“IN THE
TWINKLING
OF AN EYE”

By Sydney Watson

Author of
“The Mark of the Beast”
“Life’s Lookout”, “Wops, the Waif”,
Etc.

Copyright 1918

THE BIOLA BOOK ROOM
BIBLE INSTITUTE OF LOS ANGELES
536-558 South Hope Street
Los Angeles, Cal.

AUTHOR’S FOREWORD

Some years ago, I received from an important Southern town, a letter from a Ladies’ Temperance Committee, to this effect:—“Sir, We, the undersigned, are a committee of Ladies, who, for many years, have purchased your “Stories for the People” in very large numbers, for free distribution and loan; always assuming that you were to be thoroughly relied upon as an upholder of strict Total-abstinence principles. But your latest story has sadly undeceived us, as regards your usefulness as a worker in the great cause we are pledged to uphold and further. On pp —— of your last story, you make your hero, returning from a day’s run with the hounds, come upon a woman lying in a lonely place, who has been injured in a trap accident. You say, speaking of your hero’s prompt help to the woman, that “taking his hunting flask from his pocket, he forced a few drops of the brandy between the woman’s lips, etc.” Now, sir, we contend that had you had the cause of Total-abstinence fully at heart, you would have made that huntsman’s flask to have contained water.”

So much for the letter. The moral of it lies on the surface. There are some persons who seem unable to see anything from the side of real, actual life—that Ladies’ committee could not—whose vision is narrowed down to the tiny slit of their own cramped, cabined life and thought, they have no true outlook upon life, as a whole.

I preface this foreword with the above incident, because I am perfectly certain that the standpoint from which I have written this book will be utterly, absolutely misunderstood by many earnest, loving-hearted people, whose eyes, with my own, have caught the upward gaze “from whence we look for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

I would at once acknowledge that the inceptive idea of writing such a book as this was born within me from reading “Long Odds,” that wondrous little half-penny booklet written by the late General Robertson, I believe, a booklet that has been so marvellously “owned and blessed.”

For five or six years the idea for this present volume has been simmering and seething in my mind. The first and only real problem I had to face in the matter was that of the principle involved in using the fictional form to clothe so sacred a subject (for, to me, the near Return of our Lord is the most sacred of all subjects.) But the problem of the principle was speedily settled, as I remembered how wondrously God had owned and blessed “Long Odds,” in which the fictional is the vehicle of the teaching.

Then, too, there are, I know, myriads of people into whose hands “Long Odds,” could never, by any chance, fall—for there are multitudes who will not so much as glance at, or touch a tract, while a volume will easily win its way among all classes. There is an enormous percentage of attendants at our churches and chapels, and many otherwise very earnest Christian workers, to whom the whole subject of the Lord’s Second Coming is an absolutely unknown realm of Truth—and these I would fain reach and arouse with the message of this book.

To those Christians who are looking for the Return of the Lord, to whom the subject is the most tenderly sacred of all subjects, who will at first sight condemn the use of the fictional element, the dramatic colour in this book—and many good people will, I am assured—I would say, first, that the book is not written for them, and second, that, our Lord Himself, speaking of His own Return, used two very remarkable illustrations from life’s strangest dramas. First, “As it was in the days of Noah, even so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man. They ate, they drank, they married, they were given in marriage, until the day, etc.” Now, think what a myriad dramas were being enacted when the flood came. And had the disciples asked their Lord, privately, after His utterance, to explain more fully what He meant, what thrilling stories He could, He doubtless would have sketched. If any Christian cavils at the dramatic in this book, I would refer him or her to Christ’s own pointing in the picture of Noah’s time, then bid them fill out, by help of the feeblest, simplest imagination, the picture of the myriad dramas that were being enacted when that flood came, of old time. Then, if the objector is honest, and is capable of the least imagination, he will say “I see! and, now that I see this fact, my wonder is not that there is a certain dramatic freedom in this book, but that the writer has kept so powerful a restraint upon his pen.”

Again, Christ said:—“As it was in the days of Lot,” etc. Now think over this saying of our Lord’s, and remembering what is actually recorded in Genesis, of the vice and crime of Sodom, (and how, alas! even when saved from the doomed city, Lot and his daughters brought away much of the vicious, criminal essence of the place with them,) think how the Return of our Lord, presently, will mean the snatching away of many of His own out of scenes infinitely more awful than anything I have used herein, or ever hinted at. A book written on the subject here chosen, and written in the vein our Lord Himself suggests in the two passages referred to above, could not have been written in any other way—to be true to life, and to the subject.

Should any reader object to the expository lectures of Major H——, as the chief vehicle for the doctrinal teaching, I would say that personal experience has proved the style to be infinitely more acceptable to readers than that of the dialogue mode.

I have purposely placed special emphasis on the Jewish side of the subject, since the Jewish question is infinitely more closely enwrapped with the fact of our Lord’s near return, than many speakers and writers give prominence to.

SYDNEY WATSON.

“The Fire,” Vernham Dean, Hungerford, Berks.

CONTENTS

“IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE”

CHAPTER I.
TAKEN AT THE FLOOD.

The man walked aimlessly amid the thronging press. He was moody and stern. His eyes showed his disappointment and perplexity. At times, about his mouth there lurked an almost savage expression. As a rule he stood and walked erect. Only the day before this incident one of a knot of flower-girls in Drury Lane had drawn the attention of her companions to him as he strode briskly along the pavement, and in a rollicking spirit had sung, as he passed her:

“Stiff, starch, straight as a larch,

Every inch a soldier;

Fond o’ his country, fond o’ his queen,

An’ hawfully fond o’ me.”

