When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy
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Title: When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy
Author: Guy Thorne
Release date: May 10, 2012 [eBook #39666]
Language: English
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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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+ _By GUY THORNE_ +
+ +
+ When It Was Dark +
+ The Story of a Great Conspiracy +
+ 12º. (By mail, $1.35) _Net_, $1.20 +
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+ A Lost Cause +
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+ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS +
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WHEN IT WAS DARK
When It Was Dark
The Story of a Great Conspiracy
By
Guy Thorne
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1906
COPYRIGHT, 1904
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Published, January, 1904
Reprinted, May, 1904; September, 1904
December, 1904; September, 1905
October, 1905; November, 1905; January, 1906
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
CONTENTS
BOOK I.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. An Incident by Way of Prologue 1
II. In the Vicar's Study 6
III. "I Think he is a Good Man" 23
IV. The Smoke Cloud at Dawn 33
V. A Lost Soul 45
VI. The Whisper 56
VII. Last Words at Walktown 69
VIII. A Dinner at the Pannier d'Or 77
IX. Inauguration 95
X. The Resurrection Sermon 107
XI. "Neither do I Condemn Thee" 116
XII. Powers of Good and Evil 126
BOOK II.
I. While London was Sleeping 141
II. Avoiding the Flower Pattern on the Carpet 165
III. "I, Joseph" 178
IV. The Domestic Chaplain's Testimony 184
V. Deus, Deus Meus, Quare Dereliquisti! 194
VI. Harness the Horses; and Get up, ye Horsemen,
and Stand forth with your Helmets, Furbish
the Spears, and Put on the Brigandines--Jer.
xlvi: 4 205
VII. The Hour of Chaos 212
VIII. The First Links 225
IX. Particular Instances, Contrasting the Old
Lady and the Special Correspondent 233
X. The Triumph of Sir Robert Llwellyn 245
XI. Progress 256
XII. A Soul alone on the Sea-Shore 262
BOOK III.
I. What it Meant to the World's Women 271
II. Cyril Hands Redux 283
III. All ye Inhabitants of the World, and
Dwellers on the Earth, See ye, when He
Lifteth up an Ensign on the Mountains--Is.
xviii: 3 289
IV. A Luncheon Party 302
V. By the Tower of Hippicus 322
VI. Under the Eastern Stars: towards Gerizim 342
VII. The Last Meeting 356
VIII. Death Coming with One Grace 364
IX. At Walktown Again 376
Epilogue 385
BOOK I
"The mystery of iniquity doth already work."
WHEN IT WAS DARK
CHAPTER I
AN INCIDENT BY WAY OF PROLOGUE
Mr. Hinchcliffe, the sexton, looked up as Mr. Philemon, the clerk,
unlocked the great gates of open ironwork which led into the street.
Hinchcliffe was cutting the lettering on a tombstone, supported by heavy
wooden trestles, under a little shed close to the vestry door of the
church.
The clerk, a small, rotund man, clerical in aspect, and wearing a round
felt hat, pulled out a large, old-fashioned watch. "Time for the bell,
William," he said.
The parish church was a large building in sham perpendicular. It stood
in a very central position on the Manchester main road, rising amid a
bare triangle of flat gravestones, and separated from the street
pavement only by high iron railings.
It was about half-past four on a dull autumn afternoon. The trams swung
ringing down the black, muddy road, and the long procession of great
two-wheeled carts, painted vermilion, carried coal from the collieries
six miles away to the great mills and factories of Salford.
The two men went into the church, and soon the tolling of a deep-voiced
bell, high up in the pall of smoke which lay over the houses, beat out
in regular and melancholy sound.
Inside the building the noise of the traffic sank into a long, unceasing
note like the _bourdon_ note of a distant organ.
Hinchcliffe tolled the bell in the dim, ugly vestibule with his foot in
a loop in the rope, sitting on the chest which held the dozen loaves
which were given away every Sunday to the old women in the free seats.
The clerk opened the green baize swing-doors and strode up the aisle
towards the vestry, waking mournful echoes as the nails in his boots
struck the tiled floor.
Saint Thomas's Church, the mother church of Walktown, was probably the
ugliest church in Lancashire. The heavy galleries, the drab walls, the
terrible gloom of the vast structure, all spoke eloquently of a chilly,
dour Christianity, a grudging and suspicious Sunday religion which
animated its congregation.
In the long rows of cushioned seats, each labelled with the name of the
person who rented it, Sunday by Sunday the moderately prosperous and
wholly vulgar Lancashire people sat for two hours. During the prayers
they leaned forward in easy and comfortable concession to convention.
Few ever knelt. During the hymn times they stood up in their places
listening carefully to a fine choir of men and women--a choir which,
despite its vocal excellence, was only allowed to perform the most
stodgy and commonplace evangelical music.
When the incumbent preached he was heard with the jealous watchfulness
which often assails an educated man. The renters of the pews desired a
Low Church aspect of doctrine and were intelligent to detect any
divergence from it.
The colour of the building was sombre. The brick-red and styx-like grey
of the flooring, the lifeless chocolate front of the galleries, the
large and ugly windows filled with glass which was the colour of a
ginger-beer bottle, had all a definite quality of cheerless vulgarity.
Philemon came out of the vestry door with a lighted taper. He lit two or
three jets of the corona over the reading-desk. Then he sat down in a
front pew close to the chancel steps and waited.
The bell outside stopped suddenly, and a tall young man in a black
Inverness cape walked hurriedly up the side aisle under the gallery
towards the vestry.
In less than a minute he came out again in surplice, stole, and
hood,--the stole and hood were always worn at Walktown,--went to the
reading-desk, and began to say Evensong in a level, resonant voice.
At the end of each psalm Mr. Philemon recited the doxology with
thunderous assertion and capped each prayer with an echoing "Amen."
The curate, Basil Gortre, was a young fellow with a strong, impressive
face. His eyes had the clearness of youth and looked out steadily on the
world under his black hair. His face was of that type men call a
"thoroughly honest" face, but, unlike the generality of such faces, it
was neither stubborn nor stupid. The clean-shaven jaw was full of power,
the mouth was refined and artistic, without being either sensual or
weak.
During the Creed he turned towards the east, and the clerk's
uncompromising voice became louder and more acid as he noticed the
action; and when the clergyman, almost imperceptibly, made the sign of
the Cross at the words "The resurrection of the body," the old man gave
a loud snort of disapprobation.
In deference to the congregation on Sundays, and at the wish of his
vicar, Gortre omitted these simple signs of reverence. But alone, at
Matins or Evensong, he followed his usual habit.
During the last low prayers, as dusk crept into the great church, and
the clank and bells of the trams outside seemed to be more remote, a
part, indeed, of that visible but not symbolic ugliness which the gloom
was hiding, a note of fervour crept into the young man's praying which
had only been latent there before.
He was reading the third collect when the few gas jets above his head
began to whistle, burnt blue for a few seconds, and then faded out with
three or four faint pops.
Some air had got into the pipes. Old Mr. Philemon rose noisily from his
knees, and shuffled off to the vestry coughing and spluttering. Outside,
with startling suddenness, a piano organ burst into a gay, strident
melody. After a few bars the music stopped with a jerk. A police
constable had spoken to the organ-grinder and moved him on.
Gortre's voice went on in a deep, fervent monotone, unmoved by the
darkness or the dissonance--
"_Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord; and by Thy great
mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the
love of Thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ._"
The faithful, quiet voice, enduring through the dark, was a
foreshadowing of the great cloud which was breaking over the world, big
with disaster, imminent with gloom. It foreshadowed the divinely aided
continuance of Truth through such a terror as men had never known
before.
It meant many things, that firm and beautiful voice--hope in the darkest
hour for thousands of dying souls, a noble woman's happiness in time of
dire stress and evil temptations and a death worse than the death Judas
died--for Mr. Schuabe the millionaire and Robert Llwellyn the scholar,
taking tea together in the Athenæum Club three hundred miles away in
London.
"--_by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of
this night_."
Mr. Philemon returned with a taper, an old and wrinkled acolyte, in time
with his loud and sonorous AMEN.
CHAPTER II
IN THE VICAR'S STUDY
The vicarage of Walktown was a new and commodious house with tall
chimneys, pointed windows, and a roof of red tiles.
It was more than a mile from the church, in the residential quarter of
the town. Here were no shops and little traffic. The solid houses of red
brick stood in their own rather dingy grounds, where, though the grass
was never really green, and spring came in a veil of smoky vapour when
the wind blew from the town, there was yet a rural suggestion.
The trees rose from neatly kept lawns, the gravel sweeps of the drives
were carefully tended, and there was distant colour in the elaborate
conservatories and palm-houses which were to be seen everywhere.
Mr. Pryde, the great Manchester solicitor, had his beautiful modern
house here. Sir John Neele, the wealthy manufacturer of disinfectants,
lived close by, and a large proportion of the well-to-do Manchester
merchants were settled round about.
Not all of them were parishioners of Mr. Byars, the vicar of Walktown.
Many attended the more fashionable church of Pendleborough, a mile away
in what answered to the "country"; others were leaders in the Dissenting
and especially the Unitarian worlds.
Walktown was a stronghold of the Unitarians. The wealthy Jews of two
generations back, men who made vast fortunes in the black valley of the
Irwell, had chosen Walktown to dwell in. Their grandsons had found it
more politic to abjure their ancient faith. A few had become
Christians,--at least in name, inasmuch as they rented pews at St.
Thomas's,--but others had compromised by embracing a faith, or rather a
dogma, which is simply Judaism without its ritual and ceremonial
obligations. The Baumanns, the Hildersheimers, the Steinhardts,
flourished in Walktown.
It was people of this class who supported the magnificent concerts in
the Free Trade Hall at Manchester, who bought the pictures and read the
books. They had brought an alien culture to the neighbourhood. The vicar
had two strong elements to contend with,--for his parochial life was all
contention,--on the one hand the Lancashire natives, on the other the
wealthy Jewish families.
The first were hard, uncultured people, hating everything that had not
its origin and end in commerce. They disliked Mr. Byars because he was a
gentleman, because he was educated, and because--so they considered--the
renting of the pews in his church gave them the right to imagine that he
was in some sense a paid servant of theirs.
The second class of parishioners were less Philistine, certainly, but
even more hopeless from the parish priest's point of view. In their
luxurious houses they lived an easy, selfish, and sensual life, beyond
his reach, surrounded by a wall of indifferentism, and contemptuous of
all that was not tangible and material. At times the rector and the
curate confessed to each other that these people seemed more utterly
lost than any others with whom the work of the Church brought them in
contact.
Mr. Byars was a widower with one son, now at Oxford, and one daughter,
Helena, who was engaged to Basil Gortre, the curate.
About six o'clock the vicar sat in his study with a pile of letters
before him. The room was a comfortable, bookish place, panelled in pitch
pine where the walls were not covered with shelves of theological and
philosophical works.
The arm-chairs were not new, but they invited repose; the large
engraving over the pipe-littered mantel was a fine autotype of Giacomo's
_St. Emilia_. The room was brightly lit with electric light.
Mr. Byars was a man of medium height, bald, his fine, domed forehead
adding to his apparent age, and wore a pointed grey beard and moustache.
He was an epitome of the room around him.
The volumes on his shelves were no ancient and musty tomes, but
represented the latest and newest additions to theological thought.
Lathom and Edersheim stood together with Renan's _Vie de Jésus_ and
Clermont-Ganneau's _Recueil d'Arch. Orient_, and Westcott guarded them
all.
The ivory crucifix which stood on the writing-table completed the
impression of the man.
Ambrose Byars at forty-five was thoroughly acquainted with modern
thought and literature. His scholarship was tempered with the wisdom of
an active and clear-headed man of the world. His life and habits were
simple but unbigoted, and his broad-mindedness never obscured his
unalterable convictions. He lived, as he conceived it his duty to live
in his time and place, in thorough human and intellectual correspondence
with his environment, but one thought, one absolute certainty informed
his life.
As year by year his knowledge grew greater, and the scientific criticism
of the Scriptures undermined the faith of weaker and less richly
endowed minds, he only found in each discovery a more vivid proof of the
truth of the Incarnation and the Resurrection.
It was his habit in discussions to reconcile all apparently conflicting
antichristian statements and weave them into the fabric of his
convictions. He held that, even scientifically, historically, and
materially, the evidence for the Resurrection was too strong to be ever
overthrown. And beyond these intellectual evidences he knew that Christ
must have risen from the dead, because he himself had found Christ and
was found in Him.
His attitude was a careful one with all its conciseness. An anecdote
illustrates this.
One day, when walking home from a meeting of the School Board, of which
he was a member, he had met a parishioner named Baxter, the proprietor
of a small engineering work in the district. The man, who never came to
church, on what he called "principle," but spent his Sundays in bed with
a sporting paper, was one of those half-educated people who condemn
Christianity by ridiculing the Old Testament stories.
They walked together, Baxter quoting the _Origin of Species_, which he
knew from a cheap epitomised handbook.
"Do you really think, Mr. Byars," he had said, "do you really believe,
after Darwin's discovery, that we were made by a sort of conjuring trick
by a Supreme Power? Seven days of cooking, so to speak, and then a
world! Why, it's childish to expect thinking people to believe it. We
are simply evolved by scientific evolution out of the primæval
protoplasm."
"Very possibly," said the vicar; "and who made the protoplasm, Mr.
Baxter?"
The man was silent for a minute. "Then, Mr. Byars," he said at length,
"you do not believe the Old Testament--the Adam and Eve part, for
instance. You do not believe the Book on which your creed is founded."
"There are such things as allegories," he had answered. "The untutored
brain must be taught the truth in such a way as it can receive it."
The vicar lit his pipe and began to open his letters with a slight sigh.
Of all men, he sometimes felt, he was the least possible one for
Walktown. For twelve years he had worked there, and he seemed to make
little headway. He longed for an educated congregation. Here methods too
vulgar for his temperament seemed to be the only ones.
The letters were all from applicants for the curacy which Gortre's
impending departure would shortly leave vacant.
"It will be a terrible wrench to lose Basil," he said to himself; "but
it must be. He will have his chance and be far happier in London, in
more congenial environment. He would never be a great success in
Walktown. He has tried nobly, but the people won't understand him. They
would never like him; he's too much of a gentleman. How they all hate
breeding in Walktown! There is nothing for it, I can see. I must get an
inferior man this time. An inferior man will go down with them better
here. I only hope he will be a really good fellow. If he isn't, it will
be Jerrold over again--vulgar cabals against me, and all the women in
the place quarrelling and taking sides."
He read letter after letter, and saw, with a humorous shrug of disgust,
that he would have little difficulty in engaging the "inferior" man of
his thoughts.
The best men would not come to the North. Men of family with decent
degrees, Oxford men, Cambridge men, accustomed to decent society and
intellectual friends, knew far too much to accept a title in the
Manchester district.
The applications were numerous enough, but obviously from second-rate
men, or at any rate from men who appeared to be so at first glance.
A Durham graduate, 40, with five children, begged earnestly for the £120
a year which was all Mr. Byars could offer. A few young men from
theological colleges wanting titles, a Dublin B.A., announcing himself
as "thoroughly Protestant in views"--they were a weary lot. A
non-collegiate student from Oxford with a second class in Theology, a
Manchester Grammar-School boy, whose father lived at Higher Broughton,
seemed to promise the best. He would be able to get on with the people,
probably. "I suppose I must have him, accent and all," the vicar said
with a sigh, "though I suppose it's prejudice to dislike the lessons
read with the Lancashire broad 'a' and short 'o.' St. Paul probably
spoke with a terrible local twang! and yet, I don't know, he was too
great to be vulgar; one doesn't like to think that----"
Mr. Byars was certainly a difficult person for his congregation to
appreciate.
He picked up the letter and was re-reading it when the door opened and
his daughter came in.
Helena Byars was a tall girl, largely made and yet slender. Her hair was
luxuriant and of a traditional "heroine" gold. She was dressed with a
certain richness, though soberly enough, a style which, with its slight
hint of austerity, accentuated a quiet and delicate charm. So one felt
on meeting her for the first time. Sweet-faced she was and with an
underlying seriousness even in her times of laughter. Her mouth was
rather large, her nose straight and beautifully chiselled. The eyes were
placid, intelligent, but without keenness. There was an almost matronly
dignity about her quiet and yet decided manner.
The vicar looked up at her with a smile, thinking how like her mother
the girl was--that grave and gracious lady who looked out of the picture
by the door, St. Cecilia in form and face. "Eh, but Helena she favours
her mother," Hinchcliffe, the sexton, had said with the frank
familiarity of the Lancashire workman soon after Mrs. Byars's funeral
four years ago.
"I've brought _Punch_, father," she said, "it's just come. Leave your
work now and enjoy yourself for half an hour before dinner. Basil will
be here by the time you're finished."
She stirred the fire into a bright glow, and, singing softly to herself,
left the study and went into the dining-room to see that the table
looked inviting for the coming meal.
About seven o'clock Gortre arrived, and soon afterwards the three sat
down to dine. It was a simple meal, some fish, cold beef, and a pudding,
with a bottle of beer for the curate and a glass of claret for the
vicar. The housemaid did not wait upon them, for they found the meal
more intimate and enjoyable without her.
"I've got some news," said Gortre. "The great question of domicile is
settled. You know there is no room in the clergy-house at St. Mary's.
Moreover, Father Ripon thought it well that I should live outside. He
wanted one of the assistant clergy, at least, to be in constant touch
with lay influences, he said when I saw him."
"What have you arranged, dear?" said Helena.
"Something very satisfactory, I think," he answered. "My first thought
was to take ordinary rooms in Bloomsbury. It would be near St. Mary's
and the schools. Then I thought of chambers in one of the Inns of Court.
At any rate I wrote to Harold Spence to ask his advice. He was at
Merton with me, you know, lived on the same staircase in 'Stubbins,' and
is just one of the best fellows in the world. We haven't corresponded
much during the last three years, but I knew a letter to the New Oxford
and Cambridge would always find him. So I wrote up. He's been University
Extension lecturing for a time, you know, and writing too. Now he tells
me that he is writing leaders for the _Daily Wire_ and doing very well.
I'll read you what he says."
He took a letter from his pocket, glanced down it for the paragraph he
wanted, and began to read:
... "--and I am delighted to hear that you have at last made up
your mind to leave the North country and have accepted this London
curacy. I asked Marsh, our ecclesiastical editor, about St. Mary's
last night. He tells me that it is a centre of very important
Church work, and has some political and social influence. Of all
the 'ritualistic' parishes--I use the word as a convenient
label--it is thought to be the sanest. Here you will have a real
chance. I know something of the North, and came in contact with all
sorts and conditions of people when I was lecturing on the French
Revolution round Liverpool and Manchester for the Extension. They
are not the people for you to succeed with, either socially or from
a clergyman's point of view--at least, that's my opinion, old man.
You ask me about rooms. I have a proposal to make to you in this
regard. I am now living in Lincoln's Inn with a man named
Hands--Cyril Hands. You may know his name. He is a great
archæologist, was a young Cambridge professor. For three years now
he has been working for The Palestine Exploring Society. He is in
charge of all the excavations now proceeding near Jerusalem, and
constantly making new and valuable Biblical discoveries."
The vicar broke in upon the reading. "Hands!" he said; "a most
distinguished man! His work is daily adding to our knowledge in a
marvellous way. He has just recently discovered some important
inscriptions at El-Edhamîyeh--Jeremiah's grotto, you know, the place
which is thought may be Golgotha, you know. But go on, I'm sorry to
interrupt."
Gortre continued:
"Hands is only at home for three months in the year, when he comes
to the annual meeting of the Society and recuperates at the
seaside. His rooms, however, are always kept for him. The chambers
we have are old-fashioned but very large. There are three big
bedrooms, a huge sitting-room, two smaller rooms and a sort of
kitchen, all inside the one oak. I have a bedroom and one small
room where I write. Hands has only one bedroom and uses the big
general room. Now if you care to come and take up your abode in the
Inn with us, I can only say you will be heartily welcome. Your
share of the expenses would be less than if you lived alone in
rooms as you propose, and you would be far more comfortable. You
could have your study to work in. Our laundress is nearly always
about, and there is altogether a pleasant suggestion of Oxford and
the old days in the life we lead. Of course I need hardly tell you
that we are very quiet and quite untroubled by any of the rowdy
people, all of whom live away from our court altogether. You would
be only five minutes' walk from St. Mary's. What do you think of
the idea? Let me know and I will give you all further details. I
hope you will decide on joining us. I should find it most
pleasant.--Ever yours,
"HAROLD MASTERMAN SPENCE."
