BOOK III
" ... Woman fearing and trembling"
[CHAPTER I]
WHAT IT MEANT TO THE WORLD'S WOMEN
In her house in the older, early-Victorian remnants of Kensington, Mrs. Hubert Armstrong sat at breakfast. Her daughter, a pretty, unintellectual girl, was pouring out tea with a suggestion of flippancy in her manner. The room was grave and somewhat formal. Portraits of Matthew Arnold, Professor Green, and Mark Pattison hung upon the sombre, olive walls.
Over the mantel-shelf, painted in ornamental chocolate-coloured letters, the famous authoress's pet motto was austerely blazoned,—
"The decisive events of the world take place in the intellect."
Indeed, save for the bright-haired girl at the urn, the room struck just that note. It would be difficult to imagine an ordinary conversation taking place there. It was a place in which solid chunks of thought were gravely handed about.
Mrs. Armstrong wore a flowing morning wrap of dark red material. It was clasped at the smooth white throat by a large cameo brooch, a dignified bauble once the property of George Eliot. The clear, steady eyes, the smooth bands of shining hair, the full, calm lips of the lady were all eloquent of splendid unemotional health, assisted by a careful system of hygiene.
She was opening her letters, cutting the envelopes carefully with a silver knife.
"Shall I give you some more tea, Mother?" the daughter asked in a somewhat impatient voice. The offer was declined, and the girl rose to go. "I'm off now to skate with the Tremaines at Henglers," she said, and hurriedly left the room.
Mrs. Armstrong sighed in a sort of placid wonder, as Minerva might have sighed coming suddenly upon Psyche running races with Cupid in a wood, and turned to another letter.
It was written in firm, strong writing on paper headed with some official-looking print.
THE WORLD'S WOMAN'S LEAGUE
London Headquarters,
100 Regent Street, S. W.secretary, miss paull
"My Dear Charlotte,—I should be extremely glad to see you here to-day about lunch time. I must have a long and important talk with you. The work is in a bad way. I know you are extremely busy, but trust to see you as the matters for conference are urgent. Your affectionate Sister,
"Catherine Paull."
Miss Paull was a well-known figure in what may be called "executive" life. Both she and her elder sister, Mrs. Armstrong, had been daughters of an Oxford tutor, and had become immersed in public affairs early in life. While the elder became a famous novelist and leader of "cultured doubt," the younger had remained unmarried and thrown herself with great eagerness into the movement which had for its object the strengthening of woman's position and the lightening of her burdens, no less in England than over the whole world.
The "World's Woman's League" was a great unsectarian society with tentacles all over the globe. The Indian lady missionaries and doctors, who worked in the zenanas, were affiliated to it. The English and American vigilance societies for the safe-guarding of girls, the women of the furtive students' clubs in Russia, the Melbourne society for the supply of domestic workers in the lonely up-country stations of Australia, all, while having their own corporate and separate existences, were affiliated to, and in communication with, the central offices of the League in Regent Street.
The League was all-embracing. Christian, non-Christian, or heathen, it mattered nothing. It aimed at the gigantic task of centralising all the societies for the welfare of women throughout the globe.
On the board of directors one found the names and titles of all the humanitarians of Europe.
The working head of this vast organisation was the thin, active woman of middle age whose name figured in a hundred blue-books, whose speeches and articles were sometimes of international importance, whose political power was undoubtable—Miss Catherine Paull.
The most important function of the League, or one of its most important functions, was the yearly publication of a huge report or statement of more than a thousand pages. This annual was recognised universally as the most trustworthy and valuable summary of the progress of women in the world. It was quoted in Parliament a hundred times each session; its figures were regarded as authoritative in every way.
This report was published every May, and as Mrs. Hubert Armstrong drove to Regent Street in her brougham she realised that points in connection with it were to be discussed, possibly with the various sectional editors, possibly with Miss Paull alone.
As was natural, so distinguished an example of the "higher woman" as Mrs. Armstrong was a great help to the League, and her near relationship to the secretary made her help and advice in constant request.
The office occupied two extensive floors in the quadrant, housing an army of women clerks, typewriters, and a literary staff almost exclusively feminine. Here, from morning till night, was a hum of busy activity quite foreign to the office controlled by the more drone-like men. Miss Paull contrived to interest the most insignificant of her girls in the work that was to be done, making each one feel that in the performance of her task lay not only the means of earning a weekly wage, but of doing something for women all over the world.
In short, the League was an admirable and powerful institution, presided over by an admirable and earnest woman of wonderful organising ability and the gift of tact, that extreme tact necessary in dealing with hundreds of societies officered and ruled by women whose official activities did not always quell that feminine jealousy and bickering which generally militate against success.
It was some weeks since Mrs. Armstrong had seen her sister or communicated with her. The great events in Jerusalem, the chaos into which the holders of the old creeds had been thrown, had meant a series of platform and journalistic triumphs for the novelist. Her importance had increased a thousand-fold, her presence was demanded everywhere, and she had quite lost touch with the League for a time.
As she entered her sister's room she was beaming with satisfaction at the memory of the past few weeks, and anticipating with pleasure the congratulations that would be forthcoming. Miss Paull, in the main, agreed with her sister's opinions, though her extraordinarily strenuous life and busy activities in other directions prevented her public adherence to them.
Moreover, her position as head of the League, which included so many definitely Christian societies, made it inadvisable for her to take a prominent controversial part as Mrs. Armstrong did.
The secretary's room was large and well lit by double windows, which prevented the roar of the Regent Street traffic from becoming too obtrusive.
Except that there was some evidence of order and neatness on the three great writing-tables, and that the books on the shelves were all in their places, there was nothing to distinguish the place from the private room of a busy solicitor or merchant.
Perhaps the only thing which gave the place any really individual note was a large brass kettle, which droned on the fire, and a sort of sideboard with a good many teacups and a glass jar full of what seemed to be sponge cakes.
The two women greeted each other affectionately. Then Miss Paull sent away her secretary, who had been writing with her, expressing her desire to be quite alone for an hour or more.
"I want to discuss the report with you, Charlotte," said Miss Paull, deftly pouring some hot water into a green stone-ware teapot.
She removed her pince-nez, which had become clouded with the steam, and waited for Mrs. Armstrong to speak.
"I expected that was it when I got your note, dear," said the novelist. "I am sorry I have been so much away of late. But, of course, you will have seen how my time has been taken up. Since all Our contentions have been so remarkably established, of course one is looked to a great deal. I have to be everywhere just at present. John Mulgrave has been through three more editions during the last fortnight."
"Yes, Charlotte," answered the sister, "one hears of you on all sides. It is a wonderful triumph from one point of view."
Mrs. Armstrong looked up quickly, with surprise in her eyes. There was a strange lack of enthusiasm in the secretary's tone. Indeed, it was even less than unenthusiastic; it hinted almost of dislike, nearly of dismay.
It could not be jealousy of the blaze of notoriety which had fallen upon Mrs. Armstrong, the lady knew her sister too well for that. For one brief moment she allowed herself the unworthy suspicion that Miss Paull had been harbouring Christian leanings, or had, in the stress and worry of overwork, permitted herself a sentimental adherence to the Christ-myth.
But it was only for a single moment that such thoughts remained in her brain. She dismissed them at once as disloyal to her sister and undignified for herself.
"I don't quite understand, Catherine," she said. "Surely from every point of view this glorious vindication of the truth is of incalculable benefit to mankind. How can it be otherwise? Now that we know the great teacher Jesus——"
She was beginning somewhat on the lines of her public utterances, with a slightly inspired look which, though habit had made mechanical, was still sincere, when her sister checked her with some asperity.
"That is all well and good," she said, her rather sharp, animated features becoming more harsh and eager as she spoke. "You, Charlotte, are at the moment concerned with the future and with abstractions. I am busied with the present and with facts. However I may share your gladness at this vindication, in my official capacity, and more, in the interests of my life work, I am bound to deplore what has happened. I deplore it grievously."
Placid and equable as was her usual temper of mind, Mrs. Armstrong was hardly proof against such a sweeping assertion as this.
Her face flushed slightly.
"Please explain," she said somewhat coldly.
"That is why I wanted you to come to-day," answered Miss Paull. "I very much fear you will be more than startled at what I have to tell you and show you. My facts are all ready—piteous, heart-breaking facts, too. We know, here, what is going on below the surface. We are confronted by statistics, and theories pale before them. Our system is perfect."
She made a movement of her arm and pointed to a small adjacent table, on which were arranged various documents for inspection.
The novelist followed the glance, curiously disturbed by the sadness of the other's voice and the bitterness of her manner. "Show me what you mean, dear," she said.
Miss Paull got up and went to the table. "I will begin with points of local interest," she said, "that is, with the English statistics. In regard to these I will call your attention to a branch of the Social Question. First of all, look at the monthly map for the current month and the one for the month before the Palestine Discovery."
She handed two outline maps of Great Britain and Ireland to her sister.
The maps were shaded in crimson in different localities, the colour being either light, medium, or dark. Innumerable figures were dotted over them, referring to comprehensive marginal notes. Above each map was printed:
series d.—crimes against women
And the month and year were written in below in violet ink.
Mrs. Armstrong held the two maps, which were mounted on stiff card, and glanced from one to the other. Suddenly her face flushed, her eyes became full of incredulous horror, and she stared at her sister. "What is this, Catherine?" she said in a high, agitated voice. "Surely there is some mistake? This is terrible!"
"Terrible, indeed," Miss Paull answered. "During the last month, in Wales, criminal assaults have increased two hundred per cent. In England scarcely less. In Ireland, with the exception of Ulster, the increase has been only eight per cent. I am comparing the map before the discovery with that of the present month. Crimes of ordinary violence, wife-beating and such like, have increased fifty per cent., on an average, all over the United Kingdom. We have, of course, all the convictions, sentences, and so forth. The local agents supply them to the British Protection Society, they tabulate them and send them here, and then the maps are made in this office ready for the annual report."
"But," said Mrs. Armstrong with a shocked, pale face, "is it certain that this is a case of cause and effect?"
"Absolutely certain, Charlotte. Here I have over a thousand letters from men and women interested in the work in all the great towns. They are in answer to direct queries on the subject. In order that there could be no possibility of any sectarian bias, the form has been sent to leading citizens, of all denominations and creeds, who are interested in the work. I will show you two letters at random."
She picked out two of the printed forms which had been sent out and returned filled in, and gave them to Mrs. Armstrong. One ran:
"Kindly state what, in your opinion, is the cause of the abnormal increase of crimes against women in Great Britain during the past month, as shown by the annexed map.
"Name. Rev. William Carr,
"Vicar of St. Saviour's,
"Birmingtown."The recent 'discovery' in Palestine, which appears to do away with the Resurrection of Christ, is in my opinion entirely responsible for the increase of crime mentioned above. Now that the Incarnation is on all hands said to be a myth, the greatest restraint upon human passion is removed. In my district I have found that the moment men give up Christ and believe in this 'discovery,' the moment that the Virgin birth and the manifestation to the Magdalen are dismissed as untrue, women's claim to consideration, and reverence for women's chastity, in the eyes of these men disappear.
"William Carr."
Mrs. Armstrong said nothing whatever, but turned to the other form. In this case the name was that of a Manchester alderman, obviously a Jew—Moses Goldstein, of Goldstein & Hildesheimer, chemical bleachers.
In a flowing business hand the following remarks were written:
"Regrettable increase of crime due in my opinion to sudden wave of disbelief in Christian doctrines. Have questioned men in my own works on the subject. Record this as fact without pretending to understand it. Crimes of violence on increase among Jewish workmen also. Probably sympathetic reaction against morality, though as a strict Jew myself find this doubly distressing.
"Moses Goldstein."
"The famous philanthropist," murmured Mrs. Armstrong.
The lady seemed dazed. Her usual calm volubility seemed to have deserted her.
"This is a terrible blow," said Miss Paull, sadly, "and day by day things are getting worse as figures come in. It seems as if all our work has been in vain. Men seem to be relapsing into the state of the barbaric heathen world. But there is much more yet. I will read you an extract from Mrs. Mary P. Corbin's letter from Chicago. You will remember that she is the organising secretary of the United States branch of the League."
She took up a bundle of closely typewritten sheets.
"'The Friend to Poor Girls' Society' in this city reports a most painful state of things. The work has suddenly fallen to pieces and become totally disorganised. Many of the girls have left the home and returned to lives of prostitution—there seems to be no restraining influence left. In a few cases girls have returned, after two or three weeks of sin, mere wrecks of their former selves. A—— S—— was a well-known girl on the streets when she was converted and brought to the home. Five weeks ago she went away, announcing her intention of resuming her former life. She has just returned in a dying condition from brutal ill-usage. She says that her former experience was nothing to what she has lately endured. Her words are terribly significant: 'I went back as I thought it was no use being good any more now that there isn't any Jesus. I thought I'd have a good old time. But it's not as it was. Hell's broke loose in the streets. The men are a million times worse than they were. It's hell now.'
"Another awful blow has been struck at the purity work. The state of the lower parts of Chicago and New York City has become so bad that even the municipal authorities have become seriously alarmed. Unmentionable orgies take place in public. Accordingly a bill is to be rushed through Congress licensing so many houses of ill-fame in each city ward, according to the Continental system."
She laid down the letter. "There is no need to read more than extracts," she said. "The letter is full of horrors. I may mention that the law against polygamy in the Mormon State of Utah is on the point of being repealed, and there can be no doubt that things will soon be as bad as ever there. Here is a letter from the Bishop of Toomarbin, who is at present in Melbourne, Australia. A Bill is preparing in the House of Legislature to make the divorce laws for men as easy and simple as possible, while women's privileges are to be greatly curtailed in this direction. In Rhodesia the mine-captains are beginning to flog native women quite unchecked by the local magistrates. English magistrates——"
"Stop, dear," said Mrs. Armstrong, with a sudden gesture almost of fear. There was a craven, hunted look in the eyes of this well-known woman. Her face was blanched with pain. She sat huddled up in her chair. All the stately confidence was gone. That proud bearing of equality, and more than equality, with men, which was so noticeable a characteristic of her port and manner, had vanished.
The white hand which lifted a cup of scalding tea to her lips trembled like a leaf.
The sisters sat together in silence. They sat there, names famous in the world for courage, ability, resource. To these two, perhaps more than to any others in England, had been given the power of building up the great edifice of women's enlightened position at the present day.
And now?
In a moment all was changed. The brute in man was awake, unchained, and loose. The fires of cruelty and lust were lit, they heard the roaring of the fires like the roaring of wolves that "devour apace and nothing said."
Mrs. Armstrong was terribly affected. Her keen intelligence told her at once of coming horrors of which these were but the earliest signs.
The roaring of a great fire, louder and more menacing, nearer ... nearer.
Christ had gone from the world never to return—Christ Whom the proud, wishful, worldly woman had not believed in.... They were flogging girls, selling girls ... the fires grew greater and greater ... nearer!
mary, pity women!
[CHAPTER II]
CYRIL HANDS REDUX
For the first two weeks after Hands's return he was utterly bewildered by the rush of events in which he must take part and had little or no time for thought.
His days were filled by official conferences with his chiefs at the Exploring Society, from which important but by no means wealthy body he had suddenly attained more than financial security.
Meeting succeeded meeting. Hands was in constant communication with the heads of the Church, Government, and Society. Interviewers from all the important papers shadowed him everywhere. Despite his protests, for he was a quiet and retiring man, photographers fought for him, and his long, somewhat melancholy face and pointed fair beard stared at him everywhere.
He had to read papers at learned societies, and afterwards women came and carried him off to evening parties without possibility of escape.
The Unitarians of England started a monster subscription for him, a subscription which grew so fast that the less sober papers began to estimate it day by day and to point out that the fortunate discoverer would be a rich man for life.
Everywhere he was flattered, caressed, and made much of. In fact, he underwent what to some natures is the grimmest torture of a humane age—he became the man of the hour. Even by Churchmen and others most interested in denying the truth of the discovery, Hands was treated with consideration and deference. His own bona fides in the matter was indubitable, his long and notable record forbade suspicion.
Of Gortre Hands saw but little. Their greeting had been cordial, but there was some natural restraint, one fearing the attitude of the other. Gortre, no less than Hands, was much away from the chambers, and the pair had few confidences. Hands felt, naturally enough under the circumstances, that he would have been more comfortable with Spence. He was surprised to find him absent, but all he was able to glean was that the journalist had suddenly left for the Continent upon a special mission. Hands supposed that Continental feeling was to be thoroughly tested, and that the work had fallen to Spence.
Meanwhile the invitations flowed in. The old staircase of the inn was besieged with callers. In order to escape them, Hands was forced to spend much time in the chambers on the other side of the landing, which belonged to a young barrister, Kennedy by name, who was able to put a spare sitting-room at his disposal. This gentleman, briefless and happy, was somewhat of the Dick Swiveller type, and it gave him intense pleasure to reconnoitre the opposite "oak" through the slit of his letter-box, and to report and speculate upon those who stood knocking for admission.
How he loathed it all!
The shock and surprise of it was not one of the least distressing features.
Far away in the ancient Eastern city he had indeed realised the momentous nature of the strange and awful things he had found. But of the consequences to himself he had thought nothing, and of the effects on the world he had not had time to think.
Hands had never wished to be celebrated. His temperament was poetic in essence, retiring in action. He longed to be back under the eye of the sun, to move among the memorials of the past with his Arab boys, to lie upon the beach of the Dead Sea when no airs stirred, and, suddenly, to hear a vast, mysterious breaker, coming from nowhere, with no visible cause, like some great beast crashing through the jungle.
And he had exchanged all this for lunches at institutions, for hot rooms full of flowers and fools of women who said, "Oh, do tell me all about your delightful discovery," smiling through their paint while the world's heart was breaking. And there was worse to come. At no distant date he would have to stand upon the platform at the Albert Hall, and Mr. Constantine Schuabe, M.P., Mrs. Hubert Armstrong, the writing woman—the whole crowd of uncongenial people—would hand him a cheque for some preposterous sum of money which he did not in the least want. There would be speeches——
He was not made for this life.
His own convictions of Christianity had never been thoroughly formulated or marked out in his brain. All that was mystical in the great history of Christ had always attracted him. He took an æsthetic pleasure in the beautiful story. To him more than to most men it had become a vivid panoramic vision. The background and accessories had been part of his daily life for years. It was as the figure of King Arthur and his old knights might be to some loving student of Malory.
