Into the Highways and Hedges Part 44

But the man's face brightened.

"Glad, are ye?" he said. "There's naught that's impossible, my la.s.s!"

And so life at the farm came to an end; and they went out together again.

THIRD PART.

CHAPTER I.

Barnabas Thorpe stood preaching by the river. He had preached in northern manufacturing towns, where the struggle for life is hard; he had preached by the sea sh.o.r.e, and in little outlying hamlets in the mining districts; but he had spoken nowhere as he spoke to-day in London.

This city, of great wealth and great poverty; of idlers and slaves; these churches, where the rich man sat on cushioned seats, and the poor man on benches hard as charity; these women, with hoa.r.s.e voices and hungry eyes, who followed him in the streets; these children, for whom the Kingdom of Heaven might indeed be open, but for whom earth had more kicks than blessings--all these stung him to a pa.s.sionate eloquence that almost touched despair.

Did Luxury never look backwards over her shoulder at the black misery treading close at her heel? he wondered. Would the men of Sodom and Gomorrah rise up in judgment on this place?

Perhaps (though he did not know it, being little given to a.n.a.lysis), a sharp personal want pointed his realisation of the contrast between the Dives and the Lazarus of London; for his wife at this moment was with her father.

He stood on a barrel by the water's edge--the Thames was neither sweet nor clean at Stepney--and preached of Heaven in the midst of, what seemed to him, an uncommonly good imitation of h.e.l.l.

It was a close evening; but there was a fine drizzling rain falling, that damped everything except the preacher's ardour, which always burnt more fiercely for opposition, either physical or moral.

Even without his barrel he would have been a head taller than most of his hearers. His vigorous manhood was in strong contrast to the stunted specimens of riverside humanity gathered round him--under-sized, unhealthy youths, who looked as if they had done nothing but "loaf" from the day they were born; girls with straight fringes, and paper feathers stuck in their hats, and just a sprinkling of navvies, a burlier and more hopeful, though brutal, element.

Barnabas Thorpe's voice rang through the heavy air, and all these faces were upturned towards him, as if under a spell. To his left stood a group of swarthy-complexioned foreign sailors; black-haired, with earrings in their ears. One of them wore a saffron-coloured handkerchief round his throat, and had a green parrot on his wrist; he made a spot of brightness in the prevailing dun colour of the crowd.

Probably these strangers understood hardly one word in ten of that vehement discourse, delivered with a strong L----shire drawl; but they also listened, as if something in the man's personality, the something stronger than words, held their attention.

With those closely packed squalid houses on the one side of him; with the slowly flowing river, whose waters had given the quietus to so many a miserable body (as for the desperate souls, G.o.d only knew what had become of them), on the other, he painted that second coming, when the glory of the Lord shall flash from East to West, and His judgment shall tarry no longer.

There was a mark on the preacher's left shoulder where some one had playfully thrown a rotten egg at him, and a cut across his forehead, to which he put his handkerchief once or twice; both were visible signs that, in spite of the present breathless lull, Barnabas was not likely to suffer from too much adulation. Indeed, he was a fighter born, and it was, perhaps, the impress of strenuous effort that made his rugged face a striking and rather refreshing sight in the midst of men who looked, for the most part, as if the beast had decidedly got the better of the angel in them.

He stood bare-headed, his hand stretched out, his gaunt figure silhouetted against the leaden sky, pleading with pa.s.sionate force. He felt the misery of London too strong for him at times; the atmosphere oppressed him both mentally and physically; but the very sense of oppression made preaching a relief. Better wear himself out striving against this horror, than acquiesce, letting it stifle and choke him.

There was a stir, a movement; the preacher lost hold of his audience.

Suddenly, as the snapping of the thread of a necklace which has been strained tight sends each bead a different way, so attention was snapt, the spell broken.

The preacher, looking over the heads of the people, saw, first, a confused ma.s.s of jeering, struggling lads, coming towards him, shouting hoa.r.s.ely; then, that they had in their midst some poor creature whom they were baiting mercilessly, some one either drunk or mad; then, that they scattered a little to the right and left, and the man (he could see it was a man now) had broken loose and made a dash forward, panting and stumbling.

Instinctively, Barnabas shouted encouragingly, and jumping off his barrel, held out his hands. He could never, for the life of him, keep clear of a fray--especially if it were a case of overwhelming odds.

The victim, when he heard the shout, looked up; his face ghastly, his eyes wide open, with the strained, agonised look of a hunted hare. His persecutors were closing on him again; when, with an inarticulate cry, he shook himself free once more, and, running desperately forward, fell at the preacher's feet, clinging to his knees. "Doan't let them!" he cried; and Barnabas recognised him as Timothy.

For one moment the preacher hesitated; he had a horror of the man.

Then, "They'll shut me up!" cried Timothy; and there was a ring of mortal terror in his voice.