But to-day there is nothing of the soldier in the pose or gait of Tom Hammond.

Yet the time and place ought to have held his attention sufficiently to have kept him alert to outward appearance. It was eleven in the forenoon. The place was Piccadilly. He came abreast of Swan and Edgar’s. The pavement was thronged with women on shopping bent. More than one of them shot an admiring glance at him, for he had the face, the head, of a king among men. But he had no eyes for these chance admirers.

Tom Hammond was thirty years of age, a journalist, and an exceptionally clever one, at the time we make his acquaintance. He was a keen, shrewd man, was gifted with a foresight and general prescience that were almost remarkable, and hence was commonly regarded by his journalistic friends as “a coming man.” He had strongly-fixed ideas of what a great daily paper should be, but never having seen any attempt that came within leagues of his ideal, he longed—lusted would not be too strong a term—for the time and opportunity when, with practically unlimited capital behind him, and with a perfectly free hand to use it, he could issue his ideal journal.

This morning he seems farther from the goal of his hopes than ever. For two years he had been sub-editor of a London daily that had made for itself a great name—of a sort. There were certain reasons which had prompted him to hope, to expect, the actual editorship before long. But now his house of cards had suddenly tumbled about his ears.

A change had recently taken place in the composition of the syndicate that financed the journal. There were wheels within wheels, the existence of some of which he had never once guessed, and which in their whirling had suddenly produced unexpected results. The editor-in-chief had resigned, and the newly elected editor proved to be a man who had, years before, done him, Tom Hammond, the foulest wrong one journalist can do to another.

Under the present circumstances there had been no honourable course open for Hammond but to resign. That morning he had found his resignation not only accepted, but he found himself practically dismissed.

Enclosed in the letter of acceptance of his resignation was a cheque covering the term of his notice, together with the intimation that his services would cease from the time of his receipt of the cheque.

His dejection, at that moment when we meet him, was caused not so much at finding himself out of employment as from the consciousness that the new editor-elect had accomplished this move with a view to his degradation in the eyes of his profession—in fact, out of sheer spite.

To escape the crowd that almost blocked the pavement in front of Swan and Edgar’s windows, he turned sharply into the road, and literally ran into the arms of a young man.

“Tom Hammond!”

“George Carlyon!”

The greeting flew simultaneously from the lips of the two men. They gripped hands.

“By all that’s wonderful!” cried Carlyon, still wringing his friend’s hand. “Do you know, Tom, I am actually up here in town for one purpose only—to hunt you up.”

“To hunt me up!”

“Oh, let’s get out of this crush, old man,” interrupted Carlyon.

The pair steered their way through the traffic, crossed the Circus, stopped for a moment at the beautiful Shaftesbury Fountain, then struck across to the Avenue. In the comparative lull of that walk Carlyon went on:

“Yes, I’ve run up to town this morning to find you out and ask you one question: Are you so fixed up—excuse the Americanism, old boy. I’ve a dashing little girl cousin, from the States, staying with my mother, and—well, you know, old fellow, how it is. Man’s an imitative creature, and all that, and absorbs dialect quicker than anything else under the sun. But what I was going to say was this: are you too fixed up with your present newspaper to forbid your entertaining the thought of a real plum in the journalistic market?”

Hammond’s customary alert look returned to his face. He was now “every inch a soldier,” as he cried, excitedly, “Don’t keep me in suspense, Carlyon; tell me quickly what you mean.”

“Let’s jump into a gondola, Tom. I can talk better as we ride.”

Carlyon had caught the eye of a cab-driver, and the next moment the two friends were being driven along riverwards.

“Someone, some Johnnie or other,” began Carlyon, as the two men settled themselves back in the cab, “once called the hansom cab the gondola of London’s streets——”

He caught the quick, impatient movement of Hammond’s face, and with a light laugh went on:

“But you’re on thorns, old boy, to hear about the journalistic plum. Well, here goes. You once met my uncle, Sir Archibald Carlyon?”

Hammond nodded.

“He is crazy to start a daily,” said Carlyon. “It is no new craze with him; he has been itching to do it for years. And now that gold has been discovered on that land of his in Western Australia, and he is likely to be a multi-millionaire—the concessions he has already sold have given him a clear million,—now that he is rich beyond all his dreams, he won’t wait another day; he will be a newspaper proprietor. It’s a case of that kiddie in the bath, Tom, doncher-know, that’s grabbing for the soap—‘he won’t be happy till he gets it.’”

“He wants to find at once a good journalist, who is also a keen business man; one who will take hold of the whole thing. To the right man he will give a perfectly free hand, will interfere with nothing, but be content simply to finance the affair.”

An almost fierce light was burning in the eyes of the eager, listening Hammond. A thousand thoughts rioted through his brain, but he uttered no word; he would not interrupt his friend.

“I told Nunkums last night, when he was bubbling and boiling over with his project, that I had heard you say it was easier to drop a hundred or two hundred thousand pounds over the starting of a new paper than perhaps over any other venture in the world.

“Nunkums just smiled as I spoke, dropped a walnut into his port glass, and said quietly, ‘Then I’ll drop them.’

