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+ _By GUY THORNE_ +
+ +
+ When It Was Dark +
+ The Story of a Great Conspiracy +
+ 12º. (By mail, $1.35) _Net_, $1.20 +
+ +
+ A Lost Cause +
+ 12º $1.50 +
+ +
+ G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS +
+ _New York and London_ +
+ +
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WHEN IT WAS DARK
When It Was Dark
The Story of a Great Conspiracy
By
Guy Thorne
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1906
COPYRIGHT, 1904
BY
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Published, January, 1904
Reprinted, May, 1904; September, 1904
December, 1904; September, 1905
October, 1905; November, 1905; January, 1906
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
CONTENTS
BOOK I.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. An Incident by Way of Prologue 1
II. In the Vicar's Study 6
III. "I Think he is a Good Man" 23
IV. The Smoke Cloud at Dawn 33
V. A Lost Soul 45
VI. The Whisper 56
VII. Last Words at Walktown 69
VIII. A Dinner at the Pannier d'Or 77
IX. Inauguration 95
X. The Resurrection Sermon 107
XI. "Neither do I Condemn Thee" 116
XII. Powers of Good and Evil 126
BOOK II.
I. While London was Sleeping 141
II. Avoiding the Flower Pattern on the Carpet 165
III. "I, Joseph" 178
IV. The Domestic Chaplain's Testimony 184
V. Deus, Deus Meus, Quare Dereliquisti! 194
VI. Harness the Horses; and Get up, ye Horsemen,
and Stand forth with your Helmets, Furbish
the Spears, and Put on the Brigandines--Jer.
xlvi: 4 205
VII. The Hour of Chaos 212
VIII. The First Links 225
IX. Particular Instances, Contrasting the Old
Lady and the Special Correspondent 233
X. The Triumph of Sir Robert Llwellyn 245
XI. Progress 256
XII. A Soul alone on the Sea-Shore 262
BOOK III.
I. What it Meant to the World's Women 271
II. Cyril Hands Redux 283
III. All ye Inhabitants of the World, and
Dwellers on the Earth, See ye, when He
Lifteth up an Ensign on the Mountains--Is.
xviii: 3 289
IV. A Luncheon Party 302
V. By the Tower of Hippicus 322
VI. Under the Eastern Stars: towards Gerizim 342
VII. The Last Meeting 356
VIII. Death Coming with One Grace 364
IX. At Walktown Again 376
Epilogue 385
BOOK I
"The mystery of iniquity doth already work."
WHEN IT WAS DARK
CHAPTER I
AN INCIDENT BY WAY OF PROLOGUE
Mr. Hinchcliffe, the sexton, looked up as Mr. Philemon, the clerk,
unlocked the great gates of open ironwork which led into the street.
Hinchcliffe was cutting the lettering on a tombstone, supported by heavy
wooden trestles, under a little shed close to the vestry door of the
church.
The clerk, a small, rotund man, clerical in aspect, and wearing a round
felt hat, pulled out a large, old-fashioned watch. "Time for the bell,
William," he said.
The parish church was a large building in sham perpendicular. It stood
in a very central position on the Manchester main road, rising amid a
bare triangle of flat gravestones, and separated from the street
pavement only by high iron railings.
It was about half-past four on a dull autumn afternoon. The trams swung
ringing down the black, muddy road, and the long procession of great
two-wheeled carts, painted vermilion, carried coal from the collieries
six miles away to the great mills and factories of Salford.
The two men went into the church, and soon the tolling of a deep-voiced
bell, high up in the pall of smoke which lay over the houses, beat out
in regular and melancholy sound.
Inside the building the noise of the traffic sank into a long, unceasing
note like the _bourdon_ note of a distant organ.
Hinchcliffe tolled the bell in the dim, ugly vestibule with his foot in
a loop in the rope, sitting on the chest which held the dozen loaves
which were given away every Sunday to the old women in the free seats.
The clerk opened the green baize swing-doors and strode up the aisle
towards the vestry, waking mournful echoes as the nails in his boots
struck the tiled floor.
