The Angel

"It is a fine thing to get these great people to go," said the old man simply. "Then how can you be downcast, Joseph? Surely here is yet another evidence of the favor and protection of God?"

"I do not know why this assails me," the Teacher answered; "but it does, and it is there. I cannot help it."

David Owen shut the Bible on the table in front of him, and rose to his feet.

"Dear Master," he said, "the Son of God was also troubled, in the Desert and in the Garden. But it is well – all is well. All is part of the beneficent ordering of the Father. There is but one medicine for your black thoughts, dear Master, and after you've taken it you'll let come what may."

"And that is, old friend?"

"The Lord's Prayer," answered the old gentleman, taking off his horn spectacles and placing them upon the table.

And, kneeling down, they said it together.

It was the middle of the morning and a dull, leaden day. There was no fog down in the breathing areas of town, but high above a leaden pall hung over the City of Dreadful Night, shutting out the clear light of the sun, livid, sinister and hopeless.

In the big room of the house in Bloomsbury a dozen people were gathered together. Sir Augustus Kirwan was talking to The Duke, a thick-set, clean-shaven man with a strong watchful face. Sir Thomas Ducaine and Eric Black the journalist stood together.

Several other notabilities stood in the big, bare room, and there were also three unobtrusive men with pointed beards, who stood together a little apart from the others. Detective-inspectors Alpha, Beta and Gamma, the real satraps and rulers of the lawless districts of Whitechapel and its environs.

All the men wore hard felt hats and dark overcoats, peer and policeman alike. It does not do to venture where these were going in anything but a very simple and unobtrusive dress.

Joseph and Hampson were talking earnestly together in one corner of the room. They were mapping out the terrible itinerary that should be taken, readjusting and remembering their own sad knowledge of the East, when they had walked starving down the Commercial Road.

"And now, my friends," Joseph said at length, in his deep, organ voice, "I think that all is prepared, and that we may start. Sir Thomas has some carriages waiting for us below."

Sir Augustus Kirwan answered the evangelist.

"My dear fellow," he said – "my dear Joseph, we shall all be delighted to come as soon as may be. But has it occurred to you that while we have all, doubtless, breakfasted, none of us have as yet lunched? It is lunch time now, you know; and though a piece of bread and cheese would do excellently for me, and no doubt for the rest of us, you can hardly expect the present company to penetrate into Whitechapel fasting!"

The Teacher looked at Sir Augustus with a startled face. Then he flushed slightly. It had never occurred to him that his guests must necessarily need refreshment. On his own part he had put away material needs as things of no moment for himself. He was sustained, even in body, by spiritual food. But he realized now how remiss he had been, and that all men were not as he was.

"Sir Augustus," he said, in a voice full of pain and contrition, "I have been absolutely stupid. It is quite abominable of me not to have thought of it, but there is, I am dreadfully afraid, no lunch at all!"

Sir Thomas Ducaine joined in the conversation.

"My dear Joseph," he said, "don't make yourself unhappy. There is plenty. Some of my people have brought lunch. Mary and I foresaw this little contretemps, and we made arrangements accordingly. In your burning eagerness to get us all down to see what you have to show us you forgot that we are but mortal, and that the body must be nourished if the eye is to see and the brain observe."

Joseph's face had cleared, but it wore a somewhat rueful expression.

"I can't thank you enough," he said, "for thinking of this. It is a fault in me that I did not do so myself. One is too apt to forget that we are all body and spirit also. Forgive me!"

They all fell to at the sandwiches and so forth which two of Sir Thomas Ducaine's servants brought into the room.

Only Joseph took nothing at all. He stood by himself, tall, beautiful, lost in a reverie that no one disturbed.

He was musing and dreaming still as the carriages took the party to the East End of London.

But when Bishopsgate was passed at last, he threw his thoughts from him with a great effort, and became once more the keen and eager leader of those people whom he had brought to see the ultimate horror of the Modern Babylon.

They sent the carriages away at a certain turning in the Whitechapel Road. Then they plunged into the dark.

