When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy

He turned, said good-night with sudden abruptness, as if he had been lingering too long and was displeased with himself, and hurried away. It was his usual manner of farewell.

A few minutes afterwards Gortre went to bed. He found it difficult to believe that he had walked down the Faubourg de la Barre that morning. It had been a crowded day.

CHAPTER X
THE RESURRECTION SERMON

Sir Michael Manichoe was the great help and standby of St. Mary's. His father had been a wealthy banker in Rome, and a Jew. The son, who had enormously increased his inherited wealth, was an early convert to Christianity during his Oxford days in England. He was the Conservative member for a division in Lincolnshire, where his great country house was situated, and had become a pillar of the Church and State in England. In the House of Commons he presented the somewhat curious spectacle of a Jew by birth leading the moderate "Catholic" party. He was the great antagonist of Constantine Schuabe, and with equal wealth and position, though Schuabe was by far the more brilliant of the two men, he devoted all his energies to the opposition of the secular and agnostic influences of his political rival.

Every Sunday during the session, when he was in London, Sir Michael drove to St. Mary's for both morning and evening service. He was church warden, and intimately concerned in all the parochial business, while his purse was always open at Father Ripon's request.

Gortre had been introduced to Sir Michael during the week, and he knew the great man purposed attending to hear his first sermon at St. Mary's on the Sunday evening.

He prepared his discourse with extreme care. A natural wish to make a good first impression animated him; but, as he sat late on the Saturday night, finally arranging his notes, he began to be conscious of new and surprising thoughts about the coming event. Earlier in the evening he had been talking to Hands, but the archæologist had gone to bed and left him alone.

The day had been a gloomy one. A black pall of fog fell over London at dawn, and had remained all day, almost choking him as he said evensong in the almost empty church.

All day long he had felt strangely overweighted and depressed. A chance paragraph in an evening paper, stating that Mr. Schuabe, M.P., had returned from a short Continental trip, started an uneasy and gloomy train of thought. The memory of the terrible night at Walktown recurred to him with a horrible sense of unreality, the picture blurred somewhat, as if the fingers of the disease which had struck him down had already been pressing on his brain when he had been alone with the millionaire. Much of what he remembered of that dread interview must have been delusion. And yet in all other matters he was sane and unprejudiced enough. Many times he had met and argued with unbelievers. They had saddened him, but no more. Why was it that this man, notorious atheist as he was, filled him with a shuddering fear, a horror for which he had no name?

Then also, what had been the significance of the incident at Dieppe – its true significance? Sir Robert Llwellyn had also inspired him with a feeling of utter loathing and abhorrence, though perhaps in a less degree. There was the sudden glimpse of Schuabe's signature on the letter. What was the connection between the two men? How could the Antichristian be in friendly communion with the greatest Higher Critic of the time?

He recalled an even more sinister occurrence, or so it had seemed to him. Two days after his first introduction to Llwellyn and the dinner at the Pannier d'Or he had seen him enter the Paris train with Schuabe himself, who had just arrived from England. He had said nothing of the incident to Mr. Byars or Helena. They would have regarded it as ordinary enough. They knew nothing of what had passed between him and Schuabe. The deliberate words of Sir Robert at the restaurant recurred to him again and again, taking possession of his brain and ousting all other thoughts. What new discoveries was the Professor hinting at?

What did the whole obsession of his brain mean?

Curiously enough, he felt certain that these thoughts were in no way heralds of a new attack of brain fever. He knew this for a certainty. It seemed as if the persistent whisperings within him were rather the results of some spiritual message, as if the unseen agency which prompted them had some definite end and purpose in view.

The more he prayed the stronger his premonitions became; added force was given to them, as if they were the direct causes of his supplications.

It almost seemed that God was speaking to him.

He had questioned Hands cautiously, trying to learn if any new and important facts bearing upon Biblical history were indeed likely to be discovered in the near future.

But the answer did not amount to very much. The new and extensive excavations, under the permission of the lately granted firman from the Turkish Government, were only just beginning. The real work was to commence when Hands had finished his work in London and had returned to take charge of the operations.

