The Angel

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

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

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

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gilded gang of young men who were accustomed to take stalls for considerable portions of the run of a popular piece had withdrawn their applications.

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

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

Mr. Levison made a commiserating noise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She shook her head.

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

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

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

Mimi Addington spoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER XIV

THE WARNING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The preacher resumed: —

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

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

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

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

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

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