"And so the very next day was last Friday, the 18th of August?" concluded Carlton with apparent levity.
The witness refused to answer, appealed to the bench, and secured another reprimand for the accused.
"I harp upon that date," said Carlton, "because, as I have already remarked, it seems to have been a fatal date for me. It has arisen so many times in the course of this case! This, however, is not the precise moment for enumerating those occasions; let us first finish with each other. Did you, Sir WiltonGleed, on the eighteenth day of this present month, have separate or collective conversation with the witnesses Busby, Fuller, and Ivey?"
"Yes, I did," said Gleed, hot, white, and glaring.
"Separate or collective? Did you speak to them one at a time or all together?"
"Both, if you like!" cried the witness, wildly. "I can't remember. Better say both!"
"You interviewed these witnesses, separately and collectively, on the very day that the other witness, Frost, laid an information against me before yourself as Justice of the Peace?"
"I said it was that day. You ask the same question again and again!"
The man was fuming, trembling, near to tears or curses of mortification and blind rage.
"I have but two more questions to ask you, and I am done," rejoined Carlton. "Did the witness Fuller tell you of the light in the church, and the witness Ivey of whathesaw later on, during these conversations of the fatal eighteenth?"
"They did."
"And was this the first you had heard of those experiences?"
"It was."
"That is my last question, Sir Wilton Gleed."
The justices put none. Gleed glared at them as he left the box.
"I think," said he, "that this is the most scandalous incident—most disgraceful thing I ever heard of in my life!"
"I quite agree with you," whispered Wilders.
"And I also," said Mr. Preston, in a different tone.
But no word fell from Rhadamanthus. His small eyes did not leave Carlton's face for above one second in the sixty. But their expression was inscrutable.
"May I now claim the indulgence of the court for a very few minutes?" asked the clergyman in the dock.
The clergymen on the bench looked at the clock and at each other. It was already past the hour for luncheon.
"Better go on," urged Preston, "and get it over."
"If you mean what you say," said Wilders to the accused, "we will hear you now; if you proceed to treat us to a mere display of words, I shall adjourn the court. Meanwhile it is my duty to remind you that whatever you say will be taken down in writing, and may be given in evidence against you upon your trial."
"In the event of my committal," returned Robert Carlton, "I am prepared to stand or fall by every word that I have uttered or may utter now; and I shall not detain you long. I am well aware how I have trespassed already upon the time of this court, but I will waste none upon vain or insincere apology. I came here to answer to a very terrible charge; it was and it is my duty to do so as fully and as emphatically as I possibly can. Yet I have little to add to the evidence before you; a comment or two, and I am done.
"It seems to me that the witnesses called by the police have between them produced but three points of any weight against me, or worthy of the seriousconsideration of this or any other court of law. I will take these three points in their proper order, and will give my answer to each in the fewest possible words in which I can express my meaning to your worships.
"Arthur Busby has sworn that on the morning before the fire I ordered him to fill the lamps with paraffin, though it was extremely unlikely that any artificial light would be required in church next evening. But on the man's own showing he was wearying and distressing me beyond measure at the time—a more terrible time than this!" cried Carlton from his heart; and was brought to pause, not for effect (though the effect was marked) but by the very suddenness of his emotion. "And on the man's own showing," he continued in a lower key, "he had once omitted this important duty of filling the lamps, and I was 'for ever at him' on the subject. What more natural than to tell him to go away and fill his lamps, as one had told him a dozen times before, but this time without thinking and simply to get rid of the man? On the other hand, if the paraffin had been wanted for the felonious purpose suggested, could anything be more incriminating and incredible than the suggested method of obtaining it? I submit these two questions, with the highly important point involved, to the consideration of the bench; and I do so with some confidence.
"The next point, I confess, is more difficult to dismiss. I shall not attempt to dismiss it from any mind in court. I shall simply leave it to the consideration of your worships as men of the world and students ofthe human heart. It is near midnight. I am not to be found at the rectory, and a light is seen in the church. I admit that I was in the church, and that I lighted one of the lamps.
"Here I am forced to allude to another matter: a matter in which, God knows, I have never denied my guilt, as I do deny my guilt of the crime of arson: a matter in which I have never sought to defend myself, as I have been compelled to do in this court for a very long day and a half.
