Thorne Guy
The Angel

CHAPTER XIII
THE CONSPIRATORS OF ST. JOHN'S WOOD

At precisely the same hour on the Sunday evening when Joseph ascended the pulpit of St. Elwyn's Church a large red Napier motor-car stopped before the gate of a smart little villa in St. John's Wood.

The villa stood in its own grounds, and was surrounded by a high wall. It had a general air of seclusion and retirement, though it was obviously the property or in the tenancy of people of wealth.

The wall was clean and newly pointed, the gate was painted a dark green, the short drive which led to the front door was made of the finest white marl.

The motor-car stopped, and two men descended from it, clearly defined in the radiance from two electric globes that were mounted on each pillar of the villa gate. Both wore opera hats, white scarves round their throats and black overcoats.

One was tall, slim, and clean-shaven. His age was about twenty-six, his hair was a pale golden color, and his face, too young as yet to be permanently spoilt and damaged, nevertheless bore the unmistakable imprint of a fast life.

The young man, evil though his countenance was, conveyed a certain impression of birth and breeding.

His companion, on the other hand, was just as unmistakably destitute of both. He was short and fat in figure. His face boasted a modicum of impudent good looks, and was of a strongly Hebraic cast. The fine dark eyes, the hooked nose, the large lips – red like a ripe plum – all shouted the prosperous Jew.

The younger man gave an order to the chauffeur. The automobile swung away towards Hampstead, and the companions walked up the approach to the villa, the door of which was opened to them by a servant.

They entered a small hall, luxuriously furnished in the Eastern style, and lit with shaded electric lamps. As they did so, a manservant hurried up to them from behind some heavy Moorish curtains.

"Where is your mistress?" said the younger of the two men.

"My mistress is in the drawing-room, my lord," the servant answered.

"Oh, all right! Take our coats. We will go and find her at once."

The servant took the coats and hats, and the two men walked down a wide-carpeted passage, brilliantly lit by globes in the roof, which made their stiff white shirt-fronts glitter like talc, and opened a heavy door of oak.

The villa was the home of Miss Mimi Addington, the leading musical comedy actress of London – the star of the Frivolity.

The young man with the light hair and the dissipated expression was Lord Bellina, an Irish viscount.

He had succeeded to the title some three years before, and to a very large fortune, which had come into the impoverished Irish family owing to a marriage with the daughter of a wealthy Liverpool manufacturer.

The short Jewish-looking man who accompanied him was Mr. Andrew Levison, the theatrical entrepreneur and leesee of the Frivolity Theatre, in which Lord Bellina had invested several thousand pounds.

Lord Bellina opened the door of the room and entered, followed by Mr. Levison.

Upon one of the divans, wearing a long tea-gown of Indian red, Mimi Addington was lounging. Her face was very pale, and on this occasion quite destitute of the little artistic touches with which she was wont to embellish it. The expression was strained and angry, and the beautiful eyes shone with a hard, fierce glitter.

There had been no performance at the Frivolity Theatre on the night after Joseph's sudden appearance there.

Mimi Addington had been taken away in a state of wild and terrified hysteria. It was impossible for her to play upon the Saturday night, and her understudy, who should have sustained the part in the illness of her principal, had disappeared, and could not be found. Moreover, several other members of the cast had sent in their resignations, and many of the ticket offices of the West End of town had reported that the gilded gang of young men who were accustomed to take stalls for considerable portions of the run of a popular piece had withdrawn their applications.

"Well, Mimi, my dear," said Mr. Levison, with anxious geniality, "and how are you to-day?"

"Bad," the girl answered in one single bitter word.

Mr. Levison made a commiserating noise.

"Tut, tut!" he said; "you must try and bear up, Mimi, though I must own this abominable and unprecedented occurrence has been enough to try any one – this Joseph."

At the word the woman sprang from her couch with a swift feline movement of rage.

"Him!" she screamed, in a voice from which all the usual melody and sweetness had entirely departed. "If I had him here I'd murder him! No, that would be too good for him! I've thought of worse things than that to do!"

Lord Bellina went up to her and put his arm round her shoulder.

