There were two of his parishioners at Bridford whom Cyril could not be content to leave behind him. Those were Emmanuel Joyce and his mother. Emmanuel’s gratitude for the man who had risked his life to save him had done what argument and teaching might never have accomplished. Emmanuel was now a conscientious conforming Christian. He believed, as the leper believed, because he had been saved. The conduct of one Christian man opened his heart to receive the sublime mystery of a Redeemer who was more than man. He went to the altar without one lurking doubt. He made himself like a little child, and confessed that all the learning he had been so proud of was nothing, when weighed against his friend and teacher’s one act of Christian self-abnegation.
‘What was I that you should sacrifice yourself for me?’ he said. ‘When man can be so generous I will no longer refuse to believe that God can suffer and die for sinners.’
‘I would have you believe upon better grounds than any friendly act of mine,’ said Cyril.
‘I have been face to face with death,’ answered Joyce. ‘Men learn strange things on their deathbeds. A death-bed repentance may be a poor thing, but a death-bed revelation may accomplish what a life of study could not do.’
And then Emmanuel, being by nature an enthusiast, talked wildly of the visions of his bed of pain—the cloud-curtain that had been lifted from the invisible world—the wonders that he had seen and heard in that mysterious border-land between life and death.
Cyril asked no more than a simple unquestioning belief.
It was with a thrill of joy that he saw Emmanuel kneeling before the altar rails, meekly lifting up his hands to receive the sacred symbols of Divine love. Could he leave his convert behind him in the fever-tainted alley, where the sweet summertide was ever the harbinger of death? No. He made up his mind that Emmanuel and his mother should go with him.
‘I am doubtful if you would be able to live at Little Yafford by shoe-mending,’ he said, when he discussed the question with Joyce and the widow, ‘but, if I could get the schoolmaster a better berth somewhere else, I am sure you could manage the school, with a little help from me at the beginning.’
‘Oh, sir, it would be the very thing for him,’ cried Mrs. Joyce. ‘His father began life as a parish schoolmaster, and he gave Emmanuel a good plain education. He was very severe with the poor lad, but that was partly in his anxiety to make him a thorough scholar. I don’t think there’s any one could beat my boy in arithmetic or Bible history. I’m sure he could teach. You’d like to teach, wouldn’t you, Emmanuel?’
‘John Milton was a schoolmaster,’ said Joyce, with his face all aglow. ‘I should like it of all things, if you think I could do it, Mr. Culverhouse.’