“He hooked that walnut out of his wine with the miniature silver boathook—he had the thing made for him for the purpose,—devoured the wine-saturated nut, then smiled back into my face, as he said: ‘Yes, Georgie, I am quite prepared to drop my hundred, two hundred, three hundred thousand, if needs be, as I did my walnut. But I am equally hopeful—if I can secure the right man to edit and manage my paper,—that I shall eventually hook out an excellent dividend for my outlay. I want a man who not only knows how to do his own work well, as an editor, but one who has the true instinct in choosing his staff.’

“Of course, Tom, I trotted you out before him. He remembered you, of course, and jumped at the idea of getting you, if you were to be got. The upshot of it is, nothing would satisfy him but that I should come up by an early train this morning—early bird catches the worm, and all that kind of business, you know,—and now, in spite of the fact that my particular worm had wriggled and squirmed miles from his usual habitat, I’ve caught him. Now, tell me, are you open to treat with Sir Archibald?”

“Yes, and can begin business this very day!” Hammond laughed with the abandon of a boy, as he told, in a few sentences, the story of his dismissal.

“Good!” Carlyon, in his own exuberant glee, slapped his friend’s knee.

“Sir Archibald,” he went on, “was to come up by the 10:05 from our place, due at Waterloo at 11:49. He’ll be fixed up—“Hail Columbia!” again—at the hotel by this time. That’s where we are driving to now, and—ah! here we are!”

A moment later the two men were mounting the hotel steps. One of the servants standing in the vestibule recognized Carlyon, and saluted him.

“My uncle arrived, Bates?” Carlyon asked.

“Yes, sir, and a young lady with him!”

Carlyon turned quickly to Hammond.

“That’s Madge, my American cousin, Tom. I’m awfully glad she has come; I should like you to know her.”

Turning to the servant, he asked, “Same old rooms, Bates?”

“Yes, sir.”

Three steps at a time, laughing and talking all the while, Carlyon, ignoring the lift, raced up the staircase, followed more slowly by his friend.

Hammond never wholly forgot the picture of the sitting-room and its occupant, as he entered with Carlyon. The room was a large one, exquisitely furnished, and flooded with a warm, mellow light. A small but cheerful-looking wood fire burned upon the tiled hearth, the atmosphere of the room fragrant with a soft, subtle odour, as though the burning wood were scented. From a couch, as the two men entered, a girl rose briskly, and faced them. She made a picture which Tom never forgot. The warm, mellow light that filled the room seemed to clothe her as she stood to meet them. “America” was stamped upon her and her dress, upon the arrangement of her hair, upon the very droop of her figure. She was tall, fair, with that exquisite colouring and smoothness of complexion that is the product of an unartificial, hygienic life.

Her face could not be pronounced wholly beautiful, but it was a face that was full of life and charm, her eyes being especially arrestive.

“Awfully glad you came up, Madge!” cried Carlyon. “I’ve run my quarry down, and this is my own particular, Tom Hammond.”

He made a couple of mockingly-funny elaborate bows, saying: “Miss Madge Finisterre, of Duchess County, New York. Mr. Tom Hammond, of—oh, shades of Cosmopolitanism!—of everywhere, of London just at present.”—Tom bowed to the girl.—She returned his salute, and then held forth her hand in a frank, pleasant way, as she laughingly said, “I have heard so much of Tom Hammond during the last few days, that I guess you seem like an old acquaintance.”

Tom shook hands with the maiden, and for a moment or two they chatted as freely and merrily as though they were old acquaintances.

The voice of Carlyon broke into their chat, asking: “Where’s Nunkums, Madge?”

Before the girl could reply, the door opened and Sir Archibald entered the room.

One glance into his face would have been sufficient to have told Tom the type of man he had to deal with, even if he had not seen him before. A warm-hearted, unconventional, impulsive man, a perfect gentleman in appearance, but a merry, hail-fellow-well-met man in his dealings with his fellows.

With a bit of mock drama in the gesture, Madge Finisterre flourished her hand towards the newcomer, crying,

“Sir Archibald, George? Lo, he is here!” She flashed a quick glance to the piano as she added, “If only I had known you were about to enter, uncle, I would have treated you to a few crashing bars of stage-life entree-music.”

“Go away with your nonsense!” laughed the old man.

“Nonsense, indeed!” the girl laughed as merrily as the old man. Then, with a sudden, swift movement, she crossed to the piano, struck one sharp note upon it, and whispered in well-feigned hoarseness, “Slow music for the three conspirators as they retire to plot the destruction of London’s press, and the accumulation of untold millions by their own special journalistic production!”

Her fingers moved over the ivory keys, and low, weird, creepy music filled the room with its eerie notes.

Sir Archibald and George Carlyon fell in with the girl’s mood, and crept doorwards on tiptoe.

“Number three,” hissed the girl.

And Tom Hammond laughingly followed with the two other men.

“She is a treat, is Madge!” laughed George Carlyon, as the three men passed through the doorway and made for the study-like room of Sir Archibald.

CHAPTER II.
“THE COURIER.”

For two hours the three men held close conference together. At the end of that time all the preliminaries of the new venture were settled. Tom Hammond had explained his long-cherished views of what the ideal daily paper should be. Sir Archibald was delighted with the scheme, and, in closing with Hammond, gave him a perfectly free hand.

“You were on the point of saying something about a striking poster to announce the coming paper, Mr. Hammond,” said the old baronet.