"And serve him right," he said; "but try and be quiet, Mimi, you'll only make yourself worse."

She pushed the young man roughly away, in a blaze of passion so lurid and terrible that it frightened the two men.

Lord Bellina looked helplessly at Levison for a moment. The elder man rose to the occasion.

"Let's get to business," he said; "something must be done."

The woman nodded eagerly and quickly, and with the same unnatural glitter in her eyes.

"Have you seen any of the papers?" Levison said.

She shook her head.

"Well, Bally and I have been going through them, and, what's more, we have been seeing a whole lot of people, and getting various extra opinions. You know that I can say without boasting in the least that there are very few men in London who know the popular taste as I do. I've made my success by realizing exactly what London will do and think just a day or two before it has made up its own mind. I have never made a mistake. I won't bother you now with an account of how I have arrived at my present conclusion. It is enough to say that I am certain of it, and that it is this:

"There is not the slightest doubt that if this man Joseph continues in his pleasant little games – you see, I speak without heat – theatrical business in London will be ruined for months. There is going to be a great wave of religious enthusiasm all over the place. This man – Joseph he calls himself – is going to lead it. The man is an extraordinary one. He has a personality and a force greater, probably, than any living person in Europe to-day. There is no doubt about it. You, my dear Mimi, will have to forego your nightly triumphs. Public opinion will hound you off the stage and shut up my theatre, or compel me to let it as a mission-hall for ten pounds a night! As for you, Bellina, you will have to retire to your estates in Galway, and superintend the potato crop, and take an intelligent interest in the brood of the Irish national animal – the pig in short, Bally!"

Although he spoke jauntily enough, there was a deep vein of bitterness and sincerity underlying the Jew's words. He watched the faces of his two listeners with a quick and cunning scrutiny.

Mimi Addington spoke.

"You've hit the mark, Andrew," she said, in a low voice, in which there was a curious hissing quality – "you've hit the mark, as you always do. What you've said is perfectly true. I know it and feel it."

Her eyes blazed, and she put one white and shapely hand up to the ivory column of her throat, wrestling with the agony of hysteria and hate, which once more threatened to master her. With a great effort of will, she calmed herself, and went on speaking.

"But all this, Andrew, depends upon one little word, 'if.'"

Lord Bellina looked quickly at Levison, with a glance which seemed to say that they had already arrived at precisely the same conclusion.

"That's it," he said; "there is always that little word, 'if.'"

There was a dead silence in the little room, and three faces, pale and full of sinister purpose, sought each other in a horrid trio of hate.

The girl's face was as it had been from the first, unredeemed evil. The countenance of the young peer had changed from its usual vacuous and dissipated weakness into something which, bad as it was, had still a quality of strength. He had sat cowering in the theatre while the terrible denunciation of the evangelist had laid bare the secrets of his life. And although he did not outwardly show how hard he had been hit, his resentment was no less furious though less vulgarly expressed, than that of Mimi.

The Israelite gave no indication of his inward feelings. In truth, they were of a quite different nature from those of the other two. He lived for two purposes. One was to make money, the other was to enjoy himself; he saw now that his money-making was menaced, and that his enjoyment would be spoiled – unless —

Mimi Addington became suddenly quite calm and business-like. She realized that she was in perfect accord with the other two.

"Now let's get to work," she said. "This Joseph must be got rid of at once. It can be done, I suppose, if we pay enough."

"Quite so," said Mr. Levison. "It now only remains to form ourselves into a committee of ways and means."

CHAPTER XIV
THE WARNING

Like a bell the preacher's voice rang through the crowded church.

After the delivery of the solemn and menacing text of warning, Joseph began, suddenly and swiftly, without any of the usual preliminary platitudes with which so many preachers in all the churches commence their addresses.

"I look down upon you and see you with an inward and spiritual vision. And to me, you men and women in your wealth, your temporal power, your beauty, your curiosity and your sin, seem as a vast Slough of Despond.