"An extremely genial letter," said the vicar. "I suppose you'll accept,
Basil? It will be pleasant to be with friends like that."
"Isn't it just a little, well, bachelor?" said Helena rather nervously.
Gortre smiled at the question.
"No, dear," he said. "I don't think you need be afraid. I know the sort
of visions you have. The sort of thing in _Pendennis_, isn't it? The boy
sent out for beer to the nearest public-house, and breakfast at twelve
in the morning, cooked in the sitting-room. You don't know Harold. He is
quite _bourgeois_ in his habits, despite his intellect, hates a muddle,
always dresses extremely well, and goes to church like any married man.
He was a great friend of the Pusey House people at Oxford."
"The days when you couldn't be a genius without being dirty are gone,"
said the vicar. "I am glad of it. I was staying at St. Ives last summer,
where there is quite an artistic settlement. All the painters carried
golf-clubs and looked like professional athletes. They drink Bohea in
Bohemia now."
Gortre talked a little about his plans for the future. He had a
sympathetic audience. During the four years of his curacy at Walktown he
had become very dear to Mr. Byars. He had arrived in the North from
Oxford, after a year at Litchfield Theological College, just about the
time that Mrs. Byars had died. His help and sympathy at such a time had
begun a friendship with his vicar that had been firmly cemented as the
time went on, and had finally culminated in his engagement to Helena. He
had been the vicar's sole intellectual companion all this time, and his
loss would be irreparable. But both men felt that his departure was
inevitable. The younger man's powers were stifled and confined in the
atmosphere of the place. He had private means of his own, and belonged
to an old West-country family, and, try as he would he failed to
identify himself socially with the Walktown people. His engagement to
Helena Byars had increased his unpopularity. He would be far happier at
St. Mary's in London, at the famous High Church, where he would find all
those exterior accompaniments of religion to which he had been
accustomed, and which, though he did not exalt the shadow into the
substance, always made him happier when he was surrounded by them.
He was to wait a year and then he would be married. There were no money
obstacles in the way and no reason for further delay. Only the vicar
looked forward with a sort of horror to his future loneliness, and tried
to put the thought from him whenever it came.
After dinner Helena left the two men to smoke alone in the study. There
was a concert in the Town Hall to which she was going with Mrs. Pryde,
the solicitor's wife, a neighbour. Her friend's carriage called for her
about eight, and Gortre settled down for a long talk with the vicar on
parochial affairs.
They sat on each side of the dancing fire, with coffee on a table
between them, quietly enjoying the after-dinner pipe, the best and
finest of the five cardinal pipes of the day. It was a comfortable
scene. The room was lighted only by a single electric reading-lamp with
a green shade, and the firelight flickered and played over the dull gold
and crimson of the books on the shelves, and threw red lights on the
shining ivory of the sculptured Christ.
"I daresay this North-country man will do all right," said the vicar.
"He will be more popular than you, Basil."
The young man sighed. "God knows I have tried hard enough to win their
confidence," he said sadly, "but it was not to be. I _can't_ get in
touch with them, vicar. They dislike my manners, my way of
speaking--everything about me. Even the landlady of my rooms distrusts
me because I decline to take tea with my evening chop, and charges me
three shillings a week extra because I have what she calls 'late
dinner'!"
The vicar laughed. "At any rate," he said, "you have got hold of Leef,
your landlord; he comes to church regularly now."
"Oh, Leef illustrates more than any one else how impossible it is, for
me, at any rate, to do much good. Last week he said to me, 'It's a fine
thing, religion, when you've got it at last, Mr. Gortre. When I look
back at my unregenerate years I wonder at myself. Religion tells me to
give up certain things. It only 'armonises with the experience of any
sensible man of my age. I don't want to drink too much, for instance. My
health is capital, and I'm not such a fool as to spoil it. To think that
all those years I never knew that religion was as easy as winking, and
with a certainty of everlasting glory afterwards. I'll always back you
up, Mr. Gortre, in saying that religion's the finest thing out.'"
"Well, dear boy, you will be in another environment altogether soon.
It's no use being discouraged. _Tot homines, quot sententiæ_! We can't
alter these things. The Essenes used to speak disrespectfully enough of
'Ye men of Galilee,' no doubt. Sometimes I think I would rather have
these stubborn people than those of the South, men as easy and _commode_
as an old glove, and worth about as much. Have you seen the _Guardian_
to-day?"
"No, I haven't. I've been at the schools all the morning, visiting in
Timperley Street till Evensong, home for a wash, and then here."
"I see Schuabe is going to address a great meeting in the Free Trade
Hall on the Education Bill."
"Then he is at Mount Prospect?"
"He arrived from London yesterday."
The two men looked at each other in silence. Mr. Byars seemed ill at
ease. His foot tapped the brass rail of the fender. Then, a sure sign of
disturbance with him, he put down his pipe, which was nearly smoked
away, and took a cigarette from a box on the table and smoked in short,
quick puffs.
Gortre's face became dark and gloomy. The light died out of it, the
kindliness of expression, which was habitual, left his eyes.
"We have never really told each other what we think of Schuabe and how
we think of him, vicar," he said. "Let us have it out here and now while
we are thinking of him and while we have the opportunity."
"In a question of this sort," said Mr. Byars, "confidences are extremely
dangerous as a rule, but between you and me it is different. It will
clear our brains mutually. God forbid that you and I, in our profession
as Christ's priests and our socio-political position as clerks in Holy
Orders, should bear rancour against any one. But we are but human.
Possibly our mutual confidence may help us both."
There was a curious eagerness in his manner which was reflected by that
of the other. Both were conscious of feelings ill in accord with their
usual open and kindly attitude towards the world. Each was anxious to
know if the other coincided with himself.
Men are weak, and there is comfort in community.
"From envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness--" said Gortre.
"Good Lord deliver us," replied the vicar gravely.
There was a tense silence for a time, only broken by the dropping of the
coals in the grate. The vicar was the first to break it.
"I'll sum up my personal impression of the man for and against," he
said.
Gortre nodded.
"There can be no doubt whatever," said Mr. Byars, "that among all the
great North-country millionaires--men of power and influence, I
mean--Schuabe stands first and pre-eminent. His wealth is enormous to
begin with. Then he is young--can hardly be forty yet, I should say. He
belongs to the new generation. In Walktown he stands entirely alone.
Then his brilliancy, his tremendous intellectual powers, are equalled by
few men in England. His career at Oxford was marvellous, his political
life, only just beginning as it is, seems to promise the very highest
success. His private life, as far as we know--and everything about the
man seems to point to an ascetic temperament and a refined habit--is
without grossness or vice of any kind. In appearance he is one of the
ten most striking-looking men in England. His manners are fascinating."
Gortre laughed shortly, a mirthless, bitter laugh.
"So far," he said, "you have drawn a picture which approaches the ideal
of what a strong man should be. And I grant you every detail of it. But
let me complete it. You will agree with me that mine also is true."
His voice trembled a little. Half unconsciously his eyes wandered to the
crucifix on the writing-table. In the red glow of the fire, which had
now ceased to crackle and flame, the drooping figure on the cross showed
distinct and clear in all its tremendous appeal to the hearts of
mankind. Tears came into the young man's eyes, his face became drawn and
pained. When he spoke, his voice was full of purpose and earnestness.
"Yes," he said, with an unusual gesture of the hand, "Schuabe is all
that you say. In a hard, godless, and material age he is an epitome of
it. The curse of indifferentism is over the land. Men have forgotten
that this world is but an inn, a sojourning place for a few hours. O
fools and blind! The terror of death is always with them. But this man
is far more than this--far, far more. To him has been given the eye to
see, the heart to understand. _He, of all men living in England to-day,
is the mailed, armed enemy of Our Lord._ No loud-mouthed atheist,
sincere and blatant in his ignorance, no honest searcher after truth.
All his great wealth, all his attainments, are forged into one devilish
weapon. He is already, and will be in the future, the great enemy of
Christianity. Oh, I have read his book! 'Even now there are many
antichrists.' I have read his speeches in Parliament. I know his
enormous influence over those unhappy people who call themselves
'Secularists.' Like Diocletian, like Julian, _he hates Christ_. He is no
longer a Jew. Judaism is nothing to him--one can reverence a Montefiore,
admire an Adler. His attacks on the faith are something quite different
to those of other men. As his skill is greater, so his intention is more
evil. And yet how helpless are we who know! The mass of Christians--the
lax, tolerant Christians--think he is a kind of John Morley. They praise
his charities, his efforts for social amelioration. They quote, 'And God
fulfils Himself in many ways.' I say again, O fools and blind! They do
not know, they cannot see, this man as he is at heart, accursed and
antichrist!" His voice dropped, tired with its passion and vehemence. He
continued in a lower and more intimate vein:
"Do you think I am a fanatic, vicar? Am I touched with monomania when I
tell you that of late I have thought much upon the prophetic indications
of the coming of 'the Man of Sin,' the antichrist in Holy Writ? Can it
be, I have asked myself, as I watch the comet-like brilliance of this
man's career, can it be that in my own lifetime and the lifetime of
those I love, the veritable enemy of our Saviour is to appear? Is this
man, this Jew, he of whom it is said in Jacob's words, 'Dan shall be a
serpent by the way, an adder in the path'--the tribe of which _not one_
was sealed?"
"You are overwrought, Basil," said the elder man kindly. "You have let
yourself dwell too much on this man and his influences. But I do not
condemn you. I also have had my doubts and wonderings. The outside world
would laugh at us and people who might be moved as we are at these
things. But do we not live always with, and by help of, the Unseen? God
alone knows the outcome of the trend of these antichristian influences,
of which, I fear, Schuabe is the head. The Fathers are clear enough on
the subject, and the learned men of mediæval times also. Let me read to
you."
He got up from his arm-chair, glad, it seemed, at opportunity of change
and movement, and went to the book-shelves which lined the wall. His
scholar's interest was aroused, his magnificent reading and knowledge of
Christian history and beliefs engaged and active.
He dipped into book after book, reading extracts from them here and
there.
"Listen. Marchantius says the ship of the Church will sink and be lost
in the foam of infidelity, and be hidden in the blackness of that storm
of desolation which shall arise at the coming of Antichrist. 'The sun
shall be darkened and the stars shall fall from heaven.' He means, of
course, the sun of faith, and that the stars, the great ecclesiastical
dignitaries, shall fall into apostasy. But, he goes on to say, the
Church will remain unwrecked, she will weather the storm and come forth
'_beautiful as the moon, terrible as an army with banners_.'"
His voice was eager and excited, his face was all alight with the
scholar's eagerness, as he took down book after book with unerring
instinct to illustrate his remarks.
"Opinions as to the nature and personality of Antichrist have been very
varied," he continued. "Some of the very early Christian writers say he
will be a devil in a phantom body, others that he will be an incarnate
demon, true man and true devil, in fearful and diabolic parody of the
Incarnation of our Lord. There is a third view also. That is that he
will be merely a desperately wicked man, acting upon diabolic
inspirations, just as the saints act upon Divine inspirations.
"Listen to St. John Damascene upon the subject. He is very express. 'Not
as Christ assumed humanity, so will the Devil become human; but the Man
will receive all the inspiration of Satan, and will suffer the Devil to
take up his abode within him.'"
Gortre, who was listening with extreme attention, made a short, sharp
exclamation at this last quotation.
He had risen from his seat and stood by the mantel-shelf, leaning his
elbow upon it.
One of the ornaments of the mantel was a head of Christ, photographed on
china, from Murillo, and held in a large silver frame like a photograph
frame.
Just as the vicar had finished reading there came a sudden knock at the
door. It startled Gortre, and he moved suddenly. His elbow slid along
the marble of the shelf and dislodged the picture, which fell upon the
floor and was broken into a hundred pieces, crashing loudly upon the
fender.
The housemaid, who had knocked, stood for a moment looking with dismay
upon the breakage. Then she turned to the vicar.
"Mr. Schuabe from Mount Prospect to see you, sir," she said. "I've shown
him into the drawing-room."
CHAPTER III
"I THINK HE IS A GOOD MAN"
The servant had turned on the lights in the drawing room, where a low
fire still glowed red upon the hearth, and left Constantine Schuabe
alone to await the vicar's arrival.
On either side of the fireplace were heavy hangings of emerald and
copper woven stuff, a present to Helena from an uncle, who had bought
them at Benares. Schuabe stood motionless before this background.
The man was tall, above the middle height, and the heavy coat of fur
which he was wearing increased the impression of proportioned size, of
massiveness, which was part of his personality. His hair was a very dark
red, smooth and abundant, of that peculiar colour which is the last to
show the greyness of advancing age. His features were Semitic, but
without a trace of that fulness, and sometimes coarseness, which often
marks the Jew who has come to the middle period of life. The eyes were
large and black, but without animation, in ordinary use and wont. They
did not light up as he spoke, but yet the expression was not veiled or
obscured. They were coldly, terribly _aware_, with something of the
sinister and untroubled regard one sees in a reptile's eyes.
The jaw, which dominated the face and completed its remarkable
_ensemble_, was very massive, reminding people of steel covered with
olive-coloured parchment. Handsome was hardly the word which fitted him.
He was a strikingly handsome man; but that, like "distinction," was
only one of the qualities which made up his personality. Force,
power--the relentless and conscious power suggested by some great marine
engine--surrounded him in an almost indescribable way. They were like
exhalations. Most people, with the casual view, called him merely
indomitable, but there were others who thought they read deeper and saw
something evil and monstrous about the man; powerless to give an exact
and definite reason for the impression, and dubious of voicing it.
Nevertheless, now and again, two or three people would speak of him to
each other without reserve, and on such occasions they generally agreed
to this feeling of the sinister and malign, in much the same manner as
the vicar and his curate had been agreeing but half an hour before his
arrival at the house.
The door opened with a quick click of the handle, and the vicar entered
with something of suddenness. One might almost have supposed that he had
lingered, hesitant, in the hall, and suddenly nerved himself for this
encounter.
Mr. Byars advanced to take the hand of his visitor. Beside the big man
he seemed shrunken and a little ineffectual. He was slightly nervous in
his manner also, for Basil's impassioned and terror-ridden words still
rang in his ears and had their way with him.
The coincidence of the millionaire's arrival was altogether too sudden
and _bizarre_.
When they had made greetings, cordial enough on the surface, and were
seated on either side of the fire, Schuabe spoke at once upon the object
of his visit.
"I have come, Mr. Byars," he said, in a singularly clear, vibrant voice,
"to discuss certain educational proposals with you. As you probably
know, just at present I am taking a very prominent part in the House of
Commons in connection with the whole problem of primary education.
Within the last few weeks I have been in active correspondence with your
School Board, and you will know all about the scholarships I have
founded.
"But I am now coming to you to propose something of the same sort in
connection with your own Church schools. My opinions on religious
matters are, of course, not yours. But despite my position I have always
recognised that, with whatever means, both the clergy and my own party
are broadly working towards one end.
"Walktown provides me with very many thousands a year, and it is my duty
in some way or another to help Walktown. My proposal is roughly this: I
will found and endow two yearly scholarships for two boys in the
national schools. The money will be sufficient, in the first instance,
to send them to one of the great Northern Grammar Schools, and
afterwards, always providing that the early promise is maintained, to
either university.
"My only stipulation is this. The tests shall be purely and simply
intellectual, and have nothing whatever to do with the religious
teaching of the schools, with which I am not in sympathy. Nevertheless,
it is only fair that a clever boy in a Church school should have the
same opportunities as in a secular school. I should tell you that I have
made the same offer to the Roman Catholic school authorities and it has
been declined."
The vicar listened with great attention. The offer was extremely
generous, and showed a most open-minded determination to put the donor's
personal prejudices out of the question. There could be no doubt as to
his answer--none whatever.
"My dear sir," he said, "your generosity is very great. I see your point
about the examinations. Religion is to form no part of them exactly. But
by the time one of our boys submits himself for examination we should
naturally hope that he would already be so firmly fixed in Christian
principles that his after-career would have no influence upon his faith.
Holding the opinions that you do, your offer shows a great freedom from
any prejudice. I hope I am broad-minded enough to recognise that
philanthropy is a fine, lovely thing, despite the banner under which the
philanthropist may stand. I accept your generous offer in the spirit
that it is made. Of course, the scheme must be submitted to the managers
of the schools, of whom I am chief, but the matter practically lies with
me, and my lead will be followed."
"I am only too glad," said the big man, with a sudden and transforming
smile, "to help on the cause of knowledge. All the details of the scheme
I will send you in a few days, and now I will detain you no longer."
He rose to go.
During their brief conversation the vicar had been conscious of many
emotions. He blamed himself for his narrowness and the somewhat
fantastic lengths to which his recent talk with Gortre had gone. The man
was an infidel, no doubt. His intellectual attacks upon Christian faith
were terribly damaging and subversive. Still, his love for his
fellow-men was sincere, it seemed. He attacked the faith, but not the
preachers of it. And--a half thought crossed his brain--he might have
been sent to him for some good purpose. St. Paul had not always borne
the name of Paul!
These thoughts, but half formulated in his brain, had their immediate
effect in concrete action.
"Won't you take off your coat, Mr. Schuabe," he said, "and smoke a cigar
with me in my study?"
The other hesitated a moment, looked doubtful, and then assented. He
hung his coat up in the hall and went into the other room with the
vicar.
During the conversation in the drawing-room Helena had come back from
the concert, and Basil, hearing her, had left the study and gone to her
own private sanctum for a last few minutes before saying good-night.
Helena sat in a low chair by the fire sipping a bowl of soup which the
maid had brought up to her. She was a little tired by the concert, where
a local pianist had been playing a nocturne of Chopin's as if he wanted
to make it into soup, and the quiet of her own sitting-room, the
intimate comfort of it all, and the sense of happiness that Basil's
presence opposite gave her were in delightful contrast.
"It was very stupid, dear," she said. "Mrs. Pryde was rather trying,
full of dull gossip about every one, and the music wasn't good. Mr.
Cuthbert played as if he was playing the organ in church. His touch is
utterly unfitted for anything except the War March from _Athalie_ with
the stops out. He knows nothing of the piano. I was in a front seat, and
I could see his knee feeling for the swell all the time. He played _the_
sonata as if he was throwing the moonlight at one in great solid chunks.
I'm glad to be back. How nice it is to sit here with you, dearest!--and
how good this Bovril is!" she concluded with a little laugh of content
and happiness at this moment of acute physical and mental ease.
He looked lovingly at her as she lay back in rest and the firelight
played over her white arms and pale gold hair.
"It's wonderful to think," he said, with a little catch in his voice,
"it's wonderful to me, an ever-recurring wonder, to think that some day
you and I will always be together for all our life, here and afterwards.
What supreme, unutterable happiness God gives to His children! Do you
know, dear, sometimes as I read prayers or stand by the altar, I am
filled with a sort of rapture of thankfulness which is voiceless in its
intensity. Tennyson got nearer to expressing it than any one in that
beautiful _St. Agnes' Eve_ of his--a little gem which, with its
simplicity and fervour, is worth far more than Keats's poem with all its
literary art."
"It is good to feel like that sometimes," she answered; "but it is well,
I think, not to get into the way of _inducing_ such feelings. The human
brain is such a sensitive thing that one can get into the way of
drugging it with emotion, as it were. I think I am tinged a little with
the North-country spirit. I always think of Newman's wonderful lines--
"'The thoughts control that o'er thee swell and throng;
They will condense within the soul and turn to purpose strong.
But he who lets his feelings run in soft luxurious flow,
Shrinks when hard service must be done, and faints at every blow.'
"I only quote from memory. But you look tired, dear boy; you are rather
white. Have you been overworking?"
He did not answer immediately.
"No," he said slowly, "but I've been having a long talk with the vicar.
We were talking about Mr. Schuabe and his influence. Helena, that man is
the most active of God's enemies in England. Almost when I was
mentioning his name, by some coincidence, or perhaps for some deeper,
more mysterious, psychical reason which men do not yet understand, the
maid announced him. He had come to see your father on business,
and--don't think I am unduly fanciful--the Murillo photograph, the head
of Christ, on the mantel-shelf, fell down and was broken. He is here
still, I think."
"Yes," said Helena; "Mr. Schuabe is in the study with father. But, Basil
dear, it's quite evident to me that you've been doing too much. Do you
know that I look upon Mr. Schuabe as a really _good_ man! I have often
thought about him, and even prayed that he may learn the truth; but God
has many instruments. Mr. Schuabe is sincere in his unbelief. His life
and all his actions are for the good of others. It is terrible--it is
deplorable--to know he attacks Christianity; but he is tolerant and
large-minded also. Yes, I should call him a good man. He will come to
God some day. God would not have given him such power over the minds and
bodies of men otherwise."
