"For ever with the Lord."
An untuneful voice, louder than need be, but with what conviction!
Hands tried to fix his attention on the newspaper which he held.
He read that in Rhodesia the mine capitalists were moving for slavery pure and simple. It was proposed openly that slavery should be the penalty for law-breaking for natives. This was the only way, it asserted, by which the labour problem in South Africa could be solved.
"Life from the dead is in that word,
'Tis immortality."
It seemed that there was small opposition to this proposal. It would be the best thing for the Kaffir, perhaps, this wise and kindly discipline. So the proposal was wrapped up.
"And nightly pitch my moving tent
A day's march nearer home."
Hands saw that, quite suddenly, the old horror of slavery had disappeared.
This, too, was coming, then? This old horror which Christians had banished from the world?
"So when my latest breath
Shall rend the veil in twain."
Hands started. His thoughts came back to the house in which he sat. The girl's voice touched him immeasurably. He heard it clearly in a lull of the storm. Then another tremendous gust of wind drowned it.
Two great tears rolled down his cheeks.
It was midnight, and all the people in the house were long since asleep, when Hands picked up the last of his newspapers.
It was Saturday's edition of the London Daily Mercury, the powerful rival of the Wire. A woman who had been to Penzance market had brought it home for him, otherwise he would have had to wait for it until the Monday morning.
He gazed wearily round the homely room.
Weariness, that was what lay heavy over mind and body—an utter weariness.
The firelight played upon the crude pictures, the simple ornaments, the ship worked in worsted when the coast-guard was a boy in the Navy, the shells from a Pacific island, a model gun under a glass shade. But his thoughts were not prisoned by these humble walls and the humble room in which he sat. He heard the groaning of the peoples of the world, the tramp of armies, the bitter cry of souls from whom hope had been plucked for ever.
He remembered the fair morning in Jerusalem when, with the earliest light of dawn, he had gone to work with his Arab boys before the heat of the day.
From the Mosque of Omar he had heard the sonorous chant of the muezzin.
"The night has gone with the darkness, and the day approaches with light and brightness!
"Praise God for securing His favour and kindness!
"God is most great! God is most great! I testify that there is no god but God!
"I testify that Mohammed is the Apostle of God!
"Come to prayer!
"Come to security!
"Prayer is better than sleep!
"God is most great!
"There is no god but God!
"Arise, make morning, and to God be the praise!"
He had heard the magnificent chant as he passed by, almost kneeling with his Arabs. So short a time ago! Hardly three months—he had kept no count of time lately, but it could hardly be four months.
How utterly unconscious he had been on that radiant morning outside the Damascus Gate! He had seen the men at work, and was sitting under his sun-tent writing on his pad; he was just lighting a cigarette, he remembered, when Ionides, the foreman, had come running up to him, his shrewd, brown face wrinkled with excitement.
And now, even as he sat there on that stormy midnight, far from the world, even now the whole globe was echoing and reverberating with his discovery. He had opened the little rock chambers, and it seemed that the blows of the picks had set free a troop of ruinous spirits, who were devastating mankind.
Pandora's box—that legend fitted what he had done, but with a deadly difference.
He could not find that Hope remained. It would have been better a thousand times if the hot Eastern sun had struck him down that distant morning on his way through the city.
The awful weight, the initial responsibility rested with him.
He alone had been the means by which the world was being shaken with horrors—horrors growing daily, and that seemed as if the end would be unutterable night.
How the wind shrieked and wailed!
Εγω Ιωσηφ ὁ ἀπο Αριμαθειας.
The words were written in fire on his mind!
The wind was shrieking louder and louder.
The Atlantic boomed in one continuous burst of sound.
He looked once more at the leading article in the paper.
It was that article which was long afterwards remembered as the "Simple Statement" article.
The writer had spoken the thought that was by this time trembling for utterance on the lips and in the brains of all Englishmen—the thought which had never been so squarely faced, so frankly stated before.
Here and there passages started out more vividly than the rest. The words seemed to start out and stab him.
"—So much for India, where, sprung from the same Cause, the indications are impossible to mistake.
"Let us now turn to the Anglo-Saxon sprung communities other than these Islands.
"In America we find a wave of lawlessness and fierce riot passing over the country, such as it has never known before.
"The Irishmen and Italians, who throng the congested quarters of the great cities, are robbing and murdering Protestants and Jews. The United States Legislature is paralysed between the necessity of keeping order and the impossibility of resolution in the face of this tremendous bouleversement of belief.
"From Australia the foremost prelate of the great country writes of the utter overthrow of a communal moral sense, and concludes his communication with the following pathetic words:
"'Everywhere,' he says, 'I see morals, no less than the religion which inculcates them, falling into neglect, set aside in a spirit of despair by fathers and mothers, treated with contempt by youths and maidens, spat upon and cursed by a degraded populace, assailed with eager sarcasm by the polite and cultured.'
"The terrible seriousness of the situation need hardly be further insisted on here. Its reality cannot be more vividly indicated than by the statement of a single fact.
"consols are down to sixty-five
"—and therefore we demand, in the name of humanity, a far more comprehensive and representative searching into the facts of the alleged 'discovery' at Jerusalem. Society is falling to pieces as we write.
"Who will deny the reason?
"Already, after a few short weeks, we are learning that the world cannot go on without Christianity. That is the Truth which the world is forced to realise. And no essay in sociology, no special pleading on the part of Scientists or Historians, can shake our conviction that a creed which, when sudden doubts are thrown upon it, can be the means of destroying the essential fabric of human society, is not the true and unassailable creed of mankind.
"We foresee an immediate reaction. The consequences of the wave of antichristian belief are now, and will be, so devastating, that sane men will find in Disbelief and its consequences a glorious recrudescence and assurance of Faith."
Hands stared into the dying fire.
A solemn passage from John Bright's great speech on the Crimean War came into his mind. The plangent power and deep earnestness of the words were even more applicable now than then.
"The Angel of Death has been abroad throughout the land: you may almost hear the beating of his wings. There is no one, as when the first-born were slain of old, to sprinkle with blood the lintel and two side-posts of our doors, that he may spare and pass on."
So they were asking for another commission! Well, they might try that as a forlorn hope, but he knew that his discovery was real. Could he be mistaken possibly? Could that congress of the learned be all mistaken and imposed upon? It was not possible. It could not be. Would that it were possible.
