“I must ask you to pardon me,” said I, “for appearing to doubt your good faith. You must attribute it to my entire unfamiliarity with the terms of Evangelical piety.”
He looked at me queerly for a moment, and then, in the quiet tones of a man of the world, said, smiling pleasantly:
“Very many years ago I had the pleasure of knowing your grandfather, the late baronet. May I say that you remind me of him?”
I have never heard an apology more gracefully and tactfully accepted. For an unregenerate second he had become the gallant Rupert Mainwaring again, and showed me wherein might lie his attraction.
“Pray be seated,” said he, more gravely, “and allow me to explain.”
He unfolded his story. It was well, said he, that an outsider (I an outsider in that familiar room!) should hear it. I was at liberty to make it public. Indeed, publicity was what he earnestly craved. As far as my memory serves me, for my wits were whirling as I listened, the following is an epitome of his narrative:
He had been a man of sin—not only in the vague ecclesiastical sense, but in downright, practical earnest. He had committed every imaginable crime, save the odd few that lead to penal servitude and the gallows. He drank, he betrayed women, he cheated at cards, he had an evil reputation on the turf. His companions were chosen from the harlotry and knavery of the civilised world. He had lured Judith from her first husband, thus breaking his heart, poor man, so that he died soon after. He had married Judith, and had deserted her for a barmaid whom in her turn he had abandoned. He wallowed, to use his own expression, in the trough of iniquity. He was, as I had always understood, about as choice a blackguard as it would be possible to meet outside a gaol. One day a pretty girl, whom he had been following in the street, unwittingly enticed him into a revivalist meeting. He described that meeting so vividly that had my stupefied mind been capable of fresh emotions, I too might have been converted at second hand by the revivalist preacher. He repeated parts of the sermon, rose to his feet, waved his arms, thundered out the commonplaces of Salvation Army Christianity, as if he had made an amazing theological discovery. It was pathetic. It was ludicrous. It was also inconceivably painful. At last he mopped his forehead and shiny head.
“Before that meeting was over I was on my knees praying beside the girl whom I had designed to ruin. I went into the streets a converted man, filled with the grace of God. I resolved to devote my life to saving souls for Christ. My old habits of sin fell away from me like a garment. I studied for the ministry. I am now in deacon’s orders, and I am the incumbent of a little tin mission church in Hoxton. God moves in a mysterious way, Sir Marcus.”
“He is generally credited with doing so,” said I, stupidly.
“You are doubtless wondering, Sir Marcus,” he went on, “why I placed such a long interval between my awakening and my communicating with my wife. I set myself a period of probation. I desired to be assured of God’s will. It was essential that I should test my strength of purpose, and my power of making a life’s atonement, as far as the things of this world are concerned, for the wrongs I have inflicted on her. I have come now to offer her a Christian home.”