Gortre smiled a little sadly,--a rather wan smile, which sat strangely
upon his strong and hearty face--, but he said no more.
He knew that his attitude was illogical, perhaps it could be called
bigoted and intolerant--a harsh indictment in these easy, latitudinarian
days; but his conviction was an intuition. It came from within, from
something outside or beyond his reason, and would not be stifled.
"Well, dear," he said, "perhaps it is as you say. Nerves which are
overwrought, and a system which is run down, certainly have their say,
and a large say, too, in one's attitude towards any one. Now you must go
to bed. I will go down and say good-night to the rector and Mr.
Schuabe--just to show there's no ill-feeling; though, goodness knows, I
oughtn't to jest about the man. Good-night, sweet one; God bless you.
Remember me also in your prayers to-night."
She kissed him in her firm, brave way--a kiss so strong and loving, so
pure and sweet, that he went away from that little room of books and
_bric-à-brac_ as if he had been sojourning in some shrine.
As Basil came into the study he found Mr. Byars and Schuabe in eager,
animated talk. A spirit decanter had been brought in during his
absence, and the vicar was taking the single glass of whisky-and-water
he allowed himself before going to bed. Basil, who was in a singularly
alert and observant mood, noticed that a glass of plain seltzer water
stood before the millionaire.
Gortre's personal acquaintance with Schuabe was of the slightest. He had
met him once or twice on the platform of big meetings, and that was all.
A simple curate, unless socially,--and Schuabe did not enter into the
social life of Walktown, being almost always in London,--he would not be
very likely to come in the way of this mammoth.
But Schuabe greeted him with marked cordiality, and he sat down to
listen to the two men.
In two minutes he was fascinated, in five he realised, with a quick and
unpleasant sense of inferiority, how ignorant he was beside these two.
In Schuabe the vicar found a man whose knowledge was as wide and
scholarship as profound as his own.
From a purely intellectual standpoint, probably Gortre and Schuabe were
more nearly on a level, but in pure knowledge he was nowhere. He
wondered, as he listened, if the generation immediately preceding his
own had been blessed with more time for culture, if the foundation had
been surer and more comprehensive, when they were _alumni_ of the
"loving mother" in the South.
They were discussing archæological questions connected with the Holy
Land.
Schuabe possessed a profound and masterly knowledge of the whole Jewish
background to the Gospel picture, not merely of the archæology, which in
itself is a life study, but of the essential characteristics of Jewish
thought and feeling, which is far more.
Of course, every now and again the conversation turned towards a
direction that, pursued, would have led to controversy. But, with mutual
tact, the debatable ground was avoided. That Christ was a historic fact
Schuabe, of course, admitted and implied, and when the question of His
Divinity seemed likely to occur he was careful and adroit to avoid any
discussion.
To the young man, burning with the zeal of youth, this seemed a pity.
Unconsciously, he blamed the vicar for not pressing certain points home.
What an opportunity was here! The rarity of such a visit, the obvious
interest the two men were beginning to take in each other--should not a
great blow for Christ be struck on such an auspicious night? Even if the
protest was unavailing, the argument overthrown, was it not a duty to
speak of the awful and eternal realities which lay beneath this vivid
and brilliant interchange of scholarship?
His brain was on fire with passionate longing to speak. But,
nevertheless, he controlled it. None knew better than he the depth and
worth of the vicar's character. And he felt himself a junior; he had no
right to question the decision of his superior.
"You have missed much, Mr. Byars," said Schuabe, as he arose to go at
last, "in never having visited Jerusalem. One can get the knowledge of
it, but never the colour. And, even to-day, the city must appear, in
many respects, exactly as it did under the rule of Pilate. The Fellah
women sell their vegetables, the camels come in loaded with roots for
fuel, the Bedouin, the Jews with their long gowns and slippers--I wish
you could see it all. I have eaten the meals of the Gospels, drunk the
red wine of Saron, the spiced wine mixed with honey and black pepper,
the 'wine of myrrh' mentioned in the Gospel of Mark. I have dined with
Jewish tradesmen and gone through the same formalities of hand-washing
as we read of two thousand years ago; I have seen the poor
ostentatiously gathered in out of the streets and the best part of the
meal given them for a self-righteous show. And yet, an hour afterwards,
I have sat in a _café_ by King David's Tower and played dice with
Turkish soldiers armed with Martini rifles!"
The vicar seemed loath to let his guest go, though the hour was late,
but he refused to stay longer. Mr. Byars, with a somewhat transparent
eagerness, mentioned that Gortre's road home lay for part of the way in
the same direction as the millionaire's. He seemed to wish the young man
to accompany him, almost, so Basil thought, that the charm of his
personality might rebuke him for his tirade in the early part of the
evening.
Accordingly, in agreement with the vicar's evident wish, but with an
inexplicable ice-cold feeling in his heart, he left the house with
Schuabe and began to walk with him through the silent, lamp-lit
streets.
CHAPTER IV
THE SMOKE CLOUD AT DAWN
The two men strode along without speaking for some way. Their feet
echoed in the empty streets.
Suddenly Schuabe turned to Basil. "Well, Mr. Gortre," he said, "I have
given you your opportunity. Are you not going to speak the word in
season after all?"
The young man started violently. Who was this man who had been reading
his inner thoughts? How could his companion have fathomed his sternly
repressed desire as he sat in the vicarage study? And why did he speak
now, when he knew that some chilling influence had him in its grip, that
his tongue was tied, his power weakened?
"It is late, Mr. Schuabe," he said at length, and very gravely. "My
brain is tired and my enthusiasm chilled. Nor are you anxious to hear
what I have to say. But your taunt is ungenerous. It almost seems as if
you are not always so tolerant as men think!"
The other laughed--a cold laugh, but not an unkindly one. "Forgive me,"
he said, "one should not jest with conviction. But I should like to talk
with you also. There are lusts of the brain just as there are lusts of
the flesh, and to-night I am in the mood and humour for conversation."
They were approaching a side road which led to Gortre's rooms.
Schuabe's great stone house was still a quarter of a mile away up the
hill.
"Do not go home yet," said Schuabe, "come to my house, see my books, and
let us talk. Make friends with the mammon of unrighteousness, Mr.
Gortre! You are disturbed and unstrung to-night. You will not sleep.
Come with me."
Gortre hesitated for a moment, and then continued with him. He was
hardly conscious why he did so, but even as he accepted the invitation
his nerves seemed recovered as by some powerful tonic. A strange
confidence possessed him, and he strode on with the air and manner of a
man who has some fixed purpose in his brain.
And as he talked casually with Schuabe, he felt towards him no longer
the cold fear, the inexplicable shrinking. He regarded him rather as a
vast and powerful enemy, an evil, sinister influence, indeed, but one
against which he was armed with an armour not his own, with weapons
forged by great and terrible hands.
So they entered the drive and walked up among the gaunt black trees
towards the house.
Mount Prospect was a large, castellated modern building of stone. In a
neighbourhood where architectural monstrosities abounded, perhaps it
outdid them all in its almost brutal ugliness and vulgarity. It had been
built by Constantine Schuabe's grandfather.
The present owner was little at Walktown. His Parliamentary and social
duties bound him to London, and when he had time for recreation the
newspapers announced that he had "gone abroad," and until he was
actually seen again in the midst of his friends his disappearances were
mysterious and complete.
In London he had a private set of rooms at one of the great hotels.
But despite his rare visits, the hideous stone palace in the smoky North
held all the treasures which he himself had collected and which had been
left to him by his father.
It was understood that at his death the pictures and library were to
become the property of the citizens of Manchester, held in trust for
them by the corporation.
Schuabe took a key from his pocket and opened the heavy door in the
porch.
"I always keep the house full of servants," he said, "even when I am
away, for a dismantled house and caretakers are horrible. But they will
be all gone to bed now, and we must look after ourselves."
Opening an inner door, they passed through some heavy padded curtains,
which fell behind them with a dull thud, and came out into the great
hall.
Ugly as the shell of the great building was, the interior was very
different.
Here, set like a jewel in the midst of the harsh, forbidding country,
was a treasure-house of ordered beauty which had few equals in England.
Gortre drew a long, shuddering breath of pleasure as he looked round.
Every æsthetic influence within him responded to what he saw. And how
simple and severe it all was! Simply a great domed hall of white marble,
brilliantly lit by electric light hidden high above their heads. On
every side slender columns rose towards the dome, beyond them were tall
archways leading to the rooms of the house; dull, formless curtains,
striking no note of colour, hung from the archways.
In the centre of the vast space, exactly under the dome, was a large
pool of still green water, a square basin with abrupt edges, having no
fountain nor gaudy fish to break its smoothness.
And that was all, literally all. No rugs covered the tesselated floor,
not a single seat stood anywhere. There was not the slightest suggestion
of furniture or habitation. White, silent, and beautiful! As Gortre
stood there, he knew, as if some special message had been given him,
that he had come for some great hidden purpose, that it had been
foreordained. His whole soul seemed filled with a holy power, unseen
powers and principalities thronged round him like sweet but awful
friends.
He turned inquiringly towards his host. Schuabe's face was very pale;
the calm, cruel eyes seemed agitated; he was staring at the priest.
"Come," he said in a voice which seemed to be without its usual
confidence; "come, this place is cold--I have sometimes thought it a
little too bare and fantastic--come into the library; let us eat and
talk."
He turned and passed through the pillars on the right. Gortre followed
him through the dark, heavy curtains which led to the library.
They found themselves in an immense low-ceilinged room. The floor was
covered with a thick carpet of dull blue, and their feet made no sound
as they passed over it towards the blazing fire, which glowed in an old
oak framework of panelling and ingle-nook brought from an ancient
manor-house in Norfolk.
At one end of the room was a small organ, cased, modern as the mechanism
was, in priceless Renaissance painted panels from Florence and set in a
little octagonal alcove hung with white and yellow.
The enormous writing-table of dark wood stood in front of the fireplace
and was covered with books and papers. By it was a smaller circular
table laid with a white cloth and shining glass and silver for a meal.
"My valet is in bed," said Schuabe; "I hate any one about me at night,
and I prefer to wait on myself then. 'From the cool cisterns of the
midnight air my spirit drinks repose.' If you will wait here a few
moments I will go and get some food. I know where to find some. Pray
amuse yourself by looking at my books."
He left the room noiselessly, and Basil turned towards the walls. From
ceiling to floor the immense room was lined with shelves of enamelled
white wood, here and there carved with tiny florid bunches of fruit and
flowers--Jacobean work it seemed.
A few pictures here and there in spaces between the shelves--the hectic
flummery of a Whistler nocturne; a woman _avec cerises_, by Manet; a
green silk fan, painted with _fêtes gallantes_, by Conder--alone broke
the many-coloured monotony of the books.
Gortre had, from his earliest Oxford days, been a lover of books and a
collector in a moderate, discriminating way. As a rule he was roused to
a mild enthusiasm by a fine library. But as his practised eye ran over
the shelves, noting the beauty and variety of the contents, he was
unmoved by any special interest. His brain, still, so it seemed, under
some outside and compelling instinct or influence, was singularly
detached from ordinary interests and rejected the books' appeal.
Close to where he stood the shelves were covered with theological works.
Müller's _Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy_, Romane's _Reply to Dr.
Lightfoot_, De la Saussaye's _Manual_, stood together. His hand had been
wandering unconsciously over the books when it was suddenly arrested,
and stopped on a familiar black binding with plain gold letters. It was
an ordinary reference edition of the Holy Bible, the "pearl" edition
from the Oxford University Press.
There was something familiar and homely in the little dark volume, which
showed signs of constant use. A few feet away was a long shelf of Bibles
of all kinds, rare editions, expensive copies bound up with famous
commentaries--all the luxuries and _éditions de luxe_ of Holy Writ. But
the book beneath his fingers was the same size and shape as the one
which stood near his own bedside in his rooms--the one which his father
had given him when he went to Harrow, with "Flee youthful lusts" written
on the fly-leaf in faded ink. It was homelike and familiar.
He drew it out with a half smile at himself for choosing the one book he
knew by heart from this new wealth of literature.
Then a swift impulse came to him.
Gortre could not be called a superstitious man. The really religious
temperament, which, while not rejecting the aids of surface and symbol,
has seen far below them, rarely is "superstitious" as the word has come
to be understood.
The familiar touch, the pleasant sensation of the limp, rough leather on
his finger-balls gave him a feeling of security. But that very fact
seemed to remind him that some danger, some subtle mental danger, was
near. Was this Bible sent to him? he wondered. Were his eyes and hands
_directed_ to it by the vibrating, invisible presences which he felt
were near him? Who could say?
But he took the book in his right hand, breathed a prayer for help and
guidance--if it might so be that God, who watched him, would speak a
message of help--and opened it at random.
He was about to make a trial of that old mediæval practice of
"searching"--that harmless trial of faith which a modern hard-headed
cleric has analysed so cleverly, so completely, and so entirely
unsatisfactorily.
He opened the book, with his eyes fixed in front of him, and then let
them drop towards it. For a moment the small type was all blurred and
indistinct, and then one text seemed to leap out at him.
It was this--
"TAKE YE HEED, WATCH AND PRAY: FOR YE KNOW NOT WHEN THE TIME IS."
This, then, was his message! He was to _watch_, to pray, for the time
was at hand when--
The curtain slid aside, and Schuabe entered with a tray. He had changed
his morning coat for a long dressing-gown of camel's-hair, and wore
scarlet leather slippers.
Basil slipped the Bible back into its place and turned to face him.
"I live very simply," he said, "and can offer you nothing very
elaborate. But here is some cold chicken, a watercress salad, and a
bottle of claret."
They sat down on opposite sides of the round table and said little. Both
men were tired and hungry. After he had eaten, the clergyman bent his
head for a second or two in an inaudible grace, and made the sign of the
Cross before he rose from his chair.
"Symbol!" said Schuabe, with a cold smile, as he saw him.
The truce was over.
"What is that Cross to which all Christians bow?" he continued. "It was
the symbol of the water-god of the Gauls, a mere piece of their
iconography. The Phoenician ruin of Gigantica is built in the shape of a
cross; the Druids used it in their ceremonies; it was Thor's hammer long
before it became Christ's gibbet; it is used by the pagan Icelanders to
this day as a magic sign in connection with storms of wind. Why, the
symbol of Buddha on the reverse of a coin found at Ugain is the same
cross, the 'fylfot' of Thor. The cross was carved by Brahmins a thousand
years before Christ in the caves of Elephanta. I have seen it in India
with my own eyes in the hands of Siva Brahma and Vishnu! The worshipper
of Vishnu attributes as many virtues to it as the pious Roman Catholic
here in Salford to the Christian Cross. There is the very strongest
evidence that the origin of the cross is phallic! The _crux ansata_ was
the sign of Venus: it appears beside Baal and Astarte!"
"Very possibly, Mr. Schuabe," said Gortre, quietly. "Your knowledge on
such points is far wider than mine; but that does not affect
Christianity in the slightest."
"Of course not! Who ever said it did? But this reverence for the cross,
the instrument of execution on which an excellent teacher, and, as far
as we know, a really good man, suffered, angers me because it reminds me
of the absurd and unreasoning superstitions which cloud the minds of so
many educated men like yourself."
"Ah," said Gortre, quietly, "now we are 'gripped.' We have come to the
point."
"If you choose, Mr. Gortre," Schuabe answered; "you are an intellectual
man, and one intellectual man has a certain right to challenge another.
I was staying with Lord Haileybury the other day, and I spent two whole
mornings walking over the country with the Bishop of London, talking on
these subjects. He very ably endeavoured to bring physical and
psychological science into a single whole. But all he seemed to me to
prove was this, crystallised into an axiom or at least a postulate.
_Conscious volition is the ultimate source of all force._ It is his
belief that behind the sensuous and phenomenal world which gives it
form, existence, and activity, lies the ultimate invisible, immeasurable
power of Mind, conscious Will, of Intelligence, analogous to our own;
and--mark this essential corollary--_that man is in communication with
it_, and that was positively all he could do for me! I met him there
easily enough, but when he tried to prove a _revelation_--Christianity
--he utterly broke down. We parted very good friends, and I gave him a
thousand pounds for the East London poor fund. But still, say what you
will to me. I am here to listen."
He looked calmly at the young man with his unsmiling eyes. He held a
Russian cigarette in his fingers, and he waved it with a gentle gesture
of invitation as if from an immeasurable superiority.
And as Gortre watched him he knew that here was a brain and intelligence
far keener and finer than his own. But with all that certainty he felt
entirely undismayed, strangely uplifted.
"I have a message for you, Mr. Schuabe," he began, and the other bowed
slightly, without irony, at his words. "I have a message for you, one
which I have been sent here--I firmly believe--to deliver, but it is not
the message or the argument that you expect to hear."
He stopped for a short time, marshalling his mental forces, and noticing
a slight but perceptible look of surprise in his host's eyes.
"I know you better than you imagine, sir," he said gravely, "and not as
many other good and devout Christians see you. I tell you here to-night
with absolute certainty that you are the active enemy of Christ--I say
_active_ enemy."
The face opposite became slightly less tranquil, but the voice was as
calm as ever.
"You speak according to your lights, Mr. Gortre," he said. "I am no
Christian, but there is much good in Christianity. My words and writings
may have helped to lift the veil of superstition and hereditary
influences from the eyes of many men, and in that sense I am an enemy of
the Christian faith, I suppose. My sincerity is my only apology--if one
were needed. You speak with more harshness and less tolerance than I
should have thought it your pleasure or your duty to use."
Gortre rose. "Man," he cried, with sudden sternness, "I _know! You hate
our Lord_, and would work Him evil. You are as Judas was, for to-night
it is given me to read far into your brain."
Schuabe rose quickly from his chair and stood facing him. His face was
pallid, something looked out of his eyes which almost frightened the
other.
"What do you know?" he cried as if in a swift stroke of pain. "Who--?"
He stopped as if by a tremendous effort.
Some thought came to reassure him.
"Listen," he said. "I tell you, paid priest as you are, a blind man
leading the blind, that a day is coming when all your boasted fabric of
Christianity will disappear. It will go suddenly, and be swept utterly
away. And you, you shall see it. You shall be left naked of your faith,
stripped and bare, with all Christendom beside you. Your pale Nazarene
shall die amid the bitter laughter of the world, die as surely as He
died two thousand years ago, and no man or woman shall resurrect Him.
You know nothing, but you will remember my words of to-night, until you
also become as nothing and endure the inevitable fate of mankind."
He had spoken with extraordinary vehemence, hissing the words out with a
venom and malice, general rather than particular, from which the
Churchman shrunk, shuddering. There was such unutterable _conviction_ in
the thin, evil voice that for a moment the pain of it was like a spasm
of physical agony.
Schuabe had thrown down the mask; it was even as Gortre said, the soul
of Iscariot looked out from those eyes. The man saw the clergyman's
sudden shrinking.
The smile of a devil flashed over his face. Gortre had turned to him
once more and he saw it. And as he watched an awful certainty grew
within him, a thought so appalling that beside it all that had gone
before sank into utter insignificance.
He staggered for a moment and then rose to his full height, a fearful
loathing in his eyes, a scorn like a whip of fire in his voice.
Schuabe blanched before him, for he saw the truth in the priest's soul.
"As the Lord of Hosts is my witness," cried Gortre loudly, "I know you
now for what you are! YOU KNOW THAT CHRIST IS GOD!"
Schuabe shrank into his chair.
"ANTICHRIST!" pealed out the accusing voice. "You know the truth full
well, and, knowing, in an awful presumption you have dared to lift your
hand against God."
Then there was a dead silence in the room. Schuabe sat motionless by the
dying fire.
Very slowly the colour crept back into his cheeks. Slowly the strength
and light entered his eyes. He moved slightly.
At last he spoke.
"Go," he said. "Go, and never let me see your face again. You have
spoken. Yet I tell you still that such a blinding blow shall descend on
Christendom that----"
He rose quickly from his chair. His manner changed utterly with a
marvellous swiftness.
He went to the window and pulled aside the curtain. A chill and ghostly
dawn came creeping into the library.
"Let us make an end of this," he said quietly and naturally. "Of what
use for you and me, atoms that we are, to wrangle and thunder through
the night over an infinity in which we have neither part nor lot? Come,
get you homewards and rest, as I am about to do. The night has been an
unpleasant dream. Treat it as such. We differ on great matters. Let that
be so and we will forget it. You shall have a friend in me if you will."