There was no hope, despite the newspapers. For centuries the world had been living in a fool's paradise. He had destroyed it. It would be a hundred years before the echoes of his deed had died away.
But the terrible weight of the world's burden was too heavy for him to bear. He knew that. Not for much longer could he endure it.
The life seemed oozing out of him, pressed out by a weight—the sensation was physical.
He wished it was all over. He had no hope for the future, and no fear.
The weight was too heavy. The outside dark came through the walls, and began to close in on him. His heart beat loudly. It seemed to rise up in his throat and choke him.
The pressure grew each moment; mountains were being piled upon him, heavier, more heavy.
The wind was but a distant murmur now, but the weight was crushing him. Only a few more moments and his heart would burst. At last!
The dark thing huddled on the hearth-rug, which the girl found when she came down in the morning, was the scholar's body.
The newspaper he had been reading lay upon his chest.
Constantine Schuabe's great room at the Hotel Cecil had been entirely refurnished and arranged for the winter months.
The fur of great Arctic beasts lay upon the heavy Teheran carpets, which had replaced the summer matting—furs of enormous value. The dark red curtains which hung by windows and over doors were worked with threads of dull gold.
All the chairs were more massive in material and upholstered warmly in soft leather; the logs in the fireplace crackled with white flame, amethyst in the glowing cavern beneath.
However the winter winds might sweep over the Thames below or the rain splash and welter on the Embankment, no sound or sign of the turmoil could reach or trouble the people who moved in the fragrant warmth and comfort of this room.
For his own part Schuabe never gave any attention to the mise-en-scène by which he was surrounded, here or elsewhere. The head of a famous Oxford Street firm was told to call with his artists and undermen; he was given to understand that the best that could be done was to be done, and the matter was left entirely to him.
In this there was nothing of the parvenu or of an ignorance of art, as far as Schuabe was concerned. He was a man of catholic and cultured taste. But experience had taught him that his furnishing firm were trained to be catholic and cultured also, that an artist would see to it that no jarring notes appeared. And since he knew this, Schuabe infinitely preferred not to be bothered with details. In absolute contrast to Llwellyn, his mind was always busy with abstractions, with thought and forms of thought, things that cannot be handled or seen. They were the real things for him always.
The millionaire sat alone by the glowing fire. He was wearing a long gown of camel's hair, dyed crimson, confined round the waist by a crimson cord. In this easy garment and a pair of morocco slippers without heels, he looked singularly Eastern. The whole face and figure suggested that—sinister, lonely, and splendid.
The morning papers were resting on a chair by his side. He was reading one of them.
It announced the death from heart disease of Mr. Cyril Hands while taking a few days' rest in a remote village of Cornwall. Not a shadow of regret passed over the regular, impassive face. The eyes remained in fixed thought. He was logically going over the bearings of this event in his mind. How could it affect him? Would it affect him one way or the other?
He paced the long room slowly. On the whole the incident seemed without meaning for him. If it meant anything at all it meant that his position was stronger than ever. The voice of the discoverer was now for ever silent. His testimony, his reluctant but convinced opinion, was upon record. Nothing could alter that. Hands might perhaps have had doubts in the future. He might have examined more keenly into the way in which he came to examine the ground where the new tomb was hidden. Yes, this was better. That danger, remote as it had been, was over.
As his eyes wandered over the rest of the news columns they became more alert, speculative, and anxious. The world was in a tumult, which grew louder and louder every hour. Thrones were rocking, dynasties trembling.
He sank down in his chair with a sigh, passing his hand wearily over his face. Who could have foreseen this? It was beyond belief. He gazed at the havoc and ruin in terrified surprise, as a child might who had lit a little fire of straw, which had grown and devoured a great city.
It was in this very room—just over there in the centre—that he had bought the brain and soul of the archæologist.
The big man had stood exactly on that spot, blanched and trembling. His miserable notes of hand and promises to pay had flamed up in this fire.
And now? India was slipping swiftly away; a bloody civil war was brewing in America; Central Europe was a smouldering torch; the whips of Africa were cracking in the ears of Englishmen; the fortunes of thousands were melting away like ice in the sun. In London gentlemen were going from their clubs to their houses at night carrying pistols and sword-sticks. North of Holborn, south of the Thames, no woman was safe after dark had fallen.
He saw his face in an oval silver glass. It fascinated him as it had never done before. He gripped the leather back of a chair and stared fiercely, hungrily, at the image. It was this, this man he was looking at, some stranger it seemed, who had done all this. He laughed—a dreadful, mirthless, hollow laugh. This mass of phosphates, carbon, and water, this moving, talking thing in a scarlet gown, was the pivot on which the world was turning!
His brain became darkened for a time, lost in an awful wonder. He could not realise or understand.
And no one knew save his partner and instrument. No one knew!
The secret seemed to be bursting and straining within him like some live, terrible creature that longed to rush into light. For weeks the haunting thought had grown and harassed him. It rang like bells in his memory. If only he could share his own dark knowledge. He wanted to take some calm, pale woman, to hold her tight and tell her all that he had done, to whisper it into her ears and watch the mask of flesh change and shrink, to see his words carve deep furrows in it, sear the eyes, burn the colour from the lips. He saw his own face was working with the mad violence of his imaginings.
He wrenched his brain back into normal grooves, as an engineer pulls over a lever. He was half-conscious of the simile as he did so.
Turning away from the mirror, he shuddered as a man who has escaped from a sudden danger.
That above all things was fatal. His luxuriant Eastern imagination had been checked and kept in subjection all his life; the force of his intellect had tamed and starved it. He knew, none better, the end, the extinction of the brain that has got beyond control. No, come what may, he must watch himself cunningly that he did not succumb. A tiny speck in the brain, and then good-bye to thought and life for ever. He was a visitor of the Lancashire Asylum—had been so once at least—and he had seen the soulless lumps of flesh the doctors called "patients." ... "I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul," he repeated to himself, and even as he did so, his other self sneered at the weakness which must comfort itself with a poet's rhyme and cling to an apothegm for readjustment.
He tried to shut out the world's alarm from his mental eyes and ears.
He went back to the scenes of his first triumph. They had been sweet indeed.
Yes! worth all the price he had paid and might be called upon to pay.