And although his life was pure, his actions gentle and blameless, it had always been thus to him—a lovely and poetic picture and no more. He had never made a personal application of it to himself. His heart had never been touched, and he had never heard the Divine Voice calling to him.
At the end of a fortnight Hands found that he could stand the strain no longer. His nerves were failing him; there was a constant babble of meaningless voices in his ear which took all the zest and savour from life. His doctor told him quite unmistakably that he was doing too much, that he was not inured to this gaiety, and that he must go away to some solitude by the sea and rest.
The advice not only coincided with his own wishes, but made them possible. A good many engagements were cancelled, a paragraph appeared in the newspapers to say that Mr. Hands's medical adviser had insisted upon a thorough rest, and the man of the moment disappeared. Save only Gortre and the secretary of the Exploring Society, no one knew of his whereabouts.
In a week he was forgotten. Greater things began to animate Society—harsh, terrible, ugly things. There was no time to think of Hands, the instrument which had brought them about.
The doctor had recommended the remotest parts of Cornwall. Standing in his comfortable room at Harley Street, he expatiated, with an enthusiastic movement of his hand, upon the peace to be found in that lost country of frowning rocks and bottle-green seas, where, so far is it from the great centres of action, men still talk of "going into England" as if it were an enterprise, an adventure.
Two days found him at a lonely fishing cove, rather than village, lodging in the house of a coast-guard, not far from Saint Ives.
A few whitewashed houses ran down to the beach of the little natural harbour where the boats were sheltered.
On the shores of the little "Porth," as it was called, the fishermen sat about with sleepy, vacant eyes, waiting for the signal of watchmen on the moor above—the shrill Cornish cry of "Ubba!" "Ubba!" which would tell them the mackerel were in sight.
Behind the cove, running inland, were the vast, lonely moors which run between the Atlantic and the Channel. It is always grey and sad upon these rolling solitudes, sad and silent. The glory of summer gorse had not yet clothed them with a fleeting warmth and hospitality. As far as the eye could reach they stretched away with a forlorn immensity that struck cold to Hands's heart. Peace was here indeed, but how austere! quiet, but what a brooding and cruel silence!
Every now and again the roving eye, in its search for incident and colour, was caught and arrested by the bleak engine-house of some ancient deserted mine and the gaunt chimney which pointed like a leaden finger to the stormy skies above. Great humming winds swept over the moor, driving flocks of Titanic clouds, an Olympian army in rout, before their fierce breath.
Here, day by day, Hands took his solitary walk, or sometimes he would sit sheltered in a hollow of the jagged volcanic rocks which set round about the cove a barrier of jagged teeth. Down below him a hard, green sea boiled and seethed in an agony of fierce unrest. The black cormorants in the middle distance dived for their cold prey. The sea-birds were tossed on the currents of the wild air, calling to each other with forlorn, melancholy voices. This remote Western world resounded with the powerful voices of the waves; night and day the gongs of Neptune's anger were sounding.
In the afternoon a weary postman tramped over the moor. He brought the London newspapers of the day before, and Hands read them with a strange subjective sensation of spectatorship.
So far away was he from the world that by a paradox of psychology he viewed its turmoil with a clearer eye. As poetry is emotion remembered in tranquillity, as a painter often prefers to paint a great canvas from studies and memory—quiet in his studio—rather than from the actual but too kinetic scene, so Hands as he read the news-sheets felt and lived the story they had to tell far more acutely than in London.
He had more time to think about what he read. It was in this lost corner of the world that the chill began to creep over him.
The furious sounds of Nature clamoured in his ears, assaulting them like strongholds; these were the objective sounds.
But as his subjective brain grew clear the words his eyes conveyed to it filled it with a more awful reverberation.
The awful weight grew. He began to realise with terrible distinctness the consequences of his discovery. They stunned him. A carved inscription, a crumbling tomb in half an acre of waste ground. He had stumbled upon so much and little more. He, Cyril Hands, had found this.
His straining eyes day by day turned to the columns of the papers.
[CHAPTER III]
all ye inhabitants of the world, and dwellers on the earth, see ye,
when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains.—isaiah xviii: 3
Hands awoke to terrible realisation.
The telegrams in the newspapers provided him with a bird's-eye view, an epitomised summary of a world in tumult.
Out of a wealth of detail, culled from innumerable telegrams and articles, certain facts stood out clearly.
In the Balkan States, always in unrest, a crisis, graver than ever before, suddenly came about. The situation flared up like a petrol explosion.
A great revival of Mohammedan enthusiasm had begun to spread from Jerusalem as soon as Europe had more or less definitely accepted the discovery made by Cyril Hands and confirmed by the international committee.
It was no longer possible to hold the troops of the Sultan in check. It was openly said by the correspondents that instructions had been sent from Yildiz Kiosk to the provincial Valis in both European and Asiatic Turkey that Christians were to be exterminated, swept for ever from the world.
Telegrams of dire importance filled the columns of the papers.
Hands would read in one Daily Wire:
"Paris (From our own Correspondent).—The Prince of Bulgaria has indefinitely postponed his departure, and remains at the Hotel Ritz for the present. It is impossible for him to progress beyond Vienna. Dr. Daneff, the Bulgarian Premier, has arrived here. In the course of an interview with a representative of Le Matin he has stated the only hope of saving the Christians remaining in the Balkan States lies in the intervention of Russia. 'The situation,' Dr. Daneff is reported to have said, 'has assumed the appearance of a religious war. The followers of Islam are drunk with triumph and hatred of the "Nazarenes." The recent discoveries in Jerusalem simply mean a licence to sweep Christians out of existence. The exulting cries of "Ashahadu, lá ílaha ill Allah" have already sounded the death-knell of our ancient faith in Bulgaria.' M. Daneff was extremely affected during the interview, and states that Prince Ferdinand is unable to leave his room."
Never before in the history of Eastern Europe had the future appeared so gloomy or the present been so replete with horror.
The massacres of bygone years were as nothing to those which were daily flashed over the wires to startle and appal a world which was still Christian, at least in name.
An extract from a leading article in the Daily Wire shows that the underlying reason and cause was thoroughly appreciated and understood in England no less than abroad.
"In this labyrinth of myth and murder," the article said, "a sudden and spontaneous outburst of hatred, of Mussulman hatred for the Christian, has now—owing to the overthrow of the chief accepted doctrine of the Christian faith—become a deliberate measure of extermination adopted by a barbarous Government as the simplest solution of the problem in the Near East. The stupendous fact which has lately burst upon the world has had effects which, while they might have been anticipated in some degree, have already passed far beyond the bounds of the most confirmed political pessimist's dream.
"From the fact of the Jerusalem discovery, ambitious agitators have hurried to draw their profit. Politicians have not hesitated to provoke a series of massacres, and by playing upon the worst forms of Mussulman fanaticism to organise that ghastliest system of crime upon the largest and most comprehensive scale. The whole thing is, moreover, immensely complicated by the utter unscrupulousness of that association universally notorious as the Macedonian Committee. These people, who may be described as a company of aspirants to the crown of immortality earned by other people's martyrdom, have themselves assisted in the work of lighting the fires of Turkish passion, and they have helped to provoke atrocities which will enable them to pose before the eyes of the civilised world as the interesting victims of Moslem ferocity."
Thus Hands read in his rock cave above the boiling winter sea. Thus and much more, as the cloud grew darker and darker over Eastern Europe, darker and darker day by day.
In a week it became plain to the world that Bulgarians, Servians, and Armenians alike had collapsed utterly before the insolent exultation of the Turks. The spirit of resistance and enthusiasm had gone. The ignorant and tortured peoples had no answer for those who flung foul insults at the Cross.
As reflected in the newspapers, the public mind in England was becoming seriously alarmed at these horrible and daily bulletins, but neither Parliament nor people were as yet ready with a suggested course of action. The forces of disintegration had been at work; it seemed no longer possible to secure a great body of opinion as in the old times. And Englishmen were troubled with grave domestic problems also. More especially the great increase of the worst forms of crime attracted universal attention and dismay.
Then news came which shook the whole country to its depths. Men began to look into each other's eyes and ask what these things might mean.
Hands read:
"Our special correspondent in Bombay telegraphs disquieting news from India. The native regiments in Bengal are becoming difficult to handle. The officers of the staff corps are making special reports to headquarters. Three native officers of the 100th Bengal Lancers have been placed under arrest, though no particulars as to the exact reason for this step have been allowed to transpire."
This first guarded intimation of serious disaffection in India was followed, two days afterwards, by longer and far more serious reports. The Indian mail arrived with copies of The Madras Mail and The Times of India, which disclosed much more than had hitherto come over the cables.
Long extracts were printed from these journals in the English dailies.
Epitomised, Hands learned the following facts. From a mass of detail a few lurid facts remained fixed in his brain.
The well-meant but frequently unsuccessful mission efforts in Southern India were brought to a complete and utter stand-still.
By that thought-willed system of communication and the almost flame-like mouth-to-mouth carnage of news which is so inexplicable to Western minds, who can only understand the workings of the electric telegraph, the whole of India seemed to be throbbing with the news of the downfall of Christianity, and this within a fortnight of the publication of the European report.
From Cashmere to Travancore the millions whispered the news to each other with fierce if secret exultation.
The higher Hinduism, the key to the native character in India, the wall of caste, rose up grim and forbidding. The passionate earnestness of the missionaries was met by questions they could not answer. In a few days the work of years seemed utterly undone.
Europeans began to be insulted in the Punjaub as they had never been since the days before the Mutiny. English officers and civilians also began to send their wives home. The great P. and O. boats were inconveniently crowded.
In Afghanistan there was a great uneasiness. The Emir had received two Russian officers. Russian troops were massing on the north-west frontier. Fanatics began to appear in the Hill provinces, claiming divine missions. People began to remember that every fourth man, woman, and child in the whole human race is a Buddhist. Asia began to feel a great thrill of excitement permeating it through and through. There were rumours of a new incarnation of Buddha, who would lead his followers to the conquest of the West.
Troops from all over India began to concentrate near the Sri Ulang Pass in the Hindu-Kush.
Simultaneously with these ominous rumours of war came an extraordinary outburst of Christian fanaticism in Russia. The peasantry burst into a flame of anger against England. The priests of the Greek Church not only refused to believe in the Palestine discovery, but they refused to ignore it, as the Roman Catholics of the world were endeavouring to do.
They began to preach war against Great Britain for its infidelity, and the political Powers seized the opportunity to use religious fanaticism for their own ends.
All these events happened with appalling swiftness.
In the remote Cornish village Hands moved as in a dream. His eyes saw nothing of his surroundings, his face was pallid under the brown of his skin. Sometimes, as he sat alone on the moors or by the sea, he laughed loudly. Once a passing coast-guard heard him. The man told of it among the fishermen, and they regarded their silent visitor with something of awe, with the Celtic compassion for those mentally afflicted.
On the first Sunday of his arrival Hands heard the deep singing of hymns coming from the little white chapel on the cliff. He entered in time for the sermon, which was preached by a minister who had walked over from Penzance.
Here all the turmoil of the world beyond was ignored. It seemed as though nothing had ever been heard of the thing that was shaking the world. The pastor preached and prayed, the men and women answered with deep, groaning "Amens." It all mattered nothing to them. They heeded it no more than the wailing wind in the cove. The voice of Christ was not stilled in the hearts of this little congregation of the Faithful.
This chilled the recluse. He could find no meaning or comfort in it.
That evening he heard the daughter of the coast-guard with whom he lodged singing. It was a wild night, and Hands was sitting by the fire in his little sitting-room. Outside the wind and rain and waves were shouting furiously in the dark.
The girl was playing a few simple chords on the harmonium and singing to them.
"For ever with the Lord."
An untuneful voice, louder than need be, but with what conviction!
Hands tried to fix his attention on the newspaper which he held.
He read that in Rhodesia the mine capitalists were moving for slavery pure and simple. It was proposed openly that slavery should be the penalty for law-breaking for natives. This was the only way, it asserted, by which the labour problem in South Africa could be solved.
"Life from the dead is in that word,
'Tis immortality."
It seemed that there was small opposition to this proposal. It would be the best thing for the Kaffir, perhaps, this wise and kindly discipline. So the proposal was wrapped up.
"And nightly pitch my moving tent
A day's march nearer home."
Hands saw that, quite suddenly, the old horror of slavery had disappeared.
This, too, was coming, then? This old horror which Christians had banished from the world?
"So when my latest breath
Shall rend the veil in twain."
Hands started. His thoughts came back to the house in which he sat. The girl's voice touched him immeasurably. He heard it clearly in a lull of the storm. Then another tremendous gust of wind drowned it.
Two great tears rolled down his cheeks.
It was midnight, and all the people in the house were long since asleep, when Hands picked up the last of his newspapers.
It was Saturday's edition of the London Daily Mercury, the powerful rival of the Wire. A woman who had been to Penzance market had brought it home for him, otherwise he would have had to wait for it until the Monday morning.
He gazed wearily round the homely room.
Weariness, that was what lay heavy over mind and body—an utter weariness.
The firelight played upon the crude pictures, the simple ornaments, the ship worked in worsted when the coast-guard was a boy in the Navy, the shells from a Pacific island, a model gun under a glass shade. But his thoughts were not prisoned by these humble walls and the humble room in which he sat. He heard the groaning of the peoples of the world, the tramp of armies, the bitter cry of souls from whom hope had been plucked for ever.
He remembered the fair morning in Jerusalem when, with the earliest light of dawn, he had gone to work with his Arab boys before the heat of the day.
From the Mosque of Omar he had heard the sonorous chant of the muezzin.
"The night has gone with the darkness, and the day approaches with light and brightness!
"Praise God for securing His favour and kindness!
"God is most great! God is most great! I testify that there is no god but God!
"I testify that Mohammed is the Apostle of God!
"Come to prayer!
"Come to security!
"Prayer is better than sleep!
"God is most great!
"There is no god but God!
"Arise, make morning, and to God be the praise!"
He had heard the magnificent chant as he passed by, almost kneeling with his Arabs. So short a time ago! Hardly three months—he had kept no count of time lately, but it could hardly be four months.
How utterly unconscious he had been on that radiant morning outside the Damascus Gate! He had seen the men at work, and was sitting under his sun-tent writing on his pad; he was just lighting a cigarette, he remembered, when Ionides, the foreman, had come running up to him, his shrewd, brown face wrinkled with excitement.
And now, even as he sat there on that stormy midnight, far from the world, even now the whole globe was echoing and reverberating with his discovery. He had opened the little rock chambers, and it seemed that the blows of the picks had set free a troop of ruinous spirits, who were devastating mankind.
Pandora's box—that legend fitted what he had done, but with a deadly difference.
He could not find that Hope remained. It would have been better a thousand times if the hot Eastern sun had struck him down that distant morning on his way through the city.
The awful weight, the initial responsibility rested with him.
He alone had been the means by which the world was being shaken with horrors—horrors growing daily, and that seemed as if the end would be unutterable night.
How the wind shrieked and wailed!
Εγω Ιωσηφ ὁ ἀπο Αριμαθειας.
The words were written in fire on his mind!
The wind was shrieking louder and louder.
The Atlantic boomed in one continuous burst of sound.
He looked once more at the leading article in the paper.
It was that article which was long afterwards remembered as the "Simple Statement" article.
The writer had spoken the thought that was by this time trembling for utterance on the lips and in the brains of all Englishmen—the thought which had never been so squarely faced, so frankly stated before.
Here and there passages started out more vividly than the rest. The words seemed to start out and stab him.
"—So much for India, where, sprung from the same Cause, the indications are impossible to mistake.
"Let us now turn to the Anglo-Saxon sprung communities other than these Islands.
"In America we find a wave of lawlessness and fierce riot passing over the country, such as it has never known before.
"The Irishmen and Italians, who throng the congested quarters of the great cities, are robbing and murdering Protestants and Jews. The United States Legislature is paralysed between the necessity of keeping order and the impossibility of resolution in the face of this tremendous bouleversement of belief.
"From Australia the foremost prelate of the great country writes of the utter overthrow of a communal moral sense, and concludes his communication with the following pathetic words:
"'Everywhere,' he says, 'I see morals, no less than the religion which inculcates them, falling into neglect, set aside in a spirit of despair by fathers and mothers, treated with contempt by youths and maidens, spat upon and cursed by a degraded populace, assailed with eager sarcasm by the polite and cultured.'
"The terrible seriousness of the situation need hardly be further insisted on here. Its reality cannot be more vividly indicated than by the statement of a single fact.
"consols are down to sixty-five
"—and therefore we demand, in the name of humanity, a far more comprehensive and representative searching into the facts of the alleged 'discovery' at Jerusalem. Society is falling to pieces as we write.
"Who will deny the reason?
"Already, after a few short weeks, we are learning that the world cannot go on without Christianity. That is the Truth which the world is forced to realise. And no essay in sociology, no special pleading on the part of Scientists or Historians, can shake our conviction that a creed which, when sudden doubts are thrown upon it, can be the means of destroying the essential fabric of human society, is not the true and unassailable creed of mankind.
"We foresee an immediate reaction. The consequences of the wave of antichristian belief are now, and will be, so devastating, that sane men will find in Disbelief and its consequences a glorious recrudescence and assurance of Faith."
"'Everywhere,' he says, 'I see morals, no less than the religion which inculcates them, falling into neglect, set aside in a spirit of despair by fathers and mothers, treated with contempt by youths and maidens, spat upon and cursed by a degraded populace, assailed with eager sarcasm by the polite and cultured.'
Hands stared into the dying fire.
A solemn passage from John Bright's great speech on the Crimean War came into his mind. The plangent power and deep earnestness of the words were even more applicable now than then.
"The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land: you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and two side-posts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on."
So they were asking for another commission! Well, they might try that as a forlorn hope, but he knew that his discovery was real. Could he be mistaken possibly? Could that congress of the learned be all mistaken and imposed upon? It was not possible. It could not be. Would that it were possible.
There was no hope, despite the newspapers. For centuries the world had been living in a fool's paradise. He had destroyed it. It would be a hundred years before the echoes of his deed had died away.
But the terrible weight of the world's burden was too heavy for him to bear. He knew that. Not for much longer could he endure it.
The life seemed oozing out of him, pressed out by a weight—the sensation was physical.
He wished it was all over. He had no hope for the future, and no fear.
The weight was too heavy. The outside dark came through the walls, and began to close in on him. His heart beat loudly. It seemed to rise up in his throat and choke him.
The pressure grew each moment; mountains were being piled upon him, heavier, more heavy.