“Yes,” Tom replied; “I think a great deal may be done by arresting the attention of the people—those in London especially. My idea for a poster is this: the name of the paper is to be ‘The Courier.’ Very well, let us have an immense sheet poster, first-class drawing, striking but harmonious colouring, and bold, arrestive title of the paper and announcement of its issue. Following the title, I would have in the extreme left a massive sign-post, a prominent arm of the structure bearing the legend ‘To-morrow.’ On the extreme right of the picture I would put another sign-post, the arm of which should bear the words ‘The Day After To-morrow.’ I would have a splendidly-drawn mounted courier, the horse galloping towards the right-hand post, having left ‘To-morrow’ well in the rear.”

The old baronet exclaimed, “Rush the thing on! Flood the hoardings of London, Edinburgh, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Cardiff—all the large towns, and the smaller ones as well, if you can get hoardings big enough. Don’t study the expense, either in the get-up or in the issue of the picture. Don’t let the pill-sellers or cocoa or mustard people beat us.”

The old man sprang to his feet and paced the floor, rubbing his hands, crying continually,

“Good! good! We’ll wake old England up. We’ll——”

“Toddle into lunch,” interrupted George Carlyon. “That’s the third summons we’ve had!”

Tom Hammond sat next to Madge at luncheon, and was charmed with her easy, unconventional manners. But his mind was too full of the new paper, of the great opportunity that had come to him so unexpectedly, to be as wholly absorbed with the charm of her personality as he might otherwise have been.

He did not linger over the luncheon table.

“There are one or two fellows, Sir Archibald,” he explained, “whom I should like to secure on my staff at once. I don’t want to lose even an hour.”

As he bade Madge Finisterre good-bye, he expressed the hope that he might see her again soon, and the girl in reply allowed her eyes unconsciously to express more than her words.

“She is the most charming woman I ever met,” he told himself, as he followed Sir Archibald into his room for the final word for which the baronet had asked. George Carlyon had remained behind with Madge.

“It was about the first working expenses I wanted to speak to you, Mr. Hammond,” the baronet began. They were seated in the baronet’s room.

“I will have fifty thousand pounds—or shall we say a hundred thousand?—deposited, at once, in your name at—what bank?”

“Any good bank you please, Sir Archibald, so long as the particular branch is fairly central.”

“Capital and Counties—how will that do?” the baronet asked, adding, “I always bank with them myself.”

“That will do, sir.”

“How about the Ludgate Hill branch, Mr. Hammond?”

“Could not be better, sir.”

“Settled, then, Mr. Hammond!” There were a few more words exchanged between master and man, and then they parted.

As Tom Hammond strode along the Embankment towards Waterloo Bridge, his heart was the heart of a boy again.

“Is life worth living!” he cried inwardly, answering his own question with the rapturous words: “In this hour I know nothing else that earth could give me to make life more joyous!”

People passing him saw his face radiant with a wondrous joy. It’s rare to see peace, even, in faces in our great cities. It is rarer still to see joy’s gleam. He allowed his glance to flash all around him, as he murmured, “I am glad, too, that I am in London. Who dare say that London is dull, or grim, or sordid? Who was it that wrote, “No man curses the town more heartily than I, but after travelling by mountains, plain, desert, forest, and on the deep sea, one comes back to London and finds it the most wonderful place of them all!”

“Ah! It was Roger Pocock, I believe, wrote that sentiment. Roger Pocock, ‘I looks towards yer, sir. Them’s my senterments!’”

He laughed low and gleefully at his own merry mood. Then as his eyes took in the river, the moving panorama of the Embankment, and caught the throb of the mighty pulsing of life all about him, Le Gallienne’s lines came to him, and, while he moved onward, he murmured:

“London, whose loveliness is everywhere.

London so beautiful at morning light,

One half forgets how fair she is at night.

“London as beautiful at set of sun

As though her beauty had just begun!

London, that mighty sob, that splendid tear,

That jewel hanging in the great world’s ear.

“Ah! of your beauty change no single grace,

My London with your sad mysterious face.”

He moved forward in a strange rapture of spirit. He forgot even “beautiful London”; he was momentarily unconscious how he travelled or whither. He might have been blind or deaf for all that he now saw or heard. The drone of a blind beggar’s voice reading the Scriptures, however, presently had power to break his trance. He paused a moment before the man.

“This same Jesus,” droned the blind man’s voice, “who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go.”

Hammond dropped a sixpence into the beggar’s box, and moved away, the wonder of the words he had just heard read arresting all his previous thoughts of his glad success.

“Shall so come in like manner!” he murmured. “I wonder what it means?”

The next instant a woman’s pitiful voice filled his ear, crying:

“For the love of God, good sir, give me the price of a piece of bread.”

He turned sharply towards her. Her face was haggard and hunger-filled; her eyes were wells of despair. He slipped his finger and thumb into the fob of his coat. The first coin that came to his touch was a shilling. He dropped it into the emaciated, outstretched palm.

The wretched creature gazed at the coin, then at him. Her lips moved, but no words came from them. Her eyes filled with a rush of tears. He passed on. But the incident moved him strangely.

“If Christ,” he mused, “ever comes back to earth again, surely, surely He will deliver it from such want and misery as that!”

He paused and looked back at the woman. Her face was buried in her hands. Her form was shaking with sobs. Curiosity tempted him to go back.