All over England his life's thought, his constant programme had been gloriously vindicated. They had hailed him as the prophet of Truth at first—a prophet who had cried in the wilderness for years, and who had at last come into his own.
The voices of great men and vast multitudes had come to him as incense. He was to be the leader of the new religion of common sense. Why had they doubted him before, led away by the old superstitions?
Men who had hated and feared him in the old days, had spoken against him and his doctrines as if both were abhorred and unclean, were his friends and servants now. Christians had humbled themselves to the representative of the new power. Bishops had consulted him as to the saving of the Church, and its reconstruction upon "newer, broader, more illuminated lines." They had come to him with fear—anxious, eager to confess the errors of the past, swift to flatter and suggest that, with his help, the fabric and political power of the Church might yet stand.
He was shown, with furtive eyes and hesitating lips, from which the shame had not yet been cleansed, how desirable and necessary it was that in the reconstruction of Christianity the Church should still have a prominent and influential part.
He had been a colossus among them all. But—and he thought of it with anger and the old amazement—all this had been at first, when the discovery had flashed over a startled world. While the thing was new it had been a great question, truly the greatest of all, but it had been one which affected men's minds and not their bodies. That is speaking of the world at large.
As has already been pointed out, only religious people—a vast host, but small beside the mass of Englishmen—were disturbed seriously by what had happened. The price of bread remained the same; beef was no dearer.
During these first weeks Schuabe had been all-powerful. He and his friends had lived in a constant and stupendous triumph.
But now—and in his frightful egoism he frowned at the thick black head-lines in the newspapers—the whole attitude of every one was changed. There was a reflex action, and in the noise it made Schuabe was forgotten.
Men had more to think of now. There was no time to congratulate the man who had been so splendidly right.
Consols were at 65!
Bread was rising each week. War was imminent. On all sides great mercantile houses were crashing. Each fall meant a thousand minor catastrophes all over the country.
The antichristians had no time to jeer at the Faithful; they must work and strain to save their own fortunes from the wreck.
The mob, who were swiftly bereft of the luxuries which kept them in good-humour, were turning on the antichristian party now. In their blind, selfish unreason they cried them down, saying that they were responsible for the misery and terror that lay over the world.
With an absolute lack of logic, the churches were crowded again. The most irreligious cried for the good old times. Those who had most coarsely exulted over the broken Cross now bewailed it as the most awful of calamities.
Christianity was daily being terribly avenged through the pockets and stomachs of the crowd!
It was bizarre beyond thinking, sordid in its immensity, vulgar in its mighty soulless greed, but TRUE, REAL, a FEARFUL FACT.
A stupendous confusion.
Two great currents had met in a maelstrom. The din of the disturbance beat upon the world's ear with sickening clamour.
Louder and louder, day by day.
And the man who had done all this, the brain which had called up these legions from hell, which had loosed these fiery sorrows on mankind, was in a rich room in a luxurious hotel, alone there. Again the shock and marvel took hold of the man and shook him like a reed.
There was a round table, covered with a gleaming white cloth, by the fire. The kidneys in the silver dish were cold, the grease had congealed. The silent servants had brought up a breakfast to him. He had watched their clever, automatic movements. Did they know whom they were attending on, what would happen—?
His thoughts flashed hither and thither, now surveying a world in torture, now weaving a trivial and whimsical romance about a waiter. The frightful activity of his brain, inflamed by thoughts beyond the power of even that wonderful machine, began to have a consuming physical effect.
He felt the grey matter bubbling. Agonising pains shot from temple to temple, little knives seemed hacking at the back of his eyes. Once again, in a wave of unutterable terror, the fear of madness submerged him.
On this second occasion he was unable to recall his composure by any effort which came from within himself. He stumbled into his adjoining dressing-room and selected a bottle from a shelf. It was bromide of potassium, which he had been taking of late to deaden the clamour and vibration of his nerves.
In half an hour the drug had calmed him. His face was very pale, but set and rigid. The storm was over. He felt shattered by its violence, but in an artificial peace.
He took a cigarette.
As he was lighting it his valet entered and announced that Mr. Dawlish, his man of business, was waiting in an anteroom.
He ordered that he should be shown in.
Mr. Dawlish was the junior partner of the well-known firm of city solicitors, Burrington & Tuite. That was his official description. In effect he was Schuabe's principal man of business. All his time was taken up by the millionaire's affairs all over England.
He came in quickly—a tall, well-dressed man, hair thin on the forehead, moustache carefully trained.
"You look very unwell, Mr. Schuabe," he said, with a keen glance. "Don't let these affairs overwhelm you. Nothing is so dangerous as to let the nerves go in times like these."
Schuabe started.
"How are things, Dawlish?" he said.
"Very shaky, very shaky, indeed. The shares of the Budapest Railway are to be bought for a shilling. I am afraid your investments in that concern are utterly lost. When the Bourses closed last night dealings in Foreign Government Stock were at a stand-still. Turkish C and O bonds are worthless."
Again the millionaire started. "You bring me a record of disaster," he said.
"Baumann went yesterday," continued the level voice.
"My cousin," said Schuabe.
"The worst of it is that the situation is getting worse and worse. We have, as you know, made enormous efforts. But all attempts you have made to uphold your securities have only been throwing money away. The last fortnight has been frightful. More than two hundred thousand pounds have gone. In fact, an ordinary man would be ruined by the last month or two. Your position is better because of the real property in the Manchester mills."
"Trade has almost ceased."
"Close the mills down and wait. You cannot go on."
"If I do, ten thousand men will be let loose on the city with nothing but the Union funds to fall back on."
"If you don't, you will be what Baumann is to-day—a bankrupt."
"I have eighty thousand cash on deposit at the Bank of England."
"And if you throw that away after the rest you will be done for. You don't realise the situation. It can't recover. War is inevitable. India will go, I feel it. England is going to turn into a camp. Religion is the pretext of war everywhere. Take your money from the Bank in cash and lock it up in the Safe Deposit strong rooms. Keep that sum, earning nothing, for emergencies, then wait for the other properties to recover. It will be years perhaps, but you will win through in the end. The freehold sites of the mills are alone worth almost anything. It is only paper millionaires that are easily ruined. You are a great property owner. But you must walk very warily, even you. Who could have foreseen all this? I see that fellow Hands is dead—couldn't stand the sight of the mischief he'd done, I suppose. The fool! the eternal fool! why couldn't he have kept his sham discovery to himself? Look at the unutterable misery it has brought on the world."
