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He had stumbled against a typical bullet-headed, wicked-eyed East End rough.
The man stepped close up to Joseph, lifting an impudent and dirty face, holding the right arm ready to strike the short, jabbing blow so dear to the hooligan.
Then a strange thing happened.
Joseph, roused so suddenly and rudely from his bitter reverie, became aware of what was toward. He was about to apologize to the man when his words were checked in his mouth by the fellow's filthy profanity. Joseph suddenly, instead of speaking, turned his full face to him. The great, blazing eyes, their brilliancy accentuated a hundred times by hunger and scorn, seemed to cleave their way through the thick skull of the aggressor, to pierce the muddy and besotted brain within, to strike fear into the small leathern heart.
The man lifted his arm and covered his face, just like a street child who expects a blow; and then with a curious sound, half whimper, half snarl, turned and made off in a moment.
It was an extraordinary instance of magnetic power inherent in this starving scholar who roamed the streets in a sad dream.
On his own part, Joseph's action had been quite unconscious. He had no thought of the force stored up in him as in an electric accumulator. Some experiments in animal magnetism he had certainly made, when he had taken a passing interest in the subject at Cambridge. He had cured his "gyp" of a bad attack of neuralgia once, or at least the man said he had, but that was as far as it had gone.
He turned his steps towards the stifling attic he called "home." After all, he was better there than in the streets. Besides, he was using up what little strength remained to him in this aimless wandering.
He had eaten nothing that day, but at nine in the evening he had a lesson to give. This would mean a shilling, and there were two more owing from his pupil, so that even if Hampson, who lived in the next garret, failed to get any money, both might eat ere they slept.
As he turned into the court and began to mount the stairs, Joseph thought with an involuntary sigh of "hall" at Cambridge, the groaning tables, the generous fare, the comely and gracious life of it all.
And he had thrown it all away – for what? Just for the privilege of speaking out his thoughts, thoughts which nobody particularly wanted to hear.
With a sigh of exhaustion he sat down on the miserable little bed under the rafters, and stared out of the dirty window over the roofs of Whitechapel.
Had he been right, after all? Was it worth while to do as he had done, to give up all for the truth that was in him. The old spirit of revolt awoke. Yes, he had been right a thousand times! No man must act or live a lie.
But supposing it was all true? Supposing there was a God after all. Supposing that the Christ upon whom that woman had called so glibly really was the Saviour of mankind? Then – The thought fell upon his consciousness like a blow from a whip.
He leapt to his feet in something like fear.
"It's this physical exhaustion," he said to himself aloud, trying to find an anodyne to thought in the sound of his own voice. "My brain is starved for want of blood. No one can live as I have been living and retain a sane judgment. It was because the hermits of old starved themselves in the desert that they saw visions. Yet it is odd that I, of all men, should weaken thus. I must go out into the streets again, come what may. The mind feeds upon itself and conjures up wild and foolish thoughts in a horrible little box like this."
With a heavy sigh he went slowly out of the room and down the steep stairs. Never in all his life had he felt so lost and hopeless; so alone and deserted.
Another man in his position would have called out upon God, either with mad and puny revilings in that He had forsaken him, or with a last piteous cry for help.
Joseph did not believe in God.
All his life he had lived without God. He had ignored the love of the Father and the necessity of faith in His Son Jesus Christ. The temple of his body was all empty of the Paraclete. Now he felt sure that there was no God; never had been any God; never would be any God.
He was at the darkest hour of all, and yet, with a strange nervous force, he clenched one lean hand until the shrunken muscle sprang up in coils upon the back of it, resolving that come what might he would not give in. There was no God, only a blind giant, Circumstance – well, he would fight that!
His mental attitude was a curious one, curiously illogical. Keen and well-balanced as the scientific side of him was, the man – like all those who openly profess disbelief – was unable to see what might almost be called the grim humor of his attitude.
"I do not believe in God!" the atheist cries, and then immediately afterwards shakes his fist at the Almighty and bids Him to do His worst!
Man challenging God! There is no more grotesque and terrible thing in human life than this.
But, as the world knows now, God had a special purpose in his dealings with this man.
All unconscious of what was to befall him, of his high destiny to come, Joseph walked aimlessly in Whitechapel, cursing in his heart the God in whom he did not believe, and yet who had already chosen him to be the centre and head of mighty issues… A channel as we may think now…
We may well believe that each single step that Joseph took was known and regulated by unseen hands, voices which were unheard by ear or brain, but which the unconscious and sleeping soul nevertheless obeyed.
At last the Almighty spoke, and the first link in the chain of His mysterious operations was forged.
Joseph was walking slowly past a great building which was in course of erection or alteration. A network of scaffolding rose up into the smoky, dun-colored sky.