Of course, Hands had said there were possibilities of discovery of first-class importance, but he doubted it. The locality of Golgotha and the Holy Sepulchre was already established, in Hands's opinion. He had but little doubt of the authenticity of the established sites. Llwellyn's theories he scouted altogether, while agreeing with him in his negation of the Gordon Tomb.

So there had been very little from Hands that was in any way satisfactory to Basil.

But as he sat in the great silence of the night and read over the heads of the sermon a great sense of comfort came to him. He felt a mysterious sense of power, not merely because he knew the work was good, but something beyond that. He was conscious that for some reason or other that particular sermon which he was about to preach was one on which much depended. He could not say how or why he knew the thing was fraught with destiny to himself or others. He only knew it.

Many years afterwards he remembered that quiet night, and the help which seemed to come to him suddenly, a renewed hope and confidence after the mental misery of the day.

When he looked back on the terrible and stupendous events in which he had played so prominent a part, he was able to see clearly the chain of events, and to place his experience about what he always afterwards called his "Resurrection sermon" in their proper sequence.

Looking back through the years, he saw that a more than mortal power was guiding him towards the fulfilment of a Divine purpose.

But that night as he said his prayers before going to sleep he only felt a sweet security as he glanced at the MS. on the chair by his bedside.

The future was not yet revealed to him. God spared him the torture of foreknowledge.

The pulpit was high above the heads of the people, much higher than is usual, a box of stone set in the great arch of the chancel.

As Gortre stood for a moment, after the prayer, he kissed the stole and placed it, as a yoke, upon his shoulders. He looked down the great building and saw the hundreds of watchful, expectant faces, with an uplifting sense of power. He felt as if he were a mouthpiece of strange, unseen forces. The air seemed full of wings.

For a moment the preacher paused and sent a keen glance over the congregation below. He saw Sir Michael Manichoe, dark, aquiline, Semitic, sitting in his front pew. A few seats behind him, with a sudden throb of surprise but nothing else, the calm and evil beauty of Constantine Schuabe's face looked up at him.

The strangeness of the appearance and the shock of it had at that moment no menace or intimidation for him. Standing there to deliver God's message, in God's house, his enemy seemed to have no power to throw his brain into its old fear and tumult.

Another face, unknown to him, arrested his attention.

The sexes were not separated for worship in St. Mary's. In the same seat where Schuabe sat was a woman, dark, handsome, expensively dressed.

She also was Jewish in appearance, though it was obvious that there was no connection between her and the millionaire. Her face, as the young clergyman's eyes rested on it for a second, seemed to be curiously familiar, as if he saw it every day of his life, but it nevertheless struck no personal note.

Gortre began to speak, taking for his text part of a verse from the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans – "Declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection of the dead."

"In this world of to-day," he began calmly, and with a certain deliberation and precision in his utterance, "what men in general are hungering after is a positive assurance of actual spiritual agency in the world. They crave for something to hold by which is outside themselves, and which cannot have grown out of the inner persuasions of men. They cannot understand people who tell them that, whether the events of the Gospels actually passed upon earth or not, they may fashion their own dispositions all the same, on the supposition that these events occurred. If I can to-night show that any appearance of the Risen Lord is attested in the same way as are certain facts commonly accepted as history, I shall have accomplished as much as I can hope."

Then, very carefully, Gortre went through the scientific and historical evidences for the truth of the Resurrection. Gradually, as he marshalled his proofs and brought forth one after the other, he began, by a sort of unconscious hypnotism of the eye, to make the seat where Schuabe and the strange woman sat his objective.

Many speakers have this automatic habit of addressing one or two persons as if they were the ear of the whole congregation. It is said that by such means, even if unconsciously employed, the brain becomes more concentrated and clearer for the work in hand.

