November 10th.
I had to ring twice before Judith’s servant opened the flat door.
“Mrs. Mainwaring is engaged just at present, Sir Marcus.”
“Ask her if I can come in and wait, as I have something of importance to say to her.”
She left me standing in the passage, a thing that had never before occurred to me in Judith’s establishment, and presently returned with her answer. Would I mind waiting in the dining-room? I entered. The table was littered with sheets of her statistical work and odd bits of silk’ and lining. A type-writer stood at one end and a sewing-machine at the other. On the writing-desk by the window, in the midst of a mass of letters and account-books, rested a large bowl filled with magnificent blooms of white and yellow chrysanthemums. A volume of Dante lay open face downwards on the corner. It did my heart good to see this untidiness, so characteristic of Judith, so familiar, so intimate. She had taken her trouble bravely, I reflected. The ordinary daily task had not been left undone. Through all she had preserved her valiant sanity. I felt rebuked for my own loss of self-control.
I was about to turn away from the litter of the desk, when my eye caught sight of an envelope bearing a French stamp and addressed in Pasquale’s unmistakable handwriting. As there seemed to be a letter inside, I did not take it up to examine it more closely. The glance was enough to assure me that it came from Pasquale. Why should he be corresponding with Judith? I walked away puzzled. Was it a justification, a confession, a plea to her as my friend to obtain my forgiveness? If there is one thing more irritating than another it is to light accidentally upon a mystery affecting oneself in a friend’s correspondence. One can no more probe deeply into it than one can steal the friend’s spoons. It seems an indiscretion to have noticed it, an unpardonable impertinence to subject it to conjecture. In spite of my abhorring the impulse of curiosity, the sweeping, flaunting, swaggering handwriting of Pasquale worried me.
Judith came in, looking much as she had done on the occasion of my last visit, worn and anxious, with a strange expression in her eyes.
“I am sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said, extending a lifeless hand.
I raised it to my lips.
“I would have gladly waited all day to see you, Judith,” I said.
“Really?”
She laughed in an odd way.
“And idle speech from me to you at the present time would be an outrage,” I answered. “I have passed through much since I saw you last.”
“So have I,” said Judith. “More than you imagine. Well,” she continued as I bowed my head accepting the rebuke, “what have you got so important to tell me?”
“Much,” said I. “In the first place you must be aware of what has happened, for I can’t help seeing there a letter from Pasquale.”
She glanced swiftly at the desk and back again at me.
“Yes,” she replied, “he is in Paris.”
I was amazed at her nonchalance.
“Has he told you nothing?”
“Perhaps Sir Marcus Ordeyne would like to see his letter,” she said, ironically.
“You know perfectly well that I would not read it,” said I.
Judith laughed again, and rolled her handkerchief into a little ball between her nervous fingers.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I like to see the grand seigneur in you now and then. It puts me in mind of happier days. But about Pasquale—the only thing he tells me is that he is not able to execute a commission for me. He told me on the night he drove me home that he was going to Paris, and I asked him to get me some cosmetic. Carmine Badouin, if you want to know. I have got to rouge now before I am fit to be seen in the street. I am quite frank about it.”
“Then you know nothing of Carlotta?” I cried.
“Carlotta?”
“She eloped with that double-dyed, damned, infernal villain, the day after I saw you.”
Judith looked at me for a moment, then closed her eyes and turned her head away, resting her hand on the table. My indignation waxed hot against the scoundrel. How dare he write casual letters to Judith about Carmine Badouin with his treachery on his conscience? I know the terms of flippant grace in which the knave couched this precious epistle. And I could see Carlotta reading over his shoulder and clapping her hands and cooing: “Oh, that is so funny!”
When I had told Judith the outlines of the story, pacing up and down the little room while she remained motionless by the table, she put out her hand to me, and in a low voice, and with still averted eyes said that she was sorry, deeply sorry. Her tone rang so true and loyal that my heart throbbed with quick appreciation of her high nature, and I wrung her outstretched hand.
