Numbers were swelling now, and the street preacher, shaking back his long hair, drew a premonitory, wavering chord from his melodeon, and struck up a gospel song:
"My days are gliding swiftly by, And I, a pilgrim stranger, Would not detain them as they fly, These hours of toil and danger. For Oh, we tread on Jordan's strand, Our friends are passing over, And just before the shining shore We may almost discover."
The song ended, he mounted his camp-stool to propound his usual fiery text.
The watcher by the steps was gazing with a strange, alert intentness. Something in the scene--the spluttering, dripping flame, the music, the forensic earnestness of the pilgrim--held him enthralled. The dormant sense that in the recent weeks had again and again stirred at some elusive touch of memory, was throbbing. Since last night, with its sudden lightning flash of the past that had faded again into blankness, he had been as sensitive as a photographic plate.
Hallelujah Jones knew the melodramatic value of contrast. As his mood called, he passed abruptly from exhortation to song, from prayer to fulmination, and he embellished his harangue with anecdotes drawn from his lifelong campaign against the Arch-Enemy of Souls. Of what he had said the solitary observer had been quite unconscious. It was the _ensemble_--the repetition of something experienced somewhere before--that appealed to him. Suddenly, however, a chance phrase pierced to his understanding.
Another moment and he was leaning forward, his eyes fixed, his breath straining at his breast. For each word of the speaker now was knocking a sledge-hammer blow upon the blank wall in his brain. Hallelujah Jones had launched into the recital of an incident which had become the _chef d'ouvre_ of his repertory--a story which, though the stern charge of a bishop had kept him silent as to name and locality, yet, possessing the vividness of an actual experience, had lost little in the telling. It was the tale of an evening when he had peered through the tilted window of a chapel, and seen its dissolute rector gambling on the table of the Lord.
Back in the shadow the listener, breathless and staring, saw the scene unroll like the shifting slide of a stereopticon--the epitaph on his own dead self. Nerve and muscle and brain tightened as if to withstand a shock, for the man who moved through the pictures was himself! He saw the cards and counters falling on the table, the entrance of the two intruding figures, heard Hugh's wild laugh as he fled, and the grate of the key in the lock behind him as he stood in his study. He heard the rush of the wind past the motor-car, the rustle of dry corn in the hedges, and felt the mist beating on his bare head--