Barnabas Thorpe stood preaching by the river. He had preached in northern manufacturing towns, where the struggle for life is hard; he had preached by the sea shore, and in little outlying hamlets in the mining districts; but he had spoken nowhere as he spoke to-day in London.

This city, of great wealth and great poverty; of idlers and slaves; these churches, where the rich man sat on cushioned seats, and the poor man on benches hard as charity; these women, with hoarse voices and hungry eyes, who followed him in the streets; these children, for whom the Kingdom of Heaven might indeed be open, but for whom earth had more kicks than blessings—all these stung him to a passionate eloquence that almost touched despair.

Did Luxury never look backwards over her shoulder at the black misery treading close at her heel? he wondered. Would the men of Sodom and Gomorrah rise up in judgment on this place?

Perhaps (though he did not know it, being little given to analysis), a sharp personal want pointed his realisation of the contrast between the Dives and the Lazarus of London; for his wife at this moment was with her father.

He stood on a barrel by the water's edge—the Thames was neither sweet nor clean at Stepney—and preached of Heaven in the midst of, what seemed to him, an uncommonly good imitation of hell.

It was a close evening; but there was a fine drizzling rain falling, that damped everything except the preacher's ardour, which always burnt more fiercely for opposition, either physical or moral.

Even without his barrel he would have been a head taller than most of his hearers. His vigorous manhood was in strong contrast to the stunted specimens of riverside humanity gathered round him—under-sized, unhealthy youths, who looked as if they had done nothing but "loaf" from the day they were born; girls with straight fringes, and paper feathers stuck in their hats, and just a sprinkling of navvies, a burlier and more hopeful, though brutal, element.

Barnabas Thorpe's voice rang through the heavy air, and all these faces were upturned towards him, as if under a spell. To his left stood a group of swarthy-complexioned foreign sailors; black-haired, with earrings in their ears. One of them wore a saffron-coloured handkerchief round his throat, and had a green parrot on his wrist; he made a spot of brightness in the prevailing dun colour of the crowd.

Probably these strangers understood hardly one word in ten of that vehement discourse, delivered with a strong L——shire drawl; but they also listened, as if something in the man's personality, the something stronger than words, held their attention.

With those closely packed squalid houses on the one side of him; with the slowly flowing river, whose waters had given the quietus to so many a miserable body (as for the desperate souls, God only knew what had become of them), on the other, he painted that second coming, when the glory of the Lord shall flash from East to West, and His judgment shall tarry no longer.

There was a mark on the preacher's left shoulder where some one had playfully thrown a rotten egg at him, and a cut across his forehead, to which he put his handkerchief once or twice; both were visible signs that, in spite of the present breathless lull, Barnabas was not likely to suffer from too much adulation. Indeed, he was a fighter born, and it was, perhaps, the impress of strenuous effort that made his rugged face a striking and rather refreshing sight in the midst of men who looked, for the most part, as if the beast had decidedly got the better of the angel in them.

He stood bare-headed, his hand stretched out, his gaunt figure silhouetted against the leaden sky, pleading with passionate force. He felt the misery of London too strong for him at times; the atmosphere oppressed him both mentally and physically; but the very sense of oppression made preaching a relief. Better wear himself out striving against this horror, than acquiesce, letting it stifle and choke him.

There was a stir, a movement; the preacher lost hold of his audience. Suddenly, as the snapping of the thread of a necklace which has been strained tight sends each bead a different way, so attention was snapt, the spell broken.

The preacher, looking over the heads of the people, saw, first, a confused mass of jeering, struggling lads, coming towards him, shouting hoarsely; then, that they had in their midst some poor creature whom they were baiting mercilessly, some one either drunk or mad; then, that they scattered a little to the right and left, and the man (he could see it was a man now) had broken loose and made a dash forward, panting and stumbling.

Instinctively, Barnabas shouted encouragingly, and jumping off his barrel, held out his hands. He could never, for the life of him, keep clear of a fray—especially if it were a case of overwhelming odds.

The victim, when he heard the shout, looked up; his face ghastly, his eyes wide open, with the strained, agonised look of a hunted hare. His persecutors were closing on him again; when, with an inarticulate cry, he shook himself free once more, and, running desperately forward, fell at the preacher's feet, clinging to his knees. "Doan't let them!" he cried; and Barnabas recognised him as Timothy.

For one moment the preacher hesitated; he had a horror of the man.

Then, "They'll shut me up!" cried Timothy; and there was a ring of mortal terror in his voice.

Barnabas himself would, any day, have preferred to face death to a long imprisonment. He freed himself from Timothy's grasp, and stepped between hunter and hunted.

"I think ye should be 'shamed!" he said. "Ha' ye nought better to do than to hound that poor creature to death or to Bedlam? which, happen, is a deal worse! Let him be; he's past doin' any harm. Any way, ye'll ha' to do wi' me first."

There was a pause; the united strength of all this riff-raff would, probably, have been more than a match for the preacher; but no one quite cared to be the first to make the rush and "do wi' him".

A big coalheaver in the background shouted derisively: "A nice, white-livered set you are! Blessed if the Methody ain't a match for all of you!"