As he came abreast of her, a child, a girl about nine, barefooted and tired-looking, was saying to the woman, “What’s the matter, missis? Wouldn’t that swell giv’ yer nuffink w’en yer arst ’im?”

“Give me nothing?” The woman glanced down at the child. “Why, he is kinder than Gawd, fur he give me a shilling!”

At this Tom Hammond hurried away.

“Kinder than God!” he murmured. “Oh, God, that we should have it in our power to buy such happiness for so small a sum!”

“Kinder than God” he repeated to himself. He was now mounting the granite steps to the bridge. “Of course, one knows better; yet how difficult of proof it would become, if one had to explain it to that poor soul, and to the thousands like her in this great city!”

For the first time since leaving Sir Archibald his own joy was forgotten. The awful problem of London’s destitution had supplanted London’s beauty in his thoughts.

CHAPTER III.
FLOTSAM.

“Only nine hours!”

Tom Hammond laughed amusedly at his own murmured thought. It seemed ridiculous almost to try to believe that only nine hours before he had been a discharged journalist, while now he was at the head of what he knew would be the greatest journalistic venture London—yea, the world—had ever seen.

He had just dined. He felt that he wanted some kind of movement, some distraction, to relieve the tension. He was in that frame of mind when some kind of adventure was necessary, although he did not tell himself this, being hardly conscious of his own need. He knew that the haunts of his fellows—club, theatre, music-hall—would only serve to irritate him. Some instinct turned his feet riverwards.

It was now a quarter past seven o’clock. Night had fallen upon London. Tom Hammond crossed the great Holborn thoroughfare. The heavier traffic of London’s commercial life had almost ceased. The omnibuses going west were filled with theatregoers, and other pleasure-seekers. Hansoms flitted swiftly either way, each holding a man and a woman in evening dress.

Having crossed the roadway, he paused for a moment at the corner of Chancery Lane, and let his eye take in all the scene. And again Le Gallienne came to his mind, and he softly murmured:

“Ah! London! London! our delight,

Great flower that opens but at night,

Great city of the midnight sun,

Whose day begins when day is done.

“Lamp after lamp against the sky

Opens a sudden beaming eye,

Leaping alight on every hand,

The iron lilies of the Strand,

“Like dragonflies the hansoms hover

With jewelled eyes to catch the lover;

The streets are full of lights and loves,

Soft gowns and flutter of soiled doves.”

He turned with a faint sigh, and began to pass on down Chancery Lane.

“Oh, London!” he mused, “thy surface may be wonderful and beautiful; but below—what are you below the surface?”

“The human moths about the light

Dash and cling in dazed delight,

And burn and laugh, the world and wife,

For this is London, this is life!

“Upon thy petals butterflies,

But at thy root, some say, there lies

A world of weeping, trodden things,

Poor worms that have not eyes or wings.”

He moved onwards in the direction of the Law Courts. Presently he neared the Waterloo Bridge approach. He had, all unrealized by himself, since he left the restaurant where he had dined, been walking towards the river. A moment or two after, and he was leaning on the parapet of the bridge, looking down into the dark waters. Sluggish, oil-like in appearance, as seen in the dull gleam of the lamps, the river moved seawards. A sudden longing to get out upon those dark waters came to him.

“If only——” he mused. Then, turning briskly, he came face to face with a man in a blue guernsey, who was crossing the bridge. It was the very man of his half-uttered thought. “If only I could run up against Bob Carter!” he had almost said.

“Good evening, Mister Ham’nd.” The man in the guernsey saluted with a thick, tar-stained forefinger as he recognized Tom Hammond.

“Good evening, Carter.” Hammond laughed as he added, “I was just wishing I could meet you, for I felt I should like to get out on the river.”

“I’m jes’ going as fur as Lambeff, sir. Ef yer likes ter go wif me, you’ll do me proud, sir; yer know that, I knows!”

A few minutes later the two men sat in Carter’s boat. Hammond, in the stern, was steering. The man Carter, on the first thwart, manipulated the oars. Hammond had known the man about a year. He had done him a kindness that the waterman had never forgotten.

“Aw’d go to ther world’s end fur yer, sir,” he had often said since.

The man was ordinarily a silent companion, and to-night after a few exchanged words between the pair, he was as silent as usual.

Down the wide, turgid river the boat, propelled by Carter’s two oars, shot jerkily, the rise and fall of the glow in the rower’s pipe-bowl synchronizing with the lift and dip of the oars.

Hammond enjoyed the silence. There was a weirdness about this night trip on the river that fitted in with his mood. His brain had been considerably overwrought that day. The quiet row was beginning to soothe the overwrought nerves. Where he sat in the stern of the boat, he faced the clock-tower at Westminster. The gleaming windows of the great embankment hotels lay behind him. A myriad electric lights were on his right hand. The gloom and darkness of the unlighted wharfage on the Surrey side were on his left.

Only by a waterway miracle Carter cleared an anchored barge that, defying the laws of the river, carried no warning light.

“Drat ’em!” growled the man Carter. “They oughter do a stretch in Portlan’ or Dartmoor fur breakin’ the lor. There’s many a ’onest waterman whose boat’s foun’ bottom-up, or smashed to smithereens, an’ whose body’s foun’, or isn’t, jes, as the case may be, all becos’ they lazy houn’s is too ’ide-boun’ to light a lamp, cuss ’em!”

His growl died away in his throat. The glowing fire of his pipe rose and fell quicker than ever, telling of a fierce anger burning within him.

