Lord Bellina looked helplessly at Levison for a moment. The elder man rose to the occasion.

"Let"s get to business," he said; "something must be done."

The woman nodded eagerly and quickly, and with the same unnatural glitter in her eyes.

"Have you seen any of the papers?" Levison said.

She shook her head.

"Well, Bally and I have been going through them, and, what"s more, we have been seeing a whole lot of people, and getting various extra opinions. You know that I can say without boasting in the least that there are very few men in London who know the popular taste as I do.

I"ve made my success by realizing exactly what London will do and think just a day or two before it has made up its own mind. I have never made a mistake. I won"t bother you now with an account of how I have arrived at my present conclusion. It is enough to say that I am certain of it, and that it is this:

"There is not the slightest doubt that if this man Joseph continues in his pleasant little games--you see, I speak without heat--theatrical business in London will be ruined for months. There is going to be a great wave of religious enthusiasm all over the place. This man--Joseph he calls himself--is going to lead it. The man is an extraordinary one.

He has a personality and a force greater, probably, than any living person in Europe to-day. There is no doubt about it. You, my dear Mimi, will have to forego your nightly triumphs. Public opinion will hound you off the stage and shut up my theatre, or compel me to let it as a mission-hall for ten pounds a night! As for you, Bellina, you will have to retire to your estates in Galway, and superintend the potato crop, and take an intelligent interest in the brood of the Irish national animal--the pig in short, Bally!"

Although he spoke jauntily enough, there was a deep vein of bitterness and sincerity underlying the Jew"s words. He watched the faces of his two listeners with a quick and cunning scrutiny.

Mimi Addington spoke.

"You"ve hit the mark, Andrew," she said, in a low voice, in which there was a curious hissing quality--"you"ve hit the mark, as you always do.

What you"ve said is perfectly true. I know it and feel it."

Her eyes blazed, and she put one white and shapely hand up to the ivory column of her throat, wrestling with the agony of hysteria and hate, which once more threatened to master her. With a great effort of will, she calmed herself, and went on speaking.

"But all this, Andrew, depends upon one little word, "if.""

Lord Bellina looked quickly at Levison, with a glance which seemed to say that they had already arrived at precisely the same conclusion.

"That"s it," he said; "there is always that little word, "if.""

There was a dead silence in the little room, and three faces, pale and full of sinister purpose, sought each other in a horrid trio of hate.

The girl"s face was as it had been from the first, unredeemed evil. The countenance of the young peer had changed from its usual vacuous and dissipated weakness into something which, bad as it was, had still a quality of strength. He had sat cowering in the theatre while the terrible denunciation of the evangelist had laid bare the secrets of his life. And although he did not outwardly show how hard he had been hit, his resentment was no less furious though less vulgarly expressed, than that of Mimi.

The Israelite gave no indication of his inward feelings. In truth, they were of a quite different nature from those of the other two. He lived for two purposes. One was to make money, the other was to enjoy himself; he saw now that his money-making was menaced, and that his enjoyment would be spoiled--unless--

Mimi Addington became suddenly quite calm and business-like. She realized that she was in perfect accord with the other two.

"Now let"s get to work," she said. "This Joseph must be got rid of at once. It can be done, I suppose, if we pay enough."

"Quite so," said Mr. Levison. "It now only remains to form ourselves into a committee of ways and means."

CHAPTER XIV

THE WARNING

Like a bell the preacher"s voice rang through the crowded church.

After the delivery of the solemn and menacing text of warning, Joseph began, suddenly and swiftly, without any of the usual preliminary plat.i.tudes with which so many preachers in all the churches commence their addresses.

"I look down upon you and see you with an inward and spiritual vision.

And to me, you men and women in your wealth, your temporal power, your beauty, your curiosity and your sin, seem as a vast Slough of Despond.

"I need no such fantastic images, powerful and skilful as they may be, by means of which Dante or Milton portrayed the horrors of h.e.l.l, to show me a horror more real and terrible than any of which they wrote. This is the City of Dreadful Night. It is the Modern Babylon, where Christendom, corrupt both in state and in society, sits by many waters, and speaks in her heart, and boasts, "I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow."

"Sin and Satan exercise a terrible dominion, unG.o.dliness and debauchery accompany them, for Babylon is the abode of all unclean spirits.

"And in this church, you men and women to whom I am speaking now represent in your very persons no small portion of the army of wickedness which rules London and fattens upon its corruption."

He paused for a moment, looking down from his high place with a pale face, burning eyes, and a hand outstretched in condemnation.

