Thus was the mission to Lambeth Court decided upon. Paul had carried his Committee with him, as he always did. Its eldest member, a married bank clerk of a nervous temperament, had indeed echoed something of Mrs. Kestern's fears. He thought that the Court was no place for ladies, and said, frankly, he would not care for his wife to go there. Paul, at the head of the Mission vestry table, played with a pencil, and showed his instinctive leadership again by not answering him. He looked up instead, and caught Edith Thornton's eyes as she sat opposite him. They were eager and indignant, and he nodded ever so slightly. Edith, therefore, had taken up her parable, and the more forcefully since she did not often speak on Committee. "Oh, Mr. Derrick," she exclaimed, "I don't agree with you at all! What about our missionaries' wives? What about the Salvation Army? Do you think any place can be too bad for a Christian if there is one single soul to be saved?" She flushed a little at her own vehemence.
Mr. Derrick coughed, fumbling with his watchchain. He was well aware that the Spirit was at work in Apple Orchard Mission Hall, and he was conscious of being one of the weaker brethren. Paul's very silence daunted him, for he honestly loved the eager Paul. "Let us pray about it," he suggested.
Paul pushed his chair back, and slipped to his knees. Instinctively he always knelt to pray, though the more general custom was to sit. "A few minutes' silent prayer first," he commanded, and, in the slow ticking of the clock, he prayed himself, with utter simplicity and earnestness, for Lambeth Court, for the guidance of the Holy Spirit—and for Mr. Derrick. The result was, of course, a foregone conclusion.
Thus, at intervals, all that golden summer, Lambeth Court heard the Word. True, the signs following were so small that the less zealous Endeavourers openly shook their heads, and even the more ardent of the band would have been tempted to give in. But Paul and Edith were of different mettle. At devotional meetings, Paul spoke of heroic souls who had preached for half a generation in heathen lands and not seen a convert, until, one day, the tide turned in all its power. Most effective was the story of the Moravians who laboured among a certain band of Esquimaux for forty years unblessing and unblessed, and then, discovering that the channels were choked in themselves, cleared them, and saw many mighty works. And in July, indeed, the doubters had received a knock-out blow. Mrs. Reynolds, of No. 11, had been as truly converted as Saul on the road to Damascus, converted by the human instrumentality of Edith and a novel tract in the shape of a small slip of cardboard bearing nothing but a question mark on one side and on the other:
HOW SHALL YE ESCAPE
IF YE NEGLECT
SO GREAT SALVATION?
Poor Mrs. Reynolds, one would have thought that her present woes were big enough to discount effectively all future ones. Reynolds hawked, when he had anything to hawk or time to spare from the "South Pole" and regular terms of service for His Majesty. Mrs. Reynolds, herself, drank, when, more rarely than her spouse, she had the wherewithal to obtain drink. Reynolds, who should have accounted himself blessed in the number of olive branches round about his table, illogically cursed whenever he saw them, but added to the tribe as fast as Nature permitted. It was, indeed, when his wife was expecting what turned out to be twins, that Edith came her way. Against orders, she left the circle and gave the woman a chair within her palings whereon she might sit and listen. Mrs. Reynolds, gently intoxicated, was grateful, and asked her visitor to fetch a Bible from within which had remained to the family because it could not be pawned. On the table Edith silently laid the tract. Mrs. Reynolds, returning later, had seen it, and had been (as she said) knocked all of a heap. Why, particularly, by that tract or just then, does not appear, and was not indeed questioned for a moment by the Endeavourers. For converted Mrs. Reynolds honestly and truly had been. Into her dwarfed and darkened life had shone the radiance of a new hope, and from her hardened heart, so strangely broken, had come welling out a vivid and wonderful spring. Regular at services, humble at home, zealous in her work, undaunted by scoffing and blows, Mrs. Reynolds had not only been constrained, nervously and pathetically, to testify publicly in her own Court, but honestly did testify by her life every day of the week. The very publican at the corner, who had a soft spot for Paul by the way, admitted it. "Let the poor devil alone," he would shout at Reynolds cursing his wife and damning the Mission across the bar, "or get out of 'ere. Christ! You're a bloody fool, you are! 'Ere's the Mission give you as good a wife as any man ever 'ad, and you cursin' of 'em. Wouldn't mind if they converted my ole woman, I wouldn't. She might 'old a prayer-meetin' now and agin in the bar-parlour, off-hours, if she'd keep it clean."
(2)
But this Sunday in October was to see the end of the effort for the season. In the first place, Paul left that week for his first term at Cambridge, and this was a bigger damper than the Committee cared to allow. In the second, however, it was getting cold in the evenings, and activities took a new direction in the winter. Thus, a little late, after Communion, the band sallied out for the last time. Some fifteen or twenty of them, they gathered round the lamp-post. A couple of young men distributed the hymn-sheets to the loungers in the gardens, with a cheerful smile and a word of friendly greeting, fairly well received, as a matter of fact, by now. Paul mounted his chair under the light. Edith took her seat beneath at the harmonium, for Miss Madeline Ernest, daughter of the Rev. John Ernest, an elderly assistant curate, who usually played, was unwell. The last faint radiance of the day was dying out over the railway bridge, and the stars shone steadily in a clear sky above the hoardings.
The Court greeted the Missioners in various moods. "They've come, Joe," said Mrs. Reynolds to her husband who, for once and for obvious reasons, was at home and sober; "won't yer come out and listen-like a bit? The 'ymns will cheer yer up, and they carn't do yer no 'arm anywise. It's yer larst charnst for the season, Joe."
"Garn," said Joe, "damn yer!"