Gortre, hardly conscious of any voluntary movements, his brain in a
stupor, the arteries all over his body beating like little drums, took
the hat and coat the other handed to him, and stumbled out of the house.
It was about five o'clock in the morning, raw, damp, and cold.
With a white face, drawn and haggard with emotion, he strode down the
hill. The keen air revived his physical powers, but his brain was
whirling, whirling, till connected thought was impossible.
What was it? What was the truth about that nightmare, that long, horrid
night in the warm, rich room? His powers were failing; he must see a
doctor after breakfast.
When he reached the foot of the hill, and was about to turn down the
road which led to his rooms, he stopped to rest for a moment.
From far behind the hill, over the dark, silhouetted houses of the
wealthy people who lived upon it, a huge, formless pall of purple smoke
was rising, and almost blotting out the dawn in a Titanic curtain of
gloom. The feeble new-born sun flickered redly through it, the colour of
blood. There was no wind that morning, and the fog and smoke from the
newly lit factory chimneys in the Irwell valley could not be dispersed.
It crept over the town like doom itself--menacing, vast, unconquerable.
He pulled out his latch-key with trembling hand, and turned to enter his
own door.
The cloud was spreading.
"Lighten our darkness," he whispered to himself, half consciously, and
then fell fainting on the door-step, where they found him soon, and
carried him in to the sick-bed, where he lay sick of a brain-fever a
month or more.
_Lighten our darkness!_
CHAPTER V
A LOST SOUL
In his great room at the British Museum, great, that is, for the private
room of an official, Robert Llwellyn sat at his writing-desk finishing
the last few lines of his article on the Hebrew inscription in mosaic,
which had been discovered at Kefr Kenna.
It was about four in the afternoon, growing dark with the peculiarly
sordid and hopeless twilight of a winter's afternoon in central London.
A reading lamp upon the desk threw a bright circle of light on the sheet
of white unlined paper covered with minute writing, which lay before the
keeper of Biblical antiquities in the British Museum.
The view from the tall windows was hideous and almost sinister in its
ugliness. Nothing met the eye but the gloomy backs of some of the great
dingy lodging-houses which surround the Museum, bedroom windows, back
bedrooms with dingy curtains, vulgarly unlovely.
The room itself was official looking, but far from uncomfortable. There
were many book-shelves lining the walls. Over them hung large-framed
photographs and drawings of inscriptions. On a stand by itself, covered
with a glass shade, was a duplicate of Dr. Schick's model of the Haram
Area during the Christian occupation of Jerusalem.
A dull fire glowed in the large open fireplace.
Llwellyn wrote a final line with a sigh of relief and then leaned far
back in his swivel chair. His face was gloomy, and his eyes were dull
with some inward communing, apparently of a disturbing and unpleasant
kind.
The door opened noiselessly (all the dwellers in the mysterious private
parts of the Museum walk without noise, and seem to have caught in their
voices something of that almost religious reverence emanating from
surroundings out of the immemorial past), and Lambert, the assistant
keeper and secretary, entered.
He drew up a chair to the writing-desk.
"The firman has been granted!" he said.
A quick interest shone on Professor Llwellyn's face.
"Ah!" he said, "it has come at last, then, after all these months of
waiting. I began to despair of the Turkish Government. I never thought
it would be granted. Then the Society will really begin to excavate at
last in the prohibited spots! Really that is splendid news, Lambert. We
shall have some startling results. Results, mind you, which will be
historical, historical! I doubt but that the whole theory of the Gospel
narrative will have to be reconstructed during the next few years!"
"It is quite possible," said Lambert. "But, on the other hand, it may
happen that nothing whatever is found."
Llwellyn nodded. Then a sudden thought seemed to strike him. "But how do
you know of this, Lambert?" he said, "and how has it happened?"
Lambert was a pleasant, open-faced fellow, young, and with a certain air
of distinction. He laughed gaily, and returned his chief's look of
interest with an affectionate expression in his eyes.
"Ah!" he said, "I have heard a great deal, sir, and I have some thing to
tell you which I am very happy about. It is gratifying to bring you the
first news. Last night I was dining with my uncle, Sir Michael
Manichoe, you know. The Home Secretary was there, a great friend of my
uncle's. You know the great interest he takes in the work of the
Exploration Society, and his general interest in the Holy Land?"
"Oh, of course," said Llwellyn. "He's the leader of the uncompromising
Protestant party in the House; owes his position to it, in fact. He
breakfasts with the Septuagint, lunches off the Gospels, and sups with
Revelations. Well?"
"It is owing to his personal interest in the work," continued Lambert,
"that the Sultan has granted the firman. After dinner he took me aside,
and we had a longish talk. He was very gracious, and most eager to hear
of all our recent work here, and additions to the collections in our
department. I was extremely pleased, as you may imagine. He spoke of
you, sir, as the greatest living authority--wouldn't hear of Conrad
Schick or Clermont-Ganneau in the same breath with you. He went on to
say in confidence, and he hinted to me that I had his permission to tell
you, though he didn't say as much in so many words, that they are going
to offer you knighthood in a few days!"
A sudden flush suffused the face of the elder man. Then he laughed a
little.
"Your news is certainly unexpected, my dear boy," he said, "and, for my
part, knighthood is no very welcome thing personally. But it would be
idle to deny that I'm pleased. It means recognition of my work, you see.
In that way only, it is good news that you have brought."
"That's just it, Professor," the young man answered enthusiastically.
"That's exactly it. Sir Robert Llwellyn, or Mr. Llwellyn, of course,
cannot matter to you personally. But it _is_ a fitting and graceful
recognition of the _work_. It is a proper thing that the greatest
living authority on the antiquities and history of Asia Minor should be
officially recognised. It encourages all of us, you see, Professor."
The young man's generous excitement pleased Llwellyn. He placed his hand
upon his shoulder with a kindly, affectionate gesture.
At that moment a messenger knocked and entered with a bundle of letters,
which had just arrived by the half-past-four post, and, with a
congratulatory shake of the hand, Lambert left his chief to his
correspondence.
The great specialist, when he had left the room, rose from his chair,
went towards the door with swift, cat-like steps, and locked it. Then he
returned to the desk, opened a deep drawer with a key which he drew from
his watch-pocket, and took a silver-mounted flask of brandy from the
receptacle. He poured a small dose of brandy into the metal cup and
drank it hurriedly.
Then he leaned back once more in his chair.
Professor Llwellyn's face was familiar to all readers of the illustrated
press. He was one of the few famous _savants_ whose name was a household
word not only to his colleagues and the learned generally, but also to
the great mass of the general public.
In every department of effort and work there are one or two men whose
personality seems to catch the popular eye.
His large, clean-shaven face might have belonged to a popular comedian;
his portly figure had still nothing of old age about it. He was
sprightly and youthful in manner despite his fat. The small, merry,
green eyes--eyes which had yet something furtive and "alarmed" in them
at times--stood for a concrete personification of good humour. His
somewhat sensual lips were always smiling and jolly on public occasions.
His enormous erudition and acknowledged place among the learned of
Europe went so strangely with his appearance that the world was pleased
and tickled by the paradox.
It was a fine thing to think that the spectacled Dry-as-dust was gone.
That era of animated mummy was over, and when The World read of
Professor Llwellyn at a first night of the Lyceum, or the guest of
honour at the Savage Club, it forgot to jeer at his abstruse erudition.
Scholars admitted his scholarship, and ordinary men and women welcomed
him as _homme du monde_.
The Professor replaced the flask in the drawer and locked it. His hand
trembled as he did so. The light which shone on the white face showed it
eloquent with dread and despair. Here, in the privacy of the huge,
comfortable room, was a soul in an anguish that no mortal eyes could
see.
The Professor had locked the door.
The letters which the messenger had brought were many in number and
various in shape and style.
Five or six of them, which bore foreign stamps and indications that they
came from the Continental antiquarian societies, he put on one side to
be opened and replied to on the morrow.
Then he took up an envelope addressed to him in firm black writing and
turned it over. On the flap was the white, embossed oval and crown,
which showed that it came from the House of Commons. His florid face
became paler than before, the flesh of it turned grey, an unpleasant
sight in so large and ample a countenance, as he tore it open. The
letter ran as follows:
"HOUSE OF COMMONS.
"DEAR LLWELLYN,--I am writing to you now to say that I am quite
determined that the present situation shall not continue. You must
understand, finally, that my patience is exhausted, and that,
unless the large sum you owe me is repaid within the next week, my
solicitors have my instructions, which are quite unalterable, to
proceed in bankruptcy against you without further delay.
"The principal and interest now total to the sum of fourteen
thousand pounds. Your promises to repay, and your innumerable
requests for more time in which to do so, now extend over a period
of three years. I have preserved all your letters on the subject at
issue between us, and I find that, so far from decreasing your
indebtedness when your promises became due, you have almost
invariably asked me for further sums, which, in foolish confidence,
as I feel now, I have advanced to you.
"It would be superfluous to point out to you what bankruptcy would
mean to you in your position. Ruin would be the only word. And it
would be no ordinary bankruptcy. I have a by no means uncertain
idea where these large sums have gone, and my knowledge can hardly
fail to be shared by others in London society.
"I have still a chance to offer you, however, and, perhaps, you
will find me by no means the tyrant you think.
"There are certain services which you can do me, and which, if you
fall in with my views, will not only wipe off the few thousands of
your indebtedness, but provide you with a capital sum which will
place you above the necessity for any such financial manoeuvres in
the future as your--shall I say _infatuation_?--has led you to
resort to in the past.
"If you care to lunch with me at my rooms in the Hotel Cecil, at
two o'clock, the day after to-morrow--Friday--we may discuss your
affairs quietly. If not, then I must refer you to my solicitors
entirely.
"Yours sincerely,
"CONSTANTINE SCHUABE."
The big man gave a horrid groan--half snarl, half groan--the sound
which comes from a strong animal desperate and at bay.
He crossed over to the fireplace and pushed the letter down into a
glowing cavern among the coals, holding it there with the poker until it
was utterly consumed and fluttered up the chimney from his sight in a
sheet of ash--the very colour of his relaxed and pendulous cheeks.
He opened another letter, a small, fragile thing written on mauve paper,
in a large, irregular hand--a woman's hand:--
"15 BLOOMSBURY COURT MANSIONS.
"DEAR BOB--I shall expect you at the flat to-night at eleven,
_without fail_. You'd better come, or things which you won't like
will happen.
"You've just _got_ to come.--Yours, GERTRUDE."
He put this letter into his pocket and began to walk the room in long,
silent strides.
A little after five he put on a heavy fur coat and left the now silent
and gloomy halls of the Museum.
The lamps of Holborn were lit and a blaze of light came from Oxford
Circus, where the winking electric advertisements had just begun their
work on the tops of the houses.
A policeman saluted the Professor as he passed, and was rewarded by a
genial smile and jolly word of greeting, which sent a glow of pleasure
through his six feet.
Llwellyn walked steadily on towards the Marble Arch and Edgeware Road.
The continual roar of the traffic helped his brain. It became active and
able to think, to plan once more. The steady exercise warmed his blood
and exhilarated him.
There began to be almost a horrid pleasure in the stress of his
position. The danger was so immediate and fell; the blow would be so
utterly irreparable, that he was near to enjoying his walk while he
could still consider the thing from a detached point of view.
Throughout life that had always been his power. A strange resilience had
animated him in all chances and changes of fortune.
He was that almost inhuman phenomenon, a sensualist with a soul.
For many years, while his name became great in Europe and the solid
brilliancy of his work grew in lustre as he in age, he had lived two
lives, finding an engrossing joy in each.
The lofty scientific world of which he was an ornament had no points of
contact with that other and unspeakable half-life. Rumours had been
bruited, things said in secret by envious and less distinguished men,
but they had never harmed him. His colleagues hardly understood them and
cared nothing. His work was all-sufficient; what did it matter if
smaller people with forked tongues hissed horrors of his private life?
The other circles--the lost slaves of pleasure--knew him well and were
content. He came into the night-world a welcome guest. They knew nothing
of his work or fame beyond dim hintings of things too uninteresting for
them to bother about.
He turned down the Edgeware Road and then into quiet Upper Berkeley
Street, a big, florid, prosperous-looking man, looking as though the
world used him well and he was content with all it had to offer.
His house was but a few doors down the street and he went up-stairs to
dress at once. He intended to dine at home that night.
His dressing-room, out of which a small bedroom opened, was large and
luxurious. A clear fire glowed upon the hearth; the carpet was soft and
thick. The great dressing-table with its three-sided mirror was covered
with brushes and ivory jars, gleaming brightly in the rays of the little
electric lights which framed the mirror. A huge wardrobe, full of
clothes neatly folded and put away, suggested a man about town, a dandy
with many sartorial interests. An arm-chair of soft green leather,
stamped with red-gold pomegranates, stood by a small black table
stencilled with orange-coloured bees. On the table stood a cigarette-box
of finely plaited cream-coloured straw, woven over silver and
cedar-wood, and with Llwellyn's initials in turquoise on one lid.
He threw off his coat and sank into the chair with a sigh of pleasure at
the embracing comfort of it. Then his fingers plunged into the tea which
filled the box on the table and drew out a tiny yellow cigarette.
He smoked in luxurious silence.
He had already half forgotten the menacing letter from Constantine
Schuabe, the imperative summons to the flat in Bloomsbury Court
Mansions. This was a moment of intense physical ease. The flavour of his
saffron Salonika cigarette, a tiny glass of garnet-coloured _cassis_
which he had poured out, were alike excellent. All day long he had been
at work on a brilliant monograph dealing with the new Hebrew mosaics.
Only two other living men could have written it. But his work also had
fallen out of his brain. At that moment he was no more than a great
animal, soulless, with the lusts of the flesh pouring round him,
whispering evil and stinging his blood.
A timid knock fell upon the door outside. It opened and Mrs. Llwellyn
came slowly in.
The Professor's wife was a tall, thin woman. Her untidy clothes hung
round her body in unlovely folds. Her complexion was muddy and
unwholesome; but the unsmiling, withered lips revealed a row of fair,
white, even teeth. It was in her eyes that one read the secret of this
lady. They were large and blue, once beautiful, so one might have
fancied. Now the light had faded from them and they were blurred and
full of pain.
She came slowly up to her husband's chair, placing one hand timidly upon
it.
"Oh, is that you?" he said, not brutally, but with a complete and utter
indifference. "I shall want some dinner at home to-night. I shall be
going out about ten to a supper engagement. See about it now, something
light. And tell one of the maids to bring up some hot water."
"Yes, Robert," she said, and went out with no further word, but sighing
a little as she closed the door quietly.
They had been married fifteen years. For fourteen of them he had hardly
ever spoken to her except in anger at some household accident. On her
own private income of six hundred a year she had to do what she could to
keep the house going. Llwellyn never gave her anything of the thousand a
year which was his salary at the Museum, and the greater sums he earned
by his work outside it. She knew no one, the Professor went into none
but official society, and indeed but few of his colleagues knew that he
was a married man. He treated the house as a hotel, sleeping there
occasionally, breakfasting, and dressing. His private rooms were the
only habitable parts of the house. All the rest was old, faded, and
without comfort. Mrs. Llwellyn spent most of her life with the two
servants in the kitchen.
She always swept and tidied her husband's rooms herself. That afternoon
she had built and coaxed the fire with her own hands.
She slept in a small room at the top of the house, next to the maids,
for company.
This was her life.
Over the head of the little iron bedstead of her room hung a great
crucifix.
That was her hope.
When Llwellyn was rioting in nameless places she prayed for him during
the night. She prayed for him, for herself, and for the two servant
girls, very simply--that Heaven might receive them all some day.
The maid brought up some dinner for the Professor--a little soup, a
sole, and some _camembert_.
He ate slowly, and smoked a short light-brown cigar with his coffee.
Then he bathed, put on evening clothes, dressing himself with care and
circumspection, and left the house.
In the Edgeware Road he got into a hansom and told the man to drive him
to Bloomsbury Court Mansions.
CHAPTER VI
THE WHISPER
Robert Llwellyn paid the cabman outside the main gateway which led into
the courtyard, and dismissed him.
The Court Mansions were but a few hundred yards from the British Museum
itself, though he never visited them in the day time. A huge building,
like a great hotel, rose skyward in a square. In the quadrangle in the
centre, which was paved with asphalt, was an ornamental fountain
surrounded by evergreen plants in tubs.
The Professor strode under the archway, his feet echoing in the
stillness, and passed over the open space, which was brilliantly lit
with the hectic radiance of arc lamps. He entered one of the doorways,
and turning to the right of the ground-floor, away from the lift which
was in waiting to convey passengers to the higher storeys, he stopped at
No. 15.
He took a latch-key from his pocket, opened the door, and entered. It
was very warm and close inside, and very silent also. The narrow hall
was lit by a crimson-globed electric lamp. It was heavily carpeted, and
thick curtains of plum-coloured plush, edged with round, fluffy balls of
the same colour, hung over the doors leading into it.
He hung his hat up on a peg, and stood perfectly silent for a moment in
the warm, scented air. He could hear no sound but the ticking of a
French clock. The flat was obviously empty; and pulling aside one of
the curtains, he went into the dining-room.
The place was full of light. Gertrude Hunt, or her maid, had, with
characteristic carelessness, forgotten to turn off the switches.
Llwellyn sat down and looked around him. How familiar the place was! The
casual visitor would have recognised at a glance that the occupant of
the room belonged to the dramatic profession.
Photographs abounded everywhere. The satinwood overmantel was crowded
with them in heavy frames of chased silver. Bold enlargements hung on
the crimson walls; they were upright, and stacked in disorderly heaps
upon the grand piano.
All were of one woman--a dark Jewish girl with eyes full of a fixed
fascination, a trained regard of allurement.
The eyes pursued him everywhere; bold and inviting, he was conscious of
their multitude, and moved uneasily.
The dining-table was in a curious litter. Half-empty cups of egg-shell
china stood upon a tray of Japanese lacquer inlaid with ivory and
silver; a cake basket held pink and honey-coloured bon-bons, among which
some cigarette ends had fallen. Two empty bottles, which had held
champagne, stood side by side, cheek by jowl, with a gilt tray, on which
was a miniature methyl lamp and some steel curling tongs.
The arm-chairs were upholstered in pink satin. On one of them was a long
fawn-coloured tailor-made coat, hanging collar downwards over the back.
A handful of silver and a tiny gun-metal cigarette case had dropped out
of a pocket on to the seat of the chair.
The whole place reeked with a well-known perfume--an evil, sickly smell
of ripe lilies and the acrid smoke of Egyptian tobacco. A frilled
dressing jacket covered with yellowish lace lay in a tumbled heap upon
the hearth-rug.
The room would have struck an ordinary visitor with a sense of nausea
almost like a physical blow. There was something sordidly shameless
about it. The vulgarest and most material of Circes held sway among all
this gaudy and lavish disorder. The most sober-living and
innocent-minded man, brought suddenly into such a place, would have
known it instantly for what it was, and turned to fly as from a
pestilence.
A week or two before, a picture of this den had appeared in one of the
illustrated papers. Underneath the photograph had been printed--
"THE BOUDOIR OF ONE OF LONDON'S POPULAR FAVOURITES.
MISS GERTRUDE HUNT AT HOME."
Below had been another picture--"Miss Hunt in her new motor-car." Robert
Llwellyn had paid four hundred pounds for the machine.
The big man seemed to fit into these surroundings as a hand into a
glove. In his room at the Museum, on a platform at the Royal Society,
his intellect always animated his face. In such places his personality
was eminent, as his work also.
Here he was changed. Silenus was twin to him; he sniffed the perfume
with pleasure; he stretched himself to the heat and warmth like a great
cat. He was an integral part of the _mise-en-scène_--lost, and arrogant
of his degradation.
A key clicked in the lock, there was a rustling of silk, and Gertrude
Hunt swept into the room.
"So you're come to time, then," she said in a deep, musical voice, but
spoilt by an unpleasing Cockney twang. "I'm dead tired. The theatre was
crammed; I had to sing the _Coon of Coons_ twice. Get me a
brandy-and-soda, Bob. There's a good boy--the decanter's in the
sideboard."
She threw off her long cloak and sank into a chair. The sticky
grease-paint of the theatre had hardly been removed. She looked, as she
said, worn out.
They chatted for a few moments on indifferent subjects, and she lit a
cigarette. When she took it from her lips, Llwellyn noticed that the end
was crimsoned by the paint upon them.
"Well," she said at length, "somehow or other you must pay those bills I
sent on to you. They _must_ be paid. I can't do it. I'm only getting
twenty-five pounds from the theatre now, and that's just about enough to
pay my drink bill!"
