When It Was Dark Part 17

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 a.s.sured 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."

They looked for cigarettes in the silver box lined with cedar which stood on the mantel-shelf, but some one had smoked them all and the box was empty.

"Never mind," Spence said; "I've been meaning to run out and get a late _Westminster_ and I'll buy some cigarettes, too. There's a shop at the Holborn end of the Lane, next to the shop where the oysters come from, and it won't be shut yet."

In a few minutes he came back with several packets of cigarettes in his hand. "I've brought Virginian," he said; "I know you can't stand Egyptian, none of us can, and if these are cheap, they're good, too."

Till eleven o'clock Stokes played to them--Chopin's wild music of melancholy and fire--and as the hour struck he went home.

Gortre and Spence sat and talked casually after he had gone, about the music they had heard, the cartoon in the evening paper, anything that came.

Basil had not been smoking during the evening. He had been too intent upon the nocturnes, and now he felt a want of tobacco. One of the packets of cigarettes lay by him on the table. He pulled up the flaps and took one. Without thinking what he was doing he drew a little photograph, highly finished and very clear, from the tiny cardboard case.

He glanced at it casually.

The thing was one of those pictures of burlesque actresses which are given away with this kind of tobacco. A tall girl with short skirts and a large picture hat was shown in a coquettish att.i.tude that was meant to be full of invitation.

Basil looked at it steadily with a curious expression on his face. Then he took a large reading-gla.s.s from the table and examined it again, magnifying it to many times its original size.

He scrutinised it with great care. It was the portrait of the strange girl who came to St. Mary's.

Basil had told Spence of this woman, and now he pa.s.sed the photograph on to him.

"Harold, that is the girl who comes to church and looks so unhappy. She is an actress, of course. The name is underneath--Miss Gertrude Hunt.

Who is Miss Gertrude Hunt?"

Spence took the thing. "How very queer!" he said, "to find your unknown like this. Gertrude Hunt? Why, she is a well-known musical comedy girl, sings and dances at the Regent, you know. There are all the usual stories about the lady, but possibly they are all lies. I'm sure I don't know. I've chucked that sort of society long ago. Are you sure it's the same person?"

"Oh, quite sure! Of course, this shows the girl in a different dress and so on, but it's she without a doubt. I am glad she comes to church. It is not what one expects from what one hears of that cla.s.s of woman, and it's not what one generally finds in the parish."

He sighed, thinking of the many chilling experiences of the last few months in the vice-haunted streets and squares of Bloomsbury.

"Well," said Spence, "experiments with that type are generally failures, and sometimes dangerous to the experimenter. You remember Anatole France's _Thais_? But this damsel is no Thais certainly, and you aren't a bit like Paphuntius. I hope you will be able to do some good.

Personally, anything of the sort would be quite impossible to me.

Good-night, old man. I'm going to turn in. I've a hard day's work to-morrow. Sleep well."

He went out of the room with a yawn.

When he was left alone, with his little mystery solved in so commonplace a fashion, Basil was conscious of a curious disappointment. It was an anti-climax.

He had no narrow objection to the theatre. Now and then he had been to see famous actors in great plays. His occasional visits to the theatres of Irving or Wyndham had given him pleasure, nevertheless he had always felt a slight instinctive dislike to the trade of a mime. All voluntary sacrifices of personal dignity affect the average English temperament in this way more or less. However much the apologists of the stage may cry "art" or "beneficial influence," your British thinker is not convinced that there is anything very worthy in painting the face and making the body a public show for a wage. And there is sometimes a kind of wonder in the heart of a sincere Christian who attends a theatre as he remembers that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit.

Still Basil was tolerant enough. But this case which had thrust itself before him was quite different. He knew that the burlesque, the modern music play, made, first and foremost, a frank appeal to the senses. Its hopeless vulgarity and coa.r.s.eness of sentiment, its entire lack of appeal to anything that was not debased and materialistic, were ordinary indisputable facts of every-day life. And so his lady of evensong was a high-priestess of nothing better than this cult of froth and gaudy sensuality. More than all others, his experiences of late had taught him that women of this cla.s.s seemed to be very nearly soulless. Their souls had dissolved in champagne, their consciences were burnt up by the feverish excitement and pleasure of their lives. They sold themselves for luxury and the adulation of coa.r.s.e men.

His very chagrin made him bitter and contemptuous more than his wont.

Then his eye lit upon a photogravure hung upon the opposite wall. It was the reproduction of a quaint, decorative, stilted picture by an artist of the early Umbrian school, and represented St. Mary Magdalene.

The coincidence checked his contemptuous thoughts.

He began to reconstruct the scene in his brain, a favourite and profitable exercise of his, using his knowledge and study of the old dim times to animate the picture and make it vivid.

They were all resting, or rather lying, around the table, the body resting on the couch, the feet turned away from the table in the direction of the wall, while the left elbow rested on the table.

And then, from the open courtyard, up the verandah step, perhaps through an antechamber, and by the open door, pa.s.sed the figure of a woman into the festive reception-room and dining-hall. How had she gained access?

How incongruous her figure must have been there! In those days the Jewish prejudice against any conversation with women--even those of the most lofty character--was extreme.

The shadow of her form must have fallen on all who sat at meat. But no one spoke, nor did she heed any but One only.

The woman had brought with her an _alabastron_ of perfume. It was a flask of precious _foliatum_, probably, which women wore round the neck, and which hung over the breast. The woman stood behind Him at His feet, and as she bowed reverently a shower of tears, like sudden summer rain, "bedewed" His feet.

Basil went through the whole scene until the final, "Go _into_ peace"

not go _in_ peace, as the logical dogmatics would have had it.

And so she, the first who had come to Him for spiritual healing, went out into the better light, and into the eternal peace of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Basil tore up the vulgar little photograph and forgot that aspect of the dancer. He remembered rather the dim figure by the font.

There was a sudden furious knocking on the outer door of the chambers, and he went to open it.

CHAPTER XII

POWERS OF GOOD AND EVIL