“COMING.”
George Carlyon’s entrance, the arrival of the afternoon mail, and the
telegram gave Madge Finisterre an opportunity to escape. George Carlyon
was anxious to leave, and Madge rose at once to accompany him.
Tom Hammond did not press them to stay, for he, too, felt awkward. The
friends shook hands. The eyes of Madge and Hammond met for one instant.
Each face flushed under the power of the other’s glance.
When the door had closed upon them, Tom went back to his old place by the
table, his eyes involuntarily sweeping the whole apartment. He smiled as
he suddenly realized how empty the room now seemed. His glance rested
upon the tea-tray, and he rang for the lad Charlie.
“Clear all this away, Charlie, please,” he began. Then with a smile he
said, “You will find a capital cup of tea in that pot.”
The boy grinned. At his first glance at the tray he had mentally decided
that he would be able to have a rare feast. A couple of minutes, and the
boy had gone.
Tom Hammond gathered up his mail, and was about to drop into his ordinary
seat, when he remembered the rocker. With a smile at Madge’s occupancy of
the chair, he dropped into it.
For fully five minutes he sat still thinking, reviewing all the
circumstances of the peculiar situation upon which the unexpected coming
of George Carlyon had broken. He asked himself whether he was really in
love with the fair Madge, and whether he would have proposed to her if
her cousin had not so unexpectedly turned up? He made no definite reply
to his own questioning, but turned to his mail.
The telegram he had opened at once on its receipt. He turned now to the
letters. He had opened all but two. The last one was addressed in a
woman’s hand-writing. Breaking the envelope, he took out the letter, and
turned first to the signature on the fourth page.
“Millicent Joyce,” he read. “Millicent Joyce?” he repeated. Unconsciously
he had laid his emphasis on the “Millicent,” and he forgot the “Joyce.”
But suddenly it came to him that the letter was from Mrs. Joyce, the
woman whom he had helped to save from drowning on the night of that
memorable day when the great chance of his life had come to him.
“Poor soul!” he muttered. “I wonder what she has written about?” The next
instant he was reading the letter.
Tom Hammond cast his eyes over the letter which Mrs. Joyce had sent him,
and which ran thus:
“Dear Sir,
“I gave you my word that if ever I was in special trouble or
need I would write, or come to you for help.
“I did not promise you, however, that if any great joy or
blessing should come to me, that I would let you know. I don’t
think I believed any joy could ever possibly come into my life
again. But joy and wondrous gladness have come into my life,
and in an altogether unexpected way.
“You will remember how I said to you in parting, that morning,
that your strong, cheery words had given me a clearer view of
God than any sermon I had ever listened to. That impression
deepened rather than diminished when I got home. My husband,
I heard, had been sent to Wandsworth Prison for a month, for
assaulting the police when drunk.
“And in this month of quiet from his brutalities, the great joy
of my life came to me. I began to attend religious services
from the very first night after my return home. I went to
church, chapel, mission hall, and Salvation Army.
“One night I went to the hall of the Mission for Railway Men. A
lady was speaking that night, and God found me, and saved me.
All that I had ever heard from my dear father’s lips, when he
preached about conversion, came back to me, and that night I
passed from death to life.
“The subject of the address was ‘The Coming of the Lord.’ I
listened in amazement as the lady speaker declared that, for
this age, God evidently meant that this truth of the near
coming of Christ should have almost, if not quite, the most
prominent place in all public preaching.
“I was startled to hear her say that there were nearly three
hundred direct references to the second coming of Christ in the
Gospels and Epistles, and that there were thus more than double
the number of references to that subject than even to that of
salvation through the blood of the Atonement.
“With her Bible in her hand, she turned readily to a score of
passages as illustrations of her statement, and all through her
address she never made a statement without backing it up by
Scripture. One thing she said laid a tremendous grip upon me,
and led me to an immediate decision for Christ: she said, ‘How
often is the possibility of sudden death advanced by a preacher
as an incentive to unsaved souls to yield to God!
“‘But how poor an argument is that compared with the near
approach of Christ! Sudden death might come to one person in
a congregation before twenty-four hours, but in a sense, that
would touch that one person only. But if Christ came to take up
His people from the earth—the dead in Christ from their graves,
the living from their occupations, etc.,—this would affect
every unsaved soul in every part of the country, of the world,
even.’”
Tom Hammond paused in his reading.
“What on earth can she mean?” he murmured, under his breath. Then he went
on from the letter:
“I gave myself up to God there and then, Mr. Hammond, and am
seeking now to live so that, should Christ come, even before I
finish this letter, I may be ready to be caught up to meet Him
in the air.”
Hammond paused again.
“What can the woman mean?” he murmured again. With the letter held in
his hand, his eyes became fixed upon space, his mind was searching for
something that he had recently heard or read bearing on this strange
topic. The clue seemed almost within grasp, yet for awhile he could not
recall it.
Suddenly it came to him. A volume of poems had been sent to him for
review, amid the excitement of the second day’s issue of “The Courier.”
He had glanced rapidly through the book, had written a brief line for his
paper, acknowledging the receipt of the book, and promising to refer to
it fully at some later date.
“That book,” he mused, “had something in it about—about——”
He got up from the rocker, took his place at his table, then wheeled
about slowly in his revolving chair, and began searching his book-case.
In an instant his keen eye picked out the volume he sought. He wheeled
round again to his table, the book in his hand.
He turned a moment to the title-page. “Ezekiel and Other Poems,” he read.