"Consider my case on the night of the fire. I will not dwell upon it; it is surely within the knowledge or the imagination of most present. . . . There was my church. I had held my last service there. I felt that I could never hold another. And, whatever I had been, I loved my church! You upon the bench . . . you Members of Christ's Church . . . I ask not for your sympathy but for your insight. Can you think that I went into the church I loved, wilfully and deliberately to burn it to the ground? Can you not conceive my going there, in the dead of that dreadful night, to look my last upon it—to bid my church good-bye?"
His emotion was piteous, but never pitiful. It shook nothing but his voice. It neither bowed his head nor dimmed the brilliance of an eye turned full upon his fellows. And so he stood silent for a space, and none other spoke; then through Tom Ivey's evidence with a lighter touch. It was evidence in his favour: he scorned to enlarge upon it. The one adverse point was lightly—perhaps too lightly—dismissed. He had been seen to throw something into the flames. Did the prosecution suggest that he had thrown fresh fuel? Other points, already made in cross-examination, were left to take care of themselves: the paraffin on the pews, to which he himself had called Ivey's attention, was one. Indeed, in the whole course of the prisoner's speech, it was never admitted that the church had been purposely set fire to at all; the suggestion had been made in the heat of cross-examination, but it was not made again. It even seemed as though Robert Carlton had grown either certain, or careless, of the result of the inquiry—and the impression was not removed by the close of his remarks.
"And now," he said, "I have to deal with the evidence of Sir Wilton Gleed. I shall endeavour to deal with that evidence as dispassionately as I can, and as summarily as it deserves. Sir Wilton Gleed is a man with a genuine grievance, which you all know and I have never denied. But I do not propose to enter into the matter at issue between Sir Wilton Gleed and myself, or to suggest for an instant that he was anything but right in determining to rid his village of one who had brought himself to bitter but merited sorrow and disgrace. I am not here to defend my sins; nor have I defended them elsewhere; nor have I shrunk from suffering from anything I have done. But here have I been brought to book for something I never did—taken prisoner and brought to you on a criminal charge and no other. And I tell you that this criminal charge is as false as another was true, but for which this one would never have been made. But enough of mere assertion; letme crystallise some of the evidence that has come before you.
"The witnesses swear to three or four suspicious circumstances between them. Yet they seem scarcely to have opened their lips—nobody seems to have heard of those circumstances—until Friday of last week. On Friday last—my fatal date—these witnesses open their mouths with one accord. And, curiously enough, it is in Sir Wilton Gleed that they are one and all led to confide!
"But there is a still more curious and informing coincidence. Sir Wilton Gleed and I have several very stormy interviews, in which he tries, first by one artifice, then by another—all frankly admitted in his evidence—to drive me from a position which I have finally refused to resign. My refusal may be just as obdurate and indefensible as you are pleased to think it; that is not the point at all. The point is this contest of tenacity on his part and on mine, culminating in a final interview between us on the eve of the day upon which all these witnesses break their more or less complete silence concerning my movements on the night of the fire, and break it in the ear of Sir Wilton Gleed!
"I invite you to consider the obvious inference. My enemy has tried every other means of dislodging me. He has threatened and insulted me. He has set every builder and mason in the neighbourhood against me. He has deprived me—as he thinks—of the means of building my church, and then he turns round and tells me to build it or take the consequences! I make a beginning in spite of him; hehas to think of some new method of expulsion; so, with infinite ingenuity, he trumps up this present charge against me."
Wilders opened his lips, but the prisoner's hand flew upward in arresting gesture.
"With infinite ingenuity, your worship, but not necessarily in bad faith. I have never yet questioned thebona fidesof Sir Wilton Gleed; nor do I now. On the contrary, I am convinced that he honestly and sincerely believes me capable of any crime in the calendar; but my capability, again, is not the point; and belief and proof are very different things. If your worships hold that this horrible charge has been proved against me—proved sufficiently for this court—then send me to a higher one as your duty dictates. But if you think that hatred and prejudice, however deserved, have played the part of genuine and spontaneous suspicion; that facts have been distorted to fit a preconception, and the wish, however unconsciously, allowed to father the thought; that, in short, an honest man has been quite honestly blinded and misled by very loathing of me and all my doings; then I implore your worships to dismiss this charge against me—and let me get back to the work I left to meet it!"