Llwellyn's face clouded. "I'm just about at my last gasp myself," he
said. "I'm threatened with bankruptcy as it is."
"Oh, cheer up!" she cried. "Here, have a B. and S. I do hate to hear any
one talk like that. It gives me the hump at once. Now look here, Bob.
You know that I like you better than any one else. We've been pals for
seven or eight years now, and I'd rather have you a thousand times than
the others. You understand that, don't you?"
He nodded back at her. His face was pleased at her expression of
affection, at the kindness of this dancing-girl to the great scholar!
"But," she continued, "you know me, and you know that I can't go on
unless I have what I want all the time. And I want a lot, too. If you
can't give it me, Bob, it must be some one else--that's all. Captain
Parker's ready to do anything, any time. He's almost a millionaire, you
know. Can't you raise any 'oof anyhow? If I'd a thousand at once, and
another in a week or two, I could manage for a bit. But I _must_ have a
river-house at Shepperton. That cat, Lulu Wallace, has one, and an
electric launch and all. What about your German friend--the M.P.? _He's_
got tons of stuff. Touch him for a bit more."
"Had a letter from him this afternoon," said Llwellyn, "with a demand
for about fourteen thousand that I owe him now. Threatens to sell me up.
But there was something which looked brighter at the end of the letter,
though I couldn't quite make out what he was driving at."
"What was that?"
"The tone of the letter changed; it had been nasty before. He said that
I could do him a service for which he would not only wipe out the old
debt, but for which I could get a lot more money."
"You'll go to him at once, Bob, won't you?"
"I suppose I must. There's no way out of it. I can't think, though, how
I can do him any service. He's a dabbler, an amateur in my own work, but
he's not going to pay a good many thousands for any help in _that_."
"Let it alone till you find out," she said, with the instinctive dislike
of her class to the prolonged discussion of anything unpleasant. She got
up and rang the bell for her maid and supper.
For some reason Llwellyn could eat nothing. A weight oppressed him--a
presage of danger and disaster. The unspeakable mental torments that the
vicious man who is highly educated undergoes--torments which assail him
in the very act and article of his pleasures--have never been adequately
described. "What a frail structure his honours and positions were," he
thought as the woman chatted of the _coulisses_ and the blackguard news
of the _demi-monde_. His indulgent life had acted on the Professor with
a dire physical effect. His nerves were unstrung and he became
childishly superstitious. The slightest hint of misfortune set his brain
throbbing with a horrid fear. The spectre of overwhelming disaster was
always waiting, and he could not exorcise it.
The two accidental and trivial facts that the knives at his place were
crossed, and that he spilt the salt as he was passing it to his
mistress, set him crossing himself with nervous rapidity.
The girl laughed at him, but she was interested nevertheless. For the
moment they were on an intellectual level. He explained that the sign of
the Cross was said to avert misfortune, and she imitated him clumsily.
Llwellyn thought nothing of it at the time, but the meaningless travesty
came back afterwards when he thought over that eventful night.
Surely the holy sign of God's pain was never so degraded as now.
Their conversation grew fitful and strained. The woman was physically
tired by her work at the theatre, and the dark cloud of menace crept
more rapidly into the man's brain. The hour grew late. At last Llwellyn
rose to go.
"You'll get the cash somehow, dear, won't you?" she said with tired
eagerness.
"Yes, yes, Gertie," he replied. "I suppose I can get it somehow. I'll
get home now. If it's a clear night I shall walk home. I'm
depressed--it's liver, I suppose--and I need exercise."
"Have a drink before you go?"
"No, I've had two, and I can't take spirits at this time."
He went out with a perfunctory and uninterested kiss. She came to the
archway with him.
London was now quite silent in its most mysterious and curious hour.
The streets were deserted, but brilliantly lit by the long row of lamps.
They stood talking for a moment or two in the quadrangle.
"Queer!" she said; "queer, isn't it, just now? I walked back from the
Covent Garden ball once at this time. Makes you feel lonesome. Well, so
long, Bob. I shall have a hot bath and go to bed."
The Professor's feet echoed loudly on the flags as he approached the
open space. Never had he seemed to hear the noises of his own progress
so clearly before. It was disconcerting, and emphasised the fact of his
sole movement in this lighted city of the dead.
On the island in the centre of the cross-roads he suddenly caught sight
of a tall policeman standing motionless under a lamp. The fellow seemed
a figure of metal hypnotised by the silence.
Llwellyn walked onwards, when, just as he was passing the Oxford Music
Hall, he became conscious of quick footsteps behind him. He turned
quickly, and a man came up. He was of middle size, with polite, watchful
eyes and clean shaven.
The stranger put his hand into the pocket of his neat, unobtrusive black
overcoat and drew out a letter.
"For you, sir," he said in calm, ordinary tones.
The Professor stared at him in uncontrollable surprise and took the
envelope, opening it under a lamp. This was the note. He recognised the
handwriting at once.
"HOTEL CECIL.
"DEAR LLWELLYN,--Kindly excuse the suddenness of my request and
come down to the Cecil with my valet. I have sent him to meet you.
I want to settle our business to-night, and I am certain that we
shall be able to make some satisfactory arrangement. I know you do
not go to bed early.--Most sincerely yours,
"CONSTANTINE SCHUABE."
"This is a very sudden request," he said to the servant rather
doubtfully, but somewhat reassured by the friendly signature of the
note. "Why, it's two o'clock in the morning!"
"Extremely sorry to trouble you, sir," replied the valet civilly, "but
my master's strict orders were that I should find you and deliver the
note. He told me that you would probably be visiting at Bloomsbury Court
Mansions, so I waited about, hoping to meet you. I brought the _coupé_,
sir, in case we should not be able to get you a cab."
Following the direction of his glance, Llwellyn saw that a small
rubber-tired brougham to seat two people was coming slowly down the
road. The coachman touched his hat as the Professor got in, and, turning
down Charing Cross Road, in a few minutes they drove rapidly into the
courtyard of the hotel.
Schuabe had not been established at the Cecil for any length of time.
Though he owned a house in Curzon Street, this was let for a long period
to Miss Mosenthal, his aunt, and he had hitherto lived in chambers at
the Albany.
But he found the life at the hotel more convenient and suited to his
temperament. His suite of rooms was one of the most costly even in that
great river palace of to-day, but such considerations need never enter
into his life.
The utter unquestioned freedom of such a life, its entire liberation
from any restraint or convention, suited him exactly.
Llwellyn had never visited Schuabe in his private apartments before at
any time. As he was driven easily to the meeting he nerved himself for
it, summoning up all his resolution. He swept aside the enervating
influences of the last few hours.
Schuabe was waiting in the large sitting-room with balconies upon which
he could look down upon the embankment and the river. It was his
favourite among all the rooms of the suite.
He looked gravely and also a little curiously at the Professor as he
entered the room. There was a question in his eyes; the guest had a
sensation of being measured and weighed with some definite purpose.
The greeting was cordial enough. "I am very sorry, Llwellyn, to catch
you suddenly like this," Schuabe said, "but I should like to settle the
business between us without delay. I have certain proposals to make you,
and if we agree upon them there will be much to consider, as the thing
is a big one. But before we talk of this let me offer you something to
eat."
The Professor had recovered his hunger. The chill of the night air, the
sudden excitement of the summons, and, though he did not realise it, the
absence of patchouli odours in his nostrils, had recalled an appetite.
The space and air of the huge room, with its high roof, was soothing
after Bloomsbury Court Mansions.
Supper was spread for two on a little round table by the windows.
Schuabe ate little, but watched the other with keen, detective eyes,
talking meanwhile of ordinary, trivial things. Nothing escaped him, the
little gleam of pleasure in Llwellyn's eyes at the freshness of the
caviare, the Spanish olives he took with his partridge--rejecting the
smaller French variety--the impassive watchful eyes saw it all.
It was too late for coffee, Llwellyn said, when the man brought it, in a
long-handled brass pan from Constantinople, but he took a _kümmel_
instead.
The two men faced each other on each side of the table. Both were
smoking. For a moment there was silence; the critical time was at hand.
Then Schuabe spoke. His voice was cold and steady and very businesslike.
As he talked the voice seemed to wrap round Llwellyn like steel bands.
There was something relentless and inevitable about it; bars seemed
rising as he spoke.
"I am going to be quite frank with you, Llwellyn," he said, "and you
will find it better to be quite frank with me."
He took a paper from the pocket of his smoking jacket and referred to it
occasionally.
"You owe me now about fourteen thousand pounds?"
"Yes, it is roughly that."
"Please correct me if I am wrong in any point. Your salary at the
British Museum is a thousand pounds a year, and you make about fifteen
hundred more."
"Yes, about that, but how do you----"
"I have made it my business to know everything, Professor. For example,
they are about to offer you knighthood."
Llwellyn stirred uneasily, and the hand which stretched out for another
cigarette shook a little.
"I need hardly point out to you," the cold words went on, and a certain
sternness began to enforce them, "I need hardly point out that if I were
to take certain steps, your position would be utterly ruined."
"Bankruptcy need not entirely ruin a man."
"It would ruin you. You see _I know where the money has gone_. Your
private tastes are nothing to me, and it is not my business if you
choose to spend a fortune on a cocotte. But in your position, as the
very mainspring and arm of the Higher Criticism of the Bible, the
revelations which would most certainly be made would ruin you
irreparably. Your official posts would all go at once, your name would
become a public scandal everywhere. In England one may do just what one
likes if only one does not in any way, by reason of position or
attainments, belong to the nation. You _do_ belong to the nation. You
can never defy public opinion. With the ethical point of view I have
nothing personally to do. But to speak plainly, in the eyes of the great
mass of English people you would be stamped as an irredeemably vicious
man, if everything came out. That is what they would call you. At one
blow everything--knighthood, honour, place--all would flash away.
Moreover, you would have to give up the other side of your life. There
would be no more suppers with Phryne or rides to Richmond in the new
motor-car."
He laughed, a low, contemptuous laugh which stung. Llwellyn's face had
grown pale. His large, white fingers picked uneasily at the table-cloth.
His position was very clearly shown to him, with greater horror and
vividness than ever it had come to him before, even in his moments of
acutest depression.
The overthrow would be indeed utter and complete. With the greedy
imagination of the sensualist he saw himself living in some cheap
foreign town, Bruges perhaps, or Brussels, upon his wife's small income,
bereft alike of work and pleasure.
"All you say is true," he murmured as the other made an end. "I am in
your power. It is best to be plain about these things. What is your
alternative?"
"My alternative, if you accept it, will mean certain changes to you.
First of all, it will be necessary for you to obtain a year's leave from
the British Museum. I had thought of asking you to resign your position,
but that will not be necessary, I think, now. This can be arranged with
a specialist easily enough. Even if your health does not really warrant
it, a word from me to Sir James Fyfe will manage that. You will have to
travel. In return for your services and your absolute secrecy--though
when you hear my proposals you will realise that perhaps in the whole
history of the world never was secrecy so important to any man's
safety--I will do as follows. I will wipe off your debt at once. I will
pay you ten thousand pounds in cash this week, and during the year, as
may be agreed upon between us, I will make over forty thousand pounds
more to you. In all fifty thousand pounds, exclusive of your debt."
His voice had not been raised, nor did it show any excitement during
this tremendous proposal. The effect on Llwellyn was very different. He
rose from his chair, trembling with excitement, staring with bloodshot
eyes at the beautiful chiselled face below.
"You--you _mean_ it?" he said huskily.
The millionaire made a single confirmatory gesture.
Then the whole magnitude and splendour of the offer became gradually
plain to him in all its significance.
"I suppose," he said, "that, as the payment is great, the risk is
commensurate."
"There will be none if you do what I shall ask properly. Only two other
men living would do it, and, first and foremost, you will have to guard
against _their_ vigilance."
"Then, in God's name, what do you ask?" Llwellyn almost shouted. The
tension was almost unbearable.
Schuabe rose from his seat. For the first time the Professor saw that he
was terribly agitated. His eyes glowed, the apple in his throat worked
convulsively.
"_You are to change the history of the world!_"
He drew Llwellyn into the very centre of the room, and held him firmly
by the elbows. Tall as the Professor was, Schuabe was taller, and he
bent and whispered into the other's ear for a full five minutes.
There was no sound in the room but the low hissing of his sibilants.
Llwellyn's face became white, and then ashen grey. His whole body seemed
to shrink from his clothes; he trembled terribly.
Then he broke away from his host and ran to the fireplace with an odd,
jerky movement, and sank cowering into an arm-chair, filled with an
unutterable dread.
* * * * *
As morning stole into the room the Professor took a bundle of bills and
acknowledgements from Schuabe and thrust them into the fire with a great
sob of relief.
Then he turned into a bedroom and sank into the deep slumber of absolute
exhaustion.
He did not go to the Museum that day.
CHAPTER VII
LAST WORDS AT WALKTOWN
The great building of the Walktown national schools blazed with light.
Every window was a patch of vivid orange in the darkness of the walls.
The whole place was pervaded by a loud, whirring hum of talk and
laughter and an incredible rattle of plates and saucers.
In one of the classrooms down-stairs Helena Byars, with a dozen other
ladies of the parish, presided over a scene of intense activity. Huge
urns of tea ready mixed with the milk and sugar, were being carried up
the stone stairs to the big schoolroom by willing hands. Piles of thick
sandwiches of ham, breakfast-cups of mustard, hundreds of slices of
moist wedge-shaped cake covered the tables, lessening rapidly as they
were carried away to the crowded rooms above.
A Lancashire church tea-party was in full swing, for this was the
occasion when Basil Gortre was to say an official farewell to the people
among whom he had worked in the North.
In the tea-room itself several hundred people were making an enormous
meal at long tables, under flaring, naked gas-lights, which sent
shimmering vapours of heat up to the pitch-pine beams of the room above.
On the walls of the schoolroom hung long, map-like pictures, heavily
glazed. Some of them were representations of foreign animals, or trees
and plants, with the names printed below each in thick black type.
Others represented scenes from the life of Christ, and though somewhat
stiff and wooden, showed clearly the immense strides that educational
art has taken during the past few years.
At one end of the room was a platform running along its length. Some
palms and tree-ferns in pots, chairs, a grand piano, and some music
stands, promised a concert when tea should be over.
All the ladies of the parish were acting as attendants, or presiding at
the urns on each table. There could be no doubt that the people were in
a state of high good humour and enjoyment. Every now and again a great
roar of laughter would break through the prevailing hum from one table
or another. Despite the almost stifling heat and a mixed odour of
humanity and ham, which a sensitive person might have shrunk from, the
rough, merry Lancashire folk were happy as may be.
Basil Gortre, in his long, black coat, his skin somewhat pale from his
long illness, walked from table to table, spending a few minutes at
each. His face was wreathed in perpetual smiles, and roars of laughter
followed each sally of his wit, a homely cut-and-thrust style of humour
adapted to his audience. The fat mothers of families, wives of
prosperous colliers and artisans, with their thick gold earrings and
magenta frocks, beamed motherhood and kindliness at him. The
Sunday-school teachers giggled and blushed with pleasure when he spoke.
The vicar, smiling paternally as was his wont, walked up and down the
gangways also, toying with the _pince-nez_ at his breast, and very
successfully concealing the fact from every one that he was by no means
in the seventh heaven of happiness. Tea-parties, so numerous and popular
in the North, were always somewhat of a trial to him.
Basil and Mr. Byars met in the middle of the room when the tea was
nearly over. Tears were gleaming in the eyes of the younger man.
"It is hard to leave them all," he said. "How good and kind they are,
how hearty! And these are the people I thought disliked me and
misunderstood me. I resented what I thought was a vulgar familiarity and
a coarse dislike. But how different they are beneath the surface!"
"They have warm, loyal hearts, Basil," said the vicar. "It is a pity
that such uncouth manners and exteriors should go with them. Surface
graces may not mean much, but there is no doubt they have a tremendous
influence over the human mind. During your illness the whole parish
thought of little else, I really believe. And to-night you will have
very practical evidence of their friendship. You know, of course, that
there is going to be a presentation?"
"Yes. I couldn't help knowing that much, though I wish they wouldn't."
"It is very good of them. Now I shall call for grace."
The vicar made his way on to the platform and loudly clapped his hands.
The tumult died suddenly away into silence, punctuated here and there by
a belated rattle of a teacup and the spasmodic choking of some one
endeavouring to bolt a large piece of cake in a hurry.
"We will now sing grace," Mr. Byars said in a clear and audible
voice,--"the _Old Hundred_, following our usual custom."
As he spoke a little, bearded man in a frock-coat clambered up beside
him. This was Mr. Cuthbert, the organist of the parish church. The
little man pulled a tuning-fork from his pocket and struck it on the
back of a chair.
Then he held it to his ear for a moment. The people had all risen, and
the room was now quite silent.
"La!" sang the little organist, giving the note in a long, melodious
call.
He raised his hand, gave a couple of beats in the air, and the famous
old hymn burst out royally. The great volume of sound seemed too fierce
and urgent even for that spacious room. It pressed against the ear-drums
almost with pain, though sung with the perfect time and tune which are
the heritage of the sweet-voiced North-country folk:--
"_All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice!_"
How hearty it was! How strong and confident!
As Basil Gortre listened his heart expanded in love and fellowship
towards these brother Christians. The dark phantoms which had rioted in
his sick brain during the long weeks of his illness lay dead and
harmless now. The monstrous visions of a conventional and formal
Christianity, covering a world of secret and gibing atheism, seemed
incredibly far removed from the glorious truth, as these strong, homely
people sang a full-voiced _ave_ to the great brooding Trinity of Power
and Love unseen, but all around them.
Who was he to be refined and too dainty for his uses? There seemed
nothing incongruous in the picture before his eyes. The litter of broken
ham, the sloppy cups, the black-coated men with brilliant sky-blue satin
ties, the women with thick gnarled hands and clothes the colour of a
copper kettle, what were they now but his very own brethren, united in
this burst of praise?
And he joined in the doxology with all his heart and voice, his clear
tenor soaring joyously above the rest:
"_To FATHER, SON, and HOLY GHOST,
The GOD Whom Heaven and earth adore,
From men and from the Angel-host
Be praise and glory evermore. Amen._"
It ceased with suddenness. There was the satisfied silence of a second,
and then the attendant helpers, assisted by the feasters, fell swiftly
upon the tables. Cloths and crockery vanished like snow melting in
sunlight, and as each table was laid bare it was turned up by a patent
arrangement, and became a long bench with a back, which was added to the
rows of seats facing the platform. As each iron-supported seat was
pushed noisily into its place it was filled up at once with a laughing
crowd, replete but active, smacking anticipatory chops over the
entertainment and speech-making to come.
Mr. Cuthbert, a painstaking pianist, whose repertoire was noisily
commonplace, opened the concert with a solo.
Songs and recitations followed. All were well received by an audience
which was determined to enjoy itself, but it was obvious that the real
event of the gathering was eagerly awaited.
At last the eventful moment arrived. A table covered with green baize
and bearing some objects concealed by a cloth was carried on the
platform, and a row of chairs placed on either side of it.
The vicar, Basil, a strange clergyman, and a little group of
black-coated churchwardens and sidesmen filed upon the platform amid
tumultuous cheering and clapping of hands.
Mr. Pryde, the solicitor, rose first, and pronounced a somewhat pompous
but sincere eulogy upon Basil's work and life at Walktown, which was
heard in an absolute and appreciative silence, only broken by the
scratching pencil of the reporter from a local paper.
Then he called upon the vicar to make the presentation.
Basil advanced to the table.
"My dear friends and fellow-workers," said Mr. Byars, "I am not going to
add much to what Mr. Pryde has said. As most of you know, Mr. Gortre
stands and is about to stand to me in even a nearer and more intimate
relation than that of assistant priest to his parish priest. But before
giving Mr. Gortre the beautiful presents which your unbounded generosity
has provided, and in order that you may have as little speech-making
from me as possible, I want to take this opportunity of introducing the
Reverend Henry Nuttall to you to-night."
He bowed towards the stranger clergyman, a pleasant, burly, clean-shaven
man.
"I am going from among you for a couple of months, as I believe you have
been told, and Mr. Nuttall is to take my place as your temporary pastor
for that time. My doctor has ordered me rest for a time. So my daughter
and myself, together with Mr. Gortre, who sadly needs change after his
illness, and who is not to take up his duties in London for several
weeks, are going away together for a holiday. And now I will simply ask
Mr. Gortre to accept this tea-service and watch in the name of the
congregation of St. Thomas as a token of their esteem and good-will."