Slowly the preacher's voice became more resonant and triumphant. To many of the congregation the overwhelming and stupendous evidences for the truth of the Gospel narratives which the study of late years has collected was entirely new. The Higher Criticism, the fact that it is not only in science that "discoveries" can be made, the excavations in the East and the newly discovered MSS., with their variations of reading, the possibility that the lost Aramaic original of St. Matthew's Gospel may yet be discovered, were all things which came to them for the first time in their lives. Gortre's words began to open up to them an entirely new train of thought. Their interest was profoundly quickened.

Very few clergymen of middle age are cognisant of the latest theological thought. Time, money, and lack of education alike prevent them. The slight mental endowment and very ordinary education which are all that is absolutely necessary for an ordination candidate, are not realised by the ordinary member of a church congregation. The mass of the English clergy to-day are content to leave such questions alone, to do their duty simply, to impose upon their flock the necessity of "faith," and to deny the right of individual judgment and speculation.

They do not realise that the world of their middle age is more educated, and so more intelligent, than the world of their youth, and that, if the public intellect is nurtured by the public, those whose duty it is to keep it within the fold of Christianity must provide it with a food suited to its development.

Gortre, in his sermon, had crystallised and boiled down into pregnant paragraphs, without circumlocution or obscurity, all the brilliant work of Latham, Westcott, Professor Ramsay, and Homersham Cox. He quoted Renan's passage from Les Apôtres, dealing with the finding of the empty tomb, and showed the flaws and fallacies in that brilliant piece of antichristian suggestion.

As he began to bring his arguments to a close he was conscious that the people were with him. He could feel the brains around him thinking in unison; it was almost as if he heard the thoughts of the congregation. The dark, handsome woman stared straight up at him. Trouble was in her eyes, an awakened consciousness, and Gortre knew that the truth was dropping steadily into her mind, and that conviction was unwelcome and alarming.

And he felt also the bitter antagonism which was alive and working behind the impassive face and half-closed eyes of the millionaire below. It was a silent duel between them. He knew that his words were full of meaning, even of conviction, to the man, and yet he was subjectively conscious of some reserve of force, some hidden sense of fearful power, a desperate resolve which he could not overcome.

His soul wrestled in this dark, mysterious conflict as with a devil, but could not prevail.

He finished all his argument, the last of his proofs. There was a hushed silence in the church.

Then swiftly, with a voice which trembled with the power that was given him, he called them to repentance and a new life. If, he said, his words had carried conviction of the truth of Christ's resurrection, of His divinity, then, believing that, there was but one course open to them all. For to know the truth, and to believe it, and to continue in indifference, was to kill the soul.

It was over. Father Ripon had pronounced the blessing, the great organ was thundering out the requiem of another Sunday, and Sir Michael was shaking hands warmly with Basil in the vestry.

Gortre was tired and shaken by the long, nervous strain, but the evident pleasure of Father Ripon and Sir Michael, the knowledge that he had acquitted himself well, was comforting and sustaining.

He walked home, down quiet Holborn, curiously dead without the traffic of a week day and the lights of the shop fronts, and not reanimated by the strolling pedestrians, young people of the lower classes from the East End, who thronged it.

Lincoln's Inn was wonderfully soothing and quiet as his footsteps echoed in the old quadrangle. After a lonely, tranquil supper – Hands was at a dinner-party somewhere in Mayfair and Spence was at the office of The Daily Wire preparing for Monday's paper – he wheeled a small writing-desk up to the fireside and began a long letter of news and thankfulness to Helena.

He pictured the pleasant dining-room at Walktown, the Sunday night's supper, – an institution at the Vicarage after the labours of the busiest day in the week, – with a guest or two perhaps.

He knew they would be thinking of him, as he of them, and pictured the love-light in his lady's sweet, calm eyes.

CHAPTER XI
"NEITHER DO I CONDEMN THEE"

Autumn came to London, a warm, lingering season. There was a hint of the South in the atmosphere of town. All business moved with languor; there was more enjoyment in life as people went and came through the streets under so ripe and genial a sun.

Gortre had settled down to steady, regular work. At no time before had a routine been so pleasant to him. His days were full of work, which, hard as it was, came to him with far more appeal than his duties at Walktown. Nothing ever stagnated here, at the very hub and centre of things.