And then, all at once, the group broke up and scuttled away, dividing itself among the labyrinth of squalid streets that sloped down to the river; and tramp, tramp, with heavy, warning steps, in their tightly buttoned swallow-tail coats and white trousers, came a detachment of four City police, who promptly arrested Barnabas for making a disturbance, and Timothy for being drunk, on the king's highway.

"That he's not," remarked the preacher. "He's got too little, not too much, aboard this time."

But he went to the police station without remonstrance, for he didn't mean to lose sight of Timothy.

Certainly Barnabas ought to have had enough of taking uncalled-for responsibilities on his shoulders; but there were some simple lessons which Dame Experience never could teach him, though she tried her hardest, and punished him well for his denseness in learning. He never could turn a deaf ear to a cry for mercy, nor refrain from burning his own fingers in attempts to save other people's from fire. If his doctrines were narrow, his pity was wide. It is a combination of characteristics that gives an infinity of trouble—especially to the owner.

Timothy complicated matters by dropping on the floor of the police station in an exhausted heap; but the officer in charge, having at last arrived at the conclusion that the idiot was ill, not drunk, and that the preacher had protected, not assaulted him, dismissed both with a warning; and Barnabas found himself saddled with this most unprepossessing incubus, whose present helplessness was his only recommendation.

It was as well, after all, that Margaret was not with him, he reflected; he could not have borne to have had Timothy under the same roof with her. The preacher had said many times, in the course of his experiences in London, that it was "as well"; and said it with a sigh.

He lodged at this time in one of the streets turning out of Commercial Road. He always seemed to have an extraordinary knack of getting employment. His fingers, which never held money long, were seldom at a loss in making it; and, perhaps, his luck had something to do with the fact that no one ever forgot him, his personality being so strongly marked.

He had made one friend in London during that short visit fifteen years before, namely Giles Potter, rat catcher, bird fancier, and bird stuffer; and some people whispered dog stealer as well. Why the tipsy, jolly, old reprobate was so fond of the preacher, of all men, no one ever knew.

The Barnabas Thorpe of the present, with his fanatical and water-drinking earnestness, who preached in season and out of season, would seem to have little to do with the desperate and crack-brained young sailor, whom Giles had held back from murdering the man who had robbed him of his sweetheart in the winter of 1834; but Giles had recognised and welcomed him.

The preacher worked all day in the back room of 33 Walton Street, curing and stuffing with fingers that were a good deal steadier than his companion's, and in grave silence for the most part, till the light faded, when he would go out into the streets to preach; all the suppressed energy of those long hours in a close atmosphere finding vent in sermons that attracted larger crowds daily, and were beginning to be talked about, even in the West End. Giles would go to hear him sometimes; a disreputable, slouching old figure, in a rough fur cap; a figure with loose thick lips and stubbled chin and kindly merry black eyes.

"Lord bless you, I always knew Barnabas had something queer inside him!" he would say; "but I didn't reckon it would take this shape. To think of him turning Methody! But he was bound to be something. If he hadn't turned saint, he'd have swung from the gallows by now; he's the sort who serves any master hard, whether it's God, or the devil! Let's drink to his being made archbishop! He'd wake them all up a bit."

Giles drank to that end pretty often, and Barnabas did the work meanwhile: the business had not been so flourishing for years.

Possibly it was out of consideration for those services, or, possibly, because, with all his faults, a kinder-hearted old rascal never breathed, that Giles, after much grumbling, allowed Barnabas to bring Timothy under his roof.

"You'll repent it, Barnabas!" he said. "Mark my words, we shall have an inquest and no end of bother; and you'll wish you had taken good advice, which is always as much wasted on you as good beer. That's as evil-looking a sneak as ever I saw, and he's capable of dying on purpose to spite you. Bring him in, if you're a fool; but you'll live to repent it!"

Something in the words made the preacher's careworn face graver still.

"Happen I may," he said. "He said as bad luck was following me, but I ain't goin' to be stopped by that."

"Best turn him out again to make his ill prophecies in the gutter," said Giles crossly.

The two men were standing in the doorway now, Barnabas having deposited Timothy on his own bed upstairs, and come down to breathe the cool night air.

In Commercial Road the shops and warehouses were still alight; he could hear the continual roar of the traffic, but this little off-street was nearly dark, and the battered figure-head of a ship gleamed ghostly and white in the yard. The preacher stretched himself wearily and then smiled.

"That old Miranda must feel precious queer here," said he. He stepped into the yard, and put his hand on it. He had been sickened by what he had been hearing; his patient, in mortal terror of death, had been pouring forth a crazy confession of iniquities that made the preacher's brain reel, though he had heard a good many "confessions" before now.

Was it possible that any human being could really have committed all these unspeakable horrors, or were they the mad imaginings of a diseased brain? And was Timothy possessed by an unclean spirit, like the people in the Bible whom the Christ cured?

Barnabas at that moment felt that it would be easier to pray for fire from Heaven to destroy, than for healing power to save. Surely it was time for that second coming that should purge the world of its sins! How he hated this place!