"You yourself, Dawlish, are you suffering the common fate?"
"I? Certainly not! That is to say, I suffer of course, but not fatally. All my investments are in buildings in safe quarters. I may have to reduce rents for a year or two, but my houses will not be empty. And they are my own."
"Fortunate man," said Schuabe; "but why sham discovery?"
"Out of business hours," said the solicitor, with some stiffness and hesitation, "I am a Roman Catholic, Mr. Schuabe. Good-morning. I will send the transfer round for you to sign."
The cool, machine-like man went away. The millionaire knew that his fortune was tottering, but it moved him little. He knew that his power in the country was nearly over, had dwindled to nothing in the stir of greater things around. Money was only useful as a means of power, and with a sure prescience he saw that he would never regain his old position.
The hour was over.
Whatever would be the outcome of these great affairs, the hour was past and over.
The one glowing thought which burned within him, and seemed to be eating out his life, was the awful knowledge that he and no other man had set in motion this terrible machinery which was grinding up the civilised world.
Day and night from that there was no relief.
His valet again entered and reminded his master that some people were coming to lunch. He went away and began to dress with the man's help.
The guests were only two in number. One was Ommaney, the editor of the Daily Wire, the other Mrs. Hubert Armstrong.
Both the lady and gentleman came in together at about two o'clock.
Mrs. Armstrong was much changed in appearance. Her face had lost its serenity; her manner was quick and anxious; her voice strained.
The slim, quiet editor, on the other hand, seemed to be untouched by worry. Quiet and inscrutable as ever, the only change in him, perhaps, was a slight briskness, an aroma rather than an actual expression of good humour and bien-être.
They sat down to the meal. Schuabe, in his dark grey frock-coat, the careful ensemble of his dress no less than the regular beauty of his face—now smooth and calm—seemed to be beyond all mundane cares. Only the lady was ill at ease.
The conversation at first was all of the actual news of the day, as it had appeared in the morning's newspapers. Hands's death was discussed. "Poor fellow!" said Mrs. Armstrong, with a sigh; "it is sad to think of his sudden ending. The burden was too much for him to bear. I can understand it when I look round upon all that is happening; it is terrible!"
"Surely you do not regret the discovery of the truth?" said Schuabe, quickly.
"I am beginning to fear truth," said the lady. "The world, it seems, was not ripe for it. In a hundred years, perhaps, our work would have paved the way. But it is premature. Look at the chaos all around us. The public has ceased to think or read. They are reading nothing. Three publishers have put up the shutters during the week."
The journalist interrupted with a dry chuckle. "They are reading the Daily Wire," he said; "the circulation is almost doubled." He sent a congratulatory glance to Schuabe.
The millionaire's great holding in the paper was a secret known only to a few. In the stress of greater affairs he had half forgotten it. A swift feeling of relief crossed his brain as he realised what this meant to his tottering fortunes.
"Poor Hands!" said the editor, "he was a nice fellow. Rather unpractical and dreamy, but a nice fellow. Owing to him we had the greatest chance that any paper has ever had in the history of journalism. We owe him a great debt. The present popularity and influence of the paper has dwarfed, positively dwarfed, all its rivals. I have given the poor fellow three columns to-day; I wish I could do more."
"Do you not think, Mr. Ommaney," asked Mrs. Armstrong, "that in the enormous publication of telegrams and political foreign news, the glorious fact that the world has at last awakened to a knowledge of the glorious truths of real religion is being swamped and forgotten? After all, what will be the greatest thing in history a hundred years from now? Will it not be the death of the old superstitions rather than a mutiny in the East or a war with Russia? Will not the names of the pioneers of truth remain more firmly fixed in the minds of mankind than those of generals and chancellors?"
The editor made it quite plain that these were speculations with which he had nothing whatever to do.
"It's dead, Mrs. Armstrong," he said brutally. "The religious aspect is utterly dead, and wouldn't sell an extra copy of the paper. It would be madness to touch it now. The public gaze is fixed on Kabul River and St. Petersburg, Belgrade and Constantinople. They have almost forgotten that Jerusalem exists. I sent out twelve special correspondents ten days ago."
Mrs. Armstrong sighed deeply. It was true, bitterly true. She was no longer of any importance in the public eye. No one asked her to lecture now. The mass meetings were all over. Not a single copy of John Mulgrave had been sold for a month. How differently she had pictured it all on that winter's morning at Sir Michael's; how brightly and gloriously it had begun, and now how bitter the dénouement, how utterly beyond foresight? What was this superstition, this Christianity which in its death struggles could overthrow a world?
"The decisive events of the world occur in the intellect." Yes, but how soon do they leave their parent and outstrip its poor control?
There was no need for women now. That was the bitterest thought of all. The movement was over—done with. A private in the Guards was a greater hero than the leader of an intellectual movement. What a monstrous bouleversement of everything!
Again the lady sighed deeply.
"No," she said again, "the world was not yet strong enough to bear the truth. I have sold my Consols," she continued; "I have been advised to do so. I was investing for my daughter when I am gone. Newspaper shares are the things to buy now, I suppose! My brokers told me that I was doing the wisest thing. They said that they could not recover for years."
"The money market is a thing in which I have very little concern except inasmuch as it affects large public issues," said the editor. "I leave it all to my city editor and his staff—men in whom I have the greatest possible trust. But I heard a curious piece of news last night. I don't know what it portends; perhaps Mr. Schuabe can tell me; he knows all about these things. Sir Michael Manichoe, the head of the Church political party, you know has been buying Consols enormously. Keith, my city editor, told me. He has, so it appears, invested enormous sums. Consols will go up in consequence. But even then I don't see how he can repay himself. They cannot rise much."
"I wonder if I was well advised to sell?" said Mrs. Armstrong, nervously. "They say Sir Michael never makes a mistake. He must have some private information."
"I don't think that is possible, Mrs. Armstrong," Ommaney said. "Of course Sir Michael may very likely know something about the situation which is not yet public. He may be reckoning on it. But things are in such hopeless confusion that no sane speculator would buy for a small rise which endured for half a day. He would not be able to unload quickly enough. It seems as if Sir Michael is buying for a permanent recovery. And I assure you that nothing can bring that about. Only one thing at least."
