It was a curious sermon, and very characteristic of both the place and the man. People looked at one another, and wondered whether they were in a church at all. Two elderly unmarried ladies, who had come out of curiosity, got up indignantly and walked out of the building.
Bradley paused and followed them with his eyes until they had disappeared. Then suddenly, as he glanced round the congregation and resumed his discourse, he looked full into the eyes of the goddess Nemesis, who was regarding him quietly from a seat in the centre of the church.
Nemesis in widow’s weeds, exquisitely cut by a Parisian modiste, and with a charming black bonnet set upon her classic head. Nemesis with bold black eyes, jet black hair, and a smiling mouth. In other words, Mrs. Montmorency, seated by the side of George Craik and his father the baronet.
The preacher started as if stabbed, and for a moment lost the thread of his discourse; but controlling himself with a mighty effort, he proceeded. For a few minutes his thoughts wandered, and his words were vague and incoherent; but presently his brain cleared, and his voice rose like loud thunder, as he pictured to his hearers those shameless women, from Delilah downwards, who have betrayed men, wasted their substance, and dragged them down to disgrace and death. Were unions with such women, then, eternal? Was a man to be tied in this world, perhaps in another too, to foulness and uncleanness, to a hearth where there was no sympathy, to a home where there was no love? In words of veritable fire, he pictured what some women were, their impurity, their treachery, their mental and moral degradation; and, as a contrast, he drew a glorious picture of what true conjugal love should be—the one fair thing which sanctifies the common uses of the world, and turns its sordid paths into the flower-strewn ways that lead to heaven.
Alma, who was there, seated close under the pulpit, listened in a very rapture of sympathetic idolatry; while Mrs. Montmorency heard both denunciation and peroration with unmoved complacency, though her lips were soon wreathed in a venomous and dangerous smile.
The sermon ended, a prayer was said and a hymn sung; then Bradley walked with a firm tread from the pulpit and entered the vestry. Once there his self-possession left him, and, trembling like a leaf from head to foot, he sank upon a seat.
His sin had come home to him indeed, at last. At the very moment when he was touching on that fatal theme, and justifying himself to his own conscience, Nemesis had arisen, horrible, shameless, and forbidding; had entered the very temple of his shallow creed, smiling and looking into his eyes; had come to remind him that, justify himself as he might, he could never escape the consequence of his rash contempt of the divine sanction.
He had scarcely realised the whole danger of his situation, when he heard a light foot-tread close to him, and, looking up with haggard face, saw Alma approaching. She had used her customary privilege, and entered at the outer door, which stood open.
‘Ambrose!’ she cried, seeing his distress, ‘what is the matter?’
He could not reply, but turned his head away in agony. She came close, and put her arms tenderly around him.