Two clerks wrote in the ledgers on the desks, attended to visitors, and looked after what was known in the office as the "counter trade"—to distinguish it from the sale of Protestant literature in bulk, which was managed direct from the "Luther League Printing Works, Hornham, N."
A second room opening into the general office was tenanted by the assistant secretary of the League, Mr. Samuel Hamlyn, Junior. Here the walls were decorated with scourges, horribly knotted and thonged; "Disciplines," which were belts and armlets of sharp iron prickles, designed to wear the skin of the toughest Ritualist into an open sore after three days' wear. There were also two hair shirts, apparently the worse for wear, and a locked bookcase of Ritualistic literature with a little index expurgatorius in the neat, clerkly writing of Sam Hamlyn, and compiled by that gentleman himself.
In this chamber of horrors, the assistant secretary delighted to move and have his being, and three or four times a day it was his pleasing duty to show friends of the League and its yearly subscribers, the penitential machinery by which the priest-ridden public was secretly invited to hoist itself to heaven.
The innermost room of all was where Mr. Hamlyn, Senior, himself transacted the multifarious and growing business of his organisation. The secretary sat at a large roll-top desk, and a substantial safe stood at his right hand. An air of brisk business pervaded this sanctum. The directories, almanacs, and account-books all contributed to it, and the end of a speaking-tube, which led to the outer office, was clipped to the arm of the revolving chair.
Three portraits adorned the wall. From a massive gold frame the features of that fiery Protestant virgin, Miss Pritchett, stared blandly down into the room. Opposite it was a large photograph of Mr. Hamlyn himself, with upraised hand and parted lips—in the very act and attitude of making one of his now familiar protests. The third in this trio of Protestant champions was a drawing of Martin Luther himself, "representing the Reformer," as Mr. Hamlyn was wont to say, "singing for joy at the waning power of Rome." The artist of this picture, however, being a young gentleman of convivial tastes, had portrayed the "Nightingale of Wittemberg" in a merry mood, remembering, perhaps, Carlyle's remark, "there is laughter in this Luther," or perhaps—as is indeed most probable—remembering little of the great man but his authorship of the ditty that concludes:
Who loves not women, wine, and song
Will be a fool his whole life long.
Fortunately, Mr. Hamlyn, whose historical studies had been extremely restricted, did not know of this effort—just as he did not know that to the end of his life the student of Erfurt steadily proclaimed his belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist.
About ten o'clock on a grey, cold November morning, the two Hamlyns arrived at the offices of the Luther League together, walked briskly up the stairs, and, with a curt "good morning" to the clerks, entered the innermost room together.
People who had known the father and son six months ago, seeing them now, would have found a marked, though subtle, difference in both of them.
They were much better dressed, for one thing. The frock-coats were not made in Hornham, the silk hats were glossy and with the curly brims of the fashion. Both still suggested a more than nodding acquaintance with religious affairs in their costume, some forms of Christianity always preferring to evince themselves by the style of a cravat or the texture of a cloth.