"What is that?" asked both Mrs. Armstrong and Schuabe together.
The editor paused, while a faint smile flickered over his face. "Ah," he said, "an impossibility, of course. If any one discovered that 'The Discovery' was a fraud—a great forgery, for instance—then we should see a universal relief."
"That, of course, is asking for an impossibility," said Mrs. Armstrong, rather shortly. She resented the somewhat flippant tone of the great man.
These things were all her life. To Ommaney they but represented a passing panorama in which he took absolutely no personal interest. The novelist disliked and feared this detachment. It warred with her strong sense of mental duty. The highly trained journalist, to whom all life was but news, news, news, was a strange modern product which warred with her sense of what was fitting.
"You're not well!" said the editor, suddenly turning to Schuabe, who had grown very pale. His voice reassured them.
It was without a trace of weakness.
The "Perfectly, thank you" was deliberate and calm as ever. Ommaney, however, noticed that, with a very steady hand, the host poured out nearly a tumbler of Burgundy and drank it in one draught.
Schuabe had been taking nothing stronger than water hitherto during the progress of the meal.
The man who had been waiting had just left the room for coffee. After Ommaney had spoken, there was a slight, almost embarrassed, silence. A sudden interruption came from the door of the room.
It opened with a quick push and turn of the handle, quite unlike the deliberate movements of any one of the attendants.
Sir Robert Llwellyn strode into the room. It was obvious that he was labouring under some almost uncontrollable agitation. The great face, usually so jolly and fresh-coloured, was ghastly pale. There was a fixed stare of fright in the eyes. He had forgotten to remove his silk hat, which was grotesquely tilted on his head, showing the hair matted with perspiration.
Ommaney and Mrs. Armstrong sat perfectly still.
They were paralysed with wonder at the sudden apparition of this famous person, obviously in such urgent hurry and distress.
Then, with the natural instinct of well-bred people, their heads turned away, their eyes fell to their plates, and they began to converse in an undertone upon trivial matters.
Schuabe had risen with a quick, snake-like movement, utterly unlike his general deliberation. In a moment he had crossed the room and taken Llwellyn's arm in a firm grip, looking him steadily in the face with an ominous and warning frown.
That clear, sword-like glance seemed to nerve the big man into more restraint. A wave of artificial composure passed over him. He removed his hat and breathed deeply.
Then he spoke in a voice which trembled somewhat, but which nevertheless attained something of control.
"I am really very sorry," he said, with a ghastly attempt at a smile, "to have burst in upon you like this. I didn't know you had friends with you. Please excuse me. But the truth is—the truth is, that I am in rather a hurry to see you. I have an important message for you from—" he hesitated a single moment before he found the ready lie—"from Lord ——. There are—there is something going on at the House of Commons which—But I will tell you later on. How do you do, Mrs. Armstrong? How are you, Ommaney? Fearfully rushed, of course! We archæologists are the only people who have leisure nowadays. No, thanks, Schuabe, I lunched before I came. Coffee? Oh, yes; excellent!"
His manner was noticeably forced and unnatural in its artificial geniality. The man, who had now entered with coffee, brought the tray to him, but instead of taking any he half filled an empty cup with Kümmel and drank it off.
His hurried explanation hardly deceived the two shrewd people at the table, but at least it made it obvious that he wished to be alone with their host.
There was a little desultory conversation over the coffee, in which Llwellyn took a too easy and hilarious part, and then Mrs. Armstrong got up to go.
Ommaney followed her.
Schuabe walked with them a little way down the corridor. While he was out of the room, Llwellyn walked unsteadily to a sideboard. With shaking hand he mixed himself a large brandy-and-soda. His shaking hands, the intense greed with which he swallowed the mixture, were horrible in their sensual revelation. The mask of pleasantness had gone; the reserve of good manners disappeared.
He stood there naked, as it were—a vast bulk of a man in deadly fear.
Schuabe came back and closed the door silently. He drew Llwellyn to the old spot, right in the centre of the great room. There was a wild question in his eyes which his lips seemed powerless to utter.
"Gertrude!" gasped the big man. "You know she came back to me. I told you at the club that it was all right between us again?"
An immeasurable relief crossed the Jew's face. He pushed his friend away with a snarl of concentrated disgust.
"You come here," he hissed venomously, "and burst into my rooms to tell me of your petty amours. Have I not borne with the story of your lust and degradation enough? You come here as if the—." He stopped suddenly. The words died away on his lips.
Llwellyn was transformed.
Even in his terror and agitation an ugly sneer blazed out upon his face. His nostrils curled with evil laughter. His voice became low and threatening. Something subtly vulgar and common stole into it. It was this last that arrested Schuabe. It was horrible.
"Not quite so fast, my good friend," said Llwellyn. "Wait and hear my story; and, confound you! if you talk to me like that again, I'll kill you! Things are equal now, my Jewish partner—equal between us. If I am in danger, why, so are you; and either you speak civilly or you pay the penalty."
A curious thing happened. The enormous overbearing brutality of the man, his vitality, seemed to cow and beat down the master mind.
Schuabe, for the moment, was weak in the hands of his inferior. As yet he had heard nothing of what the other had come to tell; he was conscious only of hands of cold fear knocking at his heart.
He seemed to shrink into himself. For the first and last time in his life, the inherited slavishness in his blood asserted itself.
He had never known such degradation before. The beauty of his face went out like an extinguished candle. His features grew markedly Semitic; he cringed and fawned, as his ancestors had cringed and fawned before fools in power hundreds of years back.
This inexpressibly disgusting change in the distinguished man had its immediate effect upon his companion. It was new and utterly startling. He had come to lean on Schuabe, to place the threads of a dreadful dilemma in his hand, to rest upon his master mind.
So, for a second or two, in loathsome pantomime the men bowed and salaamed to each other in the centre of the room, not knowing what they did.
It was Sir Robert who pulled himself together first. The fear which was rushing over him in waves gave him back a semblance of control.
"We must not quarrel now," he said in a swift, eager voice. "Listen to me. We are on the brink of terrible things. Gertrude Hunt came back to me, as you know. She told me that she was sick to death of her friends the priests, that the old life called her, that she could not live apart from me. She mocked at her sudden conversion. I thought that it was real. I laughed and mocked with her. I trusted her as I would trust myself."