“Ssh!” he hissed. Hammond saw that his face was turned shorewards. He heaved aft towards Hammond, and whispered, “Kin yer see that woman, sir?” He jerked his chin in the direction of a line of moored barges.

Hammond had turned his head, and could plainly discern the form of a woman standing on the edge of the outer barge of the cluster.

The men in the boat sat still, but watchful.

“Do she mean sooerside, sir?” whispered Carter. “Looks like it, sir. Don’t make a soun’.”

Even as he spoke the woman leaped into the air. There was a low scream, a splash, a leap of foam flashed dully for one instant, then all was still again.

The waterman plied his oars furiously. Hammond steered for the spot where that foam had splashed. An instant later the boat was over the place where the body had disappeared. Carter lay on his oars, and peered into the darkness on one side. Hammond strained his eye on the other side.

With startling suddenness a hand darted upwards within a foot of where Hammond sat in the stern of the boat. In the same instant the woman’s head appeared. Hammond reached out excitedly, and caught the back hair of the woman, twisting his fingers securely into the knot of hair at the back of her head.

Carter shipped his oars, and in two minutes the wretched woman was safe in the boat. Her drenched face gleamed white where they laid her. A low whimpering sob broke from her.

“Turn ’er over on her face a little, sir, while I makes the boat fast fur a minute or two, sir,” jerked out the waterman.

“Pore soul ov ’er!” he went on, knotting his painter to a bolt in the stern of a barge. “She ’ave took in a bellyful of Thames water, an’ it ain’t filtered no sort, that’s sartin!”

Hammond had by this time turned the woman over on her face.

Carter came aft bearing a water-beaker in his hands.

“I’ll lift her legs, sir,” he said, “and you put this beaker under her, jes’ above her knees; that’ll ’elp her a bit.”

That was done, and almost instantly the woman was very sick.

“In my locker there, sir, I’ve got a drop o’ whisky. I keeps it there fur ’mergencies like this,” said Carter.

Hammond moved to allow the man to reach a seat-locker in the stern. The next minute, while Hammond supported the woman, the waterman poured a few drops of the spirit down her throat.

She coughed and sputtered, but the draught restored her. She began to cry in a low, whimpering way.

“We must get her ashore, Carter,” cried Hammond. “I’ll take the oars, and, as you know the riverside better than I do, just steer into the nearest landing-place you know.”

Carter leaped to the bows, cast off the painter, and hurried aft again.

“Jes’ ’long yere, sir, there’s an old landin’ as’ll jes’ serve us. Wots yer fink ter do wi’ the pore soul, sir—not ’and her over to the perlice?”

“No, neither the police nor workhouse, Carter. I wish I could see her face, and see what kind of woman she is.”

By way of reply, Carter struck a match, and lit a small bull’s-eye lantern. When the wick had caught light, he flashed it on the face of the woman.

Her eyes were closed, her face was deadly pale. Her hair was dishevelled. But in the one flashing glance Hammond took at her, he recognized her.

“It’s Mrs. Joyce!” he muttered half-aloud and in amazed tones.

“Know ’er, sir?” asked the waterman.

“A little!” he replied. “Her husband is a reporter—a drinking scamp.”

Carter shut off the light of the bull’s-eye, at that moment.

“We’re jes’ ’ere now, sur, so’s best not to be callin’ ’tention like wi’ a light.”

He steered the boat into a kind of narrow alley-way between two crazy old wharves.

Hammond, rightly gauging the kindly heart of his landlady, had brought the drenched woman in a cab to his lodgings. She was still in a half-fainting condition when he carried her into the house. In two sentences he explained the situation to the landlady, whose natural kindness and loyalty to her lodger made her willing to aid his purpose of rescue.

“I will carry her up to the bath-room,” he said. “Let your girl get a cup of milk heated as hot as can be sipped, while you bath this poor soul quickly in very hot water. Then let her be got to bed, and have some good, nourishing soup ready. She’ll probably sleep after that. And in the morning—well, the events of the morning will take their own shape.”

Half-an-hour later, as Hammond took a cup of coffee, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the woman he had saved was in bed, and doing well.

“Poor soul!” he mused. “That brute of a husband has probably driven her to this attempt on her life. I wonder what her history was before she married, for I remember how it struck me, that day when I saw her at the office, that she was evidently a woman of some culture.”

It was nearly ten now. He had no desire to go out again. It wanted two hours quite to his usual bed-time. But a strange sense of drowsiness began to steal over him, and he went off to his bed.

“What a day this has been!” he muttered, as he laid his head on the pillow.

CHAPTER IV.
“I ONLY REAPED WHAT I SOWED.”

Hammond awaited the woman whom he had saved from drowning.

“She has slept fairly well,” the landlady told him, “and I made her eat a good breakfast that I carried up to her myself, Mr. Hammond!”

Now he waited to speak to her. A moment or two more, and the landlady ushered her into the room, then slipped away.

“How can I ever repay you, sir!” cried the woman, seizing the hand that Hammond held out to her.

For a moment or two her emotion was too great for further speech. Hammond led her to an armchair and seated her. She sobbed convulsively for a moment or two. He allowed her to sob. Presently tears came. The paroxysm passed, the tears relieved her, and she lifted her sad, beautiful eyes to his face.

“You know—oh, yes, you must know, Mr. Hammond—(I recognized you last night)—how I came to be in the water. I tried to take my life. I was miserable, despairing! God forgive me.”

