The Missioner Part 47

"Can you reach her from prison?" he asked calmly.

The man turned and snarled at him. He knew well enough that escape or resistance alike was hopeless. He was like a pigmy in the hands of the man who held him.

"This isn't your affair," he pleaded earnestly. "Let me go, or I shall do you a mischief some day. Remember it was you who helped me to escape.

You can't give me away now."

"I helped you to escape," Macheson said, "but I did not know what you had done. There is another matter. You have to go away from here quietly and swear never to molest----"

The man ducked with a sudden backward movement, and tried to escape, but Macheson was on his guard.

"You are a fool," the man hissed out, his small bead-like eyes glittering as though touched with fire, his thick red lips parted, showing his ugly teeth. "It is money alone I want from her. I have but to breathe her name and this address in a certain quarter of Paris, and there are others who would take her life. Let me go!"

Then Macheson was conscious of a familiar figure crossing the street in their direction. He had seen him come furtively out of the house they had been watching, and had recognized him at once. It was Stephen Hurd.

Keeping his grasp upon his captive's shoulder, Macheson intercepted him.

"Hurd," he said, "I want to speak to you."

Hurd started, and his face darkened with anger when he saw who it was that had accosted him. Macheson continued hurriedly.

"Look here," he said. "I owe you this at any rate. I have just caught our friend here watching this house. Have you ever seen him before?"

Hurd looked down into the face of the man who, with an evil shrug of the shoulders, had resigned himself--for the present--to the inevitable.

"Never," he answered. "Can't say I'm particularly anxious to see him again. Convert of yours?" he asked, with a sneer.

"He is the man who visited your father on the night of his death,"

Macheson said.

Stephen Hurd was like a man electrified. He seized hold of the other's arm in excitement.

"Is this true?" he demanded.

The man blinked his eyes.

"You have to prove it," he said. "I admit nothing."

"You can leave him to me," Stephen Hurd said, turning to Macheson.

Macheson nodded and prepared to walk on.

"There is a police-station behind to the left," he remarked.

Hurd took no notice. He had thrust his arm tightly through the other man's.

"I have been looking for you," he said eagerly. "We must have a talk together. We will take this hansom," he added, hailing one.

The man drew back.

"Are you going to take me to the police-station?" he demanded.

"Police-station, no!" Hurd answered roughly. "What good would that do me? Get in! Cafe Monico!"

CHAPTER XI

THE WAY OF SALVATION

Holderness leaned back in his worn leather chair and shouted with laughter. He treated with absolute indifference the white anger in Macheson's face.

"Victor," he cried, "don't look at me as though you wanted to punch my head. Down on your knees, man, and pray for a sense of humour. It's the very salt of life."

"That's all very well," Macheson answered, "but I can't exactly see----"

"That's because you're deficient," Holderness shouted, wiping the tears from his eyes. "I haven't laughed so much for ages. Here you come from the East to the West, with all the world's tragedy tearing at your heart, flowing from your lips, a flagellator, a hater of the people to whom you speak, seeking only to strike and to wound, and they accept you as a new sensation! They bare their back to your whip! They have made you the fashion! Oh! this funny, funny world of ours!"

Macheson smiled grimly.

"I'll grant you the elements of humour in the situation," he said, "but you can scarcely expect me to appreciate it, can you? I never came here to play the mountebank, to provide a new sensation for these tired dolls of Society. d.i.c.k, do you think St. Paul could have opened their eyes?"

Holderness shook his head.

"I don't know," he declared. "They're a difficult cla.s.s--you see, they have pluck, and a sort of fantastic philosophy which goes with breeding.

They're not easily scared."

Macheson thought of his friend's words later in the afternoon, when he stood on the slightly raised platform of the fashionable room where his lectures were given. Not a chair was empty. Macheson, as he entered, gazed long and steadily into those rows of tired, distinguished-looking faces, and felt in the atmosphere the delicate wave of perfume shaken from their clothes--the indescribable effect of femininity. There were men there, too, mostly as escorts, correctly dressed, bored, vacuous, from intent rather than lack of intelligence. Macheson himself, carelessly dressed from design, his fine figure ill-clad, with untidy boots and shock hair, felt his anger slowly rising as he marked the stir which his coming had caused. He to be the showman of such a crowd! It was maddening! That day he spoke to them without even the ghost of a smile parting his lips. He sought to create no sympathy. He cracked his whip with the cool deliberation of a Russian executioner.

... "I was asked the other day," he remarked, "by an enterprising journalist, what made me decide to come here and deliver these lectures to you. I did not tell him. It is because I wanted to speak to the most ignorant cla.s.s in Christendom. You are that cla.s.s. If you have intelligence, you make it the servant of your whims. If you have imagination, you use it to enlarge the sphere of your vices. You are worse than the ostrich who buries his head in the sand--you prefer to go underground altogether....

"As you sit here--with every tick of your jewelled watches, out in the world of which in your sublime selfishness you know nothing, a child dies, a woman is given to sin, a man's heart is broken. What do you care? What do you know of that infernal, that everlasting tragedy of sin and suffering that seethes around you? Why should you care? Your life is attuned to the most pagan philosophy which all the ages of sin have evolved. You have sunk so low that you are content to sit and listen to the story of your ignominy...."

What fascination was it that kept them in their places? Holderness, who was sitting in the last row, fully expected to see them leave their seats and stream out; Macheson himself would not have been surprised.

His voice had no particular charm, his words were simple words of abuse, he attempted no rhetorical flourishes, nor any of the tricks of oratory.

He stood there like a disgusted schoolmaster lecturing a rebellious and backward school. Holderness, when he saw that no one left, chuckled to himself. Macheson, aware that his powers of invective were spent, suddenly changed his tone.

Consciously or unconsciously, he told them, every one was seeking to fashion his life according to some hidden philosophy, some unrealized ideal. With religion, as it was commonly understood, he had, in that place at any rate, nothing to do. Even the selfish drifting down the stream of idle pleasures, which const.i.tuted life for most of them, was the pa.s.sive acceptance in their consciousness of the old "faineant"

philosophy of "laissez faire." Had they any idea of the magnificent stimulus which work could give to the emptiest life! For health's sake alone, they were willing sometimes to step out of the rut of their easy-going existence, to discipline their bodies at foreign watering-places, to take up courses of physical exercises, as prescribed by the fashionable crank of the moment. What they would do for their bodies, why should they not try for their souls! The one was surely as near decay as the other--the care of it, if only they would realize it, was ten thousand times more important! He had called them, perhaps, many hard names. There was one he could not call them. He could not call them cowards. On the contrary, he thought them the bravest people he had ever known, to live the lives they did, and await the end with the equanimity they showed. The equivalent of h.e.l.l, whatever it might be, had evidently no terrors for them....

He concluded his address abruptly, as his custom was, a few minutes later, and turned at once to leave the platform. But this afternoon an unexpected incident occurred. A man from the middle of the audience rose up and called to him by name.

Macheson, surprised, paused and turned round. It was Deyes who stood there, immaculately dressed in morning clothes, his long face pale as ever, his manner absolutely and entirely composed. He was swinging his eyegla.s.s by its narrow black ribbon, and leaning a little forward.

"Sir," he said, once more addressing Macheson, "as one of the audience whose shortcomings have so--er--profoundly impressed you, may I take the liberty of asking you a question? I ask it of you publicly because I imagine that there are many others here besides myself to whom your answer may prove interesting."

Macheson came slowly to the front of the platform.

"Ask your question, sir, by all means," he said.