Then the touch of the figure-head under his hand brought him a vision of nights at sea; the hum of the great vans in Commercial Road changed to the sound of water, and his soul was refreshed. The everlasting power he had felt near in the salt strength of the sea, in the solemn wideness of his native marshes, in the cold stillness of many an early morning among the hills, was alive still. His heart went out to the strong Maker of all things, with a cry for strength.

"What are you thinking of?" said Giles.

"I was thinking," said the preacher, "that if I was never to see the country again, still I'd ha' been luckier than most o' the people here, seein' I've been bred in it. An' that I've been an unprofitable servant, too easy disgusted and weary in His service; that I've been given much an' done little. I've had a near sight o' the Maker as town folk miss; an' yet I ha' been cold an' out o' heart. I've been thinkin' I'll do more if He'll show me how."

Giles put his head on one side, like a wise old bird, and peered up at Barnabas through the gathering gloom.

"I wouldn't say that if I was you," he remarked. "Don't you be righteous overmuch; it ain't safe."

But the preacher went back to his post with fresh zeal.

Timothy was sitting upright, staring and pointing wildly at a corner of the room; he shrieked to Barnabas to come and stand between him and "it".

It was curious how, in his extremity, with the terror of death before him, he clung to Barnabas, whom he had always feared and hated, as the only person capable of exorcising the horrors that surrounded him. Barnabas lighted a candle and examined the corner.

"There's naught there!" he said.

"It's shifted; it wur afeart o' ye; it's behind me now!" cried Timothy. "It's makin' signs; it's pointin' to its head, and I didn't go to kill him. I only meant—it's comin' nearer—doan't, doan't! Ah!—--"

There was another agonised shriek. Timothy tried to spring out of bed, the drops of sweat standing on his forehead.

Barnabas put his hands on the madman's shoulders and forced him back. This sort of thing had been going on at intervals for the last three hours, and the preacher began to feel as if he were the unwilling spectator of the tortures of the damned. Indeed, he believed, almost as firmly as the miserable Timothy, that there was a devil in the room.

"It's no good doing that, man," he said at last, when Timothy made another frantic attempt to hide. "If it's a spirit ye are scared of, ye can't escape it so. If ye ha' done it a wrong, confess afore it's too late; and the Lord will, mayhap, ha' mercy on ye an' lay it."

"You'll not call in any one to shut me up, and I'll tell ye," said Timothy. "I'll be glad to get rid of 'em; but you'll not shut me up! The stones wur burning through my cap into my brain; I see 'em all on fire now—there! blazin' away. Ye must see 'em. Look inside the cap there in the corner, where it's standin' again."

The preacher glanced at Timothy's cloth cap, an ordinary enough article, such as nearly all the L——shire men of that part wore, himself included. He picked it up and shook it. Needless to say, no burning stones fell out. Possibly the whole story was a delusion, but he could not look on at this agony of terror any longer.

"Tell me what ye ha' done, an' ease your mind," he said.

"Ye'll not let me hang: ye'll not tell!" said Timothy. "Swear ye'll not."

"There's no need," said the preacher, "for me to swear, who've never betrayed any man, nor never could. I'll not betray ye."

"It wur the back o' his skull," said Timothy, in an eager whisper; "just here," putting his hand up to indicate the place. "He didn't bleed much, but went down straight; an' I turned him over an' tuk 'em out o' his pocket. I'd think it wur a dream, only he's followed me ever since. That's becos they've not buried him. Ye'll find him two stones' throw from the Pixies' Pond, lyin' very white an' quiet as if there weren't no more mischief in him; but there be; he b'ain't one to forget, an' he's tryin' to drag me to hell. He's makin' signs now. Barnabas, Barnabas, he's——"

"How long ago did ye kill him?" said the preacher.

"Eh? how long? I should think it must ha' been a matter o' ninety-nine years or maybe a hundred. Quite a hundred takin' it all round; what with the time I was hidin' in the marshes, with him allus creepin' round and peepin' behind bushes at me—tho' all the time pretendin' to lie quite stiff, for I kep' goin' back to see—an' the time I was gettin' to town, where they came hollerin' arter me an' said as I was mad. They allus say that, if one speaks the truth."

"So they do," said Barnabas. "So ye knocked a man down in the Caulderwell marsh and robbed him, and ran away and came to London, eh?"

"That's it!" cried Timothy. He leaned forward and caught the preacher's coat, holding him as a drowning man might clutch at an arm stretched out to save.

"An' he won't forget; he's been huntin' me ever since, like a cat a mouse, an' he'll have me this night if ye won't lay him; for I feel him gettin' stronger every minute, an' I'm growin' weaker. He's a bit scared o' ye, but if ye leave me a minute—there, there! he's yammerin' for me from behind that curtain. Oh, doan't let him, for God's sake, Barnabas!"

The poor wretch was shaking from head to foot. The spirit he feared was the mad creation of his own brain; yet, none the less, it was hunting him to death. Barnabas Thorpe stood upright, and lifted up his hands solemnly.

"If there is any evil spirit here," he said, and his voice rang with undoubting conviction, "I bid it begone, in the name of Jesus Christ the Master." Timothy fell back panting, with a look of utter relief.

"Ay, it's gone; I seed it go!" he said.