His strong eyes were full of a rare tenderness, as he said, “But, Mrs. Joyce, you surely know that death is not the end of all existence. I am not what would be called a religious man, but every fibre of my inward being tells me that death does not end all.”

He saw a shiver pass over her, as she hoarsely replied, “I, too, realize that this morning, Mr. Hammond. But last night the madness of an overwhelming despair was upon me. My life had been a literal hell for years, until yesterday I could bear it no longer. I was famished with hunger, sick with despair, and——”

She sighed wearily. “Perhaps,” she went on, “if you knew all I have borne, you would not wonder at my rash, mad act.”

“Tell me your story, Mrs. Joyce,” he said, gently. “It may relieve your overcharged heart, and, anyhow, I will be your friend, as far as I can.”

She sighed again. This time there was a note of relief, rather than weariness, in the sigh.

“My father was a well-to-do farmer,” she began, “in North Hants. I was the only child, and I fear I was spoiled. I received the best education possible, and loved my studies for their own sake, for culture, in all its forms, had a strong attraction for me. I had been engaged to a young yeoman farmer for nearly a year. I had known him all my life, and we had been sweethearts even as children. Then there came suddenly into my life that man Joyce, for whom I sacrificed everything. God only knows how he contrived to exercise such an awful fascination over me as to make me leave everyone, everything, and marry him.”

For a moment she paused, and shuddered. Her voice, when she spoke, again, was hollow, and full of tears.

“I killed my father by eloping on the very eve of my arranged marriage with Ronald Ferris. Ronald left the country as soon as he could wind up his affairs. And I—well, here in this mighty Babylon, I have ever since been reaping some of the sorrow I had sown. Not a penny of my father’s money ever reached me, and that brute Joyce only married me for what he expected to get with me. He has done his best to make earth a hell for me, and I, in my mad blindness, last night, almost exchanged earth’s fleeting hell for God’s eternal hell.”

A look of shame filled her eyes as she lifted them to Hammond.

“What you reminded me of just now, Mr. Hammond, I, deep down in my soul, know only too well—that death does not end all. My father was a true Christian, and a lay preacher. I have travelled with him hundreds of times to his preaching appointments, playing the harmonium and singing solos for him in his services. More than once the sense of God’s claim upon me was so great as almost to compel my yielding my heart and life. Would to God I had! But my pride, my ambitions, strangled my good desires, and, as I said just now, I broke my father’s heart. I killed him, and ruined all my own life, though I have no pity for myself. Then London life, my husband’s brutality, my own misery, all helped to drive even the memory of God from my mind.”

“Yet,” broke in Hammond, “the Christian religion teaches that sorrow and suffering ought to drive the possessor of the faith nearer to God.”

There was a hint of apology in his tones as he went on:

“Don’t misunderstand me, Mrs. Joyce; I only speak from hearsay. I have heard parsons preach it, but I know nothing experimentally about these things myself.”

She smiled in a slow, sad way, and, catching her breath in a kind of quick sob, said: “Neither have I ever known anything experimentally of these truths. I drifted into the outward form of a correct, religious, life. I learned to like the brightness of our chapel services, the fun of choir practice, the merry company, the adulation heaped upon me for my solo-singing. Then there were the tea-meetings, the service of song, and a multitude of other mild excitements which went to brighten the monotony of a rural existence. But of God, of Christ, of the Divine life, I fear I knew nothing.”

Hammond smiled inwardly as he listened to this strange confession. The phraseology was new to him.

“It is the shibboleth of Nonconformity, I suppose,” he told himself. “And I suppose each section of religious society has its own outward form of things in which it trusts, thinking, caring, nothing for the great Divine verities that should be the true religious life.”

He did not utter his thoughts aloud, but asked with some apparent irrelevance, “Where is your husband, Mrs. Joyce?”

“Off on one of his drinking bouts, or maybe, locked up for drunkenness; I cannot say.”

Her lifted eyes were full of beseeching, as she went on, “You will keep secret, Mr. Hammond, all this wild, mad episode of my life. If only I could know that the sad, mad, bad story was locked up between God and you, your kind landlady and myself, I think I could go back and face my misery better.”

“Do not fear, Mrs. Joyce,” he replied quickly. “The affair shall be as though it had never been. I can answer for Mrs. Belcher, my landlady; and for myself I give you my word, and——”

“God reward you, sir!” she sobbed. “Already you have given me clearer views of Him than any minister or any sermon ever did.”

A few moments later Mrs. Joyce rose to leave. He pressed three sovereigns into her hand, and in spite of her tearful protestations made her take the money.

“If you are ever in desperate need, come to me, or write me, Mrs. Joyce, and I will help you, if I can. Meanwhile, be assured that the little I have done for you I would have done for any stranger, for, after all, the human race is linked by a strange, a mighty family tie. Good-bye.”

She wrung the hand he gave her, then with a sudden, impulsive movement she lifted it sharply to her lips and kissed it with a tearful passionateness.

The next moment she was gone. His hand was wet with her tears.

“Poor soul!” he muttered.

Passing across the room to the window, he glanced out. She was moving down the street. Her handkerchief was pressed to her eyes.

“How strange,” he murmured, as he turned from the window, “are these chance encounters in life! Like ships at sea, we sight, hail, exchange some kind of greeting, then pass on. Do we, after all, I wonder, unconsciously influence each other in these apparently trivial life-encounters? If so, how? Take this episode now, for instance. Will my encounter with that poor soul have any effect on my life, or on hers? If so, what?”