The splendid energy and force of Father Ripon, the magnificent unconvention of his methods, animated his staff to constant and unflagging exertions.

Gortre felt that he was suddenly "grown up," that his life before had been spent in futile playtime compared to the present.

One central fact in St. Mary's parish held all the great organisation together. This was the daily services in the great church. Priests, deacons, sisters of mercy, school teachers, and lay helpers all drew their strength and inspiration from this source. The daily Eucharist, matins, evensong, were both a stimulus and stimulant of enormous power.

Church brought the mysteries in which they lived, moved, and had their being into intimate relation with every circumstance of daily life.

The extraordinary thing, which many of Father Ripon's staff were almost unable to understand, was that more people did not avail themselves of what they regarded – viewing the thing from a standpoint of personal experience – such helpful opportunities.

"They are always coming to me," Father Ripon had said on one occasion, "and complaining that they find such a tremendous difficulty in leading a holy life – say that the worldly surroundings and so forth kill their good impulses – and yet they won't come to church. People are such fools! My young men imagine that they can become good Christians by a sort of sudden magic – a low beast on Saturday night, the twentieth of August, and, after a nerve storm in church and a few tears in the vestry, a saint for evermore! And then when they get drunk or do something beastly the next week, they rail against the Christian Faith because it isn't a sort of spiritual hand cuffs! And yet if you told them you could manage a bank after merely experience in a shipping office, they would see the absurdity of that at once. Donkeys!"

This with a genial smile of tenderness and compassion, for this Whirlwind in a Cassock loved his flock.

So from the very first Basil had found his life congenial. Privately he blessed his good fortune in living in Lincoln's Inn with Spence. On the nights when the journalist was free from the office, and not otherwise engaged, the two men sat late with pipes and coffee, enjoying that vigorous communion of two keen, young, and virile brains which is one of the truly stimulating pleasures of life.

Gortre admired Spence greatly for some of his qualities. His intellect was, of course, first class – his high position on the great daily paper guaranteed that. His reading and sympathies were wide. Moreover, the clergyman found a great refreshment in the fact that, in an age of indifference, at a time when the best intellects of younger London life were professedly agnostic, Harold Spence was an avowed Christian and Churchman. As Gortre got to know him better, when the silence and detachment of midnight in the old Inn broke down reticence, he realised with a sense of thankfulness, and sometimes of fear also, how a thorough belief in religion kept the writer straight and captain of his own soul.

For the man was a creature of strong passions and wayward desires. He had not always been the clean gentleman of the present. As is so often the case with a refined and cultured temperament, he had a dark and ugly side to his nature. The coarse vices of the blood called to him long and often with their hollow siren voices. Evil came to him with swift invitation and cunning allurement. He had hinted to Basil of days of sin and secret shame. And now, very soberly and without any emotion, he clung to Christ for help.

And he had conquered.

This was ever a glorious fact to Basil, another miracle in those thousands of daily miracles which were happening all around him. But his fear for Harold came from his realisation of his friend's exact spiritual grip. Spence's Christianity was rather too utilitarian for safety. Perhaps the deep inward conviction was weak. It seemed sometimes as if it were a barren, thorny thing – too much fetish, too much a return for benefits received, a sort of half-conscious bargain. He often prayed long that nothing should ever occur to shake Spence's belief; for he felt, if that should happen, the disaster would prove irreparable. A dammed river is a dangerous thing.

But he kept all these thoughts locked in his heart, and never spoke of them to Harold.

Since the evening of his first sermon he had never seen Schuabe again. Now and then the thought of him passed through his brain, and his mental sight seemed obscured for a moment, as though great wings hid the sun from him. But since the silent duel in the church, the curious and malign influence of the millionaire had waned. It was prominent no longer, and when it troubled him it did so without power and force. Fine health, the tonic of constant work, the armour of continual prayer, had their way and were able to banish much of what he now looked back on as morbidity, sinister though it had been.