Saint Thomas's Church, the mother church of Walktown, was probably the
ugliest church in Lancashire. The heavy galleries, the drab walls, the
terrible gloom of the vast structure, all spoke eloquently of a chilly,
dour Christianity, a grudging and suspicious Sunday religion which
animated its congregation.
In the long rows of cushioned seats, each labelled with the name of the
person who rented it, Sunday by Sunday the moderately prosperous and
wholly vulgar Lancashire people sat for two hours. During the prayers
they leaned forward in easy and comfortable concession to convention.
Few ever knelt. During the hymn times they stood up in their places
listening carefully to a fine choir of men and women--a choir which,
despite its vocal excellence, was only allowed to perform the most
stodgy and commonplace evangelical music.
When the incumbent preached he was heard with the jealous watchfulness
which often assails an educated man. The renters of the pews desired a
Low Church aspect of doctrine and were intelligent to detect any
divergence from it.
The colour of the building was sombre. The brick-red and styx-like grey
of the flooring, the lifeless chocolate front of the galleries, the
large and ugly windows filled with glass which was the colour of a
ginger-beer bottle, had all a definite quality of cheerless vulgarity.
Philemon came out of the vestry door with a lighted taper. He lit two or
three jets of the corona over the reading-desk. Then he sat down in a
front pew close to the chancel steps and waited.
The bell outside stopped suddenly, and a tall young man in a black
Inverness cape walked hurriedly up the side aisle under the gallery
towards the vestry.
In less than a minute he came out again in surplice, stole, and
hood,--the stole and hood were always worn at Walktown,--went to the
reading-desk, and began to say Evensong in a level, resonant voice.
At the end of each psalm Mr. Philemon recited the doxology with
thunderous assertion and capped each prayer with an echoing "Amen."
The curate, Basil Gortre, was a young fellow with a strong, impressive
face. His eyes had the clearness of youth and looked out steadily on the
world under his black hair. His face was of that type men call a
"thoroughly honest" face, but, unlike the generality of such faces, it
was neither stubborn nor stupid. The clean-shaven jaw was full of power,
the mouth was refined and artistic, without being either sensual or
weak.
During the Creed he turned towards the east, and the clerk's
uncompromising voice became louder and more acid as he noticed the
action; and when the clergyman, almost imperceptibly, made the sign of
the Cross at the words "The resurrection of the body," the old man gave
a loud snort of disapprobation.
In deference to the congregation on Sundays, and at the wish of his
vicar, Gortre omitted these simple signs of reverence. But alone, at
Matins or Evensong, he followed his usual habit.
During the last low prayers, as dusk crept into the great church, and
the clank and bells of the trams outside seemed to be more remote, a
part, indeed, of that visible but not symbolic ugliness which the gloom
was hiding, a note of fervour crept into the young man's praying which
had only been latent there before.
He was reading the third collect when the few gas jets above his head
began to whistle, burnt blue for a few seconds, and then faded out with
three or four faint pops.
Some air had got into the pipes. Old Mr. Philemon rose noisily from his
knees, and shuffled off to the vestry coughing and spluttering. Outside,
with startling suddenness, a piano organ burst into a gay, strident
melody. After a few bars the music stopped with a jerk. A police
constable had spoken to the organ-grinder and moved him on.
Gortre's voice went on in a deep, fervent monotone, unmoved by the
darkness or the dissonance--
"_Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord; and by Thy great
mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the
love of Thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ._"
The faithful, quiet voice, enduring through the dark, was a
foreshadowing of the great cloud which was breaking over the world, big
with disaster, imminent with gloom. It foreshadowed the divinely aided
continuance of Truth through such a terror as men had never known
before.
It meant many things, that firm and beautiful voice--hope in the darkest
hour for thousands of dying souls, a noble woman's happiness in time of
dire stress and evil temptations and a death worse than the death Judas
died--for Mr. Schuabe the millionaire and Robert Llwellyn the scholar,
taking tea together in the Athenæum Club three hundred miles away in
London.
"--_by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of
this night_."
Mr. Philemon returned with a taper, an old and wrinkled acolyte, in time
with his loud and sonorous AMEN.