The wind was but a distant murmur now, but the weight was crushing him. Only a few more moments and his heart would burst. At last!
The dark thing huddled on the hearth-rug, which the girl found when she came down in the morning, was the scholar's body.
The newspaper he had been reading lay upon his chest.
[CHAPTER IV]
A LUNCHEON PARTY
Constantine Schuabe's great room at the Hotel Cecil had been entirely refurnished and arranged for the winter months.
The fur of great Arctic beasts lay upon the heavy Teheran carpets, which had replaced the summer matting—furs of enormous value. The dark red curtains which hung by windows and over doors were worked with threads of dull gold.
All the chairs were more massive in material and upholstered warmly in soft leather; the logs in the fireplace crackled with white flame, amethyst in the glowing cavern beneath.
However the winter winds might sweep over the Thames below or the rain splash and welter on the Embankment, no sound or sign of the turmoil could reach or trouble the people who moved in the fragrant warmth and comfort of this room.
For his own part Schuabe never gave any attention to the mise-en-scène by which he was surrounded, here or elsewhere. The head of a famous Oxford Street firm was told to call with his artists and undermen; he was given to understand that the best that could be done was to be done, and the matter was left entirely to him.
In this there was nothing of the parvenu or of an ignorance of art, as far as Schuabe was concerned. He was a man of catholic and cultured taste. But experience had taught him that his furnishing firm were trained to be catholic and cultured also, that an artist would see to it that no jarring notes appeared. And since he knew this, Schuabe infinitely preferred not to be bothered with details. In absolute contrast to Llwellyn, his mind was always busy with abstractions, with thought and forms of thought, things that cannot be handled or seen. They were the real things for him always.
The millionaire sat alone by the glowing fire. He was wearing a long gown of camel's hair, dyed crimson, confined round the waist by a crimson cord. In this easy garment and a pair of morocco slippers without heels, he looked singularly Eastern. The whole face and figure suggested that—sinister, lonely, and splendid.
The morning papers were resting on a chair by his side. He was reading one of them.
It announced the death from heart disease of Mr. Cyril Hands while taking a few days' rest in a remote village of Cornwall. Not a shadow of regret passed over the regular, impassive face. The eyes remained in fixed thought. He was logically going over the bearings of this event in his mind. How could it affect him? Would it affect him one way or the other?
He paced the long room slowly. On the whole the incident seemed without meaning for him. If it meant anything at all it meant that his position was stronger than ever. The voice of the discoverer was now for ever silent. His testimony, his reluctant but convinced opinion, was upon record. Nothing could alter that. Hands might perhaps have had doubts in the future. He might have examined more keenly into the way in which he came to examine the ground where the new tomb was hidden. Yes, this was better. That danger, remote as it had been, was over.
As his eyes wandered over the rest of the news columns they became more alert, speculative, and anxious. The world was in a tumult, which grew louder and louder every hour. Thrones were rocking, dynasties trembling.
He sank down in his chair with a sigh, passing his hand wearily over his face. Who could have foreseen this? It was beyond belief. He gazed at the havoc and ruin in terrified surprise, as a child might who had lit a little fire of straw, which had grown and devoured a great city.
It was in this very room—just over there in the centre—that he had bought the brain and soul of the archæologist.
The big man had stood exactly on that spot, blanched and trembling. His miserable notes of hand and promises to pay had flamed up in this fire.
And now? India was slipping swiftly away; a bloody civil war was brewing in America; Central Europe was a smouldering torch; the whips of Africa were cracking in the ears of Englishmen; the fortunes of thousands were melting away like ice in the sun. In London gentlemen were going from their clubs to their houses at night carrying pistols and sword-sticks. North of Holborn, south of the Thames, no woman was safe after dark had fallen.
He saw his face in an oval silver glass. It fascinated him as it had never done before. He gripped the leather back of a chair and stared fiercely, hungrily, at the image. It was this, this man he was looking at, some stranger it seemed, who had done all this. He laughed—a dreadful, mirthless, hollow laugh. This mass of phosphates, carbon, and water, this moving, talking thing in a scarlet gown, was the pivot on which the world was turning!
His brain became darkened for a time, lost in an awful wonder. He could not realise or understand.
And no one knew save his partner and instrument. No one knew!
The secret seemed to be bursting and straining within him like some live, terrible creature that longed to rush into light. For weeks the haunting thought had grown and harassed him. It rang like bells in his memory. If only he could share his own dark knowledge. He wanted to take some calm, pale woman, to hold her tight and tell her all that he had done, to whisper it into her ears and watch the mask of flesh change and shrink, to see his words carve deep furrows in it, sear the eyes, burn the colour from the lips. He saw his own face was working with the mad violence of his imaginings.
He wrenched his brain back into normal grooves, as an engineer pulls over a lever. He was half-conscious of the simile as he did so.
Turning away from the mirror, he shuddered as a man who has escaped from a sudden danger.
That above all things was fatal. His luxuriant Eastern imagination had been checked and kept in subjection all his life; the force of his intellect had tamed and starved it. He knew, none better, the end, the extinction of the brain that has got beyond control. No, come what may, he must watch himself cunningly that he did not succumb. A tiny speck in the brain, and then good-bye to thought and life for ever. He was a visitor of the Lancashire Asylum—had been so once at least—and he had seen the soulless lumps of flesh the doctors called "patients." ... "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul," he repeated to himself, and even as he did so, his other self sneered at the weakness which must comfort itself with a poet's rhyme and cling to an apothegm for readjustment.
He tried to shut out the world's alarm from his mental eyes and ears.
He went back to the scenes of his first triumph. They had been sweet indeed.
Yes! worth all the price he had paid and might be called upon to pay.
All over England his life's thought, his constant programme had been gloriously vindicated. They had hailed him as the prophet of Truth at first—a prophet who had cried in the wilderness for years, and who had at last come into his own.
The voices of great men and vast multitudes had come to him as incense. He was to be the leader of the new religion of common sense. Why had they doubted him before, led away by the old superstitions?
Men who had hated and feared him in the old days, had spoken against him and his doctrines as if both were abhorred and unclean, were his friends and servants now. Christians had humbled themselves to the representative of the new power. Bishops had consulted him as to the saving of the Church, and its reconstruction upon "newer, broader, more illuminated lines." They had come to him with fear—anxious, eager to confess the errors of the past, swift to flatter and suggest that, with his help, the fabric and political power of the Church might yet stand.
He was shown, with furtive eyes and hesitating lips, from which the shame had not yet been cleansed, how desirable and necessary it was that in the reconstruction of Christianity the Church should still have a prominent and influential part.
He had been a colossus among them all. But—and he thought of it with anger and the old amazement—all this had been at first, when the discovery had flashed over a startled world. While the thing was new it had been a great question, truly the greatest of all, but it had been one which affected men's minds and not their bodies. That is speaking of the world at large.
As has already been pointed out, only religious people—a vast host, but small beside the mass of Englishmen—were disturbed seriously by what had happened. The price of bread remained the same; beef was no dearer.
During these first weeks Schuabe had been all-powerful. He and his friends had lived in a constant and stupendous triumph.
But now—and in his frightful egoism he frowned at the thick black head-lines in the newspapers—the whole attitude of every one was changed. There was a reflex action, and in the noise it made Schuabe was forgotten.
Men had more to think of now. There was no time to congratulate the man who had been so splendidly right.
Consols were at 65!
Bread was rising each week. War was imminent. On all sides great mercantile houses were crashing. Each fall meant a thousand minor catastrophes all over the country.
The antichristians had no time to jeer at the Faithful; they must work and strain to save their own fortunes from the wreck.
The mob, who were swiftly bereft of the luxuries which kept them in good-humour, were turning on the antichristian party now. In their blind, selfish unreason they cried them down, saying that they were responsible for the misery and terror that lay over the world.
With an absolute lack of logic, the churches were crowded again. The most irreligious cried for the good old times. Those who had most coarsely exulted over the broken Cross now bewailed it as the most awful of calamities.
Christianity was daily being terribly avenged through the pockets and stomachs of the crowd!
It was bizarre beyond thinking, sordid in its immensity, vulgar in its mighty soulless greed, but TRUE, REAL, a FEARFUL FACT.
A stupendous confusion.
Two great currents had met in a maelstrom. The din of the disturbance beat upon the world's ear with sickening clamour.
Louder and louder, day by day.
And the man who had done all this, the brain which had called up these legions from hell, which had loosed these fiery sorrows on mankind, was in a rich room in a luxurious hotel, alone there. Again the shock and marvel took hold of the man and shook him like a reed.
There was a round table, covered with a gleaming white cloth, by the fire. The kidneys in the silver dish were cold, the grease had congealed. The silent servants had brought up a breakfast to him. He had watched their clever, automatic movements. Did they know whom they were attending on, what would happen—?
His thoughts flashed hither and thither, now surveying a world in torture, now weaving a trivial and whimsical romance about a waiter. The frightful activity of his brain, inflamed by thoughts beyond the power of even that wonderful machine, began to have a consuming physical effect.
He felt the grey matter bubbling. Agonising pains shot from temple to temple, little knives seemed hacking at the back of his eyes. Once again, in a wave of unutterable terror, the fear of madness submerged him.
On this second occasion he was unable to recall his composure by any effort which came from within himself. He stumbled into his adjoining dressing-room and selected a bottle from a shelf. It was bromide of potassium, which he had been taking of late to deaden the clamour and vibration of his nerves.
In half an hour the drug had calmed him. His face was very pale, but set and rigid. The storm was over. He felt shattered by its violence, but in an artificial peace.
He took a cigarette.
As he was lighting it his valet entered and announced that Mr. Dawlish, his man of business, was waiting in an anteroom.
He ordered that he should be shown in.
Mr. Dawlish was the junior partner of the well-known firm of city solicitors, Burrington & Tuite. That was his official description. In effect he was Schuabe's principal man of business. All his time was taken up by the millionaire's affairs all over England.
He came in quickly—a tall, well-dressed man, hair thin on the forehead, moustache carefully trained.
"You look very unwell, Mr. Schuabe," he said, with a keen glance. "Don't let these affairs overwhelm you. Nothing is so dangerous as to let the nerves go in times like these."
Schuabe started.
"How are things, Dawlish?" he said.
"Very shaky, very shaky, indeed. The shares of the Budapest Railway are to be bought for a shilling. I am afraid your investments in that concern are utterly lost. When the Bourses closed last night dealings in Foreign Government Stock were at a stand-still. Turkish C and O bonds are worthless."
Again the millionaire started. "You bring me a record of disaster," he said.
"Baumann went yesterday," continued the level voice.
"My cousin," said Schuabe.
"The worst of it is that the situation is getting worse and worse. We have, as you know, made enormous efforts. But all attempts you have made to uphold your securities have only been throwing money away. The last fortnight has been frightful. More than two hundred thousand pounds have gone. In fact, an ordinary man would be ruined by the last month or two. Your position is better because of the real property in the Manchester mills."
"Trade has almost ceased."
"Close the mills down and wait. You cannot go on."
"If I do, ten thousand men will be let loose on the city with nothing but the Union funds to fall back on."
"If you don't, you will be what Baumann is to-day—a bankrupt."
"I have eighty thousand cash on deposit at the Bank of England."
"And if you throw that away after the rest you will be done for. You don't realise the situation. It can't recover. War is inevitable. India will go, I feel it. England is going to turn into a camp. Religion is the pretext of war everywhere. Take your money from the Bank in cash and lock it up in the Safe Deposit strong rooms. Keep that sum, earning nothing, for emergencies, then wait for the other properties to recover. It will be years perhaps, but you will win through in the end. The freehold sites of the mills are alone worth almost anything. It is only paper millionaires that are easily ruined. You are a great property owner. But you must walk very warily, even you. Who could have foreseen all this? I see that fellow Hands is dead—couldn't stand the sight of the mischief he'd done, I suppose. The fool! the eternal fool! why couldn't he have kept his sham discovery to himself? Look at the unutterable misery it has brought on the world."
"You yourself, Dawlish, are you suffering the common fate?"
"I? Certainly not! That is to say, I suffer of course, but not fatally. All my investments are in buildings in safe quarters. I may have to reduce rents for a year or two, but my houses will not be empty. And they are my own."
"Fortunate man," said Schuabe; "but why sham discovery?"
"Out of business hours," said the solicitor, with some stiffness and hesitation, "I am a Roman Catholic, Mr. Schuabe. Good-morning. I will send the transfer round for you to sign."
The cool, machine-like man went away. The millionaire knew that his fortune was tottering, but it moved him little. He knew that his power in the country was nearly over, had dwindled to nothing in the stir of greater things around. Money was only useful as a means of power, and with a sure prescience he saw that he would never regain his old position.
The hour was over.
Whatever would be the outcome of these great affairs, the hour was past and over.
The one glowing thought which burned within him, and seemed to be eating out his life, was the awful knowledge that he and no other man had set in motion this terrible machinery which was grinding up the civilised world.
Day and night from that there was no relief.
His valet again entered and reminded his master that some people were coming to lunch. He went away and began to dress with the man's help.
The guests were only two in number. One was Ommaney, the editor of the Daily Wire, the other Mrs. Hubert Armstrong.
Both the lady and gentleman came in together at about two o'clock.
Mrs. Armstrong was much changed in appearance. Her face had lost its serenity; her manner was quick and anxious; her voice strained.
The slim, quiet editor, on the other hand, seemed to be untouched by worry. Quiet and inscrutable as ever, the only change in him, perhaps, was a slight briskness, an aroma rather than an actual expression of good humour and bien-être.
They sat down to the meal. Schuabe, in his dark grey frock-coat, the careful ensemble of his dress no less than the regular beauty of his face—now smooth and calm—seemed to be beyond all mundane cares. Only the lady was ill at ease.
The conversation at first was all of the actual news of the day, as it had appeared in the morning's newspapers. Hands's death was discussed. "Poor fellow!" said Mrs. Armstrong, with a sigh; "it is sad to think of his sudden ending. The burden was too much for him to bear. I can understand it when I look round upon all that is happening; it is terrible!"
"Surely you do not regret the discovery of the truth?" said Schuabe, quickly.
"I am beginning to fear truth," said the lady. "The world, it seems, was not ripe for it. In a hundred years, perhaps, our work would have paved the way. But it is premature. Look at the chaos all around us. The public has ceased to think or read. They are reading nothing. Three publishers have put up the shutters during the week."
The journalist interrupted with a dry chuckle. "They are reading the Daily Wire," he said; "the circulation is almost doubled." He sent a congratulatory glance to Schuabe.
The millionaire's great holding in the paper was a secret known only to a few. In the stress of greater affairs he had half forgotten it. A swift feeling of relief crossed his brain as he realised what this meant to his tottering fortunes.
"Poor Hands!" said the editor, "he was a nice fellow. Rather unpractical and dreamy, but a nice fellow. Owing to him we had the greatest chance that any paper has ever had in the history of journalism. We owe him a great debt. The present popularity and influence of the paper has dwarfed, positively dwarfed, all its rivals. I have given the poor fellow three columns to-day; I wish I could do more."
"Do you not think, Mr. Ommaney," asked Mrs. Armstrong, "that in the enormous publication of telegrams and political foreign news, the glorious fact that the world has at last awakened to a knowledge of the glorious truths of real religion is being swamped and forgotten? After all, what will be the greatest thing in history a hundred years from now? Will it not be the death of the old superstitions rather than a mutiny in the East or a war with Russia? Will not the names of the pioneers of truth remain more firmly fixed in the minds of mankind than those of generals and chancellors?"
The editor made it quite plain that these were speculations with which he had nothing whatever to do.
"It's dead, Mrs. Armstrong," he said brutally. "The religious aspect is utterly dead, and wouldn't sell an extra copy of the paper. It would be madness to touch it now. The public gaze is fixed on Kabul River and St. Petersburg, Belgrade and Constantinople. They have almost forgotten that Jerusalem exists. I sent out twelve special correspondents ten days ago."
Mrs. Armstrong sighed deeply. It was true, bitterly true. She was no longer of any importance in the public eye. No one asked her to lecture now. The mass meetings were all over. Not a single copy of John Mulgrave had been sold for a month. How differently she had pictured it all on that winter's morning at Sir Michael's; how brightly and gloriously it had begun, and now how bitter the dénouement, how utterly beyond foresight? What was this superstition, this Christianity which in its death struggles could overthrow a world?
"The decisive events of the world occur in the intellect." Yes, but how soon do they leave their parent and outstrip its poor control?
There was no need for women now. That was the bitterest thought of all. The movement was over—done with. A private in the Guards was a greater hero than the leader of an intellectual movement. What a monstrous bouleversement of everything!
Again the lady sighed deeply.
"No," she said again, "the world was not yet strong enough to bear the truth. I have sold my Consols," she continued; "I have been advised to do so. I was investing for my daughter when I am gone. Newspaper shares are the things to buy now, I suppose! My brokers told me that I was doing the wisest thing. They said that they could not recover for years."
"The money market is a thing in which I have very little concern except inasmuch as it affects large public issues," said the editor. "I leave it all to my city editor and his staff—men in whom I have the greatest possible trust. But I heard a curious piece of news last night. I don't know what it portends; perhaps Mr. Schuabe can tell me; he knows all about these things. Sir Michael Manichoe, the head of the Church political party, you know has been buying Consols enormously. Keith, my city editor, told me. He has, so it appears, invested enormous sums. Consols will go up in consequence. But even then I don't see how he can repay himself. They cannot rise much."
"I wonder if I was well advised to sell?" said Mrs. Armstrong, nervously. "They say Sir Michael never makes a mistake. He must have some private information."
"I don't think that is possible, Mrs. Armstrong," Ommaney said. "Of course Sir Michael may very likely know something about the situation which is not yet public. He may be reckoning on it. But things are in such hopeless confusion that no sane speculator would buy for a small rise which endured for half a day. He would not be able to unload quickly enough. It seems as if Sir Michael is buying for a permanent recovery. And I assure you that nothing can bring that about. Only one thing at least."
"What is that?" asked both Mrs. Armstrong and Schuabe together.
The editor paused, while a faint smile flickered over his face. "Ah," he said, "an impossibility, of course. If any one discovered that 'The Discovery' was a fraud—a great forgery, for instance—then we should see a universal relief."
"That, of course, is asking for an impossibility," said Mrs. Armstrong, rather shortly. She resented the somewhat flippant tone of the great man.
These things were all her life. To Ommaney they but represented a passing panorama in which he took absolutely no personal interest. The novelist disliked and feared this detachment. It warred with her strong sense of mental duty. The highly trained journalist, to whom all life was but news, news, news, was a strange modern product which warred with her sense of what was fitting.
