The Heart of a Mystery

by T. W. Speight

"And how should I contrive to get through the day, Ephy, my lad, if I had no work to do?" she would reply. "I'm not one of your fine ladies as can sit with their arms folded on their lap by the hour together. Thou must just let me go on as I have since thy father died, and instead of spending thy extry money on me, put it away in the Bank. Thou'll mayhap want it all one o' these days."

Mrs. Judd's two daughters had left the institution long ago, and were away in domestic service. Now, Ephraim, like a great many other people, had two totally opposite sides to his character. To the majority of people he was merely an ordinary, painstaking young clerk, but there were others who knew him under quite a different aspect. The fact was that Ephraim was a prominent member of a certain numerically small sect of Noncomformists, who for the purposes of this narrative may be called "Templetonians." They were not a wealthy body by any means, and their meeting-place was a large room up a narrow court in one of the least reputable streets in Ashdown, which had at one time been used as a granary. Like other and far more pretentious religious bodies, the Templetonians were desirous of making as many proselytes as possible; and, with that end in view, were in the habit, during the summer months, of sending out such of their members as showed any gifts in the way of extempore preaching and praying into the villages round about, where, on Sunday evenings, they made a point of "holding forth" to such of the rural population as cared to listen to them.

Among those rough-and-ready expounders of the peculiar tenets of the Templetonians, Ephraim Judd was one of the most popular and effective. He had that baneful gift of fluency which enables its possessor to bury the platitudes and commonplaces which, five times out of six, form his sole stock in trade, under a flow of words which his ignorant hearers mistake for eloquence, and which, for the time being, imparts to what he has to say some of the relish of original thought.

It was a faculty the possession of which Ephraim had discovered by accident--it is almost needless to say that he regarded it as a special gift from a Superior power--but after he had once become aware of its existence, he did not fail to exercise it as often as an opportunity of doing so offered itself. But Ephraim was thoroughly in earnest in his preaching and expounding; whatever his other failings might be, he was far from being a conscious hypocrite.

It was only during the light evenings between April and September that Ephraim and his co-workers could look to get an open-air audience together. Had they attempted to do so during the ordinary hours of morning service, the rural police would undoubtedly have ordered them to "move on;" while on hot summer afternoons, after the heavy Sunday dinner, the bucolic inclination is for sleep, rather than for mental excitations of even the most rudimentary kind, however stimulating the latter may be when indulged in at proper times and seasons.

To say that Ephraim Judd was not troubled in his mind by the part he had played--or, as he preferred to put it to himself, had been compelled to play--at the inquest, and subsequently at the trial of John Brancker, would be to do him scant justice indeed. Circumstances--of his own bringing about, it is true--had so conspired against him that only one of two alternatives remained open to him: he must either tell what he knew, and thereby bring about his own ruin, or otherwise, by keeping silent, help to brand his best friend with the stigma of a most heinous crime. He was a moral coward, and when the crucial moment came, his courage failed him. He allowed John Brancker to go to his trial, when a dozen words spoken by him would have gone far towards his exculpation.

Like Edward Hazeldine, he told himself that, should John be found guilty, then, at that extreme moment, he would unburden himself of his secret, let the consequences to himself be what they might. As it fell out, however, neither he nor Edward were called upon to make any such sacrifice.

But not only had Ephraim kept silent when it behoved him to speak; he had done worse than that; in a moment of weakness he had perjured himself--he had sworn to a lie. The Coroner had asked him whether he had seen Mr. Brancker leave the Bank after the latter had entered it to obtain possession of his umbrella, and he had replied that he had not; whereas the fact was that he had remained lurking no great way off, until he had seen John quit the Bank not more than three or four minutes later. Since then, to make matters worse, from the ruin he had tacitly helped to bring about there had come to him both preferment and a liberal increase of salary. Small wonder was it that the young bank clerk was a most unhappy man.

On a certain Saturday evening towards the end of January, Ephriam was sent for to the house of Mr. Hoskins, the pastor of the Ashdown Templetonians. There he found John Iredale, an elderly man, a cabinetmaker by trade, one of his co-religionists, and the leader of the choir. Mr. Hoskins had slipped on the ice, and had sprained his ankle so severely that it would be impossible for him to leave the house for several days to come, and his object in sending for Iredale and Judd was that between them they should conduct the service on the morrow in lieu of himself. The former was to take charge of the preliminary part of it, and the latter to deliver one of those discourses for which his name was already so favorably known.

Ephraim flushed with pride and pleasure when told what was expected of him. He felt it to be a great honor--the greatest that had ever been accorded him. He had plenty of self-confidence, and never for a moment doubted his ability to pass creditably through the ordeal. Although not the least bit nervous, he lay awake a great part of the night, thinking of the morrow, and turning over a variety of texts in his mind, each of which seemed to afford scope for amplification and illustration, before finally deciding on a particular one. Of course his discourse, like Mr. Hoskins' own, was to be wholly extempore: not a note or scrap of paper would he take with him to the desk--placed on a platform a couple of feet above the floor--from behind which Mr. Hoskins was in the habit of holding forth to his somewhat limited congregation.