The clipping of steel chisels upon stone, the echoing noise of falling planks, the hoarse voices of the workmen as they called to each other high up on their insecure perches, all rose above the deep diapason note of the traffic in a welter of sharply-defined sound.
Joseph stepped upon the pavement beneath the busy works. He was, he noticed, just opposite the office of the small East End newspaper for which Hampson, the poor, half-starved, but cheery little journalist did occasional jobs.
Hampson – good, kind, little Hampson! It was pleasant to think of him, and as he did so Joseph's thoughts lost their bitterness for a moment. Only the utterly vile can contemplate real unassuming goodness and unselfishness without a certain warming of the heart.
Hampson was only half educated – he had the very greatest difficulty in making a living, yet he was always bright and happy, ever illuminated by some inward joy.
Even as he thought of Hampson – almost his only friend – Joseph saw the man himself coming out of the narrow doorway. Hampson saw the scholar at once in his quick, bird-like way, and waved his hand with a significant and triumphant gesture.
There was to be dinner, then!
It was not so. The two poor friends were not to share a humble meal together on that night, at any rate.
High above Joseph's head, two planks were being slowly hauled upwards to the topmost part of the scaffolding. They were secured by the usual halter knot round the centre. The noose, however, had slipped, as the rope was a new one, and the two heavy pieces of timber hung downwards with the securing tie perilously near the upper end.
There was a sudden shout of alarm which sent a hundred startled faces peering upwards and then the planks fell right upon the man who stood beneath, crushing him to the ground, face downwards, like a broken blade of grass.
With the magic celerity which is part of the psychology of crowds, a ring of excited people sprang round the crushed, motionless figure, as if at the bidding of a magician's wand.
Willing hands began to lift the great beams from it. Hampson had been one of the first to see and realize the accident.
He was by the side of his friend in three or four seconds after the planks had struck him down. And he saw something that, even in his horror and excitement, sent a strange inexplicable throb through his blood and made all his pulses drum with a sense of quickening, of nearness to the Unseen, such as he had never experienced in all his life before.
It is given to those who are very near to God to see visions, sometimes to draw very close to the Great Veil.
The two planks of timber had fallen over Joseph's back in the exact form of the Cross. To the little journalist, if to no one else in the rapidly-gathering crowd, the wood and the bowed figure below it brought back the memory of a great picture he had seen, a picture of the Via Dolorosa, when Jesus fainted and fell under the weight He bore.
CHAPTER II
"SOMETHING MARVELLOUS IS GOING TO HAPPEN"
In the drawing-room of a house in Berkeley Square, Lady Kirwan – the wife of Sir Augustus Kirwan, the great banker – was arguing with her niece, Mary Lys.
The elder lady was tall and stately, and although not aggressive in any way, her manner was distinctly that of one accustomed to rule. Her steady grey eyes and curved, rather beak-like nose gave her an aspect of sternness which was genially relieved by a large, good-humored mouth. At fifty, Lady Kirwan's hair was still dark and glossy, and time had dealt very gently with her.
Of the old Welsh family of Lys, now bereft of all its great heritage of the past, but with a serene and lofty pride in its great name still, she had married Sir Augustus, then Mr. Kirwan, in early girlhood. As the years went on, and her husband's vast wealth grew vaster still, and he rose to be one of the financial princes of the world, Lady Kirwan became a very prominent figure in society, and at fifty she had made herself one of the hundred people who really rule it.
One daughter, Marjorie, was born to Sir Augustus and his wife, a beauty, and one of the most popular girls in society.
"You may say what you like, but I have no patience at all with either you or your crack-brained brother, Mary!" Lady Kirwan exclaimed, with an irritable rapping of her fingers upon a little lapis lazuli table at her side.
Mary Lys was a tall girl, dressed in the blue uniform of a hospital nurse. The cloak was thrown back over her shoulders, and its scarlet lining threw up the perfect oval contour of her face and the glorious masses of black hair that crowned it. If Marjorie Kirwan was generally said to be one of the prettiest girls in London – and the couple of millions she would inherit by no means detracted from her good looks – certainly Mary Lys might have been called one of the most beautiful.
The perfect lips, graver than the lips of most girls, almost maternal in their gentleness, formed, as it were, the just complement to the great grey eyes, with their long dark lashes and delicately-curved black brows. The chin was broad and firm, but very womanly, and over all that lovely face brooded a holy peace, a high serenity, and a watchful tenderness that one sees in the pictures of the old masters when they drew the pious maids and matrons who followed the footsteps of Our Lord on earth.
Her beauty was not the sort of beauty which would attract every one. It was, indeed, physical beauty in perfection, but irradiated also by loveliness of soul. The common-minded man who prefers the conscious and vulgar prettiness of some theatre girl, posed for the lens of the camera or the admiring glances of the crowd, would have said: —
"Oh, yes, she's beautiful, of course! One can't help admitting that. But she's not my style a bit. Give me something with a little more life in it."
