The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne Part 41

"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 G.o.ds. 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 a.s.sociated 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 a.s.sure you, as representing her friends and society and that sort of thing, as I have a.s.sured her, that I have not taken this step without earnest prayer and seeking the counsel of Almighty G.o.d."

I am by no means a bigoted pietist, but to hear a person talk lightly about seeking the counsel of Almighty G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d that checked me in the full career of my wickedness. It is the grace of G.o.d that has lighted my path ever since to holier things. It is the grace of G.o.d that has changed me from what I was to what I am. It is the grace of G.o.d that has brought me here to ask pardon on my knees of the woman I have wronged. The grace of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d. 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 inc.u.mbent of a little tin mission church in Hoxton. G.o.d 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 a.s.sured of G.o.d'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."

"G.o.d 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.