“God bless you, Judith,” I cried, fervently. “Bless you for your sweet sympathy. Be sorry for me only as for a man who has passed through the horrors of delirium. But for me as I stand before you now, I ask you not to be sorry. I have come to bring you, if I can, dear Judith, a measure of gladness, perhaps of happiness.”
She wrenched herself free from me, and a terrified cry of “Marcus!” checked my dithyrambic appeal. She shrank away so that a great corner of the dining-table separated us, and she stared at me as though my words hats been the affrighting utterance of a madman.
“Marcus! What do you mean?” she cried, with an unnatural shrillness in her voice.
“I mean,” said I, “I mean—I mean that ‘crushed by three days’ pressure, my three days’ love lies slain.’ Time has withered him at the root. I have buried him deep in unconsecrated ground, like a vampire, with a stake through his heart. And I have come back to you, Judith, humbly to crave your forgiveness and your love—to tell you I have changed, dear—to offer you all I have in the world if you will but take it—to give you my life, my daily, hourly devotion. My God!” I cried, “don’t you believe me?”
She still stared at me in a frightened way, leaning heavier on the table. Her lips twitched before they could frame the words,
“Yes, I believe you. You have never lied to me.”
“Then in the name of love and heaven,” I cried, “why do you look at me like that?”
She trembled, evidently suppressing something with intense effort, whether bitter laughter, indignation or a passionate outburst I could not tell.
“You ask why?” she said, unsteadily. “Because you seem like the angel of the flaming vengeance.”
At these astounding words it was my turn to look amazed.
“Vengeance?” I echud. “What wrong have you done me or any living creature? Come, my dear,” and I moved nearer by seating myself on the corner of the table, close to the type-writer, and leaning towards her, “let us look at this thing soberly. If ever a man had need of woman I have need of you. I can live alone no longer. We must share one home henceforth together. We can snap our fingers at the world, you and I. If you have anything to say against the proposal, let us discuss it calmly.”
Judith’s slender figure vibrated like a cord strung to breaking-point. Her voice vibrated.
“Yes, let us discuss it calmly. But not here. The sight of you sitting in the middle of my life, between the sewing-machine and the type-writer, is getting on my nerves. Let us go into the drawing-room. There is an atmosphere of calm there—” her voice quavered in a queer little choke—“of sabbatical calm.”
I slid quickly from the table and put my arm round her waist.
“Tell me, Judith, what is amiss with you.”
She broke away from me roughly, thrusting me back.
“Nothing. A woman’s nothing, if you understand what that means. Come into the drawing-room.”
I opened the door; she passed out and I followed her along the passage. She preceded me into the drawing-room, and I stayed for a moment to close the door, fumbling with the handle which has been loose for some months. When I turned and had made a couple of steps forward, I halted involuntarily under the shock of a considerable surprise.
We were not alone. Standing on the hearth-rug, his hands behind his back, his brows bent on me benevolently was a man in clerical attire. He looked ostentatiously, exaggeratedly clerical. His clerical frock-coat was of inordinate length; his boots were aggravatingly clump-soled; by a very large white tie, masking the edges of a turned-down collar, he proclaimed himself Evangelical. An otherwise clean-shaven florid face was adorned with brown side-whiskers growing rather long. A bald, shiny head topped a fringe of brown hair.
I stared at this unexpected gentleman for a second or two, and then, recovering my self-possession, looked enquiringly at Judith.
“Sir Marcus,” she said, “let me introduce my husband, Mr. Rupert Mainwaring.”