But there were not wanting many men and women who said that they had thought that the mother of the Saviour must have looked like Mary Lys.
"No! I've really no patience with either of you!" Lady Kirwan repeated.
"But, Aunt Ethel, surely we ought to live our own lives. I am quite happy with my nursing in the East End. One can't do more good than by trying to nurse and cure the sick, can one? And Lluellyn is happy also in his Welsh mountains. He lives a very saintly life, auntie – a life of prayer and preaching and good works, even if it is unconventional and seems strange to you. I would not have it otherwise. Lluellyn is not suited for the modern world."
"Fiddlesticks, Mary!" Lady Kirwan answered. "'Modern world,' indeed! You speak as if you said 'Modern pestilence'! Who made the world, I should like to know? And what right have you and your brother to despise it? I'm sick of all this nonsense. How a girl with your looks and of your blood, for there is hardly a peer in England with such a pedigree as that of our family, can go on grubbing away nursing horrible people with horrible diseases in that dreadful East End I can't possibly imagine. You've no money, of course, for your two hundred a year is a mere nothing. But what does that matter? Haven't your uncle and I more than we know what to do with? Marjorie has already an enormous fortune settled upon her. She is almost certain to marry the Duke of Dover next season. Well, what do we offer you – you and Lluellyn? You are to be as our second daughter. We will give you everything that a girl can have in this world. You shall share in our wealth as if you were my own daughter. With your looks and the money which is available for you, you may marry any one. We stand well at Court. His Majesty is pleased when one of the great old families of the realm restores its fallen fortunes. Every chance and opportunity is yours. As for your brother, as I have so often written and told him, he will be a son to us. We have not been given a son; he shall become one. There is enough and to spare for all. Give up this nonsense of yours. Make Lluellyn come to his senses and leave his absurd hermit life, and this mad preaching about in the mountain villages. Come to us at once, both of you. What more could any one offer you, child? Am I not pleading with you out of my love for you and my nephew, out of a sincere desire to see you both take your proper place in the world?"
Lady Kirwan stopped, a little out of breath after her long speech, every word of which had been uttered with the sincerest conviction and prompted by real affection.
There was probably no more worldly woman in London than the kindly wife of the great financier. The world was all in all to her, and she was as destitute of religion or any knowledge of spiritual things as the parish pump. She would not have divided her last shilling with any one, but she was generous with her superfluity.
And certainly one of the great wishes of her life was to see the ancient family from which she had sprung once more take a great place in life. She felt within her veins the blood of those old wild princes of the "stormy hills of Wales" – those Arthurs and Uthers, Caradocs and Lluellyns innumerable, who had kept their warlike courts in the dear mountains of her home.
It was monstrous, it was incredible to Lady Kirwan that the last two survivors of the Lys family in the direct line should live obscure, strange lives away from the world. Mary Lys a hospital nurse in the East End! Lluellyn Lys a sort of anchorite and itinerant preacher! It was inconceivable; it must be stopped.
"I will write to Lluellyn again, auntie," Mary said, rising from her chair. "But, honestly, I fear it will be of little use. And as for myself – "
As she spoke the door opened, and a footman entered the room.
"Miss Marjorie has returned, my lady," he said. "She is waiting below in the motor-brougham. I was to say that if Miss Lys was ready Miss Marjorie has a free hour, and will drive Miss Lys back to the hospital."
"There, there!" Lady Kirwan said to her niece, "Marjorie will take you back to that place. It will be more comfortable than a horrid, stuffy omnibus. Now don't give me any answer at present, but just think over what I have said very seriously. Come again in a week, and we will have another talk. Don't be in a hurry to decide. And remember, dear, that with all your exaggerated ideas of duty, you may owe a duty to your relations and to society quite as much as to indigent aliens in Whitechapel. Run along, and be a dear good girl, and be sure you don't catch some dreadful infectious disease."
A couple of footmen in knee-breeches, silk stockings, and powdered hair stood on each side of the door. A ponderous butler opened it, another footman in motor livery jumped down from his seat beside the driver and held open the door of the brougham.
"All this pomp and circumstance," Mary thought sadly, "to get a poor hospital nurse out of a house and into a carriage. Four great men are employed to do so simple a thing as that, and whole families of my dear people are starving while the breadwinner lies sick in the hospital!"
She sighed heavily, and her face was sad as she kissed the brilliant, vivacious cousin who was waiting in the brougham.
"Well, you poor dear," Marjorie Kirwan said. "And how are you? I suppose the usual thing has happened? Mother has been imploring you to take a proper place in the world – you and my delightfully mysterious cousin Lluellyn, who is quite like an old Hebrew prophet – and you have said that you prefer your grubby scarlet-fever friends in Whitechapel!"