CHAPTER V.
LILY WORK.

The room we now enter is a large one. It is close under the roof of a house in Finsbury. The man there at work pauses for a moment.

The room is a workshop. The man is a Jew—but what a Jew! He might have posed to an artist as a model, a type of the proudest Jewish monarch over Israel. Face, form, stature—not even Saul or David or Solomon could have excelled him.

The room held the finished workmanship of his hands for the three past years. And now, as he paused in his labour—a labour of love—for a moment, and drew his tall form erect, and lifted his face to the window above him, a light that was almost holy filled his eyes.

“God of our fathers,” he murmured, “God of the Holy Tent and of the Temple, instruct me; teach my fingers to do this great work.”

He let his hands fall with an almost sacred touch upon the chapiter he had been chasing. He wist not that his face shone with an unearthly light, as for a moment his lips moved in prayer. Then quietly reaching a thick old book from a shelf, he opened it at one of its earlier pages, and read aloud.

“And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, See, I have called by name Bezaleel, the son of Uri, the son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah: and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones, to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all kinds of workmanship. And I, behold, I have given with him Aholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan: and in the hearts of all that are wise-hearted I have put wisdom, that they may make all that I have commanded thee: the tabernacle of the congregation, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy-seat that is thereupon, and all the furniture of the tabernacle.”

The light—it was now almost a fire—deepened in his eyes. A rare, a rich, cadence filled his voice as he read the holy words. His fingers moved to the middle of the book. It easily opened at a certain place, as though it had been often used at that page. Again he read aloud:

“And the chapiters that were upon, the top of the pillars were of lily work, ... and the chapiters upon the two pillars had pomegranates also above, ... and the pomegranates were two hundred, in rows round about upon the other chapiter, ... and he set up the pillars in the porch of the temple: and he set up the right pillar, and called the name thereof Jachin (”He shall establish“); and he set up the left pillar, and called the name thereof Boaz (”In it is strength“). And on the top of the pillars was lily work: so was the work of the pillars finished.”

With a reverent touch the man closed the book, replaced it on the shelf, then, lifting his eyes again to where the cold, clear light streamed down through the great skylight in the ceiling, he murmured:

“How long, O Lord, shall Thy people be cast off and trodden down, and their land, Thy land, be held by the accursed races?”

For a moment a look of pain swept into his face. Then, as he became conscious of the touch of his lowered hand upon the chapiter, his eyes travelled downwards to the exquisite “lily work,” and the light of a new hope swept the pain off his face.

“The very fact that the time has come,” he murmured, “for us to be preparing for the next temple, is a token from Jehovah that the day of Messiah draweth nigh.”

His eyes lingered a moment on the rare and beautiful workmanship, then he took up a chasing tool and continued his toil; yet, while he worked he kept up a running recitative of Ezekiel’s description of the great temple—for he knew by heart all the chapters of that prophet.

As he presently repeated the words: “And the Prince in the midst of them, when they go in, shall go in; and when they go forth, shall go forth,” he lifted his eyes with a deep holy rapture shining in all his face.

He closed his recitative with a ringing note of triumph in his voice, as he cried, “It shall be round about eighteen thousand cubits: and the name of the city from that day shall be Jehovah-Chammah”—“The Lord is there.”

There was a moment of absolute silence. The graver was still, the hand that held it might have been stone, so rigid did it become. The lips of Abraham Cohen moved, but no other sound came from him save the words “Jehovah was there,” and he prayed aloud.

In the midst of his rapt devotion the door of the workroom opened. The slight sound aroused the dreamer. He turned his face in the direction of the door, and his eyes flashed with pleasure.

“Ah, Zillah!” he cried in greeting. The girl he addressed closed the door, thus shutting out the odour of frying fish. She crossed the floor quickly, with a certain eagerness, and came towards him with a rare grace. She was singularly beautiful, of an Eastern style of beauty. Her complexion was of the Spanish olive tone, and her melting eyes were of that same Spanish type. Her hair—a wondrous crown of it—was blue-black. She had a certain plumpness of form that seemed to add rather than take from her general beauty. She was sister to his wife.

“Supper will be ready in five minutes, Abraham,” she began. “Will you be ready for it?”

He smiled down into her great black eyes. He was never very keen on his meals. He ate to live only; he did not live to eat. She knew that, and had long since learned that his labour of love was as meat and drink to him. Her eyes glided past him and rested on his work.

“It is very beautiful, Abraham!” she cried. There was reverence as well as rapture and admiration in her voice and glance.

“It cannot be too beautiful, Zillah,” he returned.

Her eyes were on his work. His were on her face. He read in it the rapturous admiration of his workmanship.

“When will the Messiah come?” she sighed.

“Soon, I believe!” he returned. “Jehovah rested in His creative work after six days’ labour. A thousand years with Him are as one day. May it not well be, then, that as there have passed nearly six thousand years (each thousand years, representing one day) that He will presently rest in His finished work for His people, through the coming of the Messiah, as He did at the creation?”

He laid his tool aside, and turned to the beautiful girl, as he continued:

“Besides, do not our sacred books say that when three springs have been discovered on Mount Zion, Messiah will come? Two springs have lately been discovered by the excavators in Jerusalem, and our people out there excitedly watch the work of these men, expecting soon the discovery of the third spring.”