"You're not well!" said the editor, suddenly turning to Schuabe, who had grown very pale. His voice reassured them.
It was without a trace of weakness.
The "Perfectly, thank you" was deliberate and calm as ever. Ommaney, however, noticed that, with a very steady hand, the host poured out nearly a tumbler of Burgundy and drank it in one draught.
Schuabe had been taking nothing stronger than water hitherto during the progress of the meal.
The man who had been waiting had just left the room for coffee. After Ommaney had spoken, there was a slight, almost embarrassed, silence. A sudden interruption came from the door of the room.
It opened with a quick push and turn of the handle, quite unlike the deliberate movements of any one of the attendants.
Sir Robert Llwellyn strode into the room. It was obvious that he was labouring under some almost uncontrollable agitation. The great face, usually so jolly and fresh-coloured, was ghastly pale. There was a fixed stare of fright in the eyes. He had forgotten to remove his silk hat, which was grotesquely tilted on his head, showing the hair matted with perspiration.
Ommaney and Mrs. Armstrong sat perfectly still.
They were paralysed with wonder at the sudden apparition of this famous person, obviously in such urgent hurry and distress.
Then, with the natural instinct of well-bred people, their heads turned away, their eyes fell to their plates, and they began to converse in an undertone upon trivial matters.
Schuabe had risen with a quick, snake-like movement, utterly unlike his general deliberation. In a moment he had crossed the room and taken Llwellyn's arm in a firm grip, looking him steadily in the face with an ominous and warning frown.
That clear, sword-like glance seemed to nerve the big man into more restraint. A wave of artificial composure passed over him. He removed his hat and breathed deeply.
Then he spoke in a voice which trembled somewhat, but which nevertheless attained something of control.
"I am really very sorry," he said, with a ghastly attempt at a smile, "to have burst in upon you like this. I didn't know you had friends with you. Please excuse me. But the truth is—the truth is, that I am in rather a hurry to see you. I have an important message for you from—" he hesitated a single moment before he found the ready lie—"from Lord ——. There are—there is something going on at the House of Commons which—But I will tell you later on. How do you do, Mrs. Armstrong? How are you, Ommaney? Fearfully rushed, of course! We archæologists are the only people who have leisure nowadays. No, thanks, Schuabe, I lunched before I came. Coffee? Oh, yes; excellent!"
His manner was noticeably forced and unnatural in its artificial geniality. The man, who had now entered with coffee, brought the tray to him, but instead of taking any he half filled an empty cup with Kümmel and drank it off.
His hurried explanation hardly deceived the two shrewd people at the table, but at least it made it obvious that he wished to be alone with their host.
There was a little desultory conversation over the coffee, in which Llwellyn took a too easy and hilarious part, and then Mrs. Armstrong got up to go.
Ommaney followed her.
Schuabe walked with them a little way down the corridor. While he was out of the room, Llwellyn walked unsteadily to a sideboard. With shaking hand he mixed himself a large brandy-and-soda. His shaking hands, the intense greed with which he swallowed the mixture, were horrible in their sensual revelation. The mask of pleasantness had gone; the reserve of good manners disappeared.
He stood there naked, as it were—a vast bulk of a man in deadly fear.
Schuabe came back and closed the door silently. He drew Llwellyn to the old spot, right in the centre of the great room. There was a wild question in his eyes which his lips seemed powerless to utter.
"Gertrude!" gasped the big man. "You know she came back to me. I told you at the club that it was all right between us again?"
An immeasurable relief crossed the Jew's face. He pushed his friend away with a snarl of concentrated disgust.
"You come here," he hissed venomously, "and burst into my rooms to tell me of your petty amours. Have I not borne with the story of your lust and degradation enough? You come here as if the—." He stopped suddenly. The words died away on his lips.
Llwellyn was transformed.
Even in his terror and agitation an ugly sneer blazed out upon his face. His nostrils curled with evil laughter. His voice became low and threatening. Something subtly vulgar and common stole into it. It was this last that arrested Schuabe. It was horrible.
"Not quite so fast, my good friend," said Llwellyn. "Wait and hear my story; and, confound you! if you talk to me like that again, I'll kill you! Things are equal now, my Jewish partner—equal between us. If I am in danger, why, so are you; and either you speak civilly or you pay the penalty."
A curious thing happened. The enormous overbearing brutality of the man, his vitality, seemed to cow and beat down the master mind.
Schuabe, for the moment, was weak in the hands of his inferior. As yet he had heard nothing of what the other had come to tell; he was conscious only of hands of cold fear knocking at his heart.
He seemed to shrink into himself. For the first and last time in his life, the inherited slavishness in his blood asserted itself.
He had never known such degradation before. The beauty of his face went out like an extinguished candle. His features grew markedly Semitic; he cringed and fawned, as his ancestors had cringed and fawned before fools in power hundreds of years back.
This inexpressibly disgusting change in the distinguished man had its immediate effect upon his companion. It was new and utterly startling. He had come to lean on Schuabe, to place the threads of a dreadful dilemma in his hand, to rest upon his master mind.
So, for a second or two, in loathsome pantomime the men bowed and salaamed to each other in the centre of the room, not knowing what they did.
It was Sir Robert who pulled himself together first. The fear which was rushing over him in waves gave him back a semblance of control.
"We must not quarrel now," he said in a swift, eager voice. "Listen to me. We are on the brink of terrible things. Gertrude Hunt came back to me, as you know. She told me that she was sick to death of her friends the priests, that the old life called her, that she could not live apart from me. She mocked at her sudden conversion. I thought that it was real. I laughed and mocked with her. I trusted her as I would trust myself."
He paused for a moment, choking down the immense agitation which rose up in his throat and half strangled speech.
Schuabe's eyes, attentive and fixed, were still uncomprehending. Still the Jew did not see whither Llwellyn was leading—could not understand.
"She's gone!" said the big man, all colour fading absolutely from his face. "And, Schuabe, in my mad folly and infatuation, in my incredible foolishness ... I told her everything."
A sudden sharp animal moan burst from Schuabe's lips—clear, vibrant, and bestial in the silence.
His rigidity changed into an extraordinary trembling. It was a temporary palsy which set every separate limb trembling with an independent motion. He waited thus, with an ashen face, to hear more.
Llwellyn, when the irremediable fact had passed his lips, when the enormous difficulty of confession was surmounted, proceeded with slight relief:
"This might, you will think, be just possibly without significance for us. It might be a coincidence. But it is not so, Schuabe. I know now, as certainly as I can know anything, that she came to me, was sent to me, by the people who have got hold of her. There has been suspicion for some time, there must have been. We have been ruined by this woman I trusted."
"But why ... how?"
"Because, Schuabe, as I was walking down Chancery Lane not an hour since I saw Gertrude come out of Lincoln's Inn with the clergyman Gortre. They got into a cab together and drove away. And more: I learn from Lambert, my assistant at the Museum, that Harold Spence, the journalist, who is a member of his club and a friend of his, left for Palestine several days ago."
"I have just heard," whispered Schuabe, "that Sir Michael Manichoe has been buying large parcels of Consols."
"The thing is over. We must——"
"Hush!" said the Jew, menacingly. "All is not lost yet. Perhaps, the strong probability is, that only this Gortre knows yet. Even if anything is known to others, it is only vague, and cannot be substantiated until the man in Palestine gets a letter. Without this woman and Gortre we are safe."
The Professor looked at him and understood. Nor was there any terror in his face, only a faint film of relief.
Five minutes afterwards the two distinguished men, talking easily together, walked through the vestibule of the hotel, down the great courtyard and into the roaring Strand.
A hotel clerk explained the celebrities to a voluble group of American tourists as they went by.
[CHAPTER V]
BY THE TOWER OF HIPPICUS
Harold Spence was essentially a man of action. His mental and moral health depended for its continuance upon the active prosecution of affairs more than most men's.
A product of the day, "modern" in his culture, modern in his ideals, he must live the vivid, eager, strenuous life of his times or the fibres of his brain became slack and loosened.
In the absorbing interest of his first mission to the East Spence had found work which exactly suited his temperament. It was work which keyed him up to his best and most successful efforts.
But when that was over, when the news that he had given brilliantly to the world became the world's and was no longer his, then the reaction set in.
The whole man became relaxed and unstrung; he was drifting into a sloth of the mind and body when Gortre had arrived from the North with his message of Hope.
The renewed opportunity of action, the tonic to his weak and waning faith—that faith which alone was able to keep him clean and worthy—again strung up the chords of his manhood till they vibrated in harmony.
Once more Spence was in the Holy City.
But a short time ago he was at Jerusalem as the collective eye of millions of Englishmen, the telegraph wires stretched out behind him to London.
Now he was, to all official intents, a private person, yet, as the steamer cast anchor in the roadstead of Jaffa, he had realised that a more tremendous responsibility than ever before rested with him.
The last words spoken to Spence in England had been those of Sir Michael Manichoe. The great man was bidding him good-bye at Charing Cross.
"Remember," he had said, "that whatever proof or help we may get from this woman, Gertrude Hunt, will be but the basis for you to work on in the East. We shall cable every result of our investigations here. Remember that, as we think, you have immense ability and resource against you. Go very warily. As I have said before, no sum is too great to sacrifice, no sacrifice too great to make."
There had been a day's delay at Jaffa. It had been a day of strange, bewildering thoughts to the journalist.
The "Gate of the Holy Land" is not, as many people suppose, a fine harbour, a thronged port.
The navies of the ancient world which congregated there were smaller than even the coasting steamers of to-day. They found shelter in a narrow space of more or less untroubled water between the shelving rock of the long, flat shore and a low reef rising out of the sea parallel to the town. The vessels with timber for Solomon's Temple tossed almost unsheltered before the terraces of ochre-coloured Oriental houses.
For several hours it had been too rough for the passengers on the French boat to land. More than a mile of restless bottle-green sea separated them from the rude ladders fastened to the wave-washed quay.
There had been one of the heavy rain-storms which at that season of the year visit Palestine. Over the Moslem minarets of the town the purple tops of the central mountains of Judah and Ephraim showed clear and far away.
The time of waiting gave Spence an opportunity for collecting and ordering his thoughts, for summing up the situation and trying to get at the very heart of its meaning.
The messagery steamer was the only one in the roads. Two coasting craft with rags of light brown sails were beating over the swell into the Mediterranean.
The sky was cloudy, the air still and warm. Only the sea was turbulent and uneasy, the steamer rolled with a sickening, regular movement, and the anchor chains beat and rattled with the precision of a pendulum.
Spence sat on the india-rubber treads of the steps leading up to the bridge, with an arm crooked round a white-painted stanchion supporting the hand-rail. A few yards away two lascars were working a chain and pulley, drawing up zinc boxes of ashes from the stoke-hold and tipping them into the sea. As the clinkers fell into the water a little cloud of steam rose from them.
There were but few passengers on the ship, which wore a somewhat neglected, "off-duty" aspect. No longer were the cabins filled with drilled bands of tourists with their loud-voiced lecturing cleric in charge. Not now was there the accustomed rush to the main deck, the pious ejaculations at the first sight of Palestine, the electric knocking at the hearts even of the least devout.
Nobody came to Jerusalem now from England. From Beyrout to Jaffa the maritime plain was silent and deserted, and no tourists plucked the roses of Sharon any more.
A German commercial traveller, with cases of cutlery, from Essen, was arguing with the little Greek steward about his wine bill; a professional photographer from Alexandria, travelling with his cameras for a New York firm of art publishers; two Turkish officers smoking cigarettes; a Russian gentleman with two young sons; a fat man in flannels and with an unshaven chin, very much at home; an orange buyer from a warehouse by the Tower Bridge—these were the undistinguished companions of the journalist.
The steward clapped his hands; déjeuner was ready. The passengers tumbled down to the saloon. Spence declined the loud-voiced Cockney invitation of the fruit merchant and remained where he was, gazing with unseeing eyes at the low Eastern town, which rose and fell before him as the ship rolled lazily from side to side.
There was something immensely, tremendously incongruous in his position. It was without precedent. He had come, in the first place, as a sort of private inquiry agent. He was a detective charged by a group of three or four people, a clergyman or two, a wealthy Member of Parliament, to find out the year-old movements—if, indeed, movements there had been!—of a distinguished European professor. He was to pry, to question, to deceive. This much in itself was utterly astonishing, strangely difficult of realisation.
But how much more there was to stir and confuse his brain!
He was coming back alone to Jerusalem. But a short time ago he had seen the great savants of Europe—only thirty miles beyond this Eastern town—reluctantly pronounce the words which meant the downfall of the Christian Faith.
The gunboat which had brought them all was anchored in this very spot. A Turkish guard had been waiting yonder on the quay, they had gone along the new road to Jerusalem in open carriages,—through the orange groves,—riding to make history.
And now he was here once more.
While he sat on this dingy steamer in this remote corner of the Mediterranean, it was no exaggeration to say that the whole world was in a state of cataclysm such as it had hardly, at least not often, known before.
It was his business to watch events, to forecast whither they would lead. He was a Simon Magus of the modern world, with an electric wire and stylographic pen to prophesy with. He of all men could see and realise what was happening all over the globe. He was more alarmed than even the man in the street. This much was certain.
And a day's easy ride away lay the little town which held the acre of rocky ground from which all these horrors, this imminent upheaval, had come.
Again it seemed beyond the power of his brain to seize it all, to contain the vastness of his thoughts.
These facts, which all the world knew, were almost too stupendous for belief. But when he dwelt upon the personal aspect of them he was as a traveller whose way is irrevocably barred by sheer precipice.
At the very first he had been one mouthpiece of the news. For some hours the packet containing it had hung in the dressing-room of a London Turkish bath.
His act had recoiled upon himself, for when Gortre found him in the chambers he was spiritually dying.
Could this suspicion of Schuabe and Llwellyn possibly be true? It had seemed both plausible and probable in Sir Michael's study in London. But out here in the Jaffa roadstead, when he realised—or tried to realise—that on him might depend the salvation of the world.... He laughed aloud at that monstrous grandiloquent phrase. He was in the nineteenth century, not the tenth.
He doubted more and more. Had it been any one else it might have been possible to believe. But he could not see himself in this stupendous rôle.
The mental processes became insupportable; he dismissed thought with a great effort of will and got up from his seat.
At least there was some action, something definite to do waiting for him. Speculation only blurred everything. He would be true to the trust his friends in England reposed in him and leave the rest to happen as it was fated.
There was a relief in that attitude—the Arab attitude. Kismet!
Griggs, the fruit merchant, came up from the saloon wiping his lips.
"Bit orf," he said, "waiting like this. But the sea will go down soon. Last spring I had to go on to Beyrout, the weather was that rough. Ever tried that Vin de Rishon le Zion? It's a treat. Made from Bordeaux vines transplanted to Palestine—you'll pass the fields on the way up—just had a half bottle. Hallo!—look, there's the boat at last—old Francis Karane's boat. Must go and look after my traps."
A long boat was creeping out from behind the reef. Spence went to his cabin to see after his light kit. It was better to move and work than to think.
It was early morning, the morning after Spence's arrival in Jerusalem. He slept well and soundly in his hotel room, tired by the long ride—for he had come on horseback over the moonlit slopes of Ajalon.
When at length he awoke it was with a sensation of mental and bodily vigour, a quickening of all his pulses in hope and expectation, which was in fine contrast to the doubts and hesitations of the Jaffa roads.
A bright sun poured into the room.
He got up and went to the window. There was a deep, unspoken prayer in his heart.
The hotel was in Akra, the European and Christian quarter of Jerusalem, close by the Jaffa Gate, with the Tower of Hippicus frowning down upon it.
The whole extent of the city lay beneath the windows in a glorious panorama, washed as it was in the brilliant morning light. Far beyond, a dark shadow yet, the Olivet range rose in background to the minarets and cupolas below it.
His eye roved over the prospect, marking and recognising the buildings.
There was the purple dome of the great Mosque of Omar, very clear against the amber-primrose lights of dawn.
Where now the muezzin called to Allah, the burnt-offerings had once smoked in the courts of the Temple—it was in that spot the mysterious veil had parted in symbol of God's pain and death. It was in the porches bounding the court of the Gentiles that Christ had taught.
Closer, below the Antonia Tower, rose the dark, lead-covered cupola of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Great emotion came to him as he gazed at the shrine sacred above all others for so many centuries.
He thought of that holy spot diminished in its ancient glory in the eyes of half the Christian world.
Perhaps no more would the Holy Fire burst forth from the yellow, aged marble of the Tomb at Easter time.
Who could say?
Was not he, Harold Spence, there to try that awful issue?
He wondered, as he gazed, if another Easter would still see the wild messengers bursting away to Nazareth and Bethlehem bearing The Holy Flame.
The sun became suddenly more powerful. It threw a warmer light into the grey dome, and, deep down, the cold, dark waters of Hezekiah's Pool became bright and golden.
The sacred places focussed the light and sprang into a new life.
He made the sign of the Cross, wondering fancifully if this were an omen.
Then with a shudder he looked to the left towards the ogre-grey Turkish battlements of the Damascus Gate.
It was there, over by the Temple Quarries of Bezetha, the New Tomb of Joseph lay.
Yes! straight away to the north lay the rock-hewn sepulchre where the great doctors had sorrowfully pronounced the end of so many Christian hopes.
How difficult to believe that so short a distance away lay the centre of the world's trouble! Surely he could actually distinguish the guard-house in the wall which had been built round the spot.
Over the sad Oriental city—for Jerusalem is always sad, as if the ancient stones were still conscious of Christ's passion—he gazed towards the terrible place, wondering, hoping, fearing.
It was very difficult to know how to begin upon this extraordinary affair.
When he had made the first meal of the day and was confronted with the business, with the actual fact of what he had to do, he was aghast at what seemed his own powerlessness.
He had no plan of action, no method. For an hour he felt absolutely hopeless.
Sir Robert Llwellyn, so his friends believed, had been in Jerusalem prior to the discovery of the New Tomb.
The first duty of the investigator was to find out whether that was true.
In his irresolution he decided to go out into the city. He would call upon various people he knew, friends of Cyril Hands, and trust to events for guiding his further movements.
The rooms where Hands had always stayed were close to the schools of the Church Missionary Society; he would go there. Down in the Mûristan area he could also chat with the doctor at the English Ophthalmic Hospice; he would call on his way to the New Tomb.