Nevertheless, one thing often reminded him of that night. The dark, Jewish-looking lady he had seen sitting in the same pew with Schuabe often came to church on Sunday nights when he was preaching. The bold and insolently beautiful face looked up at him with steady interest. The fierce regard had something passionate and yet wistful in it.

Sometimes Basil found himself preaching almost directly to the face and soul of the unknown woman. There was an understanding between them. He knew it; he felt it most certainly.

Sometimes she would remain in her seat after the mass of the congregation had shuffled away into the night. She did not pray, but sat still, with her musing eyes fixed on the huge ten-foot crucifix that swung down from the chancel arch.

Once, as he passed the pew on the way to baptise the child of a poor woman of the streets – brought in furtively after the Sunday evensong – she made a movement as if to speak to him. He had waited in expectation for a moment, but she remained still, and he passed on to the font, with its sad cluster of outcasts, its dim gas-jets, and the tiny child of shame with its thin cry of distress.

He was asking the tremendous question —

"Dost thou, in the name of this child, renounce the devil and all his works, the vain pomp and glory of the world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the carnal desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow nor be led by them?"

when he saw that the unknown woman was standing by within the shadow of a pillar. A gleam of yellow light fell through the dark on her rich dress, her eye glittered behind her white veil. He thought there was a tear in it. But when he was saying the exhortation he saw that the tall, silent figure had departed.

He often wondered who the woman was, – if he should ever know her.

Something told him that she wanted help. Something assured him that he should some day give it to her.

And beyond this there was an unexplained conviction within him that the stranger was in some way concerned and bound up in the part he was to play in life.

Long ago he had realised that it was idle to deny the interference of supernatural personalities in human life. Accepting the Incarnation, he accepted the Communion of Saints. And he was always conscious of hidden powers moulding, directing him.

The episode of the cigarettes happened in this way.

Stokes, one of Gortre's fellow-curates, came to supper one night in Lincoln's Inn.

Spence was there also, as it was one of his free nights.

About ten o'clock supper was over and they proposed to have a little music. Stokes was a fine pianist, and he had brought some of the nocturnes and ballads of Chopin with him, to try on the little black-cased piano which stood at an obtuse angle with the end of the large sitting-room.

"Will you smoke, Stokes?" Spence said.

"Thank you, I'll have a cigarette," the young man replied. "I can't stand cigars, and I've left my pipe at the Clergy House."

They looked for cigarettes in the silver box lined with cedar which stood on the mantel-shelf, but some one had smoked them all and the box was empty.

"Never mind," Spence said; "I've been meaning to run out and get a late Westminster and I'll buy some cigarettes, too. There's a shop at the Holborn end of the Lane, next to the shop where the oysters come from, and it won't be shut yet."

In a few minutes he came back with several packets of cigarettes in his hand. "I've brought Virginian," he said; "I know you can't stand Egyptian, none of us can, and if these are cheap, they're good, too."

Till eleven o'clock Stokes played to them – Chopin's wild music of melancholy and fire – and as the hour struck he went home.

Gortre and Spence sat and talked casually after he had gone, about the music they had heard, the cartoon in the evening paper, anything that came.

Basil had not been smoking during the evening. He had been too intent upon the nocturnes, and now he felt a want of tobacco. One of the packets of cigarettes lay by him on the table. He pulled up the flaps and took one. Without thinking what he was doing he drew a little photograph, highly finished and very clear, from the tiny cardboard case.

He glanced at it casually.

The thing was one of those pictures of burlesque actresses which are given away with this kind of tobacco. A tall girl with short skirts and a large picture hat was shown in a coquettish attitude that was meant to be full of invitation.

Basil looked at it steadily with a curious expression on his face. Then he took a large reading-glass from the table and examined it again, magnifying it to many times its original size.

He scrutinised it with great care. It was the portrait of the strange girl who came to St. Mary's.

Basil had told Spence of this woman, and now he passed the photograph on to him.

"Harold, that is the girl who comes to church and looks so unhappy. She is an actress, of course. The name is underneath – Miss Gertrude Hunt. Who is Miss Gertrude Hunt?"