"I need no such fantastic images, powerful and skilful as they may be, by means of which Dante or Milton portrayed the horrors of hell, to show me a horror more real and terrible than any of which they wrote. This is the City of Dreadful Night. It is the Modern Babylon, where Christendom, corrupt both in state and in society, sits by many waters, and speaks in her heart, and boasts, 'I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow.'

"Sin and Satan exercise a terrible dominion, ungodliness and debauchery accompany them, for Babylon is the abode of all unclean spirits.

"And in this church, you men and women to whom I am speaking now represent in your very persons no small portion of the army of wickedness which rules London and fattens upon its corruption."

He paused for a moment, looking down from his high place with a pale face, burning eyes, and a hand outstretched in condemnation.

There was a soft, universal, and perceptible noise of movement, which rose and ceased. Then all was silent again. With their eyes fixed steadfastly on Joseph, no one had seen the vicar half rise from his seat in the chancel, with a scared look upon his face, and a sudden deprecatory movement of his arm.

The preacher resumed: —

"In a very short time – for some of you the time is shorter than you dream of – for to-night God has revealed much to me – you will all be dead. The feasting, and the folly, and the fun, and the lying and the drinking and the lust will all be over for you, and you will answer for what you have done.

"This is what I tell you to have constantly in your minds while I am speaking to you to-night. You may think in your blindness, in your folly, that I am exaggerating the evil of the time, the monstrous wickedness of London, for which you and people like you are largely responsible. Delude yourself with no such vain imagining, for I speak to you as the ambassador of the Most High God, and to-night you shall hear me.

"The signs of the time are unmistakable. London has come to the worship of the image of the beast, of the human spirit, which has apostatized from God, and made itself God. You have fallen into strong delusions, into which the Lord suffers all to fall who have not received the truth in the love of it, that they might be saved. You worship that which the inspired words of the Bible call the 'beast' because it denies what is truly human, and, with all its culture and civilization, is more and more tending to degrade humanity.

"All who see with the eye of the Spirit know that atheistic and materialistic systems, denying God and the existence of the Spirit, and based upon a purely physical view of existence, and atheistic literature, which by its poetry, fictions, and romances, diffuses the Gospel of the flesh among the masses, grow daily, and are triumphant. The words of Revelation have come true, and out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the false prophet have proceeded the three unclean spirits, like frogs. These creatures of the swamp, the mire, and the morass are among you. Their croaking, powerless as it is in itself, yet produces a sound which penetrates, and is heard all around; repeating the same thing day after day, deluding men, and bringing them into the right state of mind for the service of Antichrist.

"You call yourselves Christians. You are here in a church, and the presence of most of you is the most grim and ghastly mockery that the finite mind can possibly conceive.

"Day by day in this holy temple of the Blessed Trinity God Incarnate comes down upon the altar yonder as the priest says the words of Consecration – those incredibly wonderful five words which put the Blessed Body of our Lord under the white species of the Host. Only this morning many of you heard those

 
Jewels five words long
That on the outstretched forefinger of all time,
Sparkle for ever.
 

Next Sunday, it may be, you will hear them again, as you heard them last Sunday. Yet you live for evil pleasure still.

"When you think at all, you delude yourselves into imagining you are worshipping God, when you are taking a fitful interest in a ceremony which means no more to you than a ceremony. You come here for an hour in the morning of one day of the week, your minds full of worldly pleasures and the memories of your pleasant sins. You listen to the words of the Bible in your comfortable seats, and think how quaint, far off, and unreal they are. With a languid mental smile you hear of the devil and the evil spirits who walk up and down the City seeking whom they may devour. You would not smile if you were to take a short journey from this church into the devil's country, the East End of London – if now, with one accord, you were to drive in your carriages to those places where the air is heavy with ceaseless curses, where hideous disease and uncleanliness that you cannot even imagine, stalk hand in hand with famine, despair, and unmentionable horrors of vice.

"You would believe then, perhaps, that the devil still goes about the streets of London doing his work.

"I tell you this without any possibility of mistake, that you are the servants of Satan, and that in your lives you have enrolled yourselves under the black banners of hell.