There was a soft, universal, and perceptible noise of movement, which rose and ceased. Then all was silent again. With their eyes fixed steadfastly on Joseph, no one had seen the vicar half rise from his seat in the chancel, with a scared look upon his face, and a sudden deprecatory movement of his arm.

The preacher resumed:--

"In a very short time--for some of you the time is shorter than you dream of--for to-night G.o.d has revealed much to me--you will all be dead. The feasting, and the folly, and the fun, and the lying and the drinking and the l.u.s.t will all be over for you, and you will answer for what you have done.

"This is what I tell you to have constantly in your minds while I am speaking to you to-night. You may think in your blindness, in your folly, that I am exaggerating the evil of the time, the monstrous wickedness of London, for which you and people like you are largely responsible. Delude yourself with no such vain imagining, for I speak to you as the amba.s.sador of the Most High G.o.d, and to-night you shall hear me.

"The signs of the time are unmistakable. London has come to the worship of the image of the beast, of the human spirit, which has apostatized from G.o.d, and made itself G.o.d. You have fallen into strong delusions, into which the Lord suffers all to fall who have not received the truth in the love of it, that they might be saved. You worship that which the inspired words of the Bible call the "beast" because it denies what is truly human, and, with all its culture and civilization, is more and more tending to degrade humanity.

"All who see with the eye of the Spirit know that atheistic and materialistic systems, denying G.o.d and the existence of the Spirit, and based upon a purely physical view of existence, and atheistic literature, which by its poetry, fictions, and romances, diffuses the Gospel of the flesh among the ma.s.ses, grow daily, and are triumphant.

The words of Revelation have come true, and out of the mouth of the dragon and out of the false prophet have proceeded the three unclean spirits, like frogs. These creatures of the swamp, the mire, and the mora.s.s are among you. Their croaking, powerless as it is in itself, yet produces a sound which penetrates, and is heard all around; repeating the same thing day after day, deluding men, and bringing them into the right state of mind for the service of Antichrist.

"You call yourselves Christians. You are here in a church, and the presence of most of you is the most grim and ghastly mockery that the finite mind can possibly conceive.

"Day by day in this holy temple of the Blessed Trinity G.o.d Incarnate comes down upon the altar yonder as the priest says the words of Consecration--those incredibly wonderful five words which put the Blessed Body of our Lord under the white species of the Host. Only this morning many of you heard those

_Jewels five words long That on the outstretched forefinger of all time, Sparkle for ever._

Next Sunday, it may be, you will hear them again, as you heard them last Sunday. Yet you live for evil pleasure still.

"When you think at all, you delude yourselves into imagining you are worshipping G.o.d, when you are taking a fitful interest in a ceremony which means no more to you than a ceremony. You come here for an hour in the morning of one day of the week, your minds full of worldly pleasures and the memories of your pleasant sins. You listen to the words of the Bible in your comfortable seats, and think how quaint, far off, and unreal they are. With a languid mental smile you hear of the devil and the evil spirits who walk up and down the City seeking whom they may devour. You would not smile if you were to take a short journey from this church into the devil"s country, the East End of London--if now, with one accord, you were to drive in your carriages to those places where the air is heavy with ceaseless curses, where hideous disease and uncleanliness that you cannot even imagine, stalk hand in hand with famine, despair, and unmentionable horrors of vice.

"You would believe then, perhaps, that the devil still goes about the streets of London doing his work.

"I tell you this without any possibility of mistake, that you are the servants of Satan, and that in your lives you have enrolled yourselves under the black banners of h.e.l.l.

"And more especially than all, you are hypocrites. Outwardly all is fair and of good report until, as happens now and then, your lives are laid bare to the world in some hideous scandal. You go to church, your names are seen upon the lists of those societies which endeavor to ameliorate the life of the downtrodden and the oppressed. But what personal service do most of you give to the cause of the G.o.d in whom you confess to believe? You live for pleasure, and you are hypocrites.

"Hypocrisy occurs in all the relations of your life; in the daily intercourse between man and man, when friendship is feigned; in the political sphere, when tyrants and self-seekers pretend a deep care for Fatherland, and thereby lead men according to their design. In art and science you are hypocrites, pretending a pure unselfish love to the higher ideal, when self-gratification is all you look for; incense is offered to the idols of the time, and pleasure is alone the end and aim, the Alpha and Omega of existence.

"You are as "trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars."

"And all around you London grows worse and worse, while it is from its corruption and from its misery that your sordid pleasures are distilled.