A Lost Cause

It is better to take the stimulant of tea than the more usual brandy and soda. Hamlyn was a strong teetotaller, and that counted to his credit at a moment like this. For the man had obviously been through an unnerving experience. He was not his ready and impudent self.

The tea was brought. It revived him.

"Well!" he said in a low voice, "I don't want to go through many scenes like that again, Gussie! She's getting worse and worse. Her brain can't last much longer if she goes on like this! However, I managed to calm her down. She's going off to sleep now. I told her I'd wake Hornham up in a few days – and I'll have to do it, what's more!"

"Did you get a cheque?" said the practical Gussie.

"Yes," said Mr. Hamlyn in a slightly more relieved voice. "She gave me a couple of hundred in the end. At heart, she's devoted to the cause of Protestant Truth. But she's getting horribly restive, my dear. I'm sorry for her. She's a wreck of what she used to be – but she's a wreck that wants a lot of salvage!"

The colour came back into the plump, clean-shaven face as the tea did its work.

"I forgot, my dear," he said; "I brought you a box of chocolates. It clean went out of my 'ead," he waved an exhausted hand towards his small brown leather bag, which stood on the table between a plaster model of the leaning tower of Pisa and a massive volume entitled Every Young Lady's Vade Mecum.

Gussie smiled her thanks and opened the bag, while Mr. Hamlyn poured out another cup of tea.

Gussie felt in the bag. It was full of papers, but there were two parcels there. She took them out. They were of much the same size. Each was neatly tied up in white paper.

She pulled the string from one of them. A number of thin semi-transparent white wafers fell out upon the table.

"Oh, I'm sorry!" she cried, "I thought this was the box of chocolates."

Hamlyn looked up wearily. To his immeasurable surprise, he saw that the girl's face had grown very pale. She shrunk away from the table.

"What's the matter, my dear?" he said, thoroughly alarmed.

She suddenly flushed a deep scarlet.

"What are these?" she said, pointing with a shaking finger to the things on the table.

"Them?" said Mr. Hamlyn in cheerful surprise. "Mass wafers, my dear. I buy them in a shop in Covent Garden. We distribute them among the Luther Lecturers, for object lessons to the poor deluded Ritualists."

The girl had crouched to the wall of the room. Hamlyn was seriously alarmed. Her face was almost purple, her eyes started out of her head.

"They're not con —consecrated?" she gasped.

Hamlyn could not understand her emotion. "No," he said; "why, Gussie, what a superstitious little thing you are. And if they were, what then?" Frank amazement showed on his face.

"Oh, nothing, Mr. Hamlyn," the girl said at length, becoming more normal in her manner.

In a few minutes, Hamlyn left the house, leaving the girl in her ordinary manner, eating the chocolates that he had brought her.

His able mind was busily at work. He knew that during Miss Pritchett's adhesion to St. Elwyn's Gussie had, perforce, been one of the congregation there and had been taught and trained by the clergy.

"No wonder," he thought bitterly to himself; "no wonder that they can win along the line, when they can sow seeds like that in a girl's mind. Why, she's a thorough little Protestant at heart. To think that those things should have startled her so! It's a lingering prejudice, I suppose. They are a queer lot – the Romanists!"

As he communed thus with himself, a swift thought came to him. At the moment of its arrival in his brain, he almost staggered. Then, pulling himself together, he walked rapidly to his own house.

He thought he saw his way to a coup that would make all his previous efforts as nothing. How wonderfully simple it was! Why had he never thought of it before —what a fool he had been! Here was the solution of all the difficulties he was in. The answer seemed to have come to his conversation with Samuel in the morning.

He went to his study and fortunately found that Sam was already there. Miss Maud Hamlyn sat in the room also, but when she saw her father's face, she left the room at once. It wore the "business look" she knew well, and, though she but dimly understood what her brother and father were engaged in, she knew it had brought great prosperity and honour to all of them, and was loath to intrude upon any profitable confabulation.

"Have you got it, Pa?" said Samuel, eagerly.

"Yes, I 'ave," answered the secretary, "and very fine it is too!"

"How much?" asked Sam.

"What do you mean?"

"The cheque, Miss Pritchett's latest."

"Oh, that," said Hamlyn. "Two hundred, what we expected. I meant something else. I've got the new scheme to wake things up! The best thing we've done yet, my boy!"

Sam rubbed his hands. "What did I say this morning? I knew you'd do it, Pa. Well, let's have it."

Mr. Hamlyn sat back in his chair, willing to dally a moment with his triumph and enjoy the full savour of it.

"Why we never thought of it before," he said, "beats me entirely! Something suggested it to me to-night, and I've been wondering at our neglecting such a move."

"What is it then?"

"What about one of us going to the Mass and bringing away the consecrated wafer? Then a big public meeting's called and I show the people what we've got! The 'flour-and-water god' of the Romanists! Not the usual plan of producing a wafer we've bought from a shop, but the real thing, Sam! Then they'll all be able to see that there's no difference between before and after! It'll explode the whole thing and give the League an advertisement better than anything that's gone before!"

Sam looked very grave indeed. "It's a little bit too much, I'm afraid, Father," he said.

"What do you mean, my son?" answered the secretary in extreme and real surprise.

"Well, I don't know," Sam said doubtfully, "but I shouldn't like to meddle with it myself."

Mr. Hamlyn leaned forward. "Sam," he said, "you're a fool. You're as bad as Gussie Davies! Leave the matter to me. Who's awakened Protestantism in Hengland? ME! Who knows how to work a popular cause? ME! Who's going to boom the Luther League up to the top again? ME!"

"Have it your own way, Father," Sam said, "you generally do come out on top."

"Ring the bell for some tea," said Mr. Hamlyn, "and let's talk out the details. We'll 'ave to get it where we aren't known by sight."

CHAPTER XI

THE NEWS THAT CARR BROUGHT

As the days wore on, and Lucy Blantyre became accustomed to her surroundings, she found that she was in thorough tune with them. During the year she had been away from St. Elwyn's, she had spent most of the time abroad, at first with Lady Linquest, afterwards with friends. The old life of fashionable people and "smart" doings palled horribly. Travelling was a diversion from that, and, in some sense, a preparation for the more useful life that she determined to live in the future.

She had quite made up her mind to that. Nothing would induce her to go back to live in Park Lane once more. Life offered far more than the West End of London could offer; so much was plain. She kept up a regular correspondence with her brother and was fully informed of all that took place in Hornham. Her thoughts turned more and more affectionately towards the dingy old house, centre of such ceaseless activities, the old house with the great church watching over it.

Down there it seemed as if provision was made for all one's needs of the mind. Stress and storm beat upon it in vain, and it combined the joys of both the cloister and the hearth.

In her limited experience, there had been nothing like it. A year or two ago, she would have smiled incredulously if any one had told her that she would like going to church twice or three times on a week-day. But during her stay at St. Elwyn's how natural and helpful it had seemed, how much a part of the proper order of things. The morning Eucharist while day in the outside world was beginning, the stately and beautiful evensong as men ceased their toil, these coloured all the day, were woven into its warp and woof. She knew that the abnormal life was the life of the majority, the life of those who lived in a purely secular way, who never worshipped or prayed.

When any mind, in its settling of its attitude towards the Unseen, gets as far as this; when it realises that, despite the laughter of fools and the indifference of most people, the logical use of life is to make it in constant touch with God, then, as a rule, the personal religious conviction will come in due time. It had not come to Lucy yet in full and satisfying measure, it had not come even when she determined to make her home with her brother for a time and help in any way she could.