‘But when did you last see him, Reverend?’
‘In his unrepentant flesh? The day before yesterday. He came with a young woman.’
‘With a young woman?’
‘The old recreant must have added Lust to Gluttony and Sloth in his list of deadly sins. Like the women we saw at the door just now, she was a harlot.’
‘Why did he come here, Reverend? Why should he wish to parade his sins before you?’
‘He came first to the Tabernacle some months ago. In a state of inebriation.’ Dwight twisted his face into an expression of distaste. ‘He wanted to join our congregation. I told him to return when the light of reason had once more been lit within the darkness of his soul.’
‘And did he come back when he was sober?’
‘He did. And in a moment of weakness brought on by an overabundance of God’s celestial charity, I allowed him to attend our services.’
‘And that was a mistake?’
Dwight made no reply. He returned instead to his spiritual barometer and stared fixedly at it, as if in hope of discovering an answer to the question. Adam began to wonder whether or not the reverend had quite forgotten him.
‘The Lord demands that we should strive to ignore as much as possible the concerns of our all too perishable flesh,’ Dwight said eventually. ‘Jinkinson did no such striving. The man was an indurate and incorrigible sinner.’
Were we not, Adam asked himself, all sinners? And was the object of religion not to redeem us from our sins and their consequences? Did missions such as this one not exist to save sinners from themselves and accept them into fellowship? Yet the Reverend Dwight appeared to have other ideas about the purpose of his Tabernacle.
‘Would I be correct in assuming,’ Adam asked, ‘that it was Mr Jinkinson’s drinking to which you most objected, Reverend?’
From the evidence of his own words and the writing on his spiritual barometer, there seemed little doubt that the minister had a particular animus against alcohol.
‘Strong liquor makes woeful wrecks of men, sir. Ay, and of women, too.’ Fine words, it seemed, rarely deserted Dwight. Perhaps, Adam speculated, they were present even when careful thought was not immediately forthcoming. The minister was now well launched on the waves of his own oratory.
‘Oh! Thou invisible spirit of drink,’ he roared at Adam, gazing at the young man as though he might be the power he was addressing, ‘if thou hast no other name to go by, let us call thee Devil.’
Adam prepared himself to endure more blasts of the reverend’s rhetoric but Dwight turned abruptly on his heel and marched towards a door to the left of what he had called his communion table.
‘I shall be with you again shortly,’ he bellowed over his shoulder as he pulled open the door and disappeared through it.
Waiting for Dwight to return, Adam examined the prints that were hanging on the wall opposite the spiritual barometer. Most were illustrative of the dangers of strong drink. A woman sank to the floor holding her brow as a bearded gentleman with a glint in his eye drank furiously from a bottle. Small children clutched the legs of their father in fruitless efforts to keep him from entering a public house. The same father expired in a garret room stripped bare of furniture as wife and children wept in the corner. Death and degradation, it seemed, were the inevitable fates awaiting those who took too great an interest in the delights to be found in a bottle of gin.
The minister had now re-emerged from whatever back room he had visited. He hastened towards Adam, clutching a bundle of papers in his hands, and thrust them towards him.
‘You will find these of interest, Mr Carver. Would that that scapegrace Jinkinson had taken the trouble to read them.’
Without thinking, Adam took what Dwight was offering him. It was a pile of perhaps half a dozen small pamphlets.
‘Several small disquisitions I have written on the workings of grace,’ the reverend gentleman said, a modest pride in authorship evident in his voice. ‘Privately printed, of course. But I believe that reading them may help a man take his first uncertain footsteps on the path towards salvation.’
‘You are very kind, reverend.’ Adam could see no option but to take the booklets. He squinted at one of the titles. ‘What We Must Do To Be Saved,’ it read. ‘I shall lose no time in perusing them.’ He tucked the minister’s literature awkwardly under one arm. ‘But can you tell me no more about the man Jinkinson?’
‘I have told you all I know, sir. The sinner came here. I showed him the light of the Lord. He turned his back upon that light and retreated once more into the darkness. There is no more to be said.’
Adam fumbled in his jacket pocket. ‘Perhaps I can leave you something in return.’ He held out his card to Dwight, one of several he had hidden in the darker recesses of Quint’s fustian suit before leaving Doughty Street. Dwight took it and turned it over in his hand, as if he had never before seen a calling card and was unsure what it might be.
‘One further question, reverend, and then I shall leave you in peace. Does the word “Euphorion” mean anything to you?’
‘Euphorion?’ Dwight was still twisting the card in his hand. ‘That is Greek, surely?’
‘A Greek name, I think. Perhaps a poet.’
‘I fear my knowledge of Greek is limited, Mr Carver. So, too, is my knowledge of poetry. I have no time to think of dactyls and spondees when unhappy souls come daily to the door of my Tabernacle in search of spiritual nourishment.’
‘Of course not. I quite understand that you are a busy man, Reverend. I must apologise for taking up so much of your Sunday afternoon.’
Adam, reaching up to doff his hat to Dwight in farewell, remembered at the last moment that he was bare-headed and transformed his movement into an awkward salute. The minister bowed his head slightly in response. Adam turned and made his way out of the Tabernacle of the All-Conquering Saviour and into Whitecross Street. It had not, he thought, been a particularly successful visit. He was little more knowledgeable about Jinkinson’s whereabouts than he had been earlier in the day. It was time to make his way back to Doughty Street.
‘What’s the ’oly roller got to say for himself, then?’ Quint asked, as he ushered his master into the sitting room.
‘Nothing very illuminating. He knows Jinkinson and disapproves of him heartily. But he doesn’t know where he is. He believes him to be an awful example of the destructive powers of the demon drink. The Reverend Dwight has a strong objection to the demon drink.’
Quint grunted and raised his eyes to the ceiling. ‘Another of them interfering bastards as wants to snatch the working man’s beer out of his hands, then.’ He spoke as if the interfering bastards might be hiding behind the furniture in the rooms, waiting to leap out and seize his tankard. ‘I hate ’em.’
‘Probably. But he is firmly of the belief that he is doing work the Lord has called him to do.’
‘I particularly ’ate the buggers as reckons they’ve got Gawd Almighty on their side.’
‘Certainly Dwight seems to assume a high degree of intimacy with the Lord of Hosts. Like the Prince of Preachers, Mr Spurgeon, he has the habit of addressing Him as if He were sitting at the back of the meeting room and cheering his every word.’
Quint decided there was no more to be said of the Reverend Dwight. Instead, he handed Adam a letter and a telegram. ‘This ’ere missive come with the one o’clock post,’ he said as the two men walked into the sitting room.
‘What about the telegram?’
‘The boy brought it about ’alf an hour since. ’E was wanting to wait for a reply but I told ’im you wasn’t around.’