Ten Degrees Backward

by Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

We were both silent for a few minutes, and then Blathwayte suddenly said: "By the way, I have forgotten the thing I came down to say to you. Fay wants you to go and sit with her in Frank's room."

I went at once. Fay's lightest word was law to me.

For an hour or two I sat in the sick-room, where the girl whom I loved knelt beside her dying brother. The doctor and the day-nurse were doing all they could to fan the flame that was so rapidly being extinguished, but that all amounted to very little. Already the beautiful boyish mouth was closed too tightly for any nourishment or stimulant to pass through the once mobile lips, and the boy could not have spoken even if he had wished to do so; but he was too ill now to desire to speak, and lay in rigid unconsciousness waiting for the end to come. Nobody spoke, except the doctor and the nurse; but I knew in my soul that it helped Fay to feel me near, and so I stayed while the hours rolled on and Frank's life ebbed away.

I had lost all count of time when the door was softly opened, and Arthur, followed by a stranger, came into the room, which stranger was the exact opposite of what I had expected.

I had pictured the Spiritual Healer to myself as a wild, emaciated, long-haired figure—a sort of cross between an ideal poet and John the Baptist: instead of which I beheld a tall, broad-shouldered, immaculately dressed Londoner, with the quiet manners and easy assurance of the typical man about town. I am almost ashamed to own it, only one never should be ashamed to own the truth; but—absurd as it may sound—it was the perfect cut of Mr. Henderson's coat that suddenly made the man and his mission real to me. Had he worn the garb of a monk, I should have relegated him to the sphere of mediæval superstition; had he worn the dress of a priest, I should have placed him in the category of hysterical revivalists; but I felt an irresistible conviction that a man in such a well-cut and fashionable coat as his could only preach a gospel as practical and convincing as the Times of that morning.

Blathwayte hurriedly indicated to Mr. Henderson who we all were, and then they both knelt down beside the bed, the rest of us following their example.

I cannot give a dramatic account of what followed, simply because there was nothing dramatic about it. At the time it seemed—as it has always seemed to me in recalling it—to be the most natural and simple thing in the world. To make it any way thrilling or dramatic would rob it, to my mind, of its strength, and convincingness.

First Mr. Henderson offered up aloud an extempore prayer that Frank's sufferings might be relieved and his life spared. Even the word "prayer" seems almost too stilted and transcendental to convey my meaning: he rather besought a favour of a present Person, with an assurance that that Person's sympathies were so entirely enlisted on his side, that the granting of his petition was a foregone conclusion.

I had been brought up in a godly home, and had been conversant with religious phrases and expressions all my life. But not until I heard Mr. Henderson speaking to that Other Person, whose love for and interest in Frank (so Henderson obviously took for granted) were infinitely stronger and deeper than ours could ever be, did I realise what was meant by the expression "a living Christ." From my childhood I had loved and worshipped a dimly glorious Figure, half-hidden in a haze of golden light, who had trodden the Syrian fields nearly two thousand years ago, and had died, and risen again, and ascended heavenwards leaving behind Him an inspired Gospel and a perfect Example; but now I suddenly felt that the dimly-remembered Ideal was not an Ideal at all, but a living Person, standing in Frank's room close beside us, as actual and real as we were ourselves: that it was no shadowy Syrian Prophet that I had worshipped, but a Man of to-day as much as of yesterday—a Man of London and Paris as much as of Jerusalem and Galilee—and a Man who was also God.

As a boy I remember being thrilled with the story of the unknown knight who feasted with Robin Hood and his men, and who—at the end of the day—lifted up his visor and they knew he was the King. And the same thrill—though in a far greater degree—ran through me now. A Stranger stood in our midst and wrestled, as we were wrestling, for the life of Frank, sharing our sorrow and sympathising with our anxiety, and suddenly the veil was lifted and we knew He was the King.