Spence took the thing. "How very queer!" he said, "to find your unknown like this. Gertrude Hunt? Why, she is a well-known musical comedy girl, sings and dances at the Regent, you know. There are all the usual stories about the lady, but possibly they are all lies. I'm sure I don't know. I've chucked that sort of society long ago. Are you sure it's the same person?"

"Oh, quite sure! Of course, this shows the girl in a different dress and so on, but it's she without a doubt. I am glad she comes to church. It is not what one expects from what one hears of that class of woman, and it's not what one generally finds in the parish."

He sighed, thinking of the many chilling experiences of the last few months in the vice-haunted streets and squares of Bloomsbury.

"Well," said Spence, "experiments with that type are generally failures, and sometimes dangerous to the experimenter. You remember Anatole France's Thais? But this damsel is no Thais certainly, and you aren't a bit like Paphuntius. I hope you will be able to do some good. Personally, anything of the sort would be quite impossible to me. Good-night, old man. I'm going to turn in. I've a hard day's work to-morrow. Sleep well."

He went out of the room with a yawn.

When he was left alone, with his little mystery solved in so commonplace a fashion, Basil was conscious of a curious disappointment. It was an anti-climax.

He had no narrow objection to the theatre. Now and then he had been to see famous actors in great plays. His occasional visits to the theatres of Irving or Wyndham had given him pleasure, nevertheless he had always felt a slight instinctive dislike to the trade of a mime. All voluntary sacrifices of personal dignity affect the average English temperament in this way more or less. However much the apologists of the stage may cry "art" or "beneficial influence," your British thinker is not convinced that there is anything very worthy in painting the face and making the body a public show for a wage. And there is sometimes a kind of wonder in the heart of a sincere Christian who attends a theatre as he remembers that the body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit.

Still Basil was tolerant enough. But this case which had thrust itself before him was quite different. He knew that the burlesque, the modern music play, made, first and foremost, a frank appeal to the senses. Its hopeless vulgarity and coarseness of sentiment, its entire lack of appeal to anything that was not debased and materialistic, were ordinary indisputable facts of every-day life. And so his lady of evensong was a high-priestess of nothing better than this cult of froth and gaudy sensuality. More than all others, his experiences of late had taught him that women of this class seemed to be very nearly soulless. Their souls had dissolved in champagne, their consciences were burnt up by the feverish excitement and pleasure of their lives. They sold themselves for luxury and the adulation of coarse men.

His very chagrin made him bitter and contemptuous more than his wont.

Then his eye lit upon a photogravure hung upon the opposite wall. It was the reproduction of a quaint, decorative, stilted picture by an artist of the early Umbrian school, and represented St. Mary Magdalene.

The coincidence checked his contemptuous thoughts.

He began to reconstruct the scene in his brain, a favourite and profitable exercise of his, using his knowledge and study of the old dim times to animate the picture and make it vivid.

They were all resting, or rather lying, around the table, the body resting on the couch, the feet turned away from the table in the direction of the wall, while the left elbow rested on the table.

And then, from the open courtyard, up the verandah step, perhaps through an antechamber, and by the open door, passed the figure of a woman into the festive reception-room and dining-hall. How had she gained access? How incongruous her figure must have been there! In those days the Jewish prejudice against any conversation with women – even those of the most lofty character – was extreme.

The shadow of her form must have fallen on all who sat at meat. But no one spoke, nor did she heed any but One only.

The woman had brought with her an alabastron of perfume. It was a flask of precious foliatum, probably, which women wore round the neck, and which hung over the breast. The woman stood behind Him at His feet, and as she bowed reverently a shower of tears, like sudden summer rain, "bedewed" His feet.

Basil went through the whole scene until the final, "Go into peace" not go in peace, as the logical dogmatics would have had it.

And so she, the first who had come to Him for spiritual healing, went out into the better light, and into the eternal peace of the Kingdom of Heaven.

Basil tore up the vulgar little photograph and forgot that aspect of the dancer. He remembered rather the dim figure by the font.

There was a sudden furious knocking on the outer door of the chambers, and he went to open it.