He paused for a moment, choking down the immense agitation which rose up in his throat and half strangled speech.
Schuabe's eyes, attentive and fixed, were still uncomprehending. Still the Jew did not see whither Llwellyn was leading—could not understand.
"She's gone!" said the big man, all colour fading absolutely from his face. "And, Schuabe, in my mad folly and infatuation, in my incredible foolishness ... I told her everything."
A sudden sharp animal moan burst from Schuabe's lips—clear, vibrant, and bestial in the silence.
His rigidity changed into an extraordinary trembling. It was a temporary palsy which set every separate limb trembling with an independent motion. He waited thus, with an ashen face, to hear more.
Llwellyn, when the irremediable fact had passed his lips, when the enormous difficulty of confession was surmounted, proceeded with slight relief:
"This might, you will think, be just possibly without significance for us. It might be a coincidence. But it is not so, Schuabe. I know now, as certainly as I can know anything, that she came to me, was sent to me, by the people who have got hold of her. There has been suspicion for some time, there must have been. We have been ruined by this woman I trusted."
"But why ... how?"
"Because, Schuabe, as I was walking down Chancery Lane not an hour since I saw Gertrude come out of Lincoln's Inn with the clergyman Gortre. They got into a cab together and drove away. And more: I learn from Lambert, my assistant at the Museum, that Harold Spence, the journalist, who is a member of his club and a friend of his, left for Palestine several days ago."
"I have just heard," whispered Schuabe, "that Sir Michael Manichoe has been buying large parcels of Consols."
"The thing is over. We must——"
"Hush!" said the Jew, menacingly. "All is not lost yet. Perhaps, the strong probability is, that only this Gortre knows yet. Even if anything is known to others, it is only vague, and cannot be substantiated until the man in Palestine gets a letter. Without this woman and Gortre we are safe."
The Professor looked at him and understood. Nor was there any terror in his face, only a faint film of relief.
Five minutes afterwards the two distinguished men, talking easily together, walked through the vestibule of the hotel, down the great courtyard and into the roaring Strand.
A hotel clerk explained the celebrities to a voluble group of American tourists as they went by.
Harold Spence was essentially a man of action. His mental and moral health depended for its continuance upon the active prosecution of affairs more than most men's.
A product of the day, "modern" in his culture, modern in his ideals, he must live the vivid, eager, strenuous life of his times or the fibres of his brain became slack and loosened.
In the absorbing interest of his first mission to the East Spence had found work which exactly suited his temperament. It was work which keyed him up to his best and most successful efforts.
But when that was over, when the news that he had given brilliantly to the world became the world's and was no longer his, then the reaction set in.
The whole man became relaxed and unstrung; he was drifting into a sloth of the mind and body when Gortre had arrived from the North with his message of Hope.
The renewed opportunity of action, the tonic to his weak and waning faith—that faith which alone was able to keep him clean and worthy—again strung up the chords of his manhood till they vibrated in harmony.
Once more Spence was in the Holy City.
But a short time ago he was at Jerusalem as the collective eye of millions of Englishmen, the telegraph wires stretched out behind him to London.
Now he was, to all official intents, a private person, yet, as the steamer cast anchor in the roadstead of Jaffa, he had realised that a more tremendous responsibility than ever before rested with him.
The last words spoken to Spence in England had been those of Sir Michael Manichoe. The great man was bidding him good-bye at Charing Cross.
"Remember," he had said, "that whatever proof or help we may get from this woman, Gertrude Hunt, will be but the basis for you to work on in the East. We shall cable every result of our investigations here. Remember that, as we think, you have immense ability and resource against you. Go very warily. As I have said before, no sum is too great to sacrifice, no sacrifice too great to make."
There had been a day's delay at Jaffa. It had been a day of strange, bewildering thoughts to the journalist.
The "Gate of the Holy Land" is not, as many people suppose, a fine harbour, a thronged port.
The navies of the ancient world which congregated there were smaller than even the coasting steamers of to-day. They found shelter in a narrow space of more or less untroubled water between the shelving rock of the long, flat shore and a low reef rising out of the sea parallel to the town. The vessels with timber for Solomon's Temple tossed almost unsheltered before the terraces of ochre-coloured Oriental houses.
For several hours it had been too rough for the passengers on the French boat to land. More than a mile of restless bottle-green sea separated them from the rude ladders fastened to the wave-washed quay.
There had been one of the heavy rain-storms which at that season of the year visit Palestine. Over the Moslem minarets of the town the purple tops of the central mountains of Judah and Ephraim showed clear and far away.
The time of waiting gave Spence an opportunity for collecting and ordering his thoughts, for summing up the situation and trying to get at the very heart of its meaning.
The messagery steamer was the only one in the roads. Two coasting craft with rags of light brown sails were beating over the swell into the Mediterranean.
The sky was cloudy, the air still and warm. Only the sea was turbulent and uneasy, the steamer rolled with a sickening, regular movement, and the anchor chains beat and rattled with the precision of a pendulum.
Spence sat on the india-rubber treads of the steps leading up to the bridge, with an arm crooked round a white-painted stanchion supporting the hand-rail. A few yards away two lascars were working a chain and pulley, drawing up zinc boxes of ashes from the stoke-hold and tipping them into the sea. As the clinkers fell into the water a little cloud of steam rose from them.
There were but few passengers on the ship, which wore a somewhat neglected, "off-duty" aspect. No longer were the cabins filled with drilled bands of tourists with their loud-voiced lecturing cleric in charge. Not now was there the accustomed rush to the main deck, the pious ejaculations at the first sight of Palestine, the electric knocking at the hearts even of the least devout.
Nobody came to Jerusalem now from England. From Beyrout to Jaffa the maritime plain was silent and deserted, and no tourists plucked the roses of Sharon any more.
A German commercial traveller, with cases of cutlery, from Essen, was arguing with the little Greek steward about his wine bill; a professional photographer from Alexandria, travelling with his cameras for a New York firm of art publishers; two Turkish officers smoking cigarettes; a Russian gentleman with two young sons; a fat man in flannels and with an unshaven chin, very much at home; an orange buyer from a warehouse by the Tower Bridge—these were the undistinguished companions of the journalist.
The steward clapped his hands; déjeuner was ready. The passengers tumbled down to the saloon. Spence declined the loud-voiced Cockney invitation of the fruit merchant and remained where he was, gazing with unseeing eyes at the low Eastern town, which rose and fell before him as the ship rolled lazily from side to side.
