“Yet,” broke in Hammond, “the Christian religion teaches that sorrow and suffering ought to drive the possessor of the faith nearer to God.”
There was a hint of apology in his tones as he went on:
“Don’t misunderstand me, Mrs. Joyce; I only speak from hearsay. I have heard parsons preach it, but I know nothing experimentally about these things myself.”
She smiled in a slow, sad way, and, catching her breath in a kind of quick sob, said: “Neither have I ever known anything experimentally of these truths. I drifted into the outward form of a correct, religious, life. I learned to like the brightness of our chapel services, the fun of choir practice, the merry company, the adulation heaped upon me for my solo-singing. Then there were the tea-meetings, the service of song, and a multitude of other mild excitements which went to brighten the monotony of a rural existence. But of God, of Christ, of the Divine life, I fear I knew nothing.”
Hammond smiled inwardly as he listened to this strange confession. The phraseology was new to him.
“It is the shibboleth of Nonconformity, I suppose,” he told himself. “And I suppose each section of religious society has its own outward form of things in which it trusts, thinking, caring, nothing for the great Divine verities that should be the true religious life.”
He did not utter his thoughts aloud, but asked with some apparent irrelevance, “Where is your husband, Mrs. Joyce?”
“Off on one of his drinking bouts, or maybe, locked up for drunkenness; I cannot say.”
Her lifted eyes were full of beseeching, as she went on, “You will keep secret, Mr. Hammond, all this wild, mad episode of my life. If only I could know that the sad, mad, bad story was locked up between God and you, your kind landlady and myself, I think I could go back and face my misery better.”
“Do not fear, Mrs. Joyce,” he replied quickly. “The affair shall be as though it had never been. I can answer for Mrs. Belcher, my landlady; and for myself I give you my word, and——”