Gordon was waiting for Hobhouse. They were to sup together this last night. To-morrow he was to leave for Newstead Abbey and the uncomfortable ministrations of his eccentric and capricious mother, whom he had not yet seen. He had come back to his land and place to find that enmity had been busy envenoming his absence, and the taste of home had turned unsweet to his palate.
As he sat now, however, Gordon had thrust bitterness from his mood. He was thinking with satisfaction of the copyhold he had transferred. He had always declared that for what he wrote he would take no money. If these verses—the first in which he felt he had expressed something of his real self—if these brought recompense, it was a fitting disposition he had made. He had paid an old debt to the man with the worn waistcoat and kindly, studious face—almost the only debt of its kind he owed in the world.
The words with which Dallas had left him recurred to him—“God bless you!”
“Poor old plodding Dallas!” he mused reflectively. “It’s curious how a man’s sense of gratitude drags up his religion—if he has any to drag up. He thinks now the Creator put into my heart to do that—doesn’t give himself a bit of credit for it!”
He laughed reminiscently.
“I don’t suppose he has seen six hundred pounds to spend since he bought that pony! He has had a hard row to hoe all his life, and never did an ounce of harm to any living thing, yet at the first turn of good luck, he fairly oozes thankfulness to the Almighty. He is a churchman clear through. He believes in revealed religion—though no religion ever is revealed—and yet he doesn’t mistake theology for Christianity. He positively doesn’t know the meaning of the word cant. Ah—there goes another type!”
Gordon was looking at a square, mottle-faced man passing slowly on the opposite side of the street, carrying a bundle of leaflets from which now and then he drew to give to a passer-by. He was high-browed, with eyes that projected like an insect’s and were flattish in their orbits. He wore a ministerial cloak over his street costume.
“There’s Cassidy,” he said to himself. “Dr. James Cassidy, on shore leave, distributing his little doctrinal tracts. I remember him well. He is in the navy medical service, but it’s the grief of his life he can’t be a parson. He talked enough pedantry over the ship’s table of the Pylades, while I was coming home from Greece, to last me till the resurrection. He is as ardent a predestinarian as any Calvinistic dean in gaiters, and knows all the hackneyed catch-phrases of eternal punishment. He has an itch for propaganda, and distributes his tracts, printed at his own expense, on the street-corner for the glory of theology. He is the sort of Christian who always writes damned with a dash. And yet, I wonder how much real true Christianity he has—Christianity like Dallas’, I mean. I remember that scar on his cheek; it stands for a thrashing he got once at Bombay from a deserting ensign named Trevanion—a youth I met in Greece afterward, and had cause to remember, by the way!”
His eyes had darkened suddenly. His brows frowned, his firm white hand ran over his curls as though to brush away a disagreeable recollection.
“Cassidy would travel half around the globe to find the deserter that thrashed him and land him in quod. That man would deserve it richly enough, but would Cassidy’s act be for the good of the king’s service? No—for the satisfaction of James Cassidy. Is that Christianity? Dallas never treasured an enmity in his life. Yet both of them believe the same doctrine, worship the same God, read the same Bible. Does man make his beliefs? Or do his beliefs make him? If his beliefs make man, why are Dallas and Cassidy so different? If man makes his beliefs, why should I not make my own? I will be an Anythingarian, and leave dreams to Emanuel Swedenborg!”