“Oh, he wasn’t, wasn’t he, young man?” said the preacher. “Well, as you seems to know more about the Bible than I do, perhaps you’ll step up here and take my place. Kindly tell us, if you please, out of your superior knowledge, what he was, and why he was called a publican if he was a tax-collector; and why a poor collector of rates, who only did his duty, is held up to our scorn and reprobation; yes, our reprobation.” (This word he regarded as a crushing climax.)
To my complete and indescribable confusion, Ronald, nothing loth, accepted the challenge with delight, and the next moment was standing on the platform addressing an appreciative audience. What a sermon he gave them!—lasting without a pause or break for exactly half-an-hour; every thought reasoned out, and closing with a peroration of consummate eloquence. By a clever feint he had diverted the text of the preacher to one on the Pharisee and the Publican, making a scathing attack on the Pharisaism of the day, which went to church, and gave its alms openly and never in secret; which paid its way and kept the conventional commandments, and neglected (as of little count) the weightier things of unselfishness and love. “A day is coming when it will matter nothing where we lived, nor in what occupations, nor amidst what circumstances, but only how we wrought, and in what spirit we suffered. Be the thing you say; be unselfish, in your own poor way, to your friends and to your home, and to the world about you; that is worth ten thousand sermons and a hundred thousand Articles of Religion.” A dead silence followed as he stepped down from the platform; he had left a charm upon us that it seemed sacrilege to break. Then came a word or two. “What a wonderful boy!—a second Spurgeon; with all his eloquence and none of his irreverence.”
“Summat worth hearin’, I calls it; how he did pitch into they bloomin’ aristocrats. I’ll come and hear ye, young master, whensomdever you holds forth agin.”
“Well—I never!” It was with this ungrammatical aposiopesis that I started, so soon as I could find breath to start at all. “Where on earth, Ronald, did you get it all from?” The boy had come back to me looking as cool as a cucumber, and highly delighted with the sensation he had created.
“Don’t tell, Fred,” he answered, “but it was a sermon of Vaughan’s. We are made to analyse his sermons at school, and say them afterwards for repetition lessons. So when that old donkey fell foul of the publican, I had one handy you see, on that very subject, and I thought it a pity not to fire it off.”
Surely, I thought, he’ll be satisfied now, and I tried to draw him away from the crowd, who were becoming a trifle too much interested in our name and identity. But no; not a bit of it. The excitement was full upon him still. So up he went to the harmonium (they had now started a hymn), and looking over the shoulder of the performer (she was a pretty girl of eighteen) he began to sing as lustily as the best of them. By degrees his arm, I saw, began to steal about her waist, and, fuss and fidget as she might, she was powerless to help herself. Her hands were occupied with the keyboard, and her feet with the blower, and with her voice she had to lead the singing. So he had her at his mercy, and hugged her disgracefully, while she, poor girl, was powerless to resist. The audience all thought she was his sister, and highly commended him, it was clear, for the countenance and support he was giving her.
While the last line of the last verse was being sung, the temptation became too strong for resistance, and Ronald stooped down and kissed her—an action which touched still further the sympathetic heart of the audience.
“A dear, good young feller that, as ever I see’d”—said an old lady in my immediate neighbourhood. “I only wish as how he were a son of mine; a preachin’ that fine, for all the world like the Bishop, and a’ lookin’ arter his sister so prettily—and a nice young girl she is too.”
After this exploit he slipped across the circle and joined me, and a minute later—with hot and blazing cheeks—I was thankful to find myself round the corner, and well on the way home before the throng of listeners had begun to disperse. I felt, indeed, as must that Bishop, who, to oblige a small girl younger in years than in experience, condescended to ring at a street door, and was rewarded with the advice, “Run! run for yer life! they’ll knock the ’ead off yer shoulders if they catches ye.” I wonder what he elected to do? pocket his dignity and run? or rely upon his clerical attire to see him through? In any case our anxiety would be more protracted. What if the escapade should reach our uncle’s ears? However I was spared this climax. The story of it got wind in the servants’ hall, as all stories do; but the servants were far too loyal to Master Ronald to betray him, and so it never made its way up stairs to the drawing room.
But the career of that preacher was ended—in Bayview.