He pulled the cloth away and displayed some glittering silver vessels.
Then he handed the agitated young man a gold watch in a leather case.
Basil faced the shouting, enthusiastic crowd, staring through dimmed
eyes at the long rows of animated faces.
When there was a little silence he began to speak in a voice of great
emotion.
Very simply and earnestly he thanked them for their good-will and
kindness.
"This may be," he said, "the last time I shall ever have the privilege
and pleasure of speaking to you. I want to give you one last message. I
want to urge one and all here to-night to do one thing. Keep your faith
unspotted, unstained by doubts, uninfluenced by fears. Do that and all
will be well with you here and hereafter." His voice sank a full tone
and he spoke with marked emphasis. "I have sometimes thought and felt of
late that possibly the time may be at hand, we who are here to-night may
witness a time, when the Powers and Principalities of evil will make a
great and determined onslaught upon the Christian Faith. I may not read
the signs of the times aright, my premonitions--for they have sometimes
amounted even to that--may be unfounded or imaginary. But if such a time
shall come, if the 'horror of great darkness,' a spiritual horror, that
we read of in Genesis, descend upon the world and envelop it in its
gloom and terror, oh! let us have faith. Keep the light burning
steadily. 'Let nothing disturb thee; let nothing affright thee. All
passeth: God only remaineth.' And now, dear brothers and sisters in the
Holy Faith, thank you, God bless you, and farewell."
There was a tense silence as his voice dropped to a close.
Here and there a woman sobbed.
There was something peculiar about his warning. He spoke almost in
prophecy, as if he _knew_ of some terror coming, and saw its advance
from afar. His face, pale and thin from fever, his bright, earnest eyes,
not the glittering eyes of a fanatic, but the saner, wiser ones of the
earnest single-minded man, had an immense influence with them there.
And that night, as they trudged home to mean dwellings, or suburban
villas, or rolled away in carriages, each person heard the intense,
quiet voice warning them of the future, exhorting them to be steadfast
in the Faith.
Seed which bore most fragrant blossom in the time which, though they
knew it not, was close at hand was sown that night.
CHAPTER VIII
A DINNER AT THE PANNIER D'OR
Helena stood with her hand raised to her eyes, close by the port
paddle-box, staring straight in front of her at a faint grey line upon
the horizon.
A stiff breeze was blowing in the Channel, though the sun was shining
brightly on the tossing waters, all yellow-green with pearl lights, like
a picture by Henry Moore.
By the tall, graceful figure of the girl, swaying with the motion of the
steamer and bending gracefully to the sudden onslaughts of the wind,
stood a thick-set man of middle height, dressed in a tweed suit. His
face was a strong one. Heavy reddish eyebrows hung over a pair of clear
grey eyes, intellectual and kindly. The nose was beak-like and the
large, rugged, red moustache hid the mouth.
This was Harold Spence, the journalist with whom Gortre was to live
after the holiday was over and he began his work in Bloomsbury. Spence
was snatching a few days from his work in Fleet Street, in order to
accompany Gortre and Mr. and Miss Byars to Dieppe. It had been his first
introduction to the vicar and his daughter.
"So that is really France, Mr. Spence!" said Helena; "the very first
view of a foreign country I've ever had. I don't suppose you've an idea
of what I'm feeling now? It seems so wonderful, something I've been
waiting for all my life."
Spence smiled kindly, irradiating his face with good humour as he did
so.
"Well, _my_ sensations or emotions at present, Miss Byars, are entirely
confined to wondering whether I am going to be seasick or not."
"Don't speak of it!" said a thin voice, a voice from which all the blood
seemed to be drained, and, turning, they saw the vicar at their elbow.
His face was livid, his beard hung in lank dejection, a sincere misery
poured from his pathetic eyes.
"Basil," he said, "Basil is down in the saloon eating greasy cold
chicken and ham and drinking pale ale! I told him it was an outrage--"
His feelings overcame him and he staggered away towards the stern.
"Poor father," said the girl. "He never could stand the sea, you know.
But he very soon gets all right when he is on dry land again. Oh, look!
that must be a church tower! I can see it quite distinctly, and the sun
on the roofs of the houses!"
"That is St. Jacques," said Spence, "and that dome some way to the
right, is St. Remy. Farthest of all to the right, on the cliffs, you can
just see the château where the garrison is."
Helena gazed eagerly and became silent in her excitement. Basil, who
came up from the saloon and joined them, the healthy colour beginning to
glow out on his cheeks once more, watched her tenderly. There was
something childishly sweet in her delight as the broad, tub-like boat
kicked its way rapidly towards the quaint old foreign town.
In smoky Walktown he had not often seen her thus. Life was a more sober
thing there, and her nature was graver than that of many girls, attuned
to her environment. But, at the beginning of this holiday time, under a
brilliant spring sun, which she was already beginning to imagine had a
foreign charm about it, she too was happy and in a holiday mood.
Basil pulled out his new and glorious gold watch, which had replaced the
battered old gun-metal one he usually wore. Though not a poor man, he
was simple in all his tastes, and the new toy gave him a recurring and
childish pleasure whenever he looked at it.
"We ought to be in in about twenty minutes," he said. "Have you noticed
that the tossing of the ship has almost stopped? The land protects us.
How clear the town is growing! I wonder if you will remember any of your
French, Helena? I almost wish I was like you, seeing a foreign country
for the first time. Spence is the real _voyageur_ though. He's been all
over the world for his paper."
The vicar came up to them again, just as there was a general movement of
the passengers towards the deck. A hooting cry from the steam whistle
wailed over the water and the boat began to move slowly.
In a few more minutes they had passed the breakwater and were gliding
slowly past the wharves towards the landing-stage.
Suddenly Helena clutched hold of Basil's arm.
"O Basil," she whispered, "how beautiful--look! Guarding the harbour!"
He turned and followed the direction of her glance.
An enormous crucifix, more than life size, planted in the ground, rose
from the low cliffs on the right for all entering the harbour to see.
They watched the symbol in silence as the passengers chattered on every
side and gathered up their rugs and hand-bags.
Gortre slipped his arm through Helena's.
The reminder was so vivid and sudden it affected them powerfully. They
were both people of the world, living in it and enjoying the pleasures
of life that came in their way. Gortre was not one of those narrow, and
even ill-bred, young priests with a text for ever on his lips, a sort of
inopportune concordance, with an unpleasant flavour of omniscience. His
religion and Helena's was too deep and fibrous a thing for commonplaces
about it. It did not continually effervesce within and break forth in
minute and constant bubbles, losing all its sincerity and beauty by the
vulgar wear and tear of a verbal trick.
But it was always and for ever with him a transmuting force which
changed his life each hour in a way of which the nominal believer has no
conception.
A letter he had once written to Helena during a holiday compressed all
his belief, and his joy in his belief, into a few short lines. Thus had
run the sincere and simple statement, unadorned by any effort of
literary grace to give it point and force:--
"Day by day as your letters come I go on saying my prayers for you,
and with you, in fresh faith and confidence. You know that I
absolutely trust the Lord Jesus Christ, who is, I believe, the God
who made the worlds, and that I pray to Him continually, relying on
His promises.
"I keep on reading all sides of the question, as your father does
also, and while admitting all that honest criticism and sincere
intellectual doubt can teach me, and freely conceding that there is
no infallible record in the New Testament, I grow more and more
convinced that the Gospels and Paul's letters relate _facts_ and
not imaginations or hallucinations. And the more strongly my
intellect is convinced, so much more does my heart delight in the
love of God, who has given Himself for me. How magnificent is that
finale of St. John's Gospel! 'Thomas saith unto Him, My Lord and my
God.' And, then, how exquisite is the supplement about the
manifestation at the lake side! Imagine the skill of the literary
man who INVENTED that! Fancy such a man existing in A.D. 150 or
thereabouts! I see Mrs. Humphry Ward says 'it was a dream which the
old man at Ephesus related, and his disciples thought it was fact.'
And _she_ is a literary person!"
So, as the lovers glided slowly past the high symbol of God's pain, the
worship in their hearts found but little utterance on their lips, though
they were deeply touched.
It seemed a good omen to welcome them to France!
Spence remained to look after the luggage and to see it through the
Customs, and the three others resolved to walk to the rooms which they
had taken in the Faubourg de la Barre on the steep hill behind the
château.
They passed over the railway line in the middle of the road, and past
the _cafés_ which cluster round the landing-stage, into the quaint
market-place, with the great Gothic Cathedral Church of St. Jacques upon
one side, and the colossal statue of Duquesne surrounded by baskets of
spring flowers in the centre.
To Helena Byars that simple progress was one of unalloyed excitement and
delight. The small and wiry soldiers in their unfamiliar uniforms; an
officer sipping vermouth in a _café_, with spurs, sword, and helmet
shining in the sun; two black priests, with huge furry hats--all the
moving colour of the scene gave her new and delightful sensations.
"It's all so different!" she said breathlessly. "So bright and gay. What
is that red thing over the tobacco shop, and that little brass dish over
the hair-dresser's? Think of Walktown or Salford, now!"
The house in the Faubourg de la Barre was kept by a Madame Varnier, who
spoke English well, and was in the habit of letting her rooms to
English people. A late _déjeuner_ was ready for them.
The omelette was a revelation to Helena, and the _rognons sautés_ filled
her with respect for such cooking, but she was impatient, nevertheless,
to be out and sight-seeing.
The vicar was tired, and proposed to stay indoors with the _Spectator_,
and Spence had some letters to write, so Basil and Helena went out
alone.
"The vicar and I will meet you at six," Spence said, "at the Café des
Tribuneaux, that big place with the gabled roof in the centre of the
town. At six the _l'heure verre_ begins, the time when everyone goes out
for an _apéritif_, the appetiser before dinner; afterwards I'll take you
to dine at the Pannier d'Or, a jolly little restaurant I know of, and in
the evening we'll go to the Casino."
Madame Varnier, the _patronne_, was in her kitchen sitting-room at the
bottom of the stairs, and they looked in through the hatchway as they
passed to tell her that they were not dining indoors.
On the floor a little girl, with pale yellow hair, an engaging button of
three, was playing with a live rabbit, plump and mouse-coloured.
"How sweet!" said Helena, who was in a mood which made her ready to
appreciate everything. "Look at the little darling with its pet. Has
baby had the rabbit long, Madame Varnier?"
The Frenchwoman smiled lavishly. "Est-elle gentille l'enfant! hein! I
bring the lapin chez moi from the magazin yesterday. There was very good
lapins yesterday. I buy when I can. Je trouverai ça plus prudent. He is
for the déjeuner of mademoiselle to-morrow. I take him so,"--she caught
up the animal and suited the action to the word,--"I press his throat
till his mouth open, and I pour a little cognac into him. Il se meurt,
and the flesh have a delicious flavour from the cognac!"
"How perfectly horrible!" said Helena as they came out into the street
and walked down the hill. "Fancy seeing one's lunch alive and playing
about like that, and then killing it with brandy, too! What pigs these
French people are!"
Soon after the cool gloom of St. Remy enveloped them. Under the big dome
they lingered for a time, walking from chapel to chapel, where nuns were
praying. But it dulled them rather, and they had more pleasure in the
grey and Gothic twilight of St. Jacques. Here the eye was uplifted by
more noble lines, there was a more mediæval and romantic feeling about
the place.
"We will come here to Mass on Sunday," said Basil. "I shall not go to
the English Church at all. I never do abroad, and the vicar agrees with
me. You see one belongs to the Catholic Church in England. In France one
belongs to it, too. The 'Protestant' Church, as they call it, with an
English clergyman, is, of course, a Dissenting church here."
"I see your point," said Helena, "though I don't know that I quite agree
with it. But I have never been to a Roman Catholic church in England,
and I want to see some of the services. 'Bowing down in the House of
Rimmon,' Mr. Philemon would call it at Walktown."
They turned down a narrow street of quiet houses, and came out on to the
Plage. There were a good many people walking up and down the great
promenade from the Casino to the harbour mouth. An air of fulness and
prosperity floated round the magnificent hotels which faced the sea.
It was a spring season, owing to the unusual mildness of the weather,
and Dieppe was full of people. The Casino was opened temporarily after
the long sleep of the winter, and a company was performing there,
having come on from the theatre at Rouen.
"What a curious change from the churches and market-place," said Helena.
"This is tremendously smart and fashionable. How well-dressed every one
is. Look at that red-haired woman with the furs. This is being quite in
the world again."
They began a steady walk towards the pier and lighthouse. The wind was
fresh, though not troublesome, and at five o'clock the sun, low in the
sky, was still bright, and could give his animation to the picture.
The two young people amused themselves by speculations about the varied
types of people who passed and repassed them. Gortre wore a suit of very
dark grey, with a short coat and an ordinary tweed cap--his holiday
suit, he called it--and, except for his clerical collar, there was
little to show his calling. He was pleased, with a humorous sense of
proprietorship, a kind of vicarious vanity, to notice the attention and
admiration excited by the beautiful English girl at his side.
Helena Byars held her own among the cosmopolitan crowd of women who
walked on the Plage. Her beauty was Saxon, very English, and not of a
type that is always appreciated to its full value on the Continent, but
it shone the more from Latin contrasts, and could not escape remark.
Every now and again they turned, at distances of a quarter of a mile or
so, and during the recurrence of their beat they began to notice a
person whom they met several times, coming and going.
He was an enormously big man, broad and tall, dressed expensively and
with care. His size alone was sufficient to mark him out of the usual,
but his personality seemed to them no less arresting and strange.
His large, smooth face was fat, the eyes small and brilliant, with
heavy pouches under them. His whole manner was a trifle florid and
Georgian. Basil said that he seemed to belong to the Prince Regent's
period in some subtle way. "I can imagine him on the lawns at Brighton
or dining in the Pavilion," he said. "What a sensual, evil face the man
has! Of course it may mean nothing, though. The Bishop of ----, one of
the saints of the time, whose work on the Gospels is the most wonderful
thing ever done in the way of Christian apologetics, has a face like one
of the grotesque devils carved on the roof of Notre Dame or Lincoln
Cathedral. But this man seems by his face to have no soul. One can't
feel it is there, as one does, thank God! with most people."
"But what an intellect such a man must have! Look at him now. Look at
the shape of his head. And besides, you can see it in his face, despite
its sensuality and materialism. He must be some distinguished person. I
seem to remember pictures of him, just lately, too, in the illustrated
papers, only I can't get a name to them. I'm certain he's English, and
some one of importance."
The big man passed them again with a quiet and swift glance of
appreciation for Helena. He seemed lonely. Basil and Helena realised
that he would have welcomed a chance word of greeting, some overture of
friendship, which is not so impossible between English people
abroad--even in adjacent Dieppe--as in our own country.
But neither of them responded to the unspoken wish they felt in the
stranger. They were quite happy with each other, and presently they saw
him light a cigar and turn into one of the great hotels.
They discussed the man for a few minutes--he had made an odd impression
on them by his personality--and then found that it was time for the
rendezvous at the Café des Tribuneaux.
By this time dusk was falling, and the sea moaned with a certain
melancholy. But the town began to be brilliant with electric lights, and
the florid Moorish building of the Casino was jewelled everywhere.
They turned away to the left, leaving the sea behind them, and, passing
through a narrow street by the Government tobacco factory, came into the
town again, and, after a short walk, to the _café_.
The place was bright and animated--lights, mirrors, and gilding, the
stir and movement of the pavement, combined to make a novel and
attractive picture for the English girl. The night was not cold, and
they sat under the awning at a little round table watching the merry
groups with interest. In a few minutes after their arrival they saw
Spence and the vicar, now quite restored and well, coming towards them.
They had forborne to order anything before the arrival of their
companions.
The journalist took them under his wing at once. It amused him to be a
cicerone to help them to a feeling of being at home. Gortre and Mr.
Byars had been in Switzerland, and the latter at Rome on one occasion,
but under the wing of a bishop's son who made his livelihood out of
personally conducting parties to Continental towns of interest for a
fixed fee. There was little freedom in these cut-and-dried tours, with
their lectures _en route_ and the very dinners in the hotel ordered for
the tourists, and everything so arranged that they need not speak a word
of any foreign language.
For the vicar, Spence prescribed a _vermouth sec_; Gortre, a courtesy
invalid, was given a minute glass of an amber-coloured liquid with
quinine in it--"_Dubonnet_" Spence called it; and Helena had a _sirop_
of _menthe_.
They were all very happy together in the simple-minded, almost childish,
way of quiet, intellectual people. Their enjoyment of the novel
liqueurs, in a small _café_ at tourist-haunted Dieppe, was as great as
that of any sybarite at the Hotel Ritz in Paris, or at a rare dinner at
Ciro's in Monte Carlo.
Spence ordered an absinthe for himself.
The vicar seemed slightly perturbed. "Isn't that stuff rather dangerous,
Spence?" he said, shrinking a little from the glass when the waiter
brought it. "I've heard terrible things of it."
"Oh, I know," said the journalist, laughing, "people call it the French
national vice and write tirades against it. Of course if it becomes a
regular habit it is dangerous, and excess in absinthe is worse than most
things. But one glass taken now and again is a wonderful stomachic and
positively beneficial. I take one, perhaps, five times in a year and
like it. But, like all good things, it is terribly abused both by the
people who use it and those who don't."
Suddenly Helena turned to Gortre.
"Oh, look, Basil!" she said. "There is our friend of the Plage--Quinbus
Flestrin, the mountain of flesh, you remember your Swift?"
The big stranger, now in evening dress and a heavy fur coat, had just
come into the _café_ and was sitting there with a cigarette and a Paris
paper. He seemed lost in some sort of anxious speculation--at least so
it seemed by the drooping of the journal in his massive fingers and the
set expression of abstraction which lingered in his eyes and spread a
veil over his countenance.
They had all turned at Helena's exclamation and looked towards the other
side of the _café_, where the man was sitting.
"Why, that's Sir Robert Llwellyn," said Spence.
The vicar looked up eagerly. "The great authority on the antiquities of
the Holy Land?" he said.
"Yes, that's the man. They knighted him the other day. He's supposed to
be the greatest living authority, you know."
"Do you know him, then?" asked the vicar.
"Oh, yes," said Spence, carelessly. "One knows every one in my trade. I
have to. I've often gone to him for information when anything very
special has been discovered. And I've met him in clubs and at lectures
or at first nights at the theatre. He is a great play-goer."
"A decent sort of man?" said Gortre in a tone which certainly implied a
doubt.
Spence hesitated a moment. "Oh, well, I suppose so," he said carelessly.
"There are tales about his private life, but probably quite untrue. He's
a man of the world as well as a great scholar, and I suppose the rather
unusual combination makes people talk. But he is right up at the top of
the tree,--goes everywhere; and he's just been knighted for his work.
I'll go over and speak to him."
"If he'll come over," said the vicar, his eyes alight with anticipation
and the hope of a talk with this famous expert on the subjects nearest
his own heart, "bring him, _please_. There is nothing I should like
better than a chat with him. I know his _Modern Discoveries and Holy
Writ_ almost by heart."
They watched Spence go across to Sir Robert's table. The big man started
as he was spoken to, looked up in surprise, then smiled with pleasure,
and extended a welcoming hand. Spence sat down beside him and they were
soon in the middle of a brisk conversation.
"The poor man looked very bored until Mr. Spence spoke to him," said
Helena. "Father, I'm sure you'll have your wish. He seems glad to have
some one to talk to."
She was right. After a minute or two the journalist returned with
Llwellyn, and the five of them were soon in a full flood of talk.
"I was going to dine alone at my hotel," said the Professor, at length;
"but Spence says that he knows of a decent restaurant here. I wonder if
you would let me be one of your party? I'm quite alone in Dieppe for a
couple of days. I'm waiting for a friend with whom I am going to
travel."
"Oh, do come, Sir Robert," said the vicar, with manifest pleasure. "Are
you going to be away from England for long?"
"I have leave from the British Museum for a year," said the Professor.
"My doctor says that I require absolute rest. I am _en route_ for
Marseilles and from there to Alexandria."
The Pannier d'Or proved a pleasant little place, and the dinner was
excellent. The Professor surprised and then amused the others by his
criticism of the viands. He made the dinner his especial business, sent
for the cook and had a serious conversation with him, chose the wines
with extreme care.
His knowledge of the culinary art was enormous, and he treated it with a
kind of reverence, addressing himself more particularly to Helena.
"Yes, Miss Byars, you must be _most_ careful in the preparation of
really good crayfish soup. This is excellent. The great secret is to
flavour with a little lobster spawn and to mix the crumb of a French
roll with the stock--white stock of course--before you add the powdered
shells and anchovies."