And how dark that darkness is! Fiction can hardly tell – fiction must not tell, fearing to infringe upon the bitterness and the agony of the truth. For we who write of things as they are must always consider our audience. Ask General Booth, G. R. Sims, or Mr. Holmes, the police-court missionary, what is the measure of this darkness. Ask the modern martyrs of our day, of all sects and creeds, who labor in these hell-ridden places.

Ask, and you shall hear nothing but the tolling of a great bell, the deep and awful sound of immedicable misery, the iron pæan of the blackness of sin, the deep and ringing wail of the mighty bell – the iron bell – which tolls of hopelessness, and voices the cry of the downtrodden, the oppressed, the lost!

The slaves of the Modern Babylon! But with one difference. In the walled city of wickedness between the two great rivers, hope had not come. They could not know that our Lord was to be born of a pure Virgin to save them —

Thoughts akin to these were in the minds of all of them as they went in and out of the foul slums of the East.

Sir Thomas Ducaine was covered with shame as he saw the horrors all around – horrors existing upon his own property, long unregarded and unknown. But the young man was not the only one among them who registered a mental vow to do all that he could for the wretched beings they had come amongst.

Sir Augustus Kirwan, though he had taken the chair at many philanthropic meetings, and though his name often headed important subscription lists, had never really been brought in contact, in actual personal contact, with the great open wound of London.

The party had come to the mouth of a particularly evil-looking alley. There is character in brick and stone, and this place – "Wilson's Rents" by name – had a sinister cut-throat aspect in every line of it.

"What is in there?" Sir Augustus asked one of the police inspectors.

"It's a particularly bad street, Sir Augustus," the man answered. "A sort of great human rabbit-warren or rat's run, as you may say. The houses nearly all communicate through cellars and subterranean passages."

"Shall we go down here?" Sir Augustus asked Joseph.

"I should not advise it, sir," said the policeman. "The people are so dirty and degraded and disgusting in their habits that they hardly resemble human beings at all."

"Never mind that," Sir Augustus answered. "Now we have come I wish to see everything, however personally distasteful it may be. I am ashamed gentlemen, to think that I have shirked so obvious a duty as this for so long! I am sorry and ashamed of myself!"

With eyes that were not quite dry the great financier took Joseph by the arm and marched down the alley, followed by the others.

They walked cautiously down the place, which seemed strangely deserted. Sir Augustus was talking eagerly to Joseph, opening his heart in a way to which he had long been a stranger, when there was a sudden loud report in the air above them.

Looking upwards with startled eyes, they saw that a little coil of blue smoke was floating out of an open window high above them.

A second afterwards Sir Augustus Kirwan sighed twice and fell forward upon his face, dead, shot through the heart.

CHAPTER XXI

WAITING!

Mr. Andrew Levison lived in Jermyn Street. His establishment was comfortable, but modest. A sitting-room, a small dining-room, a bedroom for himself, and one for his man – these, together with the bath-room, completed his suite.

It was a bright morning as he opened his Daily Wire and sat down before the kedjeree and kidneys that his servant had just brought him for breakfast. It was rather late; the Jew had been at a theatrical supper-party the night before until long after midnight. During the party, at which a great many of the stars of the lighter stage had been present, the conversation had turned almost entirely upon the marked slump in theatrical business during Joseph's ministry in London.

One and all of their company were united in their hatred and alarm of this evangelist who bade fair to ruin them.

The whole situation was, moreover, aggravated because of the immense public support Joseph was receiving from some of the most wealthy and influential people in society. There was no getting over this fact. And yet no one had any remedy to suggest.

Lord Ballina and Mimi Addington had also been of the party, and a keen observer might possibly have detected a certain furtive look which passed between the actress, the peer, and the theatrical manager. All three, however, held their peace, and contributed little or nothing to the problem of how the situation was to be dealt with.

And now Mr. Levison, as he sat at table, smiled quietly to himself, reflecting that he could very considerably astonish many of his colleagues if it had been possible to do so.