Her husband! This benevolent Evangelical parson her husband! But the brilliant gallant who had dazzled her eyes? The dissolute scoundrel that had wrecked her life? Where was he? Dumfounded, I managed to bow politely enough, but my stupefaction was covered by Judith rushing across the room and uttering a strange sound which resolved itself into a shrill, hysterical laugh as she reached the door which she opened and slammed behind her. I heard her scream hysterically in the passage; then the slam of another door; and the silence told me that she had shut herself in her bedroom. Disregarding the new husband’s presence, I rang the bell, and the servant who had left her kitchen on hearing the scream entered immediately.
“Go to your mistress. She is ill,” said I.
The maid hurriedly departed. The parson and I looked at one another.
“I am afraid,” said I, “that my presence is unhappily an intrusion. I hope to make your better acquaintance on another occasion.”
“Oh, please don’t go,” said he, “my wife is only a little upset and will soon recover. I beg that you will excuse her. Besides, I should like to have a talk with you.”
He offered me a chair, my own chair, the comfortable, broad-seated Empire chair I had given Judith as a birthday present years ago, the chair in which I had invariably sat. He did it with the manner of the master of the house, a most courteous gentleman. The situation was fantastic. Some ingenious devil must have conceived it by way of pandering to the after-dinner humour of the high gods. As I sat down I rubbed my eyes. Was this brown-whiskered, bald-headed clerical gentleman real? The rubbing of my eyes dispelled no hallucination. He was flesh and blood and still regarded me urbanely. It was horrible. The desertion of the scoundrelly husband, who I thought was lost somewhere in the cesspool of Europe, was the basis, the sanction of the relations between Judith and myself; and here was this reverend, respectable man apologising for his wife and begging me to be seated in my own chair. The remark of Judith’s that I should find sabbatical calm in the drawing-room occurred to me, and I had to grip the arms of the chair to prevent myself from joining Judith in her hysterics.
The appearance of the husband in his legendary colours of rascality would have been a shock. The sudden scattering of my plans for Judith’s happiness I should have viewed with consternation. But it would have been normal. For him, however, to appear in the guise of an Evangelical clergyman, the very last kind of individual to be associated with Judith, was, I repeat, horribly fantastic.
“I believe, Sir Marcus,” said he, deliberately parting the tails of his exaggerated frock-coat and sitting down near me, “that you are a very great friend of my wife.”
I murmured that I had known Mrs. Mainwaring for some years.
“You are doubtless acquainted with her unhappy history.”
“I have heard her speak of it,” said I.
“You must then share her surprise in seeing me here to-day. I should like to assure you, as representing her friends and society and that sort of thing, as I have assured her, that I have not taken this step without earnest prayer and seeking the counsel of Almighty God.”
I am by no means a bigoted pietist, but to hear a person talk lightly about seeking the counsel of Almighty God jars upon my sense of taste. I stiffened at the sanctimonious tone in which the words were uttered.
“You have without doubt very good reasons for coming back into the circle of her life,” said I.
“The best of all reasons,” he replied, caressing a brown whisker, “namely, that I am a Christian.”
I liked him less and less.
“Is that the reason, may I ask, why you remained away from her all these years?”
“I deserve the scoff,” said he: “Those were days of sin. I deserve every humiliation that can be put upon me. But I have since found the grace of God. I found it at three o’clock in the afternoon on the eighth of January, eighteen hundred and—”
“Never mind the year,” I interrupted.
My gorge rose. The man was a sanctimonious Chadband. He had come with nefarious designs on Judith’s slender capital. I saw knavery in the whites of his upturned eyes.
“I should be glad,” I continued quickly, “if you would come to the point of the conversation you desire to have with me. I presume it concerns Mrs. Mainwaring. She has reconciled herself to circumstances and has found means to regulate her life with a certain measure of contentment and comfort until now, when you suddenly introduce a disturbing factor. You appear to wish to tell me your reasons for doing so—and I can’t see what the grace of God has to do with it.”
He sprang to his feet and shot out both hands in the awkward gesture of an inspired English prophet.