It was at The Tomb that he might learn something, perhaps, yet how nebulous it all was, how unsatisfying!
He set out, down the roughly paved streets, through the arched and shaded bazaars—places less full of colour and more sombre than the markets of other Oriental cities—to the heart of the city, where the streets were bounded by the vision of the distant hills of Olivet.
The religious riots and unrest were long since over. The pilgrims to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were less in number, but were mostly Russians of the Greek Church, who still accepted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the true goal of their desires.
The Greeks and Armenians hated each other no more than usual. The Turks were held in good control by a strong governor of Jerusalem. Nor was this a time of special festival. The city, never quite at rest, was still in its normal condition.
The Bedouin women with their unveiled faces, tattooed in blue, strode to the bazaars with the butter they had brought in from their desert herds. They wore gaudy head-dresses and high red boots, and they jostled the "pale townsmen" as they passed them; free, untamed creatures of the sun and air.
As Spence passed by the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre a crowd of Fellah boys ran up to him with candles ornamented with scenes from the Passion, pressing him to buy.
The sun grew hotter as he walked, though the purple shadows of the narrow streets were cool enough. As he left the European heights of Akra and dived deep into the eastern central city, the well-remembered scenes and smells rose up like a wall before him and the rest of life.
He began to walk more slowly, in harmony with the slow-moving forms around. He had been to Omdurman with the avenging army, knew Constantinople during the Greek war—the East had meaning for him.
And as the veritable East closed round him his doubts and self-ridicule vanished. His strange mission seemed possible here.
As he was passing one of the vast ruined structures once belonging to the mediæval knights of St. John, thinking, indeed, that he himself was a veritable Crusader, a thin, importunate voice came to him from an angle of the stone-work.
He looked down and saw an old Nurié woman sitting there. She belonged to the "Nowar," the unclean pariah class of Palestine, who are said to practise magic arts. A gipsy of the Sussex Downs would be her sister in England.
The woman was tattooed from head to foot. She wore a blue turban, and from squares and angles drawn in the dust before her, Spence knew her for a professional geomancer or fortune-teller.
He threw her a coin in idle speculation and asked her "his lot" for the immediate future.
The woman had a few shells of different shapes in a heap by her side, and she threw them into the figures on the ground.
Then, picking them up, she said, in bastard Arabic interspersed with a hard "K"-like sound, which marks the nomad in Palestine, "Effendi, you have a sorrow and bewilderment just past you, and, like a black star, it has fixed itself on your forehead. A letter is coming to you from over the seas telling you of work to do. And then you will leave this country and cross home in a steamer, with a story to tell many people."
Spence smiled at the glib prophecy. Certainly it might very well outline his future course of action, but it was no more than a shrewd and obvious guess.
He was turning to go away when the woman opened her clothes in front, showing the upper part of her body literally covered with tattoo marks, and drew out a small bag.
"Stay, my lord," she said. "I can tell you much more if you will hear. I have here a very precious stone rubbed with oil, which I brought from Mecca. Now, if you will hold this stone in your hand and give me the price you shall hear what will come to you, O camel of the house!"
The curious sensation of "expectation" that had been coming over Spence, the fatalistic waiting for chance to guide him which, in this wild and dream-like business, had begun to take hold of him, made him give the hag what she asked.
There was something in clairvoyance perhaps; at any rate he would hear what the Nurié woman had to say.
She took a dark and greasy pebble from the bag and put it in his hand, gazing at his fingers for a minute or two in a fixed stare without speaking.
When at last she broke the silence Spence noticed that something had gone out of her voice. The medicant whine, the ingratiating invitation had ceased.
Her tones were impersonal, thinner, a recitative.
"Ere sundown my lord will hear that a friend has died and his spirit is in the well of souls."
"Tell me of this friend, O my aunt!" Spence said in colloquial Arabic.
"Thy friend is a Frank, but more than a Frank, for he is one knowing much of this country, and has walked the stones of Jerusalem for many years. Thou wilt hear of his death from the lips of one who will tell thee of another thou seekest, and know not that it is he.... Give me back the stone, lord, and go thy way," she broke off suddenly, with seeming sincerity. "I will tell thee no more, for great business is in thy hands and thou art no ordinary wayfarer. Why didst thou hide it from me, Effendi?"
Drawing her blue head-dress over her face, the woman refused to speak another word.
Spence passed on, wondering. He knew, as all travellers who are not merely tourists know, that no one has ever been quite able to sift the fraud and trickery from the strange power possessed by those Eastern geomancers. It is an undecided question still, but only the shallow dare to say that all is imposture.[2]
And even the London journalist could not be purely materialistic in Jerusalem, the City of Sorrows.
He went on towards his destination. Not far from the missionary establishment was a building which was the headquarters of the Palestine Exploring Society in Jerusalem.
Cyril Hands had always lived up in Akra among the Europeans, but much of his time was necessarily spent in the Mûristan district.
The building was known as the "Research Museum."
Hands and his assistants had gathered a valuable collection of ancient curiosities.
Here were hundreds of drawings and photographs of various excavations. Accurate measurements of tombs, buried houses, ancient churches were entered in great books.
In glass cases were fragments of ancient pottery, old Hebrew seals, scarabs, antique fragments of jewellery—all the varied objects from which high scholarship and expert training was gradually, year by year, providing a luminous and entirely fresh commentary on Holy Writ.
Here, in short, were the tools of what is known as the "Higher Criticism."
Attached to the museum was a library and drawing office, a photographic dark room, apartments for the curator and his wife. A man who engaged the native labour required for the excavations superintended the work of the men and acted as general agent and intermediary between the European officials and all Easterns with whom they came in contact.
This man was well known in the city—a character in his way. In the reports of the Exploring Society he was often referred to as an invaluable assistant. But a year ago his portrait had been published in the annual statement of the fund, and the face of the Greek Ionides in his turban lay upon the study tables of many a quiet English vicarage.
Spence entered the courtyard of the building. It was quiet and deserted; some pigeons were feeding there.
He turned under a stone archway to the right, pushed open a door, and entered the museum.
There was a babel of voices.
A small group of people stood by a wooden pedestal in the centre of the room, which supported the famous cruciform font found at Bîâr Es-seb'a.
They turned at Spence's entrance. He saw some familiar faces of people with whom he had been brought in contact during the time of the first discovery.
Two English missionaries, one in orders, the English Consul, and Professor Theodore Adams, the American archæologist, who lived all the year round in the new western suburb, stood speaking in grave tones and with distressed faces—so it seemed to the intruder.
An Egyptian servant, dressed in white linen, carrying a bunch of keys, was with them.
In his hand the Consul held a roll of yellow native wax.
An enormous surprise shone out on the faces of these people as Spence walked up to him.
"Mr. Spence!" said the Consul, "we never expected you or heard of your coming. This is most fortunate, however. You were his great friend. I think you both shared chambers together in London?"
Spence looked at him in wonder, mechanically shaking the proffered hand.
"I don't think I quite understand," he said. "I came here quite by chance, just to see if there was any one that I knew about."
"Then you have not heard—" said the clergyman.
"I have heard nothing."
"Your friend, our distinguished fellow-worker, Professor Hands, is no more. We have just received a cable. Poor, dear Hands died of heart disease while taking a seaside holiday."
Spence was genuinely affected.
Hands was an old and dear friend. His sweet, kindly nature, too dreamy and retiring perhaps for the rush and hurry of Occidental life, had always been wonderfully welcome for a month or two each year in Lincoln's Inn. His quaint, learned letters, his enthusiasm for his work had become part of the journalist's life. They were recurring pleasures. And now he was gone!
Now it was all over. Never more would he hear the quiet voice, hear the water-pipe bubble in the quiet old inn as night gave way to dawn....
His brain whirled with the sudden shock. He grew very pale, waiting to hear more.
"We know little more," said the Consul, with a sigh. "A cable from the central office of the Society has just stated the fact and asked me to take official charge of everything here. We were just about to begin sealing up the rooms when you came. There are many important documents which must be seen to. Mr. Forbes, poor Hands's assistant, is away on the shores of the Dead Sea, but we have sent for him by the camel garrison post. But it will be some weeks before he can be here, probably."
"This is terribly sad news for me," said Spence at length. "We were, of course, the dearest friends. The months when Hands was in town were always the pleasantest. Of course, lately we did not see so much of each other; he had become a public character. He was becoming very depressed and unwell, terrified, I almost think, at what was going on in the world owing to the discovery he had made, and he was going away to recuperate. But I knew nothing of this!"
"I am sorry," said the Consul, "to have to tell you of such a sad business, but we naturally thought that somehow you knew—though, of course, in point of time that would hardly be possible, or only just so."
"I am in the East," said Spence, giving an explanation that he had previously prepared if it became necessary to account for his presence—"I am here on a mission for my newspaper—to ascertain various points about public opinion in view of all these imminent international complications."
"Quite so, quite so," said the Consul. "I shall be glad to help you in any way I can, of course. But when you came in we were wondering what we should do exactly about poor Hands's private effects, papers, and so on. When he went on leave all his things were packed in cases and sent down here from his rooms in the upper city. I suppose they had better be shipped to England. Perhaps you would take charge of them on your return?"
"I expect you will hear from his brother, the Rev. John Hands, a Leicestershire clergyman, when the mail comes in," said Spence. "This is a great blow to me. I should like to pay my poor friend some public tribute. I should like to write something for English people to read—a sketch of his life and work here in Jerusalem—his daily work among you all."
His voice faltered. His eyes had fallen on a photograph which hung upon the wall. A group of Arabs sat at the mouth of a rock tomb. In front of them, wearing a sun helmet and holding a ten-foot surveyor's wand, stood the dead professor. A kindly smile was on his face as he looked down upon the white figures of his men.
"It would be a gracious tribute," said one of the missionaries. "Every one loved him, whatever their race or creed. We can all tell you of him as we saw him in our midst. It is a great pity that old Ionides has gone. He was the confidential sharer of all the work here, and Hands trusted him implicitly. He could have told you much."
"I remember Ionides well," said Spence. "At the time of the discovery, of course, he was very much in evidence, and he was examined by the committee. Is the old fellow dead, then?"
"No," answered the missionary. "Some time ago, just after the Commission left, in fact, he came into a considerable sum of money. He was getting on in years, and he resigned his position here. He has taken an olive farm somewhere by Nabulûs, a Turkish city by Mount Gerizim. I fear we shall never see him more. He would grieve at this news."
"I think," said Spence, "I will go back to my hotel. I should like to be alone to-day. I will call on you this evening, if I may," he added, turning to the Consul.
He left the melancholy group, once more beginning their sad business, and went out again into the narrow street.
He wanted to be alone, in some quiet place, to pay his departed friend the last rites of quiet thought and memory. He would say a prayer for him in the cool darkness of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
How did it go?
"So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality; Then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
Always all his life long he had thought that these were perhaps the most beautiful of written words.
He turned to the right, passed the Turkish guard at the entrance, and went down the narrow steps to the "Calvary" chapel.
The gloom and glory of the great church, its rich and sombre light, the cool yet heavy air, saddened his soul. He knelt in humble prayer.
When he came out once more into the brilliant sunlight and the noises of the city he felt braver and more confident.
He began to turn his thoughts earnestly and resolutely to his mission.
Swiftly, with a quick shock of memory, he remembered his talk with the old fortune-teller. It was with an unpleasant sense of chill and shock that he remembered her predictions.
Some strange sense of divination had told her of this sad news that waited for him. He could not explain or understand it. But there was more than this. It might be wild and foolish, but he could not thrust the woman's words from his brain.
She knew he was in quest of some one. She said he would be told....
He entered the yellow stone portico of the hotel with a sigh of relief. The hall was large, flagged, and cool. A pool of clear water was in the centre, glimmering green over its tiles. The eye rested on it with pleasure. Spence sank into a deck-chair and clapped his hands. He was exhausted, tired, and thirsty.
An Arab boy came in answer to his hand-clapping. He brought an envelope on a tray.
It was a cable from England.
Spence went up-stairs to his bedroom. From his kit-bag he drew a small volume, bound in thick leather, with a locked clasp.
It was Sir Michael Manichoe's private cable code—a precious volume which great commercial houses all over the world would have paid great sums to see, which the great man in his anxiety and trust had confided to his emissary.
Slowly and laboriously he de-coded the message, a collection of letters and figures to be momentous in the history of Christendom.
"The woman has discovered everything from Llwellyn. All suspicions confirmed. Conspiracy between Llwellyn and Schuabe. You will find full confirmation from the Greek foreman of Society explorations, Ionides. Get statement of truth by any means, coercion or money to any amount. All is legitimate. Having obtained, hasten home, special steamer if quicker. Can do nothing certain without your evidence. We trust in you. Hasten.
"Manichoe."
He trembled with excitement as he relocked the code.
It was a light in a dark place. Ionides! the trusted for many years! The eager helper! The traitor bought by Llwellyn!
It was afternoon now. He must go out again. A caravan, camels, guides, must be found for a start to-morrow.
It would not be a very difficult journey, but it must be made with speed, and it was four days, five days away.
He passed out of the hotel and by the Tower of Hippicus.
A new drinking fountain had been erected there, a domed building, with pillars of red stone and a glittering roof, surmounted by a golden crescent.
Some camel drivers were drinking there. He was passing by when a tall, white-robed figure bowed low before him. A voice, speaking French, bade him good-day.
The face of the man seemed familiar. He asked him his name and business.
It was Ibrahim, the Egyptian servant he had seen at the museum in the morning.
The rooms had been sealed up, and the man had been to the Consul's private house with the keys.
This man had temporarily succeeded the Greek Ionides.
Spence turned back to the hotel and bade Ibrahim follow him.
[CHAPTER VI]
UNDER THE EASTERN STARS: TOWARDS GERIZIM
The night was cold and still, the starlight brilliant in the huge hollow sapphire of the sky.
Wrapped in a heavy cloak, Spence sat at the door of one of the two little tents which composed his caravan.
Ibrahim the Egyptian, a Roman Catholic, as it seemed, had volunteered to act as dragoman. In a few hours this man had got together the necessary animals and equipment for the expedition to Nabulûs.
Spence rode a little grey horse of the wiry Moabite breed, Ibrahim a Damascus bay. The other men, a cook and two muleteers, all Syrians of the Greek Church, rode mules.
The day's march had been long and tiring. Night, with its ineffable peace and rest, was very welcome.
On the evening of the morrow they would be on the slopes of Ebal and Gerizim, near to the homestead of the man they sought.
All the long day Spence had asked himself what would be the outcome of this wild journey. He was full of a grim determination to wring the truth from the renegade. In his hip pocket his revolver pressed against his thigh. He was strung up for action. Whatever course presented itself, that he would take, regardless of any law that there might be even in these far-away districts.
His passport was specially endorsed by the Foreign Office; he bore a letter, obtained by the Consul, from the Governor of Jerusalem to the Turkish officer in command of Nabulûs.
He had little doubt of the ultimate result. Money or force should obtain a full confession, and then, a swift rush for London with the charter of salvation—for it would be little less than that—and the engine of destruction for the two terrible criminals at home.
As they marched over the plains the red anemone and blue iris had peeped from the herbage. The ibex, the roebuck, the wild boar, had fled from the advancing caravan.
Eagles and vultures had moved heavily through the sky at vast heights. Quails, partridges, and plovers started from beneath the horses' feet.
As the sun plunged away, the owls had begun to mourn in the olive groves, the restless chirping of the grasshoppers began to die away, and as the stars grew bright, the nightingale—the lonely song-bird of these solitudes—poured out his melody to the night.
The camp had been formed under the shade of a clump of terebinth and acacias close to a spring of clear water which made the grass around it a vivid green, in pleasant contrast to the dry, withered herbage in the open.
The men had dug out tree roots for fuel, and a red fire glowed a few yards away from Spence's tent.
A group of silent figures sat round the fire. Now and then a low murmur of talk sounded for a minute and then died away again. A slight breeze, cool and keen, rustled in the trees overhead. Save for that, and the occasional movement of one of the hobbled horses, no sound broke the stillness of the glorious night.
It was here, so Spence thought, that the Lord must have walked with His disciples on the journey between Jerusalem and Nazareth.
On such a night as this the little group may have sat in the vale of El Makhna in quiet talk at supper-time.
The same stars looked down on him as they did on those others two thousand years ago. How real and true it all seemed here! How much easier it was to realise and believe than in Chancery Lane!
Why did men live in cities?
Was it not better far for the soul's health to be here alone with God?
Here, and in such places as these, God spoke clear and loud to the hearts of men. He shuddered as the thought of his own lack of faith came back to him.
In rapid review he saw the recent time of his hopelessness and shame. How utterly he had fallen to pieces! It was difficult to understand the pit into which he was falling so easily when Basil had come to him.
Now, the love of God ran in his veins like fire, every sight and sound spoke to him of the Christus Consolator.
It was more than mere cold belief, a love or personal devotion to Christ welled up in him. The figure of the Man of Sorrows was very near him—there was a great fiery cross of stars in the sky above him.
He entered the little tent to pray. He prayed humbly that it might be even thus until the end. He prayed that this new and sweet communion with his Master might never fade or lessen till the glorious daylight of Death dawned and this sojourning far from home was over.
And, in the name of all the unknown millions whom he was come to this far land to aid, he prayed for success, for the Truth to be made manifest, and for a happy issue out of all these afflictions.
"And this we beg for Jesus Christ, His sake."
Then much refreshed and comforted he emerged once more into the serene beauty of the night.
He lit his pipe and sat there, quietly smoking. Presently Ibrahim the Egyptian began to croon a low song, one of the Egyptian songs that soldiers sing round the camp-fires.
The man had done his term of compulsory service in the past, and perhaps this sudden transition from the comfortable quarters in Jerusalem to the old life of camp-fire and plein air had its way with him and opened the springs of memory.
This is part of what he sang in a thin, sad voice:
Born in Galiub, since my birth, many times have I seen the Nile's waters overflow our fields.
And I had a neighbour, Sheikh Abdehei, whose daughter's face was known only to me:
Nothing could be compared to the beauty and tenderness of Fatmé.
Her eyes were as big as coffee cups, and her body was firm with the vigour of youth.
We had one heart, and were free from jealousies, ready to be united.
But Allah curse the military inspector who bound my two hands,
For, together with many more, we were marched off to the camp.
I was poor and had to serve, nothing could soften the inspector's heart.
The drums and the trumpets daily soon made me forget my cottage and the well-wheel on the Nile.
The long-drawn-out notes vibrated mournfully in the night air.