Many times, despite his impatience to get to deeper and more congenial
subjects, the vicar smiled at the purring of this gourmet, who seemed to
prefer a sauce to an inscription and rissoles to research.
But with the special coffee--covered with fine yellow foam and
sweetened with crystals of amber sugar--the vicar's hour came. Sir
Robert realised that it was inevitable and with a half sigh gave the
required opening.
Once started, his manner changed utterly. The mask of materialism peeled
away from his face, which became younger, brighter, as thought animated
it, and new, finer lines cames out upon it as knowledge poured from him.
The conversation threatened to be a long one. Spence saw that and
proposed to go on to the Casino with Helena, leaving the two clergymen
with Llwellyn. It was when they had gone that the trio settled down
completely.
It resolved itself at first into a duologue between the two elder men.
Gortre's knowledge was too general and superficial on these purely
antiquarian matters to allow him to take much part in it. He sat sipping
his coffee and listening with keen attention and great enjoyment to this
talk of experts. He had not liked Llwellyn from the first and could not
do so even now, but he was forced to recognise the enormous intellectual
activity and power of the big, purring creature before him.
Step by step the two archæologists went over the new discoveries being
made in the ground between the City Wall of Jerusalem and the Hill of
"Jeremiah's Grotto." They talked of the blue and purple mosaics found on
the Mount of Olives, of all that had been done by the English and German
excavators during the past years.
Gradually the discussion became more intimate and began to touch on
great issues.
Mr. Byars was in a state of extraordinary interest. His knowledge was
wide, and Llwellyn early realised this, speaking to him as an equal,
but beside the Professor's all-embracing achievements it was as nothing.
The clergyman learnt something fresh, some sudden illuminating point of
view, some irradiating fact, at every moment.
"I suppose," Mr. Byars said at length, "that the true situation of the
Holy Sepulchre is still a matter of considerable doubt, Professor. Your
view would interest me extremely."
"My view," said Llwellyn, with remarkable earnestness and with an
emphasis which left no doubt about his convictions, "is that the
Sepulchre has not yet been located."
"And your view is authoritative of course," said Mr. Byars.
The Professor bowed.
"That is as it may be," he said, "but I have no doubt upon the subject.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is quite out of the question. There is
really no historical evidence for it beyond a foolish dream of the
Empress Helena, in A.D. 326. The people who _know_ dismiss the
traditional site at once. Of course it is _generally_ believed, but one
cannot expect the world at large to be cognisant of the doings of the
authorities. Canon MacColl has said that the traditional site is the
real one, and as his name has never been out of the public eye since
what were called 'The Bulgarian Atrocities,' they are content to follow
his lead. Then there is the question of the second site, in which a
great many people believe they have found the true Golgotha and
Sepulchre. 'The Gordon Tomb,' as it has been called, excited a great
deal of attention at the time of its discovery. You may remember that I
went to Jerusalem on behalf of the _Times_ to investigate the matter.
You may recollect that I proved beyond dispute that the tomb was not
Jewish at all, but indubitably Christian and long subsequent to the time
of Christ. As a matter of fact, when the tomb was excavated in 1873 it
was full of human bones and the mould of decomposed bodies, and there
were two red-painted crosses on the walls. The tomb was close to a large
Crusading hospice, and I have no doubt that it was used for the burial
of pilgrims. Besides, my excavations proved that the second "city wall"
must have _included_ the new site, so that the Gospel narrative at once
demolishes the new theory. I embodied twenty-seven other minor proofs in
my letters to the _Times_ also. No, Mr. Byars, my conviction is that we
are not yet able to locate in any way the position of Golgotha and the
Holy Tomb."
"You think that is to come?" asked Gortre.
"_I feel certain_," answered the Professor, with great deliberation and
meaning--"_I feel certain that we are on the eve of stupendous
discoveries in this direction_."
His tones were so impressive and so charged with import that the two
clergymen looked quickly at each other. It seemed obvious that Llwellyn
was aware of some impending discoveries. He must, they knew, be in
constant touch with all that was being done in Palestine. Curiously
enough, his words gave each of them a certain sense of chill, of
uneasiness. There seemed to be something behind them, something of
sinister suggestion, which they could not divine or formulate, but
merely felt as an action upon the nerves.
It was a rare experience to sit with the greatest living authority upon
a subject, and hear his views--views which it would be folly not to
accept. His knowledge was so sure and so profound, a sense of power
flowed from him.
But though both men felt a dim premonition of what his words might
possibly convey, neither could bring himself to a deliberate question.
Nor did Llwellyn appear to invite it. During the whole of their talk he
had sedulously avoided any religious questions. He had dealt solely with
historical aspects.
His position in the religious world was singular. His knowledge of
Biblical history was one of its assets, but he was not known definitely
as a believer.
His attitude had always been absolutely non-committal. He did the work
he had to do without taking sides.
It had become generally understood that no definite statement of his own
personal convictions was to be asked or expected from him.
The general consensus of opinion was that Sir Robert Llwellyn was _not_
a believer in the divinity of Christ; but it was merely an opinion, and
had never been confirmed by him.
There was rather a tense silence for a short time.
The Professor broke it.
"Let me show you," he said, taking a gold pencil-case from his pocket,
"a little map which I published at the time of the agitation about
Gordon's Tomb. I can trace the course of the city walls for you."
He felt in his pocket for some paper on which to make the drawing, and
took out a letter.
Gortre and the vicar drew their chairs closer.
Suddenly a curious pain shot through Basil's head and all his pulses
throbbed violently. He experienced a terribly familiar sensation--the
sick fear and repulsion of the night before his illness in the great
library. The aroma of some utterly evil and abominable personality
seemed to come into his brain.
For, as he had looked down at the paper on which the great white fingers
were now tracing thin lines, he had seen, before Llwellyn turned it
over, a firm, plain signature, thus:
Constantine Schuabe
With some excuse about the heat of the room, he left it and went out
into the night.
His brain was busy with terrible intuitive forebodings, he seemed to be
caught up in the fringe of some great net, the phantoms of his illness
came round him once more, the dark air was thick with their
wings--vague, and because of that more hideous.
He passed the lighted _kiosk_ at the Casino entrance with a white, set
face.
He was going home to pray.
CHAPTER IX
INAUGURATION
It was at Victoria Station that Basil said good-bye to Helena. Spence
had been back again in London for a fortnight. Mr. Byars and his
daughter were to go straight back to Manchester the same day, and Gortre
was to take possession of his new quarters in Lincoln's Inn and enter on
his duties at St. Mary's without delay.
It had been a pleasant holiday, they all agreed, as the train brought
them up from Newhaven; how pleasant they had hardly realised till it was
all over. They had been all brought more intimately together than ever
before. Gortre had come to know Mr. Byars with far more completeness
than had been possible during their busy parochial life at Walktown. The
elder man's calm and steadfast belief, his wide knowledge and culture,
the Christian _sanity_ of his life, were never more manifest than in the
uninterrupted communion of this time of rest and pleasure.
He saw in his future father-in-law such a man as he himself humbly hoped
that he might become. The impulsiveness of an eager youth had toned down
into the mature judgment of middle age. The enthusiasms of life's
springtime had solidified into quiet strength and force, and faith and
intellect had combined into a deep and immovable conviction. And Mr.
Byars's was no simple, childlike nature to whom goodness and belief were
easy, a natural attribute of the man. He was subtle rather, complex,
and the victory over himself had cost him more than it costs most men.
So much Gortre realised, and his love and admiration for the vicar were
tempered with that joyous awe that one fine nature is privileged to feel
at the contact with another.
To Helena also this time of holiday had been very precious. To mark the
fervour of her chosen one, the energy he threw into Life, Love, and
Religion, to find him a _man_ and yet a priest, to follow him in thought
to the ivory gates of his Ideals--these were her uplifting occupations;
and to all these as they walked and talked, listened to the music at the
Casino, explored the ancient forest and castle at Arques, or knelt with
bowed heads as the sacring bell rang and the priests moved about the
altar--these had been the united bond of the great knowledge and hope
they shared together.
After the farewells had been said in the noisy station, and Basil's cab
drove him rapidly towards his new home, he felt wonderfully ready and
prepared for his new work.
The moving panorama of Victoria Street, the sudden stately vision of
Palace Yard, the grandeur of the Embankment--all spoke to the young man
of a vivid, many-coloured, and pulsating life which was waiting for him
and his activities. Here, indeed, was a fine battlefield and theatre for
the Holy War.
The cab moved slowly up Chancery Lane and then turned into the sudden
quiet of Lincoln's Inn. It was almost like going back to Oxford, he
thought, with a quick glow of pleasure to see himself surrounded by
mellow, ancient buildings once more.
All his heavy personal effects had been sent up from Walktown some days
before, and when he had carried up his two portmanteaus he knocked at
the "oak" or outside door of the chambers, which was shut, and waited
for a response. He saw that his name was freshly painted on the lintel
of the door under the two others:
+---------------------------------------+
| |
| MR. HAROLD M. SPENCE. |
| |
| MR. CYRIL HANDS. |
| |
| REV. BASIL GORTRE. |
| |
+---------------------------------------+
In a minute he heard footsteps. The inner door was opened and he saw a
tall, thin man, bearded and brown, peering at him through spectacles.
"Ah! Gortre, I suppose," said the other. "We were expecting you. I'm
Hands, you know, home for another month yet. Give me these bags. Come
in, come in."
He followed the big, stooping fellow with a sense of well-being at the
cheery bohemianism of his greeting.
He found himself in a very large room indeed, panelled from floor to
ceiling, the woodwork painted a sage green. Three great windows, each
with a cushioned seat in its recess, looked down into the quadrangle
below. Curtained doors faced him on all sides of the room, which was
oddly shaped and full of nooks and angles. Books and newspapers covered
two or three writing-tables and were piled on shelves between the doors.
A bright fire burned in a large grate and the mantel above was covered
with Oxford photographs, pipes, and tobacco jars. There was a note of
comfort everywhere, of luxurious comfort though not of luxury. The
furniture was not new and it bore the signs of long use no less than
careful choice. Bohemia it was, but not a squalid Bohemia. If a room can
have a personality, this was a _gentlemanly_ room. One saw that
gentlemen lived here, men who, without daintiness or a tinge of the
sybarite, yet liked a certain order and fitness around them. At once
Basil felt in key with the place. There was no jarring note anywhere.
"I've got you a sort of meal, Gortre," said Hands, pleasantly, "though
we were rather in doubt as to what a man could want at four o'clock in
the afternoon! Spence suggested afternoon tea, as you'll be wanting to
dine later on. But Mrs. Buscall, our laundress, suggested cold beef and
Bass's beer--after a sea voyage which she regards as a sort of Columbus
adventure. So fall to--here you are. Harold is just getting up."
Indeed, as he spoke there came a noise of vigorous splashing from behind
one of the closed doors and Spence's voice bellowed out a greeting.
Basil looked puzzled for a moment and Hands laughed as he saw it.
"You must remember that Spence doesn't get back from the office till
three in the morning," he said. "He's writing four leaders a week now,
and on his late nights, when he comes back, his brain is too alert and
excited to sleep, so he has some Bovril and just works away at other
stuff till morning. He won't interfere with us, though. I never hear him
come in, nor will you. These chambers are a regular rabbit warren for
size and ramification."
Basil went into the bedroom he was to have, a spacious, clean, and
simply furnished place, and when he came out again for his meal found
Spence, in a loose suit of flannels, smoking a cigarette. The journalist
joined him at the table.
In a very short time Gortre felt thoroughly at home. He knew by a kind
of instinct that he should be happy in Lincoln's Inn. Hands had still a
month to spend in London before he went back to Palestine to continue
his work for the Exploring Society, and he looked forward to many
interesting talks with him, the actual agent and superintendent of the
work at Jerusalem, the trained eye and arm of the great and influential
English Society.
And as for Spence, he had known him intimately ever since his first
Oxford days, many years ago now. Harold Spence was like a brother to
him--had always been that.
The first hour's conversation, desultory as it was, in a sense, showed
him how full and varied his new life promised to be. After the noisy
seclusion of Walktown he felt that he was now in the centre of things.
Both Spence and Hands were thoroughly cultured men, and both were
distinguished above the crowd in their respective spheres.
Basil heard keen, critical, "inside" talk for almost the first time. His
two companions knew everybody, were at the hub of things. Two nights ago
Spence had been talking to the Prime Minister for ten minutes.--_The
Daily Wire_ was the unofficial Government organ. Hands had been at
Lambeth with the Archbishop, the president and patron of the Palestine
Society. They were absolute types of the keen, vigorous, and _young_
mental aristocracy which is always on the active service of English
life. They belonged to the executive branch.
"I'm sorry, Basil," Spence said suddenly, "I've got a note for you from
Father Ripon. I forgot to give it to you. He sent it down by a special
messenger this morning. Here it is."
Father Ripon was the vicar of St. Mary's, Gortre's new chief.
He took the note and opened it, reading as follows:
"THE CLERGY HOUSE,
"ST MARY'S, BLOOMSBURY.
"DEAR MR. GORTRE,--Friend Spence says that you will arrive in
London this afternoon. I don't believe in wasting time and I want a
good long talk with you before you begin your work with us.
To-night I am due at Bethnal Green to give a lecture. I shall be
driving home about ten and I'll call at Lincoln's Inn on my way. If
this will not be too late for you, we can then talk matters
over.--Sincerely yours in Christ, ARTHUR RIPON."
Basil passed the note to Spence.
"That'll be all right," he said. "I shall be at work, and Hands will be
in his own room. What a man Ripon is! He's just the incarnation of
breezy energy. Brusque, unconventional as Dr. Parker himself, but one of
the sincerest Christians and best men I ever met or ever shall meet. He
signs his note like that because he means it. He hates cant, and what in
some men would appear cant, or at least a rather unnecessary form of
ending, is to him just an ordinary every-day fact. You will get on with
Father Ripon, Basil, I'm sure. You'll get to love the man as we all do.
I never knew any one so absolutely joyous as he is. He's about the
happiest man in town, I should say. His private income is nearly two
thousand a year, and his living's worth something too, and yet I don't
suppose his own expenses are fifty pounds. He lives more or less on
porridge--when he remembers to eat at all--and his only extravagance is
hansom cabs, so that he can cram more work into the day."
They all laughed, and Spence began to tell anecdotes of the famous
"ritualistic" parson who daily filled more stomachs, saved more souls,
and shocked more narrow-minded people than any two men in Crockford.
At seven o'clock they all went out together--Spence to his adjacent
office in Fleet Street, the other two to dine quietly at the University
Club.
"London depresses me," said Hands, when they were seated on the top of
an omnibus and rolling westward through the Strand. "I am afraid that I
shall never be in love with London any more. I always dislike my
vacations, or rather my business visits to town. It's necessary that I
attend the annual meeting of the Society and see people in authority,
and I have to give a few lectures too. But I hate it all the same. I
love the simple life of the East, the sun, the deep blue shadows, my
silent Arabs. I know of no more beautiful sight than the Holy City--why
do they call Rome the 'Holy City'? Jerusalem is the Holy City--when the
hills are covered with the January snows. It is a wonderful, immemorial
land, Gortre, a silent, beautiful country. Just before I came over here
I spent a fortnight working at some inscriptions in a very ancient Latin
monastery. I never knew such peace. The monks are all sad-faced,
courteous Syrians, and they move along the rock balconies like benignant
ghosts. And then one comes back and is plunged into this!"
He threw out his hand over the side of the omnibus with a note of
disgust in his rather dreamy voice. The Strand was all brilliantly lit
and waiting crowds stood by all the theatre doors. Men and women passed
in and out of the bright orange light of bars and restaurants, and small
filthy boys stabbed the deep roar of the traffic with their shrill
voices as they called out the evening papers.
They dined quietly and simply at the big warm club in Piccadilly. Hands
did most of the talking and Gortre was content to listen to the pleasant
monotony of the low, level voice and to fall under the man's peculiar
spell or charm--a charm that he always exercised upon another artistic
temperament.
Hands was a poet by nature and sentiment. His strange, lonely life among
the evidences of the past under the Eastern sky had toned, mellowed,
and orientalised his vision.
As he listened Gortre also began to feel something of the mystery and
magic influence of that country of God's birth.
It was half-past nine when they got back to the chambers again. Hands
went at once to his own room to work and Basil sat down in front of a
red, glowing fire, gazing into the hot caverns, lost in reverie. It was
as though he had taken some opiate and there was nothing better in life
than to sit thus and dream in the warm silence of the firelit room.
A few minutes after ten he was suddenly called out of the clouds by a
furious knocking at the door of the chambers.
The sound cut into his dreams like a knife.
He went to open the door, and Father Ripon, his new vicar, came in like
a whirlwind. His voluminous black cloak brought cold air in its folds;
his breezy, genial personality was so actual a fact, struck such a
strident, material note, that dreams and reverie fled before it.
Gortre turned up the gas-jets and flooded the room with light.
Father Ripon was a tall, well-made man, too active to be portly, but
with hints of a tendency towards plumpness, which was never allowed to
ripen. His iron-grey hair was cropped close to his large, well-shaped
head. The shrewd, merry eyes, of a rare red-hazel colour, were shaded by
heavy grey brows, which gave them a singular directness and penetration.
The nose was aquiline, the lips thin, though the mouth was large, and
the chin massive and somewhat protruding. The mobile face, lined and
seamed by the strenuous life of its owner, was very seldom in repose. It
glowed and flashed continually with changing expression. On those
occasions when the play of feature sank to rest for a moment, at the
giving of a benediction or the saying of a solemn prayer in church, a
nobility and asceticism transformed the face into something saintly. But
in the ordinary business of life the large humanity of the man gave him
a readier title to the hearts of his people than their knowledge of the
underlying saintliness of his character.
"Whisky?" he said, as Gortre asked him to take some. "No, thanks.
Teetotaler for sake of example, always have been--and don't like the
stuff either, never did. But I'll have some coffee and some bread and
butter, if you've got it, and some of those oranges I see there. Forgot
to lunch and had no time to dine!"
He began ravenously upon the oranges and with little further preamble
plunged at once into the business of the parish. To emphasise a point,
he flung a piece of orange peel savagely into the fire now and again.
"Our congregation," he said, "is peculiar to the church. You'll realise
that when you get among them. I don't suppose in the whole of London
there is a more difficult class of people to reach than our own. In the
first place, it's a _young_ congregation, speaking generally. 'Good,'
you'll say; 'ductible material, plenty of enthusiasm to work on.' Not a
bit of it. Most of the men are engaged in the City as clerks upon a
small wage. They are mentally rather "small" men. Their lives are hard
and monotonous, their outlook upon life petty and vulgar. The lowest and
the highest classes are far easier to get at because they are
temperamentally more alike. The anarchists have some right on their side
when they condemn the _bourgeoisie_! It's difficult to show a small
brain a big thing. _Our_ difficulty is to explain the stupendous truths
of Christianity to flabby and inert, machine-like fellows. When we _do_
get hold of them, the very monotony of their lives makes religion a
more valuable thing to them. But the temptations of this class are
terribly strong, living alone in lodgings as they do. The cheap
music-hall and bar attract them; dissipation forms their society. Their
views of women are taken from their association with the girls of the
streets and the theatres. As they have no settled place in society, they
are horribly afraid of ridicule. They are a far more difficult lot than
their colleagues who live in the suburbs and have chances for healthier
recreations.
"Then much of our work lies among women who seem irretrievably lost,
and, I fear, very often are so. The Bloomsbury district is honeycombed
with well-conducted dens of impurity. The women of a certain class have
fixed upon the parish as their home. I don't mean the starving
prostitute that one meets in the East End, I mean the fairly prosperous,
utterly vicious, lazy women. You will meet with horrors of vice, a
marvellous and stony indifference, in the course of your work. To reach
some of these well-dressed, well-fed, well-housed girls, to show them
the spiritual and even the economic and material end of their lives,
requires almost superhuman powers. If an angel came some of them would
not believe. And in the great and luxurious buildings of flats which
have sprung up in all the squares, the well-known London
_demi-mondaines_--people who dance upon the stage and whose pictures
glare upon one from every hoarding--have made their homes and constantly
parade before the eyes of others the wealth which is the reward of lust.
"This is a wicked part of London, Gortre. And yet, day by day, in our
beautiful church, where the Eucharist is celebrated and prayers go up
unceasingly, we have evidences that our work is acceptable and that the
Power is with us. Magdalen still comes with her jewels and her tears of
repentance. I ask and beg of you to remember certain things--keep them
always before your eyes--during your ministry among us. Whenever a man
or woman comes to you, either at confession or otherwise, and tells of
incredible sins, welcome the very slightest movement towards the light.