“But it has everything to do with it! It is the beginning and end, core and kernel, root and branch of the matter. It is the grace of God that checked me in the full career of my wickedness. It is the grace of God that has lighted my path ever since to holier things. It is the grace of God that has changed me from what I was to what I am. It is the grace of God that has brought me here to ask pardon on my knees of the woman I have wronged. The grace of God and of his son our Lord Jesus Christ, which came upon me in a great light on that January afternoon even as it did upon Saul of Tarsus. The grace of God has everything to do with it.”
“Mr. Mainwaring,” said I, “such talk is either blasphemous or—”
He did not allow me to state the alternative, but caught up the word in a great cry.
“Blasphemous! Why, man alive! for what are you taking me? Do you think this is some unholy jest? Can’t you see that I am in deadly earnest? Come and see me where I live—” he caught me by the arm, as if he would drag me away then and there, “among the poor in Hoxton. You scarcely know where Hoxton is—I didn’t when I was a man of ease like yourself—that wilderness of grey despair where the sun of the world scarcely shines, let alone the Light of God. Come and see for yourself, man, whether I am lying!”
Then it dawned upon me that the man had been talking from innermost depths, that he was almost terrifyingly sincere.
“I must ask you to pardon me,” said I, “for appearing to doubt your good faith. You must attribute it to my entire unfamiliarity with the terms of Evangelical piety.”
He looked at me queerly for a moment, and then, in the quiet tones of a man of the world, said, smiling pleasantly:
“Very many years ago I had the pleasure of knowing your grandfather, the late baronet. May I say that you remind me of him?”
I have never heard an apology more gracefully and tactfully accepted. For an unregenerate second he had become the gallant Rupert Mainwaring again, and showed me wherein might lie his attraction.
“Pray be seated,” said he, more gravely, “and allow me to explain.”
He unfolded his story. It was well, said he, that an outsider (I an outsider in that familiar room!) should hear it. I was at liberty to make it public. Indeed, publicity was what he earnestly craved. As far as my memory serves me, for my wits were whirling as I listened, the following is an epitome of his narrative:
He had been a man of sin—not only in the vague ecclesiastical sense, but in downright, practical earnest. He had committed every imaginable crime, save the odd few that lead to penal servitude and the gallows. He drank, he betrayed women, he cheated at cards, he had an evil reputation on the turf. His companions were chosen from the harlotry and knavery of the civilised world. He had lured Judith from her first husband, thus breaking his heart, poor man, so that he died soon after. He had married Judith, and had deserted her for a barmaid whom in her turn he had abandoned. He wallowed, to use his own expression, in the trough of iniquity. He was, as I had always understood, about as choice a blackguard as it would be possible to meet outside a gaol. One day a pretty girl, whom he had been following in the street, unwittingly enticed him into a revivalist meeting. He described that meeting so vividly that had my stupefied mind been capable of fresh emotions, I too might have been converted at second hand by the revivalist preacher. He repeated parts of the sermon, rose to his feet, waved his arms, thundered out the commonplaces of Salvation Army Christianity, as if he had made an amazing theological discovery. It was pathetic. It was ludicrous. It was also inconceivably painful. At last he mopped his forehead and shiny head.
“Before that meeting was over I was on my knees praying beside the girl whom I had designed to ruin. I went into the streets a converted man, filled with the grace of God. I resolved to devote my life to saving souls for Christ. My old habits of sin fell away from me like a garment. I studied for the ministry. I am now in deacon’s orders, and I am the incumbent of a little tin mission church in Hoxton. God moves in a mysterious way, Sir Marcus.”
“He is generally credited with doing so,” said I, stupidly.
“You are doubtless wondering, Sir Marcus,” he went on, “why I placed such a long interval between my awakening and my communicating with my wife. I set myself a period of probation. I desired to be assured of God’s will. It was essential that I should test my strength of purpose, and my power of making a life’s atonement, as far as the things of this world are concerned, for the wrongs I have inflicted on her. I have come now to offer her a Christian home.”