The last words came as an after-thought, but they came from the heart, and as no anti-climax to those who knew the nature of the work named. In absolute silence Carlton availed himself of the chair in the dock, dropping all but out of sight, and bending double, his heart throbbing, his head singing, his hot hands pressed across his eyes. It was the suddenhum of talk which told him that the justices had retired; days passed in his brain before a hush as sudden announced their return. Meanwhile there were the scraps of conversation that found their way to his ears. Hearing all, he could distinguish little; but now and then a familiar phrase leapt home, as familiar faces declare themselves afar. "The gift of the gab" was one, and "He'd argue black was white" another. But some one said, "Give the devil his due"; and with that single crumb of justice Robert Carlton had to crouch content until his present fate was sealed.
But the hush came at last, and sank to profound silence as the magistrates took their seats—Rhadamanthus keen and grim—the clergymen plainly angry with each other. Preston's honest face hid no more of his feelings than heretofore, but the chairman cloaked annoyance with the fraction of a smile, and only his voice betrayed him as he addressed the prisoner.
"After a long and patient hearing," said Wilders, "the bench find this a case of ve-ry con-sid-er-able doubt in-deed. But, upon the whole, and taking all the cir-cum-stances into care-ful con-sid-er-ation, they are of o-pin-i-on that there is not enough ev-i-dence to justify them in sending the case to the assizes. The charge is therefore dis-missed. I should like, however, to add one word in respect to a witness, who might, had he been a less chiv-al-rous opponent—a less mag-nan-i-mous man—have sat here upon the bench instead of entering the witness-box to suffer the remorseless cross-questioning of a personal enemy. I could wish, indeed"—with covertmeaning—"that Sir Wilton Gleed had seen fit to take his proper place in this court! I need hardly say that he quits it without stain or slur, of any sort or kind, upon his character; and that he does so with the heartfelt sympathy of one, at all events, of his colleagues upon the bench."
Rhadamanthus turned his back to hide his face, but James Preston did not rise till he had finished as he begun. He caught Carlton's eye, and nodded once more to him, but this time unblushingly and with much vigour. There was a little hissing as the prisoner vanished, a free man; and some hooting in the street, in which he reappeared, contrary to expectation, within a minute. It was like his brazen face, so they told him as he strode through the little crowd as one who neither heard nor saw a man of them. But no hand was lifted, no missile thrown, for the deaf ear is no earnest of physical passivity, and it was notorious that this man could take care of himself with his hands as well as with his tongue. Such a very deaf ear did he turn, however, that a flyman had to follow him to the outskirts of the town, and shout till he was hoarse, before Robert Carlton paid more heed to him than to his revilers. And all the time it was a decent man from Linkworth, only begging him to jump in, as the clergyman at last discovered with instant suspicions of the truth.
"Who sent you after me?"
"Mr. Preston, sir; leastways, he told me to be here all day, in case you wanted me."
"God bless Jim Preston!" muttered Carlton, and jumped into the fly forthwith.
But presently they were at some cross-roads. And the driver drew rein with a troubled face. He wanted to go a long way round, but his reasons were wild and unintelligible. Carlton, however, divined the real reason, and whose it was, and he himself pulled the other rein.
"No, no," said he; "drive me through my own village! They drove me through it on Saturday; take me back as they took me away. But it was like Mr. Preston to think of it. Tell him I said so, and that I'll never forget his kindness as long as I live!"
It was the red-gold heart of the August afternoon, and the shrill little choir of the ruined church sang a welcome to the friend who had never sinned against them; and Glen came bounding and barking defiance at the outside world; and the unfinished stone, the first stone that Robert Carlton was to dress and to lay with his own hands, it was just as they had made him leave it on the Saturday evening. But the story of his return was still being bandied from door to door, when a new sound came with the song of birds from the ruin in the trees, and a new ending was given to the story.
The sound was the swish, swish, swish of the mason's axe, with the stiletto's point, through sandstone as soft as cheese.
Carlton completed that historic stone within another hour, and actually laid it that night. Jaded in body and brain, with every nerve exhausted, he must needs do this or drop in the attempt. It was the first stone in the new church. It was finished at last. He touched it here and there with the straight-edge. He felt its angles with the square. This stone would do. He whipped out his foot-rule and measured carefully. The stone was eleven inches all ways but one. It was the exact depth for the lower courses, but it was seventeen inches long. A seventeen-inch gap must therefore be found or made for it. And Carlton went prowling round the blackened walls, with his foot-rule and his dog, before resting from his labours. The job should be finished this time, the first stone should be laid that night.