Mary nodded.
"Dear auntie," she said. "She is wonderfully kind and good, but she doesn't quite understand. But don't let us talk about it."
"Very well, then, we won't," Marjorie answered affectionately. "Every one must gang their own gait! You don't like what I like; I don't like what you like. The great thing is to be happy, and we're both that. Tell me something of your work. It always interests me. Have you had any new adventures in Whitechapel?"
"Everything has been much the same," she said, "except that a very wonderful personality has come into the hospital."
"Oh, how delightful! A man, of course! Do tell me all about him!"
"His name is Joseph. It sounds odd, but he doesn't seem to use his surname at all. I did hear it, but I have forgotten. He is simply Joseph. He was hurt, though not nearly as badly as he might have been, by some falling planks from a house they were building. But he was in a dreadfully exhausted and rundown condition – nearly starved indeed. He is a great scholar and scientist, but he was ruined some years ago because he made a speech against God and religion at Cambridge, before all the dignitaries."
"And are you converting him?"
"No. That is no woman's work, with this man. He is in a strange state. We have nursed him back to something like health, but his mind seems quite empty. At first, when we had some talks together, he railed against God – always with the proviso that there wasn't any God! Now he is changed, with returning health. He is like an empty vessel, waiting for something to be poured into it. He neither disbelieves nor believes. Something has washed his mind clear."
"How extraordinary!"
"Extraordinary you say; but listen! Three days ago – it was in the early evening – he called me to his bedside. He drew his hand from the bedclothes and laid it on my arm. How I thrilled at the touch, I cannot explain…"
"But, my dear, think of Tom – This is extraordinary!"
"I've thought of Thomas; but, Marjorie, you cannot know – it was not that kind of love. It was nothing like love. Perhaps I put it badly, but you jumped to quite a wrong conclusion. It was something quite different. His eyes seemed to transfix me. The touch – the eyes – the thrill they sent through me will remain as long as I live! But listen. He spoke to me as he hadn't spoken before. 'Mary,' he said – "
"Did he call you Mary?"
"He had never done so before – he did then. Before I had always been 'Nurse' to him."
"Well, go on, dear – I am quite interested."
"He said, 'Mary, you are going off duty in a few minutes. Go to the upper chamber of 24, Grey Street, Hoxton, and walk straight in. There is one that has need of you.' I was about to expostulate, but he fell back in exhaustion, and I called the house surgeon."
"You surely didn't go?"
"Yes, I went," Mary went on rapidly. "Something made me go. The low door of Number 24 was open. I climbed till I got to the top. There was no light anywhere. It was a miserable foggy evening. I felt for a door and found one at last. It yielded to my hand and I entered an attic which was immediately under the roof.
"Nothing could be seen. I had come unprepared for such darkness. But taking courage I asked aloud if there was any one there.
"There was no answer. Yet I felt – I had a curious certainty – that I was not alone. I waited – and waited. Then I moved slowly about the room. I was afraid to move with any freedom for fear of stumbling over – something or other.
"Suddenly a costermonger's barrow came into the court below. The naphtha lamps lit up the whole place and the room was suddenly illuminated with a flickering red light. I could see quite well now.
"I am accustomed to rather dreadful things, as you know, Marjorie – or at least things which you would think rather dreadful. But I will confess I was frightened out of my life now. I gave a shriek of terror, and then stood trembling, utterly unable to move!"
"What was it?"
"I saw a man hanging by a rope to the rafters. His jaw had fallen down, and his tongue was protruding. I shall never forget how the red light from the court below glistened on his tongue – His eyes were starting out of his head… It was horrible."
"Oh, how frightful! I should have been frightened to death," said Marjorie, and a cold shiver ran through her whole body, which Mary could feel as her cousin nestled closer to her in the brougham.
"Yes, it was awful! I had never seen anything so awful before – except once, perhaps, at an operation for cancer. But do you know, Marjorie, I was quite unlike my usual self. I was acting under some strange influence. The eyes of that poor man, Joseph, seemed to be following me. I acted as I never should have been able to act unless something very curious and inexplicable was urging me. I knew exactly what I had to do.
"I am experienced in these things, as you know, and I saw at once that the man who was hanging from the roof was not dead. He was only just beginning the last agony. There was a big box by the window, and upon a little table I saw an ordinary table-knife. I dragged the box to the man's feet, put them upon it, caught hold of the knife, and cut him down.
"He was a small man, and fell limply back into my arms, nearly knocking me over the box, but I managed to support him, and staggered down on to the floor.
"Then I got the rope from round his neck, and tried to restore breathing by Hall's method – you know, one can use this method by oneself. It is really the basis of all methods, and is used very successfully in cases of drowning."
"What did you do then?" Marjorie asked.