“By B. M.”
“B. M.,” he mused, “Whom have I heard writes under those initials? Ah! I
remember! Mrs. Miller.—Barbara Miller.”
He ran the gilt-edged leaves rapidly through his practised fingers, his
quick eye catching enough of the running pages to satisfy him. Suddenly
he paused in his search. His eye had lit upon what he sought, and he
began to read:
“COMING.”
“At even, or at midnight, or at the cock-crowing, or in the
morning.”
“It may be in the evening,
When the work of the day is done,
And you have time to sit in the twilight
And watch the sinking sun,
While the long, bright day dies slowly
Over the sea,
And the hour grows quiet and holy
With thoughts of Me;
While you hear the village children
Passing along the street,
Among those thronging footsteps
May come the sound of My feet.
“Therefore I tell you, ‘Watch,’
By the light of the evening star,
When the room is growing dusky
As the clouds afar;
Let the door be on the latch
In your home,
For it may be through the gloaming
I will come.”
He paused in his reading for a moment, for, like a voice near by, the
drone of that blind beggar’s reading came to him, as he had heard it that
day on the embankment.
“This same Jesus shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go.”
“I remember,” he mused, “how that sentence arrested me. My mind was
utterly pre-occupied a moment before, but that wondrous sentence pierced
my pre-occupation.”
His eyes dropped to the poem again, and he read on:—
“It may be when midnight
Is heavy on the land,
And the black waves lying dumbly
Along the sand;
When the moonless night draws close,
And the lights are out in the house;
When the fires burn low and red,
And the watch is ticking loudly
Beside the bed.
Though you sleep, tired out, on your couch,
Still your heart must wake and watch
In the dark room;
For it may be that at midnight
I will come.”
He read rapidly, but more eagerly interested each moment. The next
section he scarcely paused upon, but the fourth he lingered over, and
then read it the second time:
“It may be in the morning,
When the sun is bright and strong,
And the dew is glittering sharply
Over the little lawn;
When the waves are laughing loudly
Along the shore,
And the little birds sing sweetly
About the door;
With the long day’s work before you,
You rise up with the sun,
And the neighbours come in to talk a little
Of all that must be done:
But remember that I may be the next
To come in at the door,
To call you from your busy work
For evermore.
As you work, your heart must watch,
For the door is on the latch
In your room,
And it may be in the morning
I will come.”
He read on with a strange, breathless interest the next two pages of
poem, then, with a sudden sense of hush upon him, he went carefully over
the concluding lines:
“So I am watching quietly
Every day.
Whenever the sun shines brightly,
I rise and say,
‘Surely it is the shining of His face!’
And look unto the gates of His high place
Beyond the sea,
For I know He is coming shortly
To summon me.
And when a shadow falls across the window
Of my room,
Where I am working my appointed task,
I lift my head to watch the door, and ask
If He is come;
And the angel answers sweetly
In my home:
‘Only a few more shadows,
And He will come.’”
The face of Tom Hammond, as he laid down the book, was full of a strange,
new perplexity. “Strange, very!” he muttered. “Do you know Joyce, Mr.
Simpson?” Hammond asked a reporter. “He used to be on the staff of the——”
“‘Daily Tatler,’” cried the man. “Knew him well years ago, sir. Old
school-fellows, in fact. Got wrong with the drink, sir. Gone to the
dogs, and——”
“Have you seen or heard anything of him this last month, Mr. Simpson?”
“Yes, sir. He’s grown worse than ever. Magistrate at Bow Street,
committing him for three days, said fellow ought to be put in Broadmoor.
Pity his poor wife, sir. Perfect lady, sir.”
“You know Mrs. Joyce, then?” Hammond queried.
The reporter sighed, “Rather, sir! Wished a thousand times I could have
had her for a wife, and he’d had mine. I should have had a happier life.
And he——”
The man laughed grimly. “Well, he’d have had a tartar!”
Hammond had heard something about the shrewish wife Simpson had
unfortunately married. But he had learned all he wanted to know, so
dismissed the poor, ill-married fellow.
“I think I must call upon Mrs. Joyce, and learn more about this strange
matter of the coming Christ,” he told himself.
He copied the address from the head of the letter into his pocket-book,
then turned to the last letter of his mail.
This proved to be a comparatively short letter, but, to Hammond, a
deeply-interesting one. It was signed “Abraham Cohen,” and the writer
explained that he was a Jew, who had taken the “Courier” from the very
first number, and had not only become profoundly interested in the recent
utterances of the editor in the “Prophet’s Chamber” column, but he had,
for some days, been impressed with the desire to write to the “Prophet.”
“Will you pardon me, sir,” the letter went on, “if I say that
it would be to your immense advantage, now that your mind has
become aroused to the facts and history of our race, if you
would get in touch with some really well-read, intelligent
Jew who knows our people well, knows their history, past,
present, and future, as far as the latter can be known from our
Scriptures and sacred books. Should you care to fall in with my
suggestion, I should be pleased to supply you with the names
and addresses of several good and clever men of our people.
“Yours obediently,
“ABRAHAM COHEN.”
As he folded the letter slowly, Hammond told himself that there was
something in the letter that drew him towards the writer.
“I will hunt him up, for it is evident that he is as enthusiastic over
his people’s history as he is intelligent. I will see what to-morrow
brings. Now to work.”
He put Cohen’s letter in his pocket, and turned to the hundred and one
editorial claims upon his time.