Part 41 (1/2)

”Go to your mistress. She is ill,” said I.

The maid hurriedly departed. The parson and I looked at one another.

”I am afraid,” said I, ”that my presence is unhappily an intrusion. I hope to make your better acquaintance on another occasion.”

”Oh, please don't go,” said he, ”my wife is only a little upset and will soon recover. I beg that you will excuse her. Besides, I should like to have a talk with you.”

He offered me a chair, my own chair, the comfortable, broad-seated Empire chair I had given Judith as a birthday present years ago, the chair in which I had invariably sat. He did it with the manner of the master of the house, a most courteous gentleman. The situation was fantastic. Some ingenious devil must have conceived it by way of pandering to the after-dinner humour of the high G.o.ds. As I sat down I rubbed my eyes. Was this brown-whiskered, bald-headed clerical gentleman real? The rubbing of my eyes dispelled no hallucination. He was flesh and blood and still regarded me urbanely. It was horrible. The desertion of the scoundrelly husband, who I thought was lost somewhere in the cesspool of Europe, was the basis, the sanction of the relations between Judith and myself; and here was this reverend, respectable man apologising for his wife and begging me to be seated in my own chair.

The remark of Judith's that I should find sabbatical calm in the drawing-room occurred to me, and I had to grip the arms of the chair to prevent myself from joining Judith in her hysterics.

The appearance of the husband in his legendary colours of rascality would have been a shock. The sudden scattering of my plans for Judith's happiness I should have viewed with consternation. But it would have been normal. For him, however, to appear in the guise of an Evangelical clergyman, the very last kind of individual to be a.s.sociated with Judith, was, I repeat, horribly fantastic.

”I believe, Sir Marcus,” said he, deliberately parting the tails of his exaggerated frock-coat and sitting down near me, ”that you are a very great friend of my wife.”

I murmured that I had known Mrs. Mainwaring for some years.

”You are doubtless acquainted with her unhappy history.”

”I have heard her speak of it,” said I.

”You must then share her surprise in seeing me here to-day. I should like to a.s.sure you, as representing her friends and society and that sort of thing, as I have a.s.sured her, that I have not taken this step without earnest prayer and seeking the counsel of Almighty G.o.d.”

I am by no means a bigoted pietist, but to hear a person talk lightly about seeking the counsel of Almighty G.o.d jars upon my sense of taste. I stiffened at the sanctimonious tone in which the words were uttered.

”You have without doubt very good reasons for coming back into the circle of her life,” said I.

”The best of all reasons,” he replied, caressing a brown whisker, ”namely, that I am a Christian.”

I liked him less and less.

”Is that the reason, may I ask, why you remained away from her all these years?”

”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 G.o.d. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d that checked me in the full career of my wickedness. It is the grace of G.o.d that has lighted my path ever since to holier things. It is the grace of G.o.d that has changed me from what I was to what I am. It is the grace of G.o.d that has brought me here to ask pardon on my knees of the woman I have wronged. The grace of G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 s.h.i.+nes, let alone the Light of G.o.d. Come and see for yourself, man, whether I am lying!”