"And more especially than all, you are hypocrites. Outwardly all is fair and of good report until, as happens now and then, your lives are laid bare to the world in some hideous scandal. You go to church, your names are seen upon the lists of those societies which endeavor to ameliorate the life of the downtrodden and the oppressed. But what personal service do most of you give to the cause of the God in whom you confess to believe? You live for pleasure, and you are hypocrites.

"Hypocrisy occurs in all the relations of your life; in the daily intercourse between man and man, when friendship is feigned; in the political sphere, when tyrants and self-seekers pretend a deep care for Fatherland, and thereby lead men according to their design. In art and science you are hypocrites, pretending a pure unselfish love to the higher ideal, when self-gratification is all you look for; incense is offered to the idols of the time, and pleasure is alone the end and aim, the Alpha and Omega of existence.

"You are as 'trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars.'

"And all around you London grows worse and worse, while it is from its corruption and from its misery that your sordid pleasures are distilled.

"There are men here to-night who have won fortune, rank, and celebrity from the wholesale poisoning of the poor. The food which the slaves of the modern Babylon eat, the drink they drink, is full of foulness, that you may fare sumptuously every day, that your wives may be covered with jewels. There are men here to-night who keep hundreds and thousands of their fellow-Christians in hideous and dreadful dens without hope, and for ever. In order that you may live in palaces, surrounded by all the beauties and splendors that the choicest art, the most skilled handicraft can give, hundreds of human beings who lurk in the holes for which they pay you must spend their lives, where no ordinary man or woman can remain for more than a moment or two, so terrible are these nauseous places.

"Whole miles of ground in the modern London are thickly packed with fellow-Christians who are hourly giving up their lives in one long torture that you may eat, drink and be merry. At midday you may go into the East End of London and pass a factory. Men come out of it dripping with perspiration, and that perspiration is green. The hair of these men sprouts green from the roots giving them the appearance of some strange vegetable. These men are changed and dyed like this that your wives may spend the life-earnings of any one of them in the costly shops of the perruquiers in Bond Street.

"In order that you may draw twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty per cent. from your investments, instead of an honest return from the wealth with which God has entrusted you, there are men who eat like animals. In the little eating-houses around the works, there are human beings who leave their knives and forks unused and drop their heads and bury their noses and mouths into what is set before them. All the bones, nerves, and muscles below their wrists are useless. These are the slaves of lead, who are transmuting lead with the sacrifice of their own lives, that it may change to gold to purchase your banquets. You are the people who directly or indirectly live in a luxury such as the world has never seen before, out of the wages of disease and death. Copper colic, hatter's shakers, diver's paralysis, shoemaker's chest, miller's itch, hammerman's palsy, potter's rot, shoddy fever, are the prices which others pay for your yachts and pictures, your horses and motor-cars, your music, your libraries, your clubs, your travel, and your health.

"And what of the other and more intimate side of your lives? Do you live with the most ordinary standard of family and personal purity before you? Do you spend a large portion of your lives in gambling, in the endeavor to gain money without working for it from people less skilful or fortunate than yourself? Do you reverence goodness and holiness when you find them or are told of them, or do you mock and sneer? Do you destroy your bodily health by over-indulgence in food, in wine, and in unnatural drugs, which destroy the mind and the moral sense? Do you ever and systematically seek the good and welfare of others, or do you live utterly and solely for yourself, even as the beasts that perish?"

The preacher stopped in one long pause; then his voice sank a full tone —

"Yes, all these things you do, and more, and God is not with you."

Nearly every head in the church was bent low as the flaming, scorching words of denunciation swept over them.

Wealthy, celebrated, high in the world's good favor as they were, none of these people had ever heard the terrible, naked truth about their lives before. Nor was it alone the denunciatory passion of the words and the bitter realization of the shameful truth which moved and influenced them so deeply. The personality of the Teacher, some quality in his voice which they had never yet heard in the voice of living man, the all-inspiring likeness to the most sacred figure the world has ever known, the intense vibrating quality of more than human power and conviction – all these united to light the fires of remorse in every heart, and to touch the soul with the cold fingers of fear.

