The Christian: A Story

by Sir Hall Caine

Meantime the man who was the first cause of the tumult sat alone in his cell-like chamber under the church, a bare room without carpet or rug, and having no furniture except a block bed, a small washstand, two chairs, a table, a prayer stool and crucifix, and a print of the Virgin and Child. He heard the singing of the people outside, but it brought him neither inspiration nor comfort. Nature could no longer withstand the strain he had put upon it, and he was in deep dejection. It was one of those moments of revulsion which comes to the strongest soul when at the crown or near the crown of his expectations he asks himself, “What is the good?” A flood of tender recollections was coming over him. He was thinking of the past, the happy past, the past of love and innocence which he had spent with Glory, of the little green isle in the Irish Sea, and of all the sweetness of the days they had passed together before she had fallen to the temptations of the world and he had become the victim of his hard if lofty fate. Oh, why had he denied himself the joys that came to all others? To what end had he given up the rewards of life which the poorest and the weakest and the meanest of men may share? Love, woman's love, why had he turned his back upon it? Why had he sacrificed himself? O God, if, indeed, it were all in vain!

Brother Andrew put his head in at the half-open door. His brother, the pawnbroker, was there and had something to say to the Father. Pincher's face looked over Andrew's shoulder. The muscles of the man's eyes were convulsed by religious mania.

“I've just sold my biziness, sir, and we 'aven't a roof to cover us now!” he cried, in the tone of one who had done something heroic.

John asked him what was to become of his mother.

“Lor', sir, ain't it the beginning of the end? That's the gawspel, ain't it? 'The foxes hev 'oles and the birds of the air hev nests——'”

And then close behind the man, interrupting him and pushing him aside, there came another with fixed and staring eyes, crying: “Look 'ere, Father! Look! Twenty years I 'obbled on a stick, and look at me now! Praise the Lawd, I'm cured, en' no bloomin' errer! I'm a brand as was plucked from the burnin' when my werry ends 'ad caught the flames! Praise the Lawd, amen!”

John rebuked them and turned them out of the room, but he was almost in as great a frenzy. When he had shut the door his mind went back to thoughts of Glory. She, too, was hurrying to the doom that was coming on all this wicked city. He had tried to save her from it, but he had failed. What could he do now? He felt a desire to do something, something else, something extraordinary.

Sitting on the end of the bed he began again to recall Glory's face as he had seen it at the race-course. And now it came to him as a shock after his visions of her early girlhood. He thought there was a certain vulgarity in it which, he had not observed before—a slight coarsening of its expression, an indescribable degeneracy even under the glow of its developed beauty. With her full red lips and curving throat and dancing eyes, she was smiling into the face of the man who was sitting by her side. Her smile was a significant smile, and the bright and eager look with which the man answered it was as full of meaning. He could read their thoughts. What had happened? Were all barriers broken down? Was everything understood between them?

This was the final madness, and he leaped to his feet in an outburst of uncontrollable rage. All at once he shuddered with a feeling that something terrible was brewing within him. He felt cold, a shiver was running over his whole body. But the thought he had been in search of had come to him of itself. It came first as a shock, and with a sense of indescribable dread, but it had taken hold of him and hurried him away. He had remembered his text: “Deliver him up to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord.”

“Why not?” he thought; “it is in the Holy Book itself. There is the authority of St. Paul for it. Clearly the early Christians countenanced and practised such things.” But then came a spasm of physical pain. That beautiful life, so full of love and loveliness, radiating joy and sweetness and charm! The thing was impossible! It was monstrous! “Am I going mad?” he asked himself.