Cultivate an all-embracing sympathy. I firmly believe that more souls
have been lost by a repellent manner on the part of a priest, or an
apparent lack of understanding, than any one has any idea of. Remember
that when a thoroughly evil and warped nature has made a great effort
and laid its spiritual case before a priest, it expects in its inner
consciousness a pat on the back for its new efforts. It wants
commendation. One _must_ fight warily, with a thorough psychological
knowledge, with a broad humanity. To take even the slightest signs of
repentance as a matter of course, to throw any doubt upon its reality or
permanence, is to accept an awful responsibility. Err rather on the side
of sentiment. Who are we to judge?"
Gortre had listened with deep attention to Father Ripon's earnest words.
He began to realise more clearly the difficulties of his new life. And
yet the obstacles did not daunt him. They seemed rather a trumpet note
for battle. Ripon's enthusiasm was contagious; he felt the exhilaration
of the tried soldier at a coming contest.
"One more thing," said the vicar. "In all your teaching and preaching
hammer away at the great central fact of the Incarnation. No system of
morals will reach these people--however plausible, however pure--unless
you constantly bring the supernatural side of religion before them.
Preach the Incarnation day in, day out. Don't, like so many men, regard
it as an accepted fact merely, using it as a postulate on which to found
a scheme of conduct. Once get the central truth of all into the hearts
of a congregation, and then all else will follow. Now, good-night. I've
kept you late, but I wished to have a talk with you. A good deal will
devolve upon you. I have especially arranged that you should not live in
the Clergy House with Stokes, Carr, and myself. I would rather that your
environment should be more secular. Stokes and Carr are perhaps a little
too priestly, too "professional" in manner, if you understand what I am
driving at. Keep yourself from that. If you go among the young men, see
them at home, smoke with them, and take what they offer you in the way
of refreshment. Well, good-bye. You are to preach at Sunday Evensongs
you know. Sir Michael Manichoe, our patron, will be there, and there
will be a large congregation."
He turned, said good-night with sudden abruptness, as if he had been
lingering too long and was displeased with himself, and hurried away. It
was his usual manner of farewell.
A few minutes afterwards Gortre went to bed. He found it difficult to
believe that he had walked down the Faubourg de la Barre that morning.
It had been a crowded day.
CHAPTER X
THE RESURRECTION SERMON
Sir Michael Manichoe was the great help and standby of St. Mary's. His
father had been a wealthy banker in Rome, and a Jew. The son, who had
enormously increased his inherited wealth, was an early convert to
Christianity during his Oxford days in England. He was the Conservative
member for a division in Lincolnshire, where his great country house was
situated, and had become a pillar of the Church and State in England. In
the House of Commons he presented the somewhat curious spectacle of a
Jew by birth leading the moderate "Catholic" party. He was the great
antagonist of Constantine Schuabe, and with equal wealth and position,
though Schuabe was by far the more brilliant of the two men, he devoted
all his energies to the opposition of the secular and agnostic
influences of his political rival.
Every Sunday during the session, when he was in London, Sir Michael
drove to St. Mary's for both morning and evening service. He was church
warden, and intimately concerned in all the parochial business, while
his purse was always open at Father Ripon's request.
Gortre had been introduced to Sir Michael during the week, and he knew
the great man purposed attending to hear his first sermon at St. Mary's
on the Sunday evening.
He prepared his discourse with extreme care. A natural wish to make a
good first impression animated him; but, as he sat late on the Saturday
night, finally arranging his notes, he began to be conscious of new and
surprising thoughts about the coming event. Earlier in the evening he
had been talking to Hands, but the archæologist had gone to bed and left
him alone.
The day had been a gloomy one. A black pall of fog fell over London at
dawn, and had remained all day, almost choking him as he said evensong
in the almost empty church.
All day long he had felt strangely overweighted and depressed. A chance
paragraph in an evening paper, stating that Mr. Schuabe, M.P., had
returned from a short Continental trip, started an uneasy and gloomy
train of thought. The memory of the terrible night at Walktown recurred
to him with a horrible sense of unreality, the picture blurred somewhat,
as if the fingers of the disease which had struck him down had already
been pressing on his brain when he had been alone with the millionaire.
Much of what he remembered of that dread interview must have been
delusion. And yet in all other matters he was sane and unprejudiced
enough. Many times he had met and argued with unbelievers. They had
saddened him, but no more. Why was it that this man, notorious atheist
as he was, filled him with a shuddering fear, a horror for which he had
no name?
Then also, what had been the significance of the incident at Dieppe--its
true significance? Sir Robert Llwellyn had also inspired him with a
feeling of utter loathing and abhorrence, though perhaps in a less
degree. There was the sudden glimpse of Schuabe's signature on the
letter. What was the connection between the two men? How could the
Antichristian be in friendly communion with the greatest Higher Critic
of the time?
He recalled an even more sinister occurrence, or so it had seemed to
him. Two days after his first introduction to Llwellyn and the dinner
at the Pannier d'Or he had seen him enter the Paris train _with Schuabe_
himself, who had just arrived from England. He had said nothing of the
incident to Mr. Byars or Helena. They would have regarded it as ordinary
enough. They knew nothing of what had passed between him and Schuabe.
The deliberate words of Sir Robert at the restaurant recurred to him
again and again, taking possession of his brain and ousting all other
thoughts. What new discoveries was the Professor hinting at?
What did the whole obsession of his brain mean?
Curiously enough, he felt certain that these thoughts were in no way
heralds of a new attack of brain fever. He knew this for a certainty. It
seemed as if the persistent whisperings within him were rather the
results of some spiritual message, as if the unseen agency which
prompted them had some definite end and purpose in view.
The more he prayed the stronger his premonitions became; added force was
given to them, as if they were the direct causes of his supplications.
It almost seemed that God was speaking to him.
He had questioned Hands cautiously, trying to learn if any new and
important facts bearing upon Biblical history were indeed likely to be
discovered in the near future.
But the answer did not amount to very much. The new and extensive
excavations, under the permission of the lately granted firman from the
Turkish Government, were only just beginning. The real work was to
commence when Hands had finished his work in London and had returned to
take charge of the operations.
Of course, Hands had said there were possibilities of discovery of
first-class importance, but he doubted it. The locality of Golgotha and
the Holy Sepulchre was already established, in Hands's opinion. He had
but little doubt of the authenticity of the established sites.
Llwellyn's theories he scouted altogether, while agreeing with him in
his negation of the Gordon Tomb.
So there had been very little from Hands that was in any way
satisfactory to Basil.
But as he sat in the great silence of the night and read over the heads
of the sermon a great sense of comfort came to him. He felt a mysterious
sense of power, not merely because he knew the work was good, but
something beyond that. He was conscious that for some reason or other
that particular sermon which he was about to preach was one on which
much depended. He could not say how or why he knew the thing was fraught
with destiny to himself or others. He only knew it.
Many years afterwards he remembered that quiet night, and the help which
seemed to come to him suddenly, a renewed hope and confidence after the
mental misery of the day.
When he looked back on the terrible and stupendous events in which he
had played so prominent a part, he was able to see clearly the chain of
events, and to place his experience about what he always afterwards
called his "Resurrection sermon" in their proper sequence.
Looking back through the years, he saw that a more than mortal power was
guiding him towards the fulfilment of a Divine purpose.
But that night as he said his prayers before going to sleep he only felt
a sweet security as he glanced at the MS. on the chair by his bedside.
The future was not yet revealed to him. God spared him the torture of
foreknowledge.
* * * * *
The pulpit was high above the heads of the people, much higher than is
usual, a box of stone set in the great arch of the chancel.
As Gortre stood for a moment, after the prayer, he kissed the stole and
placed it, as a yoke, upon his shoulders. He looked down the great
building and saw the hundreds of watchful, expectant faces, with an
uplifting sense of power. He felt as if he were a mouthpiece of strange,
unseen forces. The air seemed full of wings.
For a moment the preacher paused and sent a keen glance over the
congregation below. He saw Sir Michael Manichoe, dark, aquiline,
Semitic, sitting in his front pew. A few seats behind him, with a sudden
throb of surprise but nothing else, the calm and evil beauty of
Constantine Schuabe's face looked up at him.
The strangeness of the appearance and the shock of it had at that moment
no menace or intimidation for him. Standing there to deliver God's
message, in God's house, his enemy seemed to have no power to throw his
brain into its old fear and tumult.
Another face, unknown to him, arrested his attention.
The sexes were not separated for worship in St. Mary's. In the same seat
where Schuabe sat was a woman, dark, handsome, expensively dressed.
She also was Jewish in appearance, though it was obvious that there was
no connection between her and the millionaire. Her face, as the young
clergyman's eyes rested on it for a second, seemed to be curiously
familiar, as if he saw it every day of his life, but it nevertheless
struck no _personal_ note.
Gortre began to speak, taking for his text part of a verse from the
Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans--"_Declared to be the Son of God with
power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the
dead._"
"In this world of to-day," he began calmly, and with a certain
deliberation and precision in his utterance, "what men in general are
hungering after is a positive assurance of actual spiritual agency in
the world. They crave for something to hold by which is outside
themselves, and which cannot have grown out of the inner persuasions of
men. They cannot understand people who tell them that, whether the
events of the Gospels actually passed upon earth or not, they may
fashion their own dispositions all the same, on the supposition that
these events occurred. If I can to-night show that any appearance of the
Risen Lord is attested in the same way as are certain facts commonly
accepted as history, I shall have accomplished as much as I can hope."
Then, very carefully, Gortre went through the scientific and historical
evidences for the truth of the Resurrection. Gradually, as he marshalled
his proofs and brought forth one after the other, he began, by a sort of
unconscious hypnotism of the eye, to make the seat where Schuabe and the
strange woman sat his objective.
Many speakers have this automatic habit of addressing one or two persons
as if they were the ear of the whole congregation. It is said that by
such means, even if unconsciously employed, the brain becomes more
concentrated and clearer for the work in hand.
Slowly the preacher's voice became more resonant and triumphant. To many
of the congregation the overwhelming and stupendous evidences for the
truth of the Gospel narratives which the study of late years has
collected was entirely new. The Higher Criticism, the fact that it is
not only in science that "discoveries" can be made, the excavations in
the East and the newly discovered MSS., with their variations of
reading, the possibility that the lost Aramaic original of St. Matthew's
Gospel may yet be discovered, were all things which came to them for
the first time in their lives. Gortre's words began to open up to them
an entirely new train of thought. Their interest was profoundly
quickened.
Very few clergymen of middle age are cognisant of the latest theological
thought. Time, money, and lack of education alike prevent them. The
slight mental endowment and very ordinary education which are all that
is absolutely necessary for an ordination candidate, are not realised by
the ordinary member of a church congregation. The mass of the English
clergy to-day are content to leave such questions alone, to do their
duty simply, to impose upon their flock the necessity of "faith," and to
deny the right of individual judgment and speculation.
They do not realise that the world of their middle age is more educated,
and so more intelligent, than the world of their youth, and that, if the
public intellect is nurtured by the public, those whose duty it is to
keep it within the fold of Christianity must provide it with a food
suited to its development.
Gortre, in his sermon, had crystallised and boiled down into pregnant
paragraphs, without circumlocution or obscurity, all the brilliant work
of Latham, Westcott, Professor Ramsay, and Homersham Cox. He quoted
Renan's passage from _Les Apôtres_, dealing with the finding of the
empty tomb, and showed the flaws and fallacies in that brilliant piece
of antichristian suggestion.
As he began to bring his arguments to a close he was conscious that the
people were with him. He could feel the brains around him thinking in
unison; it was almost as if he _heard_ the thoughts of the congregation.
The dark, handsome woman stared straight up at him. Trouble was in her
eyes, an awakened consciousness, and Gortre knew that the truth was
dropping steadily into her mind, and that conviction was unwelcome and
alarming.
And he felt also the bitter antagonism which was alive and working
behind the impassive face and half-closed eyes of the millionaire below.
It was a silent duel between them. He knew that his words were full of
meaning, _even of conviction_, to the man, and yet he was subjectively
conscious of some _reserve_ of force, some hidden sense of fearful
power, a desperate resolve which he could not overcome.
His soul wrestled in this dark, mysterious conflict as with a devil, but
could not prevail.
He finished all his argument, the last of his proofs. There was a hushed
silence in the church.
Then swiftly, with a voice which trembled with the power that was given
him, he called them to repentance and a new life. _If_, he said, his
words had carried conviction of the truth of Christ's resurrection, of
His divinity, then, believing that, there was but one course open to
them all. For to know the truth, and to believe it, and to continue in
indifference, was to kill the soul.
It was over. Father Ripon had pronounced the blessing, the great organ
was thundering out the requiem of another Sunday, and Sir Michael was
shaking hands warmly with Basil in the vestry.
Gortre was tired and shaken by the long, nervous strain, but the evident
pleasure of Father Ripon and Sir Michael, the knowledge that he had
acquitted himself well, was comforting and sustaining.
He walked home, down quiet Holborn, curiously dead without the traffic
of a week day and the lights of the shop fronts, and not reanimated by
the strolling pedestrians, young people of the lower classes from the
East End, who thronged it.
Lincoln's Inn was wonderfully soothing and quiet as his footsteps echoed
in the old quadrangle. After a lonely, tranquil supper--Hands was at a
dinner-party somewhere in Mayfair and Spence was at the office of _The
Daily Wire_ preparing for Monday's paper--he wheeled a small
writing-desk up to the fireside and began a long letter of news and
thankfulness to Helena.
He pictured the pleasant dining-room at Walktown, the Sunday night's
supper,--an institution at the Vicarage after the labours of the busiest
day in the week,--with a guest or two perhaps.
He knew they would be thinking of him, as he of them, and pictured the
love-light in his lady's sweet, calm eyes.
CHAPTER XI
"NEITHER DO I CONDEMN THEE"
Autumn came to London, a warm, lingering season. There was a hint of the
South in the atmosphere of town. All business moved with languor; there
was more enjoyment in life as people went and came through the streets
under so ripe and genial a sun.
Gortre had settled down to steady, regular work. At no time before had a
routine been so pleasant to him. His days were full of work, which, hard
as it was, came to him with far more appeal than his duties at Walktown.
Nothing ever stagnated here, at the very hub and centre of things.
The splendid energy and force of Father Ripon, the magnificent
unconvention of his methods, animated his staff to constant and
unflagging exertions.
Gortre felt that he was suddenly "grown up," that his life before had
been spent in futile playtime compared to the present.
One central fact in St. Mary's parish held all the great organisation
together. This was the daily services in the great church. Priests,
deacons, sisters of mercy, school teachers, and lay helpers all drew
their strength and inspiration from this source. The daily Eucharist,
matins, evensong, were both a stimulus and stimulant of enormous power.
Church brought the mysteries in which they lived, moved, and had their
being into intimate relation with every circumstance of daily life.
The extraordinary thing, which many of Father Ripon's staff were almost
unable to understand, was that more people did not avail themselves of
what they regarded--viewing the thing from a standpoint of personal
experience--such helpful opportunities.
"They are always coming to me," Father Ripon had said on one occasion,
"and complaining that they find such a tremendous difficulty in leading
a holy life--say that the worldly surroundings and so forth kill their
good impulses--and yet they _won't_ come to church. People are such
fools! My young men imagine that they can become good Christians by a
sort of sudden magic--a low beast on Saturday night, the twentieth of
August, and, after a nerve storm in church and a few tears in the
vestry, a saint for evermore! And then when they get drunk or do
something beastly the next week, they rail against the Christian Faith
because it isn't a sort of spiritual hand cuffs! And yet if you told
them you could manage a bank after merely experience in a shipping
office, they would see the absurdity of that at once. Donkeys!"
This with a genial smile of tenderness and compassion, for this
Whirlwind in a Cassock loved his flock.
So from the very first Basil had found his life congenial. Privately he
blessed his good fortune in living in Lincoln's Inn with Spence. On the
nights when the journalist was free from the office, and not otherwise
engaged, the two men sat late with pipes and coffee, enjoying that
vigorous communion of two keen, young, and virile brains which is one of
the truly stimulating pleasures of life.
Gortre admired Spence greatly for some of his qualities. His intellect
was, of course, first class--his high position on the great daily paper
guaranteed that. His reading and sympathies were wide. Moreover, the
clergyman found a great refreshment in the fact that, in an age of
indifference, at a time when the best intellects of younger London life
were professedly agnostic, Harold Spence was an avowed Christian and
Churchman. As Gortre got to know him better, when the silence and
detachment of midnight in the old Inn broke down reticence, he realised
with a sense of thankfulness, and sometimes of fear also, how a thorough
belief in religion kept the writer straight and captain of his own soul.
For the man was a creature of strong passions and wayward desires. He
had not always been the clean gentleman of the present. As is so often
the case with a refined and cultured temperament, he had a dark and ugly
side to his nature. The coarse vices of the blood called to him long and
often with their hollow siren voices. Evil came to him with swift
invitation and cunning allurement. He had hinted to Basil of days of sin
and secret shame. And now, very soberly and without any emotion, he
clung to Christ for help.
And he had conquered.
This was ever a glorious fact to Basil, another miracle in those
thousands of daily miracles which were happening all around him. But his
fear for Harold came from his realisation of his friend's exact
spiritual grip. Spence's Christianity was rather too _utilitarian_ for
safety. Perhaps the deep inward conviction was weak. It seemed sometimes
as if it were a barren, thorny thing--too much fetish, too much a return
for benefits received, a sort of half-conscious bargain. He often prayed
long that nothing should ever occur to shake Spence's belief; for he
felt, if that should happen, the disaster would prove irreparable. A
dammed river is a dangerous thing.
But he kept all these thoughts locked in his heart, and never spoke of
them to Harold.
Since the evening of his first sermon he had never seen Schuabe again.
Now and then the thought of him passed through his brain, and his mental
sight seemed obscured for a moment, as though great wings hid the sun
from him. But since the silent duel in the church, the curious and
malign influence of the millionaire had waned. It was prominent no
longer, and when it troubled him it did so without power and force. Fine
health, the tonic of constant work, the armour of continual prayer, had
their way and were able to banish much of what he now looked back on as
morbidity, sinister though it had been.
Nevertheless, one thing often reminded him of that night. The dark,
Jewish-looking lady he had seen sitting in the same pew with Schuabe
often came to church on Sunday nights when he was preaching. The bold
and insolently beautiful face looked up at him with steady interest. The
fierce regard had something passionate and yet wistful in it.
Sometimes Basil found himself preaching almost directly to the face and
soul of the unknown woman. There was an understanding between them. He
knew it; he felt it most certainly.
Sometimes she would remain in her seat after the mass of the
congregation had shuffled away into the night. She did not pray, but sat
still, with her musing eyes fixed on the huge ten-foot crucifix that
swung down from the chancel arch.
Once, as he passed the pew on the way to baptise the child of a poor
woman of the streets--brought in furtively after the Sunday
evensong--she made a movement as if to speak to him. He had waited in
expectation for a moment, but she remained still, and he passed on to
the font, with its sad cluster of outcasts, its dim gas-jets, and the
tiny child of shame with its thin cry of distress.
He was asking the tremendous question--
"_Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all
his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous
desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that
thou wilt not follow nor be led by them?_"
when he saw that the unknown woman was standing by within the shadow of
a pillar. A gleam of yellow light fell through the dark on her rich
dress, her eye glittered behind her white veil. He thought there was a
tear in it. But when he was saying the exhortation he saw that the tall,
silent figure had departed.
He often wondered who the woman was,--if he should ever know her.
Something told him that she wanted help. Something assured him that he
should some day give it to her.
And beyond this there was an unexplained conviction within him that the
stranger was in some way concerned and bound up in the part he was to
play in life.
Long ago he had realised that it was idle to deny the interference of
supernatural personalities in human life. Accepting the Incarnation, he
accepted the Communion of Saints. And he was always conscious of hidden
powers moulding, directing him.
The episode of the cigarettes happened in this way.
Stokes, one of Gortre's fellow-curates, came to supper one night in
Lincoln's Inn.
Spence was there also, as it was one of his free nights.
About ten o'clock supper was over and they proposed to have a little
music. Stokes was a fine pianist, and he had brought some of the
nocturnes and ballads of Chopin with him, to try on the little
black-cased piano which stood at an obtuse angle with the end of the
large sitting-room.
"Will you smoke, Stokes?" Spence said.
"Thank you, I'll have a cigarette," the young man replied. "I can't
stand cigars, and I've left my pipe at the Clergy House.
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