Accustomed as most of them were to this or that piquant thrill or sensation – for were not their lives passed in the endless quest of stimulating excitement? – there was yet something in this occasion utterly alien to it, and different from anything they had ever known before.

Of what this quality consisted, of what it was composed, many of them there would have given conflicting and contradictory answers. All would have agreed in its presence.

Only a few, a very few, knew and recognized the truth, either with gladness and holy awe or with shrinking and guilty dread, the Power which enveloped them with the sense of the presence of the Holy Ghost.

There was a change in the accusing voice —

"But it is not yet too late. God's mercy is infinite, and through the merits of His Son you may save yourselves while there is time. Kneel now and pray silently as you have never prayed before, for I tell you that God is here among you. An opportunity will be given to each one of you to make reparation for the evil you have done, for the messengers of the Lord have come to London, and wondrous things will come to pass! And now pray, pray, pray! In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen."

With no further word the Teacher turned and quietly descended the pulpit steps.

Every head was bowed; hardly a single person heard or saw him move away into the vestry, and a great silence fell upon the church.

As if in a dream, the tall figure in its white linen ephod passed through the outer vestry into the large and comfortable room used by the priests. No one was there, and Joseph sank upon his knees in prayer. He had been sending up his passionate supplications for the souls of those without but a few seconds, when he felt a touch – a timid, hesitating touch – upon his shoulder.

He looked up, and saw a little elderly man, wearing the long velvet-trimmed gown which signalized a verger in St. Elwyn's, standing by his side. The old man's face was moving and working with strong emotion, and a strange blaze of eagerness shone in his eyes.

"Master," he said, "I heard it all, every word you said to them; and it is true – every word is bitter true. Master, there is one who has need of you, and in God's name I pray you to go with me."

"In God's name I will come with you, brother," Joseph answered gravely.

"Ay," the old man answered, "I felt my prayer would be answered, Master." He took Joseph's surplice from him, divested himself of his own gown, and opened the vestry door. "You found this way when you came, Master," he said. "The public do not know of it, for it goes through the big livery-stables. The district is so crowded. No one will see us when we leave the church, though there are still thousands of people waiting for you to pass in front. But my poor home is not far away."

As they walked, the old man told his story to Joseph. His son, a young fellow of eighteen or nineteen, had been employed as basement porter in the Countess of Morston's Regent Street shop for the selling of artistic, hand-wrought metal work.

Like many another fashionable woman in London, Lady Morston was making a large sum of money out of her commercial venture. But the repousse work which she sold was made by half-starved and sweated work-people in the East End of town, and all the employees in the shop itself were miserably underpaid. From early morning, sometimes till late at night, the old fellow's son had been at work carrying about the heavy crates of metal. His wages had been cut down to the lowest possible limit, and when he had asked for a rise he had been told that a hundred other young fellows would be glad to step into his shoes at any moment.

One day the inevitable collapse had come. He had found himself unable to continue the arduous labor, and had left the position. Almost immediately after his departure he had been attacked with a long and painful nervous complaint. Unable, owing to the fact of his resignation, to claim any compensation from the countess as a legal right, he had humbly petitioned for a little pecuniary help to tide him over his illness. This had been coldly refused, and the young man was now bedridden and a permanent encumbrance to the old man, who himself was unable to do anything but the lightest work.

Mr. Persse, on being applied to for assistance, had consulted the Countess of Morston, who was one of his parishioners, in order, as he said, to find out if it were "a genuine case." With an absolute disregard for truth, and in order to shield herself, the woman had told the clergyman that her late assistant was a dishonest scoundrel who merited no consideration whatever.

"And so, Master," the old man concluded – "and so I lost all hope, and tried to make up my mind to see my lad die slowly. And then I see about you in the paper, and something comes into my mind like. And then the vicar he tells me about this here service to-night, and that you were coming yourself, Master. So I prayed and I prayed that I should have a chance to speak to you. Master, I want you to raise Bill up and make him well."

The old man clutched Joseph by the arm, his cracked and pathetic voice full of poignant pleading.

"You will, won't you, Master?" he said once more.

"Take me to the young man," Joseph answered.