“You are doing quite right, my dear,” he said in a cheerful voice. “Koenig telegraphed, and I came to see you off. Don't bother about the theatre; leave everything to me. Take a rest after your great excitement, and come back bright and well.”
The locomotive whistled and began to pant, the smoke rose to the roof, the train started, and before Glory knew she was going she was gone.
Then Drake walked to his club and wrote this postscript to a letter to Lord Robert Ure, at the Grand Hotel, Paris: “The Parson has drawn first blood, and Gloria has gone home!”
VI.
On the Sunday evening after Glory's departure John Storm, with the bloodhound running by his side, made his way to Soho in search of the mother of Brother Andrew. He had come to a corner of a street where the walls of an ugly brick church ran up a narrow court and turned into a still narrower lane at the back. The church had been for some time disused, and its facade was half covered with boardings and plastered with placards: “Brighton and Back, 3s.”; “Lloyd's News”; “Coals, 1s. a cwt.”; and “Barclay's Sparkling Ales.”
There was a tumult in the court and lane. In the midst of a close-packed ring of excited people, chiefly foreigners, shouting in half the languages of Europe, a tall young Cockney, with bloated face and eyes aflame with drink, was writhing and wrestling and cursing. Sometimes he escaped from the grasp of the man who held him, and then he flung himself against the closed door of a shop which stood opposite, with the three balls of the pawnbroker suspended above it. Somebody within the shop was howling for help. It was a woman's voice, and the louder she screamed the more violent were the man's efforts to beat down the door between them.
As John Storm stood a moment looking on, some one on the street beside him said, “It's a d—— shyme.” It was a man with a feeble, ineffectual face and the appearance of a waiter. Seeing he had been overheard, the man stammered: “Beg parding, sir; but they may well say 'when the Devil can't come hisself 'e sends 'is brother Drink.'” Having said this he began to move along, but stopped suddenly on seeing what the clergyman with the dog was doing.
John Storm was pushing his way through the crowd, and his black figure in that writhing ring of undersized foreigners looked big and commanding. “What's this?” he was saying in a husky voice that rose clear above the clamour. The shouting and swearing subsided, all save the howling from the inside of the shop, and the tumult settled down in a moment to mutterings and gnashings and a broken and irregular silence.