I looked at him open-mouthed.
“Do you expect Judith to go and live with you as your wife, in Hoxton?” I asked, bluntly.
“Why not? She is my wife.”
I rose and walked about the room in agitation. Somehow such a contingency had not entered my bewildered head.
“Why not, Sir Marcus?” he repeated.
“Because Judith isn’t that kind of woman at all,” I said, desperately. “She doesn’t like Hoxton, and would be as much out of place in a tin-mission church as I should be in a cavalry charge.”
“God will see to her fitness,” said he, gravely. “To him all things are easy.”
“But she has considerable philosophic doubt as to his personal existence,” I cried.
He smiled prophetically and waved away her doubt with a gesture.
“I have no fears on that score,” he observed.
“But it is preposterous,” I objected once more, changing my ground; “Judith craves the arrears of gaiety and laughter which your conduct caused life to leave owing to her. She loves bright dresses, cigarettes, and wine and the things that are anathema in an Evangelical household.”
“My wife will find the gaiety and laughter of holiness,” replied the fanatic. “She will not be stinted of money to dress herself with becoming modesty; and as for alcohol and tobacco, no one knows better than myself how easy it is to give them up.”
“You seem as merciless in your virtues as you were in your vices,” said I.
“I have to bring souls to Christ,” he answered.
“That doesn’t appear to be the way,” I retorted, “to bring them.”
“Pray remember, Sir Marcus,” said he, bending his brows upon me, “that I did not ask you for suggestions as to the conduct of my ministry.”
“The general methods you adopt in the case of your congregation,” said I, “are matters of perfect indifference to me. But I cannot see Judith imprisoned for life in a tin church without a protest. Your proposal reminds me of the Siennese who owed a victorious general more than they could possibly repay. The legend goes that they hanged him, in order to make him a saint after his death by way of reward. I object to this sort of canonisation of Judith. And she will object, too. You seem to leave her out of account altogether. She is mistress of her own actions. She has a will of her own. She is not going to give up her comfortable flat off the Tottenham Court Road in order to dwell in Hoxton. She won’t go back to you under your conditions.”
He smiled indulgently and held out his hand to signify that the interview was over.
“She will, Sir Marcus.”
Was there ever such a Torquemada of a creature? I respect religion. I respect this man’s intense conviction of the reality of his conversion. I can respect even the long frock coat and the long brown whiskers, which in the case of so dashing a worldling as Rupert Mainwaring were a deliberate and daily mortification of the flesh. But I hold in shuddering detestation “the thumb-screw and the rack for the glory of the Lord,” which he cheerfully contemplated applying to Judith.
“Why on earth can’t you let the poor woman alone?” I asked, ignoring his hand.
“I am doing my duty to God and to her,” said he.
“With the result that you have driven her into hysterics.”
“She’ll get over them,” said he.
“I wish you good-day,” said I. “We might talk together for a thousand years without understanding each other.”
“Pardon me,” he retorted, with the utmost urbanity. “I understand you perfectly.”
He accompanied me to the dining-room where I had left my hat and umbrella, and to the flat door which he politely opened. When it shut behind me I felt inclined to batter it open again and to take Judith by main force from under his nose. But I suppose I am pusillanimous. I found myself in the street brandishing my umbrella like a flaming sword and vowing to perform all sorts of Paladin exploits, which I knew in my heart were futile.
I hailed an omnibus in the Tottenham Court Road, and clambered to the top, though a slight drizzle was falling. Why I did it I have not the remotest idea, for I abhor those locomotive engines of exquisite discomfort. I had no preconceived notion of destination. It was a moving thing that would carry me away from the Tottenham Court Road, away from the Rev. Rupert Mainwaring, away from myself. I was the solitary occupant of the omnibus roof. The rain fell, softly, persistently, soakingly. I laughed aloud.
I recognised the predestined irony of things that at every corner checks the course of the ineffectual man.
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