There was something immensely, tremendously incongruous in his position. It was without precedent. He had come, in the first place, as a sort of private inquiry agent. He was a detective charged by a group of three or four people, a clergyman or two, a wealthy Member of Parliament, to find out the year-old movements—if, indeed, movements there had been!—of a distinguished European professor. He was to pry, to question, to deceive. This much in itself was utterly astonishing, strangely difficult of realisation.
But how much more there was to stir and confuse his brain!
He was coming back alone to Jerusalem. But a short time ago he had seen the great savants of Europe—only thirty miles beyond this Eastern town—reluctantly pronounce the words which meant the downfall of the Christian Faith.
The gunboat which had brought them all was anchored in this very spot. A Turkish guard had been waiting yonder on the quay, they had gone along the new road to Jerusalem in open carriages,—through the orange groves,—riding to make history.
And now he was here once more.
While he sat on this dingy steamer in this remote corner of the Mediterranean, it was no exaggeration to say that the whole world was in a state of cataclysm such as it had hardly, at least not often, known before.
It was his business to watch events, to forecast whither they would lead. He was a Simon Magus of the modern world, with an electric wire and stylographic pen to prophesy with. He of all men could see and realise what was happening all over the globe. He was more alarmed than even the man in the street. This much was certain.
And a day's easy ride away lay the little town which held the acre of rocky ground from which all these horrors, this imminent upheaval, had come.
Again it seemed beyond the power of his brain to seize it all, to contain the vastness of his thoughts.
These facts, which all the world knew, were almost too stupendous for belief. But when he dwelt upon the personal aspect of them he was as a traveller whose way is irrevocably barred by sheer precipice.
At the very first he had been one mouthpiece of the news. For some hours the packet containing it had hung in the dressing-room of a London Turkish bath.
His act had recoiled upon himself, for when Gortre found him in the chambers he was spiritually dying.
Could this suspicion of Schuabe and Llwellyn possibly be true? It had seemed both plausible and probable in Sir Michael's study in London. But out here in the Jaffa roadstead, when he realised—or tried to realise—that on him might depend the salvation of the world.... He laughed aloud at that monstrous grandiloquent phrase. He was in the nineteenth century, not the tenth.
He doubted more and more. Had it been any one else it might have been possible to believe. But he could not see himself in this stupendous rôle.
The mental processes became insupportable; he dismissed thought with a great effort of will and got up from his seat.
At least there was some action, something definite to do waiting for him. Speculation only blurred everything. He would be true to the trust his friends in England reposed in him and leave the rest to happen as it was fated.
There was a relief in that attitude—the Arab attitude. Kismet!
Griggs, the fruit merchant, came up from the saloon wiping his lips.
"Bit orf," he said, "waiting like this. But the sea will go down soon. Last spring I had to go on to Beyrout, the weather was that rough. Ever tried that Vin de Rishon le Zion? It's a treat. Made from Bordeaux vines transplanted to Palestine—you'll pass the fields on the way up—just had a half bottle. Hallo!—look, there's the boat at last—old Francis Karane's boat. Must go and look after my traps."
A long boat was creeping out from behind the reef. Spence went to his cabin to see after his light kit. It was better to move and work than to think.
It was early morning, the morning after Spence's arrival in Jerusalem. He slept well and soundly in his hotel room, tired by the long ride—for he had come on horseback over the moonlit slopes of Ajalon.
When at length he awoke it was with a sensation of mental and bodily vigour, a quickening of all his pulses in hope and expectation, which was in fine contrast to the doubts and hesitations of the Jaffa roads.
A bright sun poured into the room.
He got up and went to the window. There was a deep, unspoken prayer in his heart.
The hotel was in Akra, the European and Christian quarter of Jerusalem, close by the Jaffa Gate, with the Tower of Hippicus frowning down upon it.
The whole extent of the city lay beneath the windows in a glorious panorama, washed as it was in the brilliant morning light. Far beyond, a dark shadow yet, the Olivet range rose in background to the minarets and cupolas below it.
His eye roved over the prospect, marking and recognising the buildings.
There was the purple dome of the great Mosque of Omar, very clear against the amber-primrose lights of dawn.
Where now the muezzin called to Allah, the burnt-offerings had once smoked in the courts of the Temple—it was in that spot the mysterious veil had parted in symbol of God's pain and death. It was in the porches bounding the court of the Gentiles that Christ had taught.
Closer, below the Antonia Tower, rose the dark, lead-covered cupola of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Great emotion came to him as he gazed at the shrine sacred above all others for so many centuries.
He thought of that holy spot diminished in its ancient glory in the eyes of half the Christian world.
Perhaps no more would the Holy Fire burst forth from the yellow, aged marble of the Tomb at Easter time.
Who could say?
Was not he, Harold Spence, there to try that awful issue?
He wondered, as he gazed, if another Easter would still see the wild messengers bursting away to Nazareth and Bethlehem bearing The Holy Flame.
The sun became suddenly more powerful. It threw a warmer light into the grey dome, and, deep down, the cold, dark waters of Hezekiah's Pool became bright and golden.
The sacred places focussed the light and sprang into a new life.
He made the sign of the Cross, wondering fancifully if this were an omen.
Then with a shudder he looked to the left towards the ogre-grey Turkish battlements of the Damascus Gate.
It was there, over by the Temple Quarries of Bezetha, the New Tomb of Joseph lay.
Yes! straight away to the north lay the rock-hewn sepulchre where the great doctors had sorrowfully pronounced the end of so many Christian hopes.
How difficult to believe that so short a distance away lay the centre of the world's trouble! Surely he could actually distinguish the guard-house in the wall which had been built round the spot.
Over the sad Oriental city—for Jerusalem is always sad, as if the ancient stones were still conscious of Christ's passion—he gazed towards the terrible place, wondering, hoping, fearing.
It was very difficult to know how to begin upon this extraordinary affair.
When he had made the first meal of the day and was confronted with the business, with the actual fact of what he had to do, he was aghast at what seemed his own powerlessness.
He had no plan of action, no method. For an hour he felt absolutely hopeless.
Sir Robert Llwellyn, so his friends believed, had been in Jerusalem prior to the discovery of the New Tomb.