Sadly the singer put his hand to one side of his head, bending as if he were wailing.
The quaint, imaginative song-story throbbed through many phases and incidents, and every now and again the motionless figures round the red embers wailed in sympathy.
At last came the end, a happy climax, no less loved by these simple children of the desert than by the European novel reader.
... So that I was in the hospital and had become most seriously ill.
But swifter than the gazelle, the light of my life came near the hospital.
And called in at the window, "Ibrahim! my eye! my heart!"
And full of joy I carried her about the camp, and presented her to all my superiors, leaving out none, from the colonel down to the sergeant.
I received my dismissal, to return to Galiub and to marry.
Old Abdehei was awaiting us, to bless us. God be praised!
So sang Ibrahim, the converted Christian, the Moslem songs of his youth; for here, in El Makhna, the plain of Shechem, there were no missionaries with their cold reproof and little hymns in simple couplets.
The fire died away, and they slept until dawn flooded the plain.
When, on the next day, the sun was waning, though still high in the western heavens, the travellers came within view of the ancient city of Nabulûs.
There was a great tumult of excitement in Spence's pulses as he saw the city, radiant in the long afternoon lights, and far away.
Here, in the confines of this distant glittering town, lay the last link in the terrible secret which he was to solve.
On either side the purple slopes of the mountains made a mighty frame to the terraced houses below. Ebal and Gerizim kept solemn watch and ward over the city.
The sun was just sinking as they rode into the suburbs. It was a lovely, placid evening.
The abundant cascades of water, which flow from great fissures in the mountain and make this Turkish town the jewel of the East, glittered in the light.
Below them the broad, still reservoirs lay like plates of gold.
They rode through luxuriant groves of olives, figs, and vines, wonderfully grateful and refreshing to the eye after the burnt brown herbage of the plain, towards the regular camping-ground where all travellers lay.
In the cool of the evening Spence and Ibrahim rode through the teeming streets to the Governor's house.
It was a city of fanatics, so the Englishman had heard, and during the great Moslem festivals the members of the various, and rather extensive, missionary establishments were in constant danger. But as the two men rode among the wild armed men who sat in the bazaars or pushed along the narrow streets they were not in any way molested.
After a ceremonious introduction and the delivery of the letter from the Governor of Jerusalem, Spence made known his business over the coffee and cigarettes which were brought immediately on his arrival.
The Governor was a placid, pleasant-mannered man, very ready to give his visitor any help he could.
It was represented to him that the man Ionides, who had but lately settled in the suburbs, was in the possession of some important secrets affecting the welfare of many wealthy residents in Jerusalem. These, it was hinted, were of a private nature, but in all probability great pressure would have to be put upon the Greek in order to receive any satisfactory confession.
The conversation, which was carried on in French, ended in an eminently satisfactory way.
"Monsieur will understand," said the Governor, "that I make no inquiry into the nature of the information monsieur wishes to obtain. I may or may not have my ideas upon that subject. The Greek was, I understand, intimately connected with the recent discoveries in Jerusalem. Let that pass. It is none of my business. Here I am a good Moslem, Allah be praised! it is a necessity of my official position."
He laughed cynically, clapped his hands for a new brass vessel of creaming coffee and continued:
"A political necessity, Monsieur, as a man of the world, will quite understand me. I have been in London, at the Embassy, and I myself am free from foolish prejudices. I am not Moslem in heart nor am I Christian—some coffee, Monsieur?—yes! Monsieur also is a man of the world!"
Spence, sitting cross-legged opposite his host, had smiled an answering cynical smile at these words. He shrugged his shoulders and threw out his hands. Everything depended upon making a good impression upon this local autocrat.
"Eh bien, monsieur avait raison-même—that, I repeat, is not my affair. But this letter from my brother of Jerusalem makes me of anxiety to serve your interests. And, moreover, the man is a Greek, of no great importance—we are not fond of the Greeks, we Turks! Now it is most probable that the man will not speak without persuasion. Moreover, that persuasion were better officially applied. To assist monsieur, I shall send Tewfik Pasha, my nephew, and captain commandant of the northern fort, with half a dozen men. If this dog will not talk they will know how to make him. I suppose you have no scruples as to any means they may employ? There are foolish prejudices among the Western people."
Spence took his decision very quickly. He was a man who had been on many battle-fields, knew the grimness of life in many lands. If torture were necessary, then it must be so. The man deserved it, the end was great if the means were evil. It must be remembered that Spence was a man to whom the very loftiest and highest Christian ideals had not yet been made manifest. There are degrees in the struggle for saintliness; the journalist was but a postulant.
He saw these questions of conduct roughly, crudely. His conscience animated his deeds, but it was a conscience as yet ungrown. And indeed there are many instruments in an orchestra, all tuneful perhaps to the conductor's beat, which they obey and understand, yet not all of equal eminence or beauty in the great scheme of the concert.
The violin soars into great mysteries of emotion, calling high "in the deep-domed empyrean." The flutes whisper a chorus to the great story of their comrade. Yet, though the plangent sounding of the kettle-drums, the single beat of the barbaric cymbals are in one note and unfrequent, yet these minor messages go to swell the great tone-symphony and make it perfect in the serene beauty of something directed and ordained.
"Sir," said the journalist, "the man must be made to speak. The methods are indifferent to me."
"Oh, that can be done; we have a way," said the Governor.
He shifted a little among his cushions. A certain dryness came into his voice as he resumed:
"Monsieur, however, as a man of the world, will understand, no doubt, that when a private individual finds it necessary to invoke the powers of law it is a vast undertaking to move so ponderous a machine?... also it is a privilege? It is not, of course, a personal matter—ça m'est égal. But there are certain unavoidable and indeed quite necessary expenses which must be satisfied."
Spence well understood the polite humbug of all this. He knew that in the East one buys justice—or injustice—as one can afford it. As the correspondent of that great paper over which Ommaney presided, he had always been able to spend money like water when it had been necessary. He had those powers now. There was nothing unusual to him in the situation, nor did he hesitate.
"Your Excellency," he said, "speaks with great truth upon these points. It is ever from a man of your Excellency's penetration that one hears those dicta which govern affairs. I have a certain object in view, and I realise that to obtain it there are certain necessary formalities to be gone through. I have with me letters of credit upon the bank of Lelain Delaunay et Cie., of Jaffa, Jerusalem, and Athens."
"A sound, estimable house," said the Governor, with a very pleased smile.
"It but then remains," said Spence, "to confer with the secretary of your Excellency as to the sum which is necessary to pay for the legal expenses of the inquiry."
"You speak most sensibly," said the Turk. "In the morning I will send the captain commandant and the soldiers to the encampment. My secretary shall accompany them. Then, Monsieur, when the little preliminaries are arranged, you will be free to start for the farm of this dog Ionides. It is not more than four miles from your camp, and my nephew will guide you there. May Allah prosper your undertaking."
"—And have you in His care," replied Spence. "I will now have the honour to wish your Excellency undisturbed rest."
He rose and bowed. The Turkish gentleman rose also and shook hands in genial European fashion.
"Monsieur," he said, with an expansive smile, "Monsieur is without doubt a thorough man of the world."
That night, in the suburbs of the city, sweet and fragrant as the olive groves and fig trees were, cool and fresh as the night wind was, Spence slept but little.
He could hear the prowling dogs of the streets baying the Eastern moon, the owls hooted in the trees, but it was not these distant sounds, all mellowed by the distance, which drove rest and sleep away. It was the imminent sense of the great issues of the morrow, a wild and fierce excitement which forbade sleep or rest and filled his veins with fire.
He could not quite realise what awful things hung upon the event of the coming day. He knew that his brain could not contain the whole terror and vastness of the thought.
Indeed, he felt that no brain could adequately realise the importance of it all.
Yet even that partial realisation of which he was capable was enough to drive all peace away, the live-long night, to leave him nothing but the plangent, burning thought.
He was very glad when the cool, hopeful dawn came.
The nightmare of vigil was gone. Action was at hand. He prayed in the morning air.
Presently, from the city gates, he saw a little cavalcade drawing near, twelve soldiers on wiry Damascene horses, an officer, with the Governor's secretary riding by his side.
Those preliminaries of a signed draft upon the bank, which cupidity and the occasion demanded, were soon over.
These twelve soldiers and their commandant cost him two hundred pounds "English"; but that was nothing.
If his own words were ineffective, then the cord and wedge must do the rest. It had to be paid for.
The world was waiting.
On through the olive groves and the vines laden with purple. On, over the little stone-bridged cascades and streams—sweet gifts of lordly Ebal—round the eastern wall of the town, crumbling stone where the mailed lizards were sleeping in the sun; on to the low roofs and vivid trees where the Greek traitor had made his home!
At length the red road opened before them on to a burnt plain which was the edge and brim of the farm.
It lay direct and patent to the view, the place of the great secret.
Ionides was waiting for them, under a light verandah which ran round the house, before they reached the building.
He had seen them coming over the plain.
A little elderly olive-skinned man, with restless eyes the colour of sherry, bowed and bent before them with terrified inquiry in every gesture.
His gaze flickered over the arms and shabby uniforms of the soldiers with hate and fear in it mingled with a piteous cringing. It was the look which the sad Greek boatmen on the shores of the Bosphorus wear all their lives.
Then he saw Spence and recognised him as the Englishman who had been the friend of Hands, and was at the meetings of the Conference.
The sight of the journalist seemed to affect him like a sudden blow. The fear and uneasiness he had shown at the first sight of the Turkish soldiers were intensified a thousand-fold.
The man seemed to shrink and collapse. His face became ashen grey, his lips parched suddenly, for his tongue began to curl round them in order to moisten their rigidity.
With a great effort he forced himself to speak in English first, fluent enough but elementary, and then in a rush of French, the language of all Europe, and one with which the cosmopolitan Greek is ever at home.
The captain gave an order. His men dismounted and tied up the horses.
Then, taking the conduct of the affair into his own hands at once, he spoke to Ionides with a snarling contempt and brutality that he would hardly have used to a strolling street dog.
"The English gentleman has come to ask you some questions, dog. See to it that you give a true answer and speedy. For, if not, there are many ways to make you. I have the warrant of his Excellency the Governor to do as I please with you and yours."
The Greek made an inarticulate noise. He raised one long-fingered, delicate hand to his throat.
Spence, as he watched, could not help a feeling of pity. The whole attitude of the man was inexpressibly painful in its sheer terror.
His face had become a white wedge of fear.
The officer spoke again.
"You will take the English pasha into a private room," he said sternly, "where he will ask you all he wishes. I shall post two of my men at the door. Take heed that they do not have to summon me. And meanwhile bring out food and entertainment for me and my soldiers."
He clapped his hands and the women of the house, who were peering round the end of the verandah, ran to bring pilaff and tobacco.
Spence, with two soldiers, closely following the swaying, tottering figure of Ionides, went into a cool chamber opening on to the little central courtyard round which the house was built.
It was a bare room, with a low bench or ottoman here and there.
But, on the walls, oddly incongruous in such a setting, were some framed photographs. Hands, in a white linen suit and a wide Panama hat, was there; there was a photograph of the museum at Jerusalem, and a picture cut from an English illustrated paper of the Society's great excavations at Tell Sandahannah.
It was odd, Spence thought gravely, that the man cared to keep these records of his life in Jerusalem, crowned as it was with such an act of treachery.
He sat down on the ottoman. The Greek stood before him, cowering against the wall.
It was a little difficult to know how he should begin; what was the best method to ensure a full confession.
He lit a cigarette to help his thoughts.
"What did Sir Robert Llwellyn give you?—how much?" he said suddenly.
Again the look of ashen fear came over the Greek's face. He struggled with it before he spoke.
"I am sorry that your meaning is not plain to me, sir. I do not know of whom you speak."
"I speak of him whom you served secretly. It was with your aid that the 'new' tomb was found. But before it was found you and Sir Robert Llwellyn were at work there. I have come to obtain from you a detailed confession of how the thing was done, who cut the inscription?—I must know everything. If not, I tell you with perfect truth, your life is not safe. The Governor has sent men with me and you will be made to speak."
He spoke with a deep menace in his tone, and at the same time drew his revolver from the hip pocket of his riding-breeches and held it on his knee.
He had begun to realise the awful nature of this man's deed more and more poignantly in his presence. True, he was the tool of greater intelligences, and his guilt was not so heavy as theirs. Nevertheless, the Greek was no fool, he had something of an education, he had not done this thing blindly.
The man crouched against the wall, desperate and hopeless.
One of the soldiers outside the door moved, and his sabre clanked.
The sound was decisive. With a broken, husky voice Ionides began his miserable confession.
How simple it was! Wild astonishment at the ease with which the whole thing had been done filled the journalist's brain.
The tomb, already known to the Greek, the slow carving of the inscription at dead of night by Llwellyn, the new coating of hamra sealing up the inner chamber.
And yet, so skilfully had the forgeries been committed, chance had so aided the forgers, and their secret had been so well preserved that the whole world of experts was deceived.
In the overpowering relief of the confession Spence was but little interested in the details, but at length they were duly set down and signed by the Greek in the presence of the officer.
By midnight the journalist was far away on the road to Jerusalem.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE LAST MEETING
In Sir Robert Llwellyn's flat in Bond Street the electric bell suddenly rang, a shrill tinkle in the silence.
Schuabe, who sat by the window, looked up with a strained, white face.
Avoiding his glance, Llwellyn rose and went out into the passage. The latch of the door clicked, there was a murmur of voices, and Llwellyn returned, following a third person.
Schuabe gave a scarcely perceptible shudder as this man entered.
The man was a thick-set person of medium height, clean shaven. He was dressed in a frock-coat and carried a silk hat, neither new nor smart, yet not seedy nor showing any evidences of poverty. The man's face was one to inspire a sensitive or alert person with a sudden disgust and terror for which a name can hardly be found. It was an utterly abominable and black soul that looked out of the still rather bilious eyes.
The eyes were much older than the rest of the face. They were full of a cold and deliberate cruelty and, worse even than this, such a hideous knowledge of unmentionable crime was there! The lips made one thin, wicked curve which hardly varied in direction, for this man could not smile.
He belonged to a certain horrible gang who infest the West End of London, bringing terror and ruin to all they meet. These people haunt the bars and music halls of the "pleasure" part of London.
It were better for a man that he had never been born—a thousand times better—than that he should go among these men. Black shame and horrors worse than death they bring with both hands to the bitter fools who lightly meet them unknowing what they are.
Constantine Schuabe, in the moment when he saw this man—knowing well who and what he was—knew the bitterest moment of his life.
Vast criminal that he was himself, mighty in his evil brain, ... he was pure; certain infamies were not his.... He spat into his handkerchief with an awful physical disgust.
"This is my friend, Nunc Wallace," said Llwellyn, pale and trembling.
The man looked keenly at his two hosts. Then he sat down in a chair.
"Well, gentlemen," he said in correct English, but with a curious lack of timbre, of life and feeling in his voice—he spoke as one might think a corpse would speak—"I'm sorry to say that it's all off. It simply can't be done at any price. Even I myself, 'King of the boys' as they call me, confess myself beaten."
Schuabe gave a sudden start, almost of relief it seemed.
Llwellyn cleared his throat once or twice before he could speak. When the words came at length there was a nauseous eagerness in them.
"Why not, Wallace? Surely you and your friends—it must be something very hard that you can't manage."
The words jostled each other in their rapid utterance.
"Give me a drink, Sir Robert, and I'll tell you the reason," said the man.
Then, with an inexpressible assumption of confidence and an identity of interests, which galled and stung the two wretched men till they could hardly bear the torture of it, he began:
"You see, it's like this; we can generally calculate on 'putting a man through it' if he's anything to do with racing on the Turf. I've seen a man's face kicked liver colour, and no one knew who did it. But this parson was a more difficult thing altogether. Then it has been very much complicated by the fact of his friend coming back.
"The idea was to get into the chambers on the evening of this Spence's arrival and put them both through it. In fact, we'd arranged everything fairly well. But two nights ago, as I was in the American bar, at the Horsecloth, a man touched me on the arm. It was Detective Inspector Melton. He knows everything. 'Nunc,' he said, 'sit down at one of these little tables and have a drink. I want to say a few words to you.' Well, of course I had to. He knows every one of the boys.
"'Now, look here,' he said straight out. 'Some of your crowd have been watching the Rev. Basil Gortre of Lincoln's Inn; also, you've had a man at Charing Cross waiting for the continental express. Now, I've nothing against you yet, but I'll just tell you this. The people behind you aren't any guarantee for you. It's not as you think. This is a big thing. I'll tell you something more. This Mr. Gortre and this Mr. Spence you're waiting for are guarded night and day by order of the Home Secretary. It's an international affair. You can no more touch them than you can touch the Prince of Wales. Is that clear? If it's not, then you'll come with me at once on suspicion. I can put my finger on Bunny Watson'—he's my organising pal, gentlemen—'inside of an hour.'"
He stopped at last, taking another drink with a shaking hand, watching the other two with horribly observing eyes.
His cleverness had at once shown him that he had stumbled into something far more dangerous than any ordinary incident of his horrid trade. A million pounds would not have made him touch the "business" now. He had come to say this to his employers now.
The unhappy men became aware that the man was looking at them both with a new expression. There was wonder in his cold eyes now, and a sort of fear also. When Llwellyn had first sought him with black and infamous proposals, there had been none of this. That had seemed ordinary enough to him, the reason he did not inquire or seek to know.
But now there was inquiry in his eyes.
Both Schuabe and Llwellyn saw it, knew the cause, and shuddered.
There was a tense silence, and then the creature spoke again. There was a loathsome confidential note in his voice.
"Now, gentlemen," he said, "you've already paid me well for any little kindness I may have been able to try to do for you. I suppose, now that the little job is 'off,' I shall not get the rest of the sum agreed upon?"
Schuabe, without speaking, made a sign to Llwellyn. The big man got up, went to a little nest of mahogany drawers which stood on his writing-table, and opening one of them, took from it a bundle of notes.
He gave them to the assassin. "There, Nunc," he said; "no doubt you've done all you could. You won't find us ungrateful. But I want to ask you a few questions."
The man took the notes, counted them deliberately, and then looked up with a gleam of satisfied greed passing over his face—the gleam of a pale sunbeam in hell.
"Ask anything you like, sir," he said; "I'll give you any help I can."
Already there was a ring almost of patronage in his voice. The word "help" was slightly emphasised.
"This inspector, who is he exactly? I mean, is he an important person?"