A place was found in the base of the east end, over a stable portion of the plinth; the situation was of sacred omen, and Carlton cleared away the old mortar with immense energy. Then his difficulties began. There was new mortar to make; this was an altogether new undertaking. It had been Tom Ivey's affair. Carlton had tried his hand at most branches of the masonic art, but he had never attempted to mix the mortar. He barely knew how to begin. There was a heap of sand at one end of the shed, and a load of lime under cover. These were the ingredients. That he knew; but it was not enough.
Suddenly, he remembered hisBuilding Constructionin two volumes; the bulkier of the two treated of materials. In a minute the book was found, deep in dust, and carried to the shed for consultation on the spot. And there was only too much about mortar; the subject monopolised a column of the index; its vastness oppressed Carlton, who nevertheless attacked it then and there. A great disappointment was in store: so he was to begin by "slaking" his lime. He had forgotten that step; now he had a dim recollection of the process. According to the book it took two or three hours at least; even this minimum presupposed that the lime was a "fat lime," whatever that might be. Carlton, lacking all means of deciding such a point, gave his inclination the benefit of the doubt, and left his shovelful of quicklime under water and sand for exactly two hours and a half.
This check came in the nick of time. It reminded Robert Carlton of the flesh, whose needs he had once more neglected, though now he would have cooked and eaten if only to have killed an hour. He lit a fire. He put on the kettle. He toasted some very stale bread; he boiled an egg warm from the hen-house, then another; and having eaten he rested while he must. The sun set; the new moon whitened in the sky, but as yet could not light a man at his work when it was really dark. And that was whythe lantern stood so long upon the ground outside the shed, in a whirl of tiny wings, while the mortar was being mixed at last.
But the lantern stood longer still upon a salient fragment of the razed east end, while the trowel rang, and the mortar flopped, until all lay smooth and glistening in its light. Then Carlton knelt, and lifted his handiwork with bursting muscles; and the mortar spattered his waistcoat as the great stone dropped into place. A wrench, a push, a tap with the trowel; a finishing touch with its point, a word of thanksgiving before he rose; and Robert Carlton had laid the first stone of a new church, and of his own new life.
Next morning he began systematic work, rising at five, lighting his fire, making his bed, sweeping, dusting, pumping, rinsing, all before the day's work started after breakfast, with the gentler arts of scraping and re-pointing, and all in strict obedience to the schedule which Carlton had drawn up before his arrest. The working day ended, as then arranged, with a violent assault upon that black disorder which had been the nave; but this also acquired system as the days closed in; while the influence of time was not less apparent in the gradual disappearance of that tendency to morbid reaction which had been inevitable in the first days of bodily and spiritual strain, of incessant and excessive hardship, of a solitude consummate and profound. But here time was assisted by the good sense and the strong will of Carlton himself, who knew how little virtue there is in mere remorse, and who struggled against it withall his might. It was a long time, however, before even he was master of himself in this regard. One day, in the exaltation of overwork, the high excitement of nervous and of physical exhaustion, he was actually heard whistling at his walls, and it was all over the village before he caught himself in the act; but none seemed to hear how suddenly he stopped at last; none saw the raised face, the clasped hands, the lips moving in meek apology for an instant's joy. Nor did any man dream how this one would still mortify himself, after such a lapse, with deliberate dwelling on the past. There was but one link, indeed, in all the mournful chain of recent events, upon which Robert Carlton would never permit his thoughts to concentrate; that was his successful conduct of his own case before the magistrates, culminating in his final triumph over Sir Wilton Gleed. He had made the rule in the hour of his release, and he called in all his strength of mind to its rigorous observance.
It was now three weeks since he had spoken to a human being, none having come near him to his knowledge; then one morning the air was full of whispers, though the yellowing elms hung stagnant in an autumn mist; and the outcast, looking over the wall which he was scraping, beheld a bevy of school-children perched on that of the churchyard.
