasury residence in Downing Street. Although the official head of the Church, with power to appoint its bishops and highest dignitaries, he was secretly a sceptic, if not openly a derider of spiritual things. For this attitude his early love passage had been chiefly accountable. That strife between duty and passion which had driven the woman he loved to religion had driven him in the other direction and left a broad swath of desolation in his soul. He had seen little of his brother since that evil time, and nothing whatever of his brother's son. Then John had written, “I am soon to be bound by the awful tie of the priesthood,” and he had thought it necessary to do something for him. When John was announced he felt a thrill of tender feeling to which he had long been a stranger. He got up and waited. The young man with his mother's face and the eyes of an enthusiast was coming down the long corridor.
John Storm saw his uncle first in the spacious old cabinet room which looks out on the little garden and the Park. He was a gaunt old man with, meagre mustache and hair, and a face like a death's head. He held out his hand and smiled. His hand was cold and his smile was half tearful and half saturnine.
“You are like your mother, John.”
John never knew her.
“When I saw her last you were a child in arms and she was younger than you are now.”
“Where was that, uncle?”
“In her coffin, poor girl.”
The Prime Minister shuffled some papers and said, “Well, is there anything you wish for?”