"He is the man who has charge of all the big things. He goes abroad when one of the big city men bunk to South America. He generally works straight from the Home Office; he's the Government man. To tell the truth, I was surprised to meet him in the Horsecloth. One of the others generally goes there. When he began to talk, I knew that there was something important, more than usual."
"He definitely said that he knew your—backers?"
"Yes, he did; and what's more, gentlemen, he seemed to know too much altogether about the business. I don't pretend to understand it. I don't know why a young parson and a press reporter are being looked after by Government as if they were continental sovereigns and the Anarchists were trying to get at them—no more than I know why two such gentlemen as you are wanting two smaller men put through it. But all's well that ends well. I'm satisfied enough, and I'm extremely glad that I got this notice in time to stop it off. But whatever you do, gentlemen, give up any idea of doing those two any harm. You couldn't do it—couldn't get near them. Give it up, gentlemen. Somehow or other, they know all about it. Be careful. Now I'm off. Good-day, gentlemen. Look after yourselves. I fear there is trouble brewing somewhere, though it won't come through me. They can't prove anything on our side."
He went slowly out of the room, back into the darkness of the pit whence he came, to the dark which mercifully hides such as he from the gaze of dwellers under the heavens.
Only the police of London know all about these men, and their imaginations are not, perhaps, strong enough to let the horror of contact remain with them.
When he had gone, Llwellyn sank heavily into a chair. He covered his face with his hands and moaned.
"Oh, fool that I was to try anything of the sort!" hissed Schuabe. "I might have known!"
"What is the state of things, really, do you suppose?" said Llwellyn.
"Imminent with doom for us!" Schuabe answered in a deep and melancholy voice. "It is all clear to me now. Your woman was set on to you by these men from the first. They are clever men. Michael Manichoe is behind them all. She got the story. Spence has been sent to verify it. He has got everything from Ionides. The Government has been told. These things have been going on during the last few hours. Spence has cabled something of his news, perhaps not all. He will be back to-day, this afternoon. He will have left Paris by now, and almost be nearing Amiens. In that train, Llwellyn, lies our death-warrant. Nothing can stop it. They will send the news all over the world to-night. It will be announced in London by dinner-time, probably."
Llwellyn groaned again. In this supreme hour of torture the sensualist was nearer collapse than the ascetic. His life told heavily. He looked up. His face was green-grey save where, here and there, his fingers had pressed into, and left red marks upon, the cheeks, which had lost their firmness and begun to be pendulous and flabby.
"What do you think must be the end?" he said.
"The end is here," said Schuabe. "What matters the form or manner of it? They may bring in a bill and hang us, they will certainly give us penal servitude for life, but probably we shall be torn in pieces by the mob. There is only one thing left."
He made an expressive gesture. Llwellyn shuddered.
"All is not necessarily at an end," he said. "I shall make a last effort to get away. I have still got the clergyman's clothes I wore when I went to Jerusalem. There will be time to get out of London before this evening."
"All over the continent and America you would be known. There is no getting away nowadays. As for me, I shall go down to my place in Manchester by the mid-day train. There is just time to catch it. And there I shall die before they can come to me."
He got up and strode away out of the flat with a set, stern face. Never a passing look did he give to the man he had enriched and damned for ever. Never a gesture of farewell.
Already he was as one in the grave. Llwellyn, left to himself in the silent, richly furnished flat, fell into hysterical sobbing.
His big body shook with the vehemence of his unnatural terror. His moans and cries were utterly without dignity or pathos. He was filled with the immense self-pity of the sensualist.
It is the added torture which comes to the evil-liver.
In the hour of blackness, every moment of physical gratification or sin adds its weight to the terrible burden which must be borne.
This man felt that he was lost. Perhaps all hope was not quite dead. He called on all his courage to make a last attempt at escape.
He must leave this place at once. He would go first to his house in Upper Berkeley Street, Lady Llwellyn's house! His wife.
Something strange and long forgotten moved within him at that word. What might not his life have been by her side, a life lived in open honour! What had he done with it all? His great name, his fame, were built up slowly by his long and brilliant work. Yet all the time that fair edifice was being undermined by secret workers. The lusts of the flesh were deep below the structure, their hammers were always slowly tapping—and now it was all over.
He drove up to his own door, unlocked it, and went up the stairs to his own rooms.
Though he had not been near them for weeks, he saw—with how keen a pang of regret—that they were swept and tidy, ready for his coming at any time.
He rang the bell.
[CHAPTER VIII]
DEATH COMING WITH ONE GRACE
The door opened softly. A long beam of late winter sunshine which had been pouring in at the opposite window and striking the door with its projection of golden powder suddenly framed, played over, and lighted up the figure of Lady Llwellyn.
Sir Robert stood in the middle of the pleasant room and looked at her.
The sunlight showed up the grey pallor of her face, the lines of sorrow and resignation, the faded hair, the thin and bony hands.
"Kate," he said in a weak voice.
It was the first time he had called her by her name for many years.
The tired face lit up with a swift and divine tenderness.
She made a step forward into the room.
He was swaying a little, giddy, it seemed.
She looked him full in the face and saw things there which she had never seen before. A great horror was upon him, a frightful awakening from the long, sensual sloth of his life.
Moving, working, in that great countenance, generally so impassive, uninfluenced by any emotion—at least to her long watchings—except by a moody irritation, she saw Doom, Fate, the Call of the Eumenides.
It came to the poor woman in a sudden wave of illuminating certainty.
And yet, strangely enough, she felt nothing but a quickening of the pulses, a swift embracing pity which was almost a joy in its breaking away of barriers.
If the end were here, it should be together—at last together.
For she loved this cruel, sinning man, this lover of light loves, this man of purple, fine linen, and the sparkling deadly wines of life.
"Kate!"
He said it once more.
Her manner changed. Shrinking, timidity, fear, fled for ever. In her overpowering rush of protecting love all the diffidences of temperament, all the bars which he had forced her to build around her instincts, were swept utterly away.
She went quickly up to him, folded him in her arms.
"Robert!" she said, "poor boy, the end has come to it all. I knew it must come some day. Well, we have not been happy. I wonder if you have been happy? No, I don't think so. But now, Robert, you have me to comfort you with my love once more, my poor Robert, once more, as in the old, simple days when we were young."
She led him to a couch.
He trembled violently. His decision of movement seemed to have gone. His purpose of flight had for the moment become obscure.
And now, into this man's heart came a remorse and regret so awful, a realisation so sudden and strong, so instinct with a pain for which there is no name, that everything before his eyes turned to burning fire.
The flames of his agony burnt up the veils which had for so long obscured the truth. They shrivelled and vanished.
Too late, too late, he knew what he had lost.
The last agony wrenched his brain round again to another and more terrible contemplation.
His thoughts were in other and outside hands, which pulled his brain from one scene to another as a man moves the eye of the camera obscura to different fields of view.
Incredible as it may seem, for the first time Llwellyn realised what he had done—realised, that is, in its entirety, the whole horror and consequences of that action of his which was to kill him now.
He had not been able to see the magnitude and extent of his crime before—either at the time when it was proposed to him, except at the first moment of speech, or after its committal.
His brain and temperament had been wrapped round in the hideous fact of sensuality, which deadens and destroys sensation.
And now, with his wife's thin arms round him, her withered cheek pressed to his, her words of glad love, a martyr's swan song in his ears, he saw, knew, and understood.
Through the terror of his thoughts her words began to penetrate.
"I know, Robert—husband, I know. The end is here. But what has happened? Tell me everything, that I may comfort you the more. Tell me, Robert, for the dear Christ's sake!"
At those words the man stiffened. "For the dear Christ's sake!"
Suddenly, in the disorder and tumult of his tortured brain, came, quite foolishly and inconsequently, a quotation from an old French romance—full of satire and the keen cynicism of a period—which he had been reading:
"'Tres volontiers,' repartit le démon.
'Vous aimez les tableaux changeans;
Je veux vous contenter.'"
Yes! the devil who was torturing him now had shown him many moving aspects of life. Les tableaux changeans!
But now, at last, here was the worst moment of all.
"For the dear Christ's sake, tell me, Robert!"
How could he tell this?
This was his last moment of peace, his last chance of any help or hope.
He had begun to cling to her, to mingle foolish tears with hers—the while his fired brain ranged all the halls of agony.
For if he told her—this gentle Christian lady, to whom he had been so unkind—then she would never touch him more.
The last hours—there was but little time remaining—would be alone. Alone!
This new revelation that her love was still his, wonder of mysteries! this came at the last moments to aid him.
A last grace before the running waters closed over him. Was he to give this up?
The thought of flight lay like a wounded bird in his brain. It crept about it like some paralysed thing. Not yet dead, but inactive. Though he knew how terribly the moments called to him, yet he could not act.
The myriad agonies he was enduring now, agonies so various and great that he knew Hell had none greater, these, even these were alleviated by the wonder of his wife's love.
The terrible remorse that was knocking at his heart could not undo that.
He clung to her.
"Tell me all about it, Robert. I will forgive you, whatever you have done. I have long ago forgiven everything in my heart. There are only the words to say."
She rested her worn, tired head on his shoulder. The sunbeams gave it a glory.
Again the man must suffer a terrible agony. She had asked him to tell her all his trouble in a voice full of gentle pleading.
Whose voice did her voice recall to him; what fatal hour? A coarser voice, a richer voice, trembling, so he had thought, with love for him.
"Tell me everything, Bob!" It was Gertrude's voice.
The day of his undoing! The day when his horrid secret was wrested from him by the levers of his own passions. The day which had brought him to this. Finis coronat opus!
But the agony within him was the agony of contrast.
The great fires round his soul had burnt his lust away. There was no more regret or longing for the evil past. All the joys of a sensual life seemed as if they had never been. Now, the pain was the pain of a man, not who knows the worst too soon, but who knows the best too late!
A vivid picture, a succession of thoughts following each other with such kinetic swiftness that they became welded in one single picture, as one may see a vast landscape of wood and torrent, champaign and forest, in one flash of the storm sword, came to him now.
And, at the last, he saw himself seated at a great table in a noble room. There were soft lights. Silver and flowers were there. Round the board sat many men and women. On their faces was the calm triumph of those who had succeeded in a fine battle, won an intellectual strife. The faces were calm, powerful, serene. They were the salt of society. He saw his own face in a little mirror set among the flowers. His face was even as their faces. Self-reverence had dignified it, self-knowledge and self-control had turned the lines to kindly marble, defiant of time.
At the other end of the table sat a calm and gracious lady, richly dressed in some glowing sombre stuff. She was the grave and loving matron who slept by his side.
Full of honour, full of the glorious satisfaction of a great work well done, a life lived well; hand in hand, a noble and notable pair, they were making their fine progress together.
"I am waiting, Robert, dear!"
Then he knew that he must speak. In rapid words, which seemed to come from a vast distance, he confessed it all.
He told her how Schuabe had tempted him with a vast fortune, how he was already in his power when the temptation had come. How his evil desires had so gripped him, his life of sin had become like air itself to him.
He told of the secret visit to Palestine and the forgery which had stirred the world.
As he spoke, he felt, in some subtle way, that the life and warmth were dying out of the arms which were round him.
The electric current of devotion which had been flowing from this lady seemed to flicker and die away.
The awful story was ended at last.
Then with a face in which the horror came out in waves, inexpressibly terrible to see, with each beat of the pulses a wave of unutterable horror, she slowly rose.
Her arms fell heavily to her sides, all her motions became automatic, jerky.
Slowly, slowly, she turned.
Her feet made no noise as she moved over the room. Her garments did not rustle. But she walked, not as an elderly woman, but a very old woman.
The door clicked softly. He was left alone in the comfortable room.
Alone.
He stood up, tottered a few steps in the direction she had gone, and then, with a resounding crash which shook the furniture in a succession of quick rattles, his great form fell prone upon the floor.
He lay there, head downwards, with the sunshine pouring on him, still and without any reactionary movement.
The afternoon was begun. London was as it had been for days. The uneasiness and unrest which were now become the common incubus of its inhabitants neither grew nor lessened.
The afternoon papers were merely repetitions of former days. Great financial houses were tottering, rumours of wars were growing every hour, no country was at rest, no colony secure. Over the world lawlessness and rapine were holding horrid revel.
But, and long afterwards, this fact was noticed and commented on by the historians: on this especial winter's afternoon there was no ultra-alarming shock, speaking comparatively, to the general state of things.
In the pale winter sunshine men moved heavily about their business, the common burden was shared by all, but there was no loud trumpet note during those hours.
About four o'clock some carriages drove to Downing Street. In one sat Sir Michael Manichoe, Father Ripon, Harold Spence, and Basil Gortre.
In another was the English Consul at Jerusalem, who had arrived with Spence from the Holy City, Dr. Schmöulder from Berlin, and the Duke of Suffolk.
The carriages stopped at the house of the Prime Minister and the party entered.
Nothing occurred, visibly, for an hour, though urgent messages were passing over the telephone wires.
In an hour's time a cab came driving furiously down the Embankment, round by the new Scotland Yard and St. Stephen's Club, into Parliament Street.
The cab contained the Editor of the Times. Following his arrival, in a few seconds, a number of other cabs drove up, all at a fast pace. Each one contained a prominent journalist. Ommaney was among the first to arrive, and Folliott Farmer was with him.
It was nearly an hour when these people left Downing Street, all with very grave faces.
A few minutes after their departure Sir Michael and his party came out, accompanied by several ministers, including the Home Secretary and the Chief Commissioner of Police.
Though the distance to Scotland Yard is only a few hundred yards, the latter gentleman jumped into a passing hansom and was driven rapidly to his office.
This brings the time up to about six o'clock.
It was quite dark in Sir Robert's room. A faint yellow flicker came through the window, which was not curtained, from a gas lamp in the street. A dull and distant murmur from the Edgeware Road could be dimly heard, otherwise the room was quite silent.
Llwellyn did not lie where he had fallen. His swoon had lasted long and no one had come to succour him. But the end was not just yet. The merciful oblivion of passing from a swoon into death was denied him.
He had come to his senses late in the afternoon, about the time that the large party of people had emerged on foot and in carriages from the narrow cul-de-sac of Downing Street.
He had felt very cold, an icy-cold. There had come a terrible moment. The physical sensation was swamped and forgotten in one frightful flash of realisation. He was alone, the end was at hand.
Alone.
Instinctively he had tried to rise. He was lying face downwards at the return of sensation. His legs would not answer the message of his brain when he tried to move them so that he might rise. They lay like long dead cylinders behind him. He was able to drag himself very slowly, for a yard or two, until he reached an ottoman. He could not lift the vast weight of his body into the seat. It was utterly beyond his strength. He propped his trunk against the seat. It was all he was able to accomplish. Icy-cold sweat ran down his cheeks at the exertion. After he had finished moving he found that all strength had left him.
He was paralysed from the waist downwards. The rest of his body was too weak to move him.
Only his brain was working with a terrible activity, there alone in the chill dark.
There came into his molten brain the impulse to pray. Deep down in every human heart that impulse lies.
It is a seed planted there by God that it may grow into the tree of salvation.
The effort was sub-conscious. Almost simultaneously with it came the awful remembrance of what he had done.
A name danced in letters of flame in his brain—JUDAS.
He looked round for some means to end this unbearable torture. He could see nothing, the room was very cold and dark, but he knew there was a case of razors on a table by the window.
When he tried to move he found that he could not. The paralysis was growing upwards.
Then this was to be the end?
A momentary flood of relief came over him. His blood seemed warm again.
But the sensation died rapidly away, the physical and mental glow alike.
He remembered those cases, frequent enough, when the whole body loses the power of movement, but the brain survives, active, alive, helpless.
And all the sweat which the physical glow had induced turned to little icicles all over his body, even as the thought froze in his brain.
An hour went by.
Alone in the dark.
His tongue was parched and dry. A sudden wonder came to him—could he speak still?
Without realising what word he used as a test he spoke.
"Kate."
A gaunt whisper in the silence.
Silence! How silent it was! Yet no, he could hear the distant rumbling of the traffic. He became suddenly conscious of it. Surely it was very loud?
It must be this physical change which was creeping over him. His head was swimming, disordered.
Yet it seemed strangely loud.
And louder, as he began to listen intently. He could not move his head to catch the sound more clearly, but he was beginning to hear it well enough now.
No traffic ever sounded quite like that. It was like an advancing tide, thundering, as a horse gallops, over flat, level sands.
A great sea rushing towards—towards what?
Then he knew what that sound was.
He could hear the individual shouts that made up the enormous mass of menacing sound.
The nation was coming to take its revenge upon its betrayer.
Mob law!
They had found him out. It was as Schuabe had said—the great conspiracy was at an end. The stunning truth was out, flying round the world with its glad message.
Yet, though once more the dishonoured Cross gleamed as the one solace in the hearts of men whose faith had been weak, though at that moment the glad news was racing round the world, yet the evil was not over.
The Prince of the Powers of the air had reigned too long. Not lightly was he to relinquish his sceptre and dominion.
They were in the erst-while quiet street below. The whole space was packed with the roaring multitude. The cries and curses came up to him in one roaring volume of sound, sounds that one looking over the brink of the pit of hell might hear.
A heavy blow upon the stout door of the old well-built house shook the walls where the palsied Judas lay impotent.
Another crash! The room was much lighter now, the crowd below had lights with them.
Crash.
The door opened silently. Lady Llwellyn came swiftly into the room.
She wore a long white robe. Her face was lighted as if a lamp shone behind it.
In her hand was the great crucifix which was wont to hang above her bed.
When Christ died and bade the dying thief ascend with him to Paradise, can we say that His silence condemned the other?
Her face was all aglow with love.
"Robert!" she said. Her voice was like the voice of an angel.
Her arms are round him, her kisses press upon him, the great crucifix is lifted to his dying eyes.
A great thunder on the stairs, furious voices, the tide rising higher, higher.
Death.
[CHAPTER IX]
AT WALKTOWN AGAIN
The news came to Walktown, the final confirmation of what had been so long suspected, in a short telegram from Basil, dispatched immediately he had left Downing Street.
Mr. Byars and Helena had been kept well acquainted with every step in the progress of the investigation.
Ever since Gortre had left Walktown, after his holiday visit, his suspicions had been ringing in the vicar's ears.
Then, when the matter had been communicated to Sir Michael and Father Ripon, when Spence had started, and Mr. Byars knew that all the powers of wealth and intellect were at work, his hopes revived.
The vicar's faith had never for a single moment wavered.
In the crash of the creeds his deep conviction never wavered.
The light burned steadily before the altar.
