“I deserve the scoff,” said he: “Those were days of sin. I deserve every humiliation that can be put upon me. But I have since found the grace of God. I found it at three o’clock in the afternoon on the eighth of January, eighteen hundred and—”
“Never mind the year,” I interrupted.
My gorge rose. The man was a sanctimonious Chadband. He had come with nefarious designs on Judith’s slender capital. I saw knavery in the whites of his upturned eyes.
“I should be glad,” I continued quickly, “if you would come to the point of the conversation you desire to have with me. I presume it concerns Mrs. Mainwaring. She has reconciled herself to circumstances and has found means to regulate her life with a certain measure of contentment and comfort until now, when you suddenly introduce a disturbing factor. You appear to wish to tell me your reasons for doing so—and I can’t see what the grace of God has to do with it.”
He sprang to his feet and shot out both hands in the awkward gesture of an inspired English prophet.
“But it has everything to do with it! It is the beginning and end, core and kernel, root and branch of the matter. It is the grace of God that checked me in the full career of my wickedness. It is the grace of God that has lighted my path ever since to holier things. It is the grace of God that has changed me from what I was to what I am. It is the grace of God that has brought me here to ask pardon on my knees of the woman I have wronged. The grace of God and of his son our Lord Jesus Christ, which came upon me in a great light on that January afternoon even as it did upon Saul of Tarsus. The grace of God has everything to do with it.”
“Mr. Mainwaring,” said I, “such talk is either blasphemous or—”
He did not allow me to state the alternative, but caught up the word in a great cry.
“Blasphemous! Why, man alive! for what are you taking me? Do you think this is some unholy jest? Can’t you see that I am in deadly earnest? Come and see me where I live—” he caught me by the arm, as if he would drag me away then and there, “among the poor in Hoxton. You scarcely know where Hoxton is—I didn’t when I was a man of ease like yourself—that wilderness of grey despair where the sun of the world scarcely shines, let alone the Light of God. Come and see for yourself, man, whether I am lying!”
Then it dawned upon me that the man had been talking from innermost depths, that he was almost terrifyingly sincere.