The first duty of the investigator was to find out whether that was true.
In his irresolution he decided to go out into the city. He would call upon various people he knew, friends of Cyril Hands, and trust to events for guiding his further movements.
The rooms where Hands had always stayed were close to the schools of the Church Missionary Society; he would go there. Down in the Mûristan area he could also chat with the doctor at the English Ophthalmic Hospice; he would call on his way to the New Tomb.
It was at The Tomb that he might learn something, perhaps, yet how nebulous it all was, how unsatisfying!
He set out, down the roughly paved streets, through the arched and shaded bazaars—places less full of colour and more sombre than the markets of other Oriental cities—to the heart of the city, where the streets were bounded by the vision of the distant hills of Olivet.
The religious riots and unrest were long since over. The pilgrims to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were less in number, but were mostly Russians of the Greek Church, who still accepted the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as the true goal of their desires.
The Greeks and Armenians hated each other no more than usual. The Turks were held in good control by a strong governor of Jerusalem. Nor was this a time of special festival. The city, never quite at rest, was still in its normal condition.
The Bedouin women with their unveiled faces, tattooed in blue, strode to the bazaars with the butter they had brought in from their desert herds. They wore gaudy head-dresses and high red boots, and they jostled the "pale townsmen" as they passed them; free, untamed creatures of the sun and air.
As Spence passed by the courtyard of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre a crowd of Fellah boys ran up to him with candles ornamented with scenes from the Passion, pressing him to buy.
The sun grew hotter as he walked, though the purple shadows of the narrow streets were cool enough. As he left the European heights of Akra and dived deep into the eastern central city, the well-remembered scenes and smells rose up like a wall before him and the rest of life.
He began to walk more slowly, in harmony with the slow-moving forms around. He had been to Omdurman with the avenging army, knew Constantinople during the Greek war—the East had meaning for him.
And as the veritable East closed round him his doubts and self-ridicule vanished. His strange mission seemed possible here.
As he was passing one of the vast ruined structures once belonging to the mediæval knights of St. John, thinking, indeed, that he himself was a veritable Crusader, a thin, importunate voice came to him from an angle of the stone-work.
He looked down and saw an old Nurié woman sitting there. She belonged to the "Nowar," the unclean pariah class of Palestine, who are said to practise magic arts. A gipsy of the Sussex Downs would be her sister in England.
The woman was tattooed from head to foot. She wore a blue turban, and from squares and angles drawn in the dust before her, Spence knew her for a professional geomancer or fortune-teller.
He threw her a coin in idle speculation and asked her "his lot" for the immediate future.
The woman had a few shells of different shapes in a heap by her side, and she threw them into the figures on the ground.
Then, picking them up, she said, in bastard Arabic interspersed with a hard "K"-like sound, which marks the nomad in Palestine, "Effendi, you have a sorrow and bewilderment just past you, and, like a black star, it has fixed itself on your forehead. A letter is coming to you from over the seas telling you of work to do. And then you will leave this country and cross home in a steamer, with a story to tell many people."
Spence smiled at the glib prophecy. Certainly it might very well outline his future course of action, but it was no more than a shrewd and obvious guess.
He was turning to go away when the woman opened her clothes in front, showing the upper part of her body literally covered with tattoo marks, and drew out a small bag.
"Stay, my lord," she said. "I can tell you much more if you will hear. I have here a very precious stone rubbed with oil, which I brought from Mecca. Now, if you will hold this stone in your hand and give me the price you shall hear what will come to you, O camel of the house!"
The curious sensation of "expectation" that had been coming over Spence, the fatalistic waiting for chance to guide him which, in this wild and dream-like business, had begun to take hold of him, made him give the hag what she asked.
There was something in clairvoyance perhaps; at any rate he would hear what the Nurié woman had to say.
She took a dark and greasy pebble from the bag and put it in his hand, gazing at his fingers for a minute or two in a fixed stare without speaking.
When at last she broke the silence Spence noticed that something had gone out of her voice. The medicant whine, the ingratiating invitation had ceased.
Her tones were impersonal, thinner, a recitative.
"Ere sundown my lord will hear that a friend has died and his spirit is in the well of souls."
"Tell me of this friend, O my aunt!" Spence said in colloquial Arabic.
"Thy friend is a Frank, but more than a Frank, for he is one knowing much of this country, and has walked the stones of Jerusalem for many years. Thou wilt hear of his death from the lips of one who will tell thee of another thou seekest, and know not that it is he.... Give me back the stone, lord, and go thy way," she broke off suddenly, with seeming sincerity. "I will tell thee no more, for great business is in thy hands and thou art no ordinary wayfarer. Why didst thou hide it from me, Effendi?"
Drawing her blue head-dress over her face, the woman refused to speak another word.
Spence passed on, wondering. He knew, as all travellers who are not merely tourists know, that no one has ever been quite able to sift the fraud and trickery from the strange power possessed by those Eastern geomancers. It is an undecided question still, but only the shallow dare to say that all is imposture.[2]
And even the London journalist could not be purely materialistic in Jerusalem, the City of Sorrows.
He went on towards his destination. Not far from the missionary establishment was a building which was the headquarters of the Palestine Exploring Society in Jerusalem.
Cyril Hands had always lived up in Akra among the Europeans, but much of his time was necessarily spent in the Mûristan district.
The building was known as the "Research Museum."
Hands and his assistants had gathered a valuable collection of ancient curiosities.
Here were hundreds of drawings and photographs of various excavations. Accurate measurements of tombs, buried houses, ancient churches were entered in great books.
In glass cases were fragments of ancient pottery, old Hebrew seals, scarabs, antique fragments of jewellery—all the varied objects from which high scholarship and expert training was gradually, year by year, providing a luminous and entirely fresh commentary on Holy Writ.
Here, in short, were the tools of what is known as the "Higher Criticism."
Attached to the museum was a library and drawing office, a photographic dark room, apartments for the curator and his wife. A man who engaged the native labour required for the excavations superintended the work of the men and acted as general agent and intermediary between the European officials and all Easterns with whom they came in contact.
This man was well known in the city—a character in his way. In the reports of the Exploring Society he was often referred to as an invaluable assistant. But a year ago his portrait had been published in the annual statement of the fund, and the face of the Greek Ionides in his turban lay upon the study tables of many a quiet English vicarage.