He had been one of the faithful thousands, learned, simple, Methodist, ritualist, who knew that this thing could not be.
Nevertheless his courage had been failing him. Life seemed to have lost its sweetness, and often he humbly wondered when he should die, hoping that the time was not too long—not without a tremulous belief that God would recognise that he had fought the good fight and kept the faith.
In his own immediate neighbourhood the consequences of the "Discovery" nearly broke his heart. He had no need to look beyond Walktown. Even the great political events which were stirring the world had left him unmoved. His own small corner of the vineyard, now, alas! so choked with rank, luxuriant growth, was enough for this faithful pastor. Here he saw nothing but vice suddenly rearing its head and threatening to overwhelm all else. He heard the Holy Names blasphemed with all the inventions of obscene imaginations, assailed with all the wit of full-blooded men amazed and rejoiced that they could stifle their consciences at last. And this after all his life-work among these folk! He had given them of his best. His prayers, his intellect, much of his money had been theirs.
How insolently they had exulted over him, these coarse and vulgar hearts!
When Basil had first told Mr. Byars of his suspicions the vicar can hardly have been blamed for regarding them sadly as the generous effects of a young and ardent soul seeking to find an immediate way out of the impasse.
The elder man knew that fraud had been at work, but he suspected no such modern and insolent attempt as Basil indicated. It was too much to believe. Gortre had left him most despondent.
But his interest had soon become quickened and alive, as the private reports from London reached him.
When he knew that great people were moving quietly, that the weight of Sir Michael was behind Gortre, he knew at once that in all probability Basil's suspicions were right.
A curious change came over the vicar's public appearances and utterances. His sermons were full of fire, almost Pauline in their strength. People began to flow and flock into the great empty church at Walktown. Mr. Byars's fame spread.
Then, swiftly, after the first week or two, had come the beginning of the great financial depression.
It was felt acutely in Manchester.
All the wealthy, comfortable, easy-going folk who grudgingly paid a small pew-rent out of their superfluity became alarmed, horribly alarmed. The Christianity which had sat so lightly upon them that at first opportunity they had rushed into the Unitarian meeting-houses became suddenly a very desirable thing.
In the fall of Christianity they saw their own fortunes falling. And these self-deceivers would be swept back upon the tide of this reaction into the arms of the Anglican mother they had despised.
The vicar saw all this. He was a keen expert in, and student of, human affairs, and withal a psychologist. He saw his opportunity.
His words lashed and stung these renegades. They were made to see themselves as they were; the preacher cut away all the ground from under them. They were left face to face with naked shame.
What puzzled and yet uplifted the congregation at St. Thomas's was their vicar's extraordinary certainty that the spiritual darkness over the land was shortly to be removed.
It was commented on, keenly observed, greatly wondered at.
"Mr. Byars speaks," said Mr. Pryde, a wealthy solicitor, "as if he had some private information about this Palestine discovery. He is so confident that he magnetises one into his own state of mind, and Byars is not a very emotional man either. His conviction is real. It's not hysteria."
And, being a shrewd, silent man, the solicitor formed his own conclusions, but said nothing of them.
The church continued full of worshippers.
When the news from Basil came, the vicar was sitting before the fire in his lighted study. He had been expecting the telegram all day.
His brain had been haunted by the picture of that distinguished figure with the dark red hair he had so often met.
Again he saw the millionaire standing in his drawing-room proffering money for scholarships. And in Dieppe also!
How well and clearly he saw the huge figure of the savant in his coat of astrachan, with his babble of soups and entrée!
Try as he would, the vicar could not hate these two men. The sin, the awful sin, yes, a thousand times. Horror could not be stretched far enough, no hatred could be too great for such immensity of crime.
But in his great heart, in his large, human nature there was a Divine pity for this wretched pair. He could not help it. It was part of him. He wondered if he were not erring in feeling pity. Was not this, indeed, that mysterious sin against the Holy Ghost for which there was no forgiveness? Was it not said of Judas that for his deed he should lie for ever in hell?
The telegram was brought in by a neat, unconcerned housemaid.
Then the vicar got up and locked the inner door of his study. He knelt in prayer and thanksgiving.
It was a moment of intense spiritual communion with the Unseen.
This good man, who had given his vigorous life and active intellect to God, knelt humbly at his study table while a joy and happiness not of this earth filled all his soul.
At that supreme moment, when the sense of the glorious vindication of Christ flooded the priest's whole being with ecstasy, he knew, perhaps, a faint foreshadowing of the life the Blessed live in Heaven.
For a few brief moments that imperfect instrument, the human body, was permitted a glimpse, a flash of the eternal joy prepared for the saints of God.
The vicar drew very near the Veil.
Helena beat at the door; he opened to her, the tall, gracious lady.
She saw the news in her father's face.
They embraced with deep and silent emotion.
Two hours later the vicarage was full of people.
The news had arrived.
Special editions of the evening papers were being shouted through the streets. Downing Street had spoken, and in Manchester—as in almost every great city in England—the Truth was pulsing and throbbing in the air, spreading from house to house, from heart to heart.
Every one knew it in Walktown now.
There was a sudden unanimous rush of people to the vicarage.
Each big, luxurious house all round sent out its eager owners into the night.
They came to show the pastor, who had not failed them in the darkness, their joy and gratitude now that light had come at last.
How warm and hearty these North-country people were! Mr. Byars had never penetrated so deeply beneath the somewhat forbidding crust of manner and surface-hardness before.
Mingled with the sense of shame and misery at their own lukewarmness, there was a fine and genuine desire to show the vicar how they honoured him for his steadfastness.
"You've been an example to all of us, vicar," said a hard-faced, brassy-voiced cotton-spinner, a kindly light in his eyes, his lips somewhat tremulous.
"We haven't done as we ought to by t' church," said another, "but you'll see that altered, Mr. Byars. Eh! but our faith has been weak! There'll be many a Christian's heart full of shame and sorrow for the past months this night, I'm thinking."
They crowded round him, this knot of expensively dressed people, hard-faced and harsh-spoken, with a warmth and contrition which moved the old man inexpressibly.
Never before had he been so near to them. Dimly he began to think he saw a wise and awful purpose of God, who had allowed this iniquity and calamity that the faith of the world might be strengthened.
"We'll never forget what you've done for us, Mr. Byars."
"If we've been lukewarm before, vicar, 't will be all boiling now!"
"Praise God that He has spoken at last, and God forgive us for forgetting Him."
The air was electric with love and praise.
"Will you say a prayer, vicar?" asked one of the churchwardens. "It seems the time for prayer and a word or two like."
The company knelt down.
It was a curious scene. In the richly furnished drawing-room the group of portly men and matrons knelt at chairs and sofas, stolid, respectable, and middle-aged.
But here and there a shoulder shook with suppressed emotion, a faint sob was heard. This, to many of them there, was the greatest spiritual moment they had ever known. Confirmation, communion, all the episodic mile-stones of the professing Christian's life had been experienced and passed decorously enough. But the inward fire had not been there. The deep certainty of God's mysterious commune with the brain, the deep love for Christ which glows so purely and steadfastly among the saints still on earth—these were coming to them now.
And, even as the fires of the Paraclete had descended upon the Apostles many centuries before, so now the Holy Spirit began to stir and move these Christians at Walktown.
The vicar offered up the joy and thanks of his people. He prayed that, in His mercy, God would never again let such extreme darkness descend upon the world. Even as He had said, "Neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done."
He prayed that all those who had been cast into spiritual darkness, or who had left the fold of Christ, might now return to it with contrite hearts and be in peace.
Finally, they said the Lord's Prayer with deep feeling, and the vicar blessed them.
And for each one there that night became a precious, helpful memory which remained with them for many years.
Afterwards, while servants brought coffee, always the accompaniment to any sort of function in Walktown, the talk broke out into a hushed amazement.
The news which had been telegraphed everywhere consisted of a statement signed by the Secretary of State and the archbishops that the discovery in Palestine was a forgery executed by Sir Robert Llwellyn at the instigation of Constantine Schuabe.
"Ample and completely satisfying evidence is in our possession," so the wording ran. "We render heartfelt gratitude to Almighty God that He has in His wisdom caused this black conspiracy to be discovered. The thanks of the whole world, the gratitude of all Christians, must be for those devoted and faithful men who have been the instruments of Providence in discovering the Truth. Sir Michael Manichoe, the Rev. Basil Gortre, the Rev. Arthur Ripon, and Mr. Harold Spence have alone dispelled the clouds that have hung over the Christian world."
It was a frightful shock to these people to know how a great magnate among them, a business confrère, the member for their own division, an intimate, should have done this thing.
As long as the world lasted the Owner of Mount Prospect who had spoken on their platforms would be accursed. It was too startling to realise at once; the thought only became familiar gradually, in little jerks, as one aspect after another presented itself to their minds.
It was incredible that this antichrist had been long housed among them but a mile from where they stood.
"What will they do to him?"
"Who can say! There's never been a case like it before, you see."
"Well, the paper doesn't say, but I expect they've got them safe enough in London—Mr. Schuabe and the other fellow."
"Just to think of our Mr. Gortre helping to find it out! Pity we ever let him go away from the parish church."
"They can't do less than make him a bishop, I should think."
"Miss Byars, you ought to be proud of your young man. There's many folk blessing him in England this night."
And so on, and so forth; simple, homely speeches, not indeed free from a somewhat hard commercial view, but informed with kindliness and gratitude.
At last, one by one, they went away. It was close upon midnight when the last visitor had departed.
The vicar read a psalm to his daughter:
"Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word. For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people."
Basil was to come to them on the morrow for a long stay.
[EPILOGUE]
IN THREE PICTURES
Note.—The three pictures all synchronise. The episodes they portray take place five years after the day upon which Sir Robert Llwellyn died.—G. T.
I. The Grave
Two figures walked over the cliffs.
The day was wild and stormy. Huge clouds, bursting with sombre light, sailed over the pewter-coloured sea. The bleak magnificence of the moor stretched away in endless billows, as sad and desolate as the sea on which no sail was to be seen.
The wayfarers turned out of the struggle of the bitter wind into a slight depression. A few scattered cottages began to come into the field of their vision.
Soon they saw the whitewashed buildings of a coast-guard station and the high, square tower of a church.
"So it's all settled, Spence," said one of the men, a tall, noble-faced man, dressed as a clerk in Holy Orders.
"Yes, Father Ripon," Spence said. "They have offered me the paper. It was one of poor Ommaney's last wishes. Of course, we were injured in our circulation by the fact that we were the first to publish the news of the great forgery. But in two years Ommaney had brought the paper to the front again. He was wonderful, the first editor of his age.
"I was there with Folliott Farmer and the doctors when he died. Fancy, it was the first time I had ever been in his flat, though we had worked together all these years! The simplest place you ever saw. Just a couple of rooms, where he slept all the daytime. No luxury, hardly even comfort. Ommaney had no existence apart from his work. He'd saved nearly all his very large salary for many years. I am an executor of his will. He left a legacy to Farmer, and to me also, and the rest to the Institute of Journalists. But I am persuaded that he did not care in the least what happened to his money. He never did. He wasn't mean in any way, but he worked all night and slept all day, and simply hadn't any use for money. A good-hearted man, a very brilliant editor, but utterly detached from any personal contact with life."
Father Ripon's keen face, still as eager and powerful as before, set into lines of thought.
He sighed a little. "A modern product," he said at length. "A modern product, a sign of the times. Well, Spence, a power is entrusted to you now such as no priest can enjoy. I pray that your editorship of this great paper will be fine. Try to be fine always. I believe that the Holy Spirit will be with you."
They rose up towards the moor again. "There's the church," said Spence, "where she lies buried. Gortre sees that the grave is kept beautiful with flowers. It was an odd impulse of yours, Father, to propose this visit."
"I do odd things sometimes," said the priest, simply. "I thought that the sight of this poor woman's resting-place might remind you and me of what has passed, of what she did for the world—though no one knows it but our group of friends. I hope that it will remind us, remind you very solemnly, my friend, in your new responsibility, of what Christ means to the world. The shadows of the time of darkness, 'When it Was Dark' during the 'Horror of Great Darkness,' have gone from us. And this poor sister did this for her Saviour's sake."
They stood by Gertrude Hunt's grave as they spoke.
A slender copper cross rose above it, some six feet high.
"I wonder how the poor girl managed it," said Spence at length; "her letter was wonderfully complete. Sir Michael—Lord Fencastle, I mean—showed it me some years ago. She was wonderfully adroit. I suppose Llwellyn had left papers about or something. But I do wonder how she did it."
"That," said Father Ripon, "was what she would never tell anybody."
"Requiescat in pace," said Spence.
"In Paradise with Saint Mary of Magdala," the priest said softly.
THE SECOND PICTURE
Quem Deus Vult Perdere.
The chaplain of the county asylum stood by the castellated red brick lodge at the end of the asylum drive, talking to a group of young ladies.
The drive, which stretched away nearly a quarter of a mile to the enormous buildings of the asylum, with their lofty towers and warm, florid architecture, was edged with rhododendrons and other shrubs.
The gardens were beautifully kept. Everything was mathematically straight and clean, almost luxurious, indeed.
The girls were three in number, young, fashionably dressed. They talked without ceasing in an empty-headed stream of girlish chatter.
They were the daughters of a great ironfounder in the district, and would each have a hundred thousand pounds.
The chaplain was showing them over the asylum.
"How sweet of you, Mr. Pritchard, to show us everything!" said one of the girls. "It's awfully thrilling. I suppose we shall be quite safe from the violent ones?"
"Oh, yes," said the chaplain, "you will only see those from a distance; we keep them well locked up, I assure you."
The girls laughed with him.
The party went laughing through the long, spotless corridors, peeping into the bright, airy living-rooms, where bodies without brains were mumbling and singing to each other.
The imbecile who moved vacantly with slobbering lip, the dementia patient, the log-like, general paralytic—"G. P."—things which must be fed, the barred and dangerous maniac, they saw them all with pleasant thrills of horror, disgust, and sometimes with laughter.
"Oh, Grace, do look at that funny little fat one in the corner—the one with his tongue hanging out! Isn't he weird?"
"There's one actually reading! He must be only pretending!"
A young doctor joined them—a handsome Scotchman with pleasant manners.
For a time the lunatics were forgotten.
"Well, now, have we seen all, Doctor Steward?" one of the girls said. "All the worst cases? It's really quite a new sensation, you know, and I always go in for new sensations."
"Did ye show the young leddies Schuabe?" said the doctor to the chaplain.
"Bless my soul!" he replied, "I must be going mad myself. I'd quite forgotten to show you Schuabe."
"Who is Schuabe?" said the youngest of the sisters, a girl just fresh from school at Saint Leonards.
"Oh, Maisie!" said the eldest. "Surely you remember. Why, it's only five years ago. He was the Manchester millionaire who went mad after trying to blow up the tomb of Christ. I think that was it. It was in all the papers. A young clergyman found out what he'd been trying to do, and then he went mad—this Schuabe creature, I mean, not the clergyman."
"Every one likes to have a look at this patient," said the doctor. "He has a little sleeping-room of his own and a special attendant. His money was all confiscated by order of the Government, but they allow two hundred a year for him. Otherwise he would be among the paupers."
The girls giggled with pleasurable anticipation.
The doctor unlocked a door. The party entered a fairly large room, simply furnished. In an arm-chair a uniformed attendant was sitting, reading a sporting paper.
The man sprang up and saluted as he heard the door open.
On a bed lay the idiot. He had grown very fat and looked healthy. The features were all coarsened, but the hair retained its colour of dark red.
He was sleeping.
"Now, Miss Clegg, ye'd never think that was the fellow that made such a stir in the world but five years since. But there he lies. He always eats as much as he can, and goes to sleep after his meal. He's waking up now, sir. Here, Mr. Schuabe, some ladies have come to see you."
It got up with a foolish grin and began some ungainly capers.
"Thank you so much, Mr. Pritchard," the girls said as they left the building. "We've enjoyed ourselves so much."
"I liked the little man with his tongue hanging out the best," said one.
"Oh, Mabel, you've no sense of humour! That Schuabe creature was the funniest of all!"
THE THIRD PICTURE
A Sunday evensong. The grim old Lancashire church of Walktown is full of people. The galleries are crowded, every seat in the aisles below is packed.
This night, Easter night, the church looks less forbidding. The harsh note is gone, something of the supreme joy of Holy Easter has driven it away.
Old Mr. Byars sits in his stall. He is tired by the long, happy day, and as the choir sings the last verse of the hymn before the sermon he sits down.
The delicate, intellectual face is a little pinched and transparent. Age has come, but it is to this faithful priest but as the rare bloom upon the fruits of peace and quiet.
How the thunderous voices peal in exultation!
Alleluia!
Christ is risen! The old man turned his head. His eyes were full of happy tears. He saw his daughter, a young and noble matron now, standing in a pew close to the chancel steps. He heard her pure voice, full of triumph. Christ is risen!
From his oak chair behind the altar rails Dean Gortre came down towards the pulpit.
Young still—strangely young for the dignity which they had pressed on him for two years before he would accept it—Basil ascended the steps.
Christ is risen!
The organ crashed; there was silence.
All the lights in the church were suddenly lowered to half their height.
The two candles in the pulpit shone brightly on the preacher's face.
They all saw that it was filled with holy fire.
Christ is risen!
"if christ be not risen your faith is vain"
The church was absolutely still as the words of the text rang out into it.
The people were thinking humbly, with contrite hearts, of the shame five years ago.
"Would that our imagination, under the conduct of Christian faith, could even faintly realise the scene when the Human Soul of Our Lord came with myriads of attendant angels to the grave of Joseph, to claim the Body that had hung upon the cross.
"To-night, with the promise and warrant of our own resurrection that His has given us, our thoughts involuntarily turn to those we call the dead. We feel that this Easter is for them also an occasion of rejoicing, and that the happiness of the earthly Church is shared by the loving and beloved choir behind the veil.
"Christ is risen! Away with the illusions which may have kept us from Him. Let us also arise and live. For, as the spouse sings in the Canticles, 'The winter is past, ... the time of the singing of birds is come; ... arise, my love, my fair one, and come away!'"
Christ is risen!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] This article has already been seen in the preceding chapter.
[2] This particular instance of the Nurié woman is not all fiction. An incident much resembling it actually occurred to a well-known writer on the intimate life of Eastern peoples. For the purposes of the narrative the locale has been changed from the Jaffa Road—where the event took place—to Jerusalem itself.
THE END
A Selection from the Catalogue of
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