Barnabas himself would, any day, have preferred to face death to a long imprisonment. He freed himself from Timothy's grasp, and stepped between hunter and hunted.

"I think ye should be 'shamed!" he said. "Ha' ye nought better to do than to hound that poor creature to death or to Bedlam? which, happen, is a deal worse! Let him be; he's past doin' any harm. Any way, ye'll ha' to do wi' me first."

There was a pause; the united strength of all this riff-raff would, probably, have been more than a match for the preacher; but no one quite cared to be the first to make the rush and "do wi' him".

A big coalheaver in the background shouted derisively: "A nice, white-livered set you are! Blessed if the Methody ain't a match for all of you!"

And then, all at once, the group broke up and scuttled away, dividing itself among the labyrinth of squalid streets that sloped down to the river; and tramp, tramp, with heavy, warning steps, in their tightly b.u.t.toned swallow-tail coats and white trousers, came a detachment of four City police, who promptly arrested Barnabas for making a disturbance, and Timothy for being drunk, on the king's highway.

"_That_ he's not," remarked the preacher. "He's got too little, not too much, aboard this time."

But he went to the police station without remonstrance, for he didn't mean to lose sight of Timothy.

Certainly Barnabas ought to have had enough of taking uncalled-for responsibilities on his shoulders; but there were some simple lessons which Dame Experience never could teach him, though she tried her hardest, and punished him well for his denseness in learning. He never could turn a deaf ear to a cry for mercy, nor refrain from burning his own fingers in attempts to save other people's from fire. If his doctrines were narrow, his pity was wide. It is a combination of characteristics that gives an infinity of trouble--especially to the owner.

Timothy complicated matters by dropping on the floor of the police station in an exhausted heap; but the officer in charge, having at last arrived at the conclusion that the idiot was ill, not drunk, and that the preacher had protected, not a.s.saulted him, dismissed both with a warning; and Barnabas found himself saddled with this most unprepossessing incubus, whose present helplessness was his only recommendation.

It was as well, after all, that Margaret was not with him, he reflected; he could not have borne to have had Timothy under the same roof with her. The preacher had said many times, in the course of his experiences in London, that it was "as well"; and said it with a sigh.

He lodged at this time in one of the streets turning out of Commercial Road. He always seemed to have an extraordinary knack of getting employment. His fingers, which never _held_ money long, were seldom at a loss in making it; and, perhaps, his luck had something to do with the fact that no one ever forgot him, his personality being so strongly marked.

He had made one friend in London during that short visit fifteen years before, namely Giles Potter, rat catcher, bird fancier, and bird stuffer; and some people whispered dog stealer as well. Why the tipsy, jolly, old reprobate was so fond of the preacher, of all men, no one ever knew.

The Barnabas Thorpe of the present, with his fanatical and water-drinking earnestness, who preached in season and out of season, would seem to have little to do with the desperate and crack-brained young sailor, whom Giles had held back from murdering the man who had robbed him of his sweetheart in the winter of 1834; but Giles had recognised and welcomed him.

The preacher worked all day in the back room of 33 Walton Street, curing and stuffing with fingers that were a good deal steadier than his companion's, and in grave silence for the most part, till the light faded, when he would go out into the streets to preach; all the suppressed energy of those long hours in a close atmosphere finding vent in sermons that attracted larger crowds daily, and were beginning to be talked about, even in the West End. Giles would go to hear him sometimes; a disreputable, slouching old figure, in a rough fur cap; a figure with loose thick lips and stubbled chin and kindly merry black eyes.

"Lord bless you, I always knew Barnabas had something queer inside him!"

he would say; "but I didn't reckon it would take this shape. To think of him turning Methody! But he was bound to be something. If he hadn't turned saint, he'd have swung from the gallows by now; he's the sort who serves any master hard, whether it's G.o.d, or the devil! Let's drink to his being made archbishop! He'd wake them all up a bit."

Giles drank to that end pretty often, and Barnabas did the work meanwhile: the business had not been so flourishing for years.

Possibly it was out of consideration for those services, or, possibly, because, with all his faults, a kinder-hearted old rascal never breathed, that Giles, after much grumbling, allowed Barnabas to bring Timothy under his roof.

"You'll repent it, Barnabas!" he said. "Mark my words, we shall have an inquest and no end of bother; and you'll wish you had taken good advice, which is always as much wasted on you as good beer. That's as evil-looking a sneak as ever I saw, and he's capable of dying on purpose to spite you. Bring him in, if you're a fool; but you'll live to repent it!"

Something in the words made the preacher's careworn face graver still.

"Happen I may," he said. "He said as bad luck was following me, but I ain't goin' to be stopped by that."

"Best turn him out again to make his ill prophecies in the gutter," said Giles crossly.

The two men were standing in the doorway now, Barnabas having deposited Timothy on his own bed upstairs, and come down to breathe the cool night air.