He bent a little lower to his work. The wall was that thirteen-foot strip, to the left of the porch, upon which he had spent the first morning of all in getting rid of the unsound upper courses. It was still his own height in most places; so the children could notwatch him at his work; but the sound of them was enough. Poor little children! To grow up with such an example and such knowledge as would be theirs! His heart had seldom smitten him so hard.
"Then said He unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences will come: but woe unto him through whom they come!
"It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones."
The text came unbidden; it cut the deeper for that. Woe unto him, indeed! Of all men, woe unto him! Hammer and chisel slipped from his hands; he hid his face. His thumbs went to his ears, but were drawn back. The children's voices were more than he could bear, so he bore them for his sin until another aspect of the case was driven home to his intelligence. Next moment he appeared in the porch, and the children were vanishing from the wall.
"Don't run away," he called. "Come back, you bigger ones!"
It was his old voice, come unbidden like the text; he might have been using it all these weeks. The children had never disobeyed that quiet but imperious summons. They did not begin to-day.
"Why aren't you all at school?"
There was silence, broken eventually by some bold but still respectful spirit.
"Please, sir, it's a holiday."
"Not Saturday, is it?"
He was beginning to lose count of the week-days;once already the Sabbath school-bell had nipped a day's work in the bud.
"No, sir, it's an extra holiday."
"Then spend it better. Get away into the fields, or down the river. I won't have you hanging about here. There's nothing for you to see—nothing that will do you any good. Run away all, and forget who has spoken to you. But don't let me have to speak again!"
There was no need for another word. And the workman went back to his wall; but his hands had lost their cunning; his heart was as heavy as the stones themselves.
Why had he never been harassed in this way before? He had not to think very long. He was without that friend of friendless man, his dog. The good Glen, his second shadow in these days, had chosen this one to desert him; and Carlton was glad, for nothing else would have made him appreciate the dog at his true worth. Now he thought of it, how often the faithful brute had gone barking to wall or gate, and come back wagging his tail! Preoccupied with his work, he had taken no thinking heed at the time. But now he remembered and understood.
Instead of working all the afternoon, he went in search of Glen. It surprised him to find how much he missed a companion whose presence he had often ignored for hours together; he felt as though he could do no good without the animal now; its dumb sympathy seemed to have had no small share in all that he had done as yet. That wag of the tail, how well he knew it after all! It was like the grasp of agood man's hand. That wistful eye, watching over him at his work, was it a blasphemous conceit to think of it as the mild eye of the All-seeing, shining through the mask of one of His humblest creatures, upon another as humble, and countenancing the work if not the man? If this was blasphemy, then Robert Carlton blasphemed for once in his heart; and had his deserts in an unsuccessful quest.
He had searched the garden and the house; had stood whistling at the gate, and in each of the far corners of the glebe. Night fell upon him sawing a huge tie-beam through and through to shift it, and sawing with all the irritable energy of the unwilling workman, very remarkable in him. And for once he was glad to put on his coat.
What could have happened to the dog? Its master could scarcely eat for wondering. Now he sat frowning heavily. Anon his brow cleared, and a fixed purpose glittered in his eyes. A little later he was in the village street once more.
The night was as dark as it could possibly be. The day's mist still lingered, impervious to stars, and there was no moon. Carlton was not sorry, for he had no wish to be seen by more people than was absolutely necessary; neither was he allowing for the shabby tweeds he had unearthed to work in, for his cloth cap and untrimmed beard, which obliterated the clergyman and changed the man.
He had not gone far before he stopped in astonishment. He had met no one, and the village was as dark as the firmament; in the first few cottages there were no lights at all. Carlton groped his way up the path of one, and knocked twice without receiving an answer or detecting any sound within. It was as though his sin had driven his parishioners to the four winds.
He went on with increasing amazement, still without encountering a soul; then swerved of a sudden from the middle of the road, and hugged the wheatfield wall on the right-hand side while passing the Flint House on the left. Here were lights, and more. The front door stood open, pouring a broken beam of lamplight into the road. And on the single step,leaning upon his great stick, towered the silhouette of Jasper Musk, only less colossal than his shadow in the lighted slice of road.
Carlton half expected a challenge, and passed slowly and openly; instead of slinking as his shame dictated. But there was neither word nor sign of recognition from the gigantic figure on the step; and the lights ended where they had begun. There were none beneath the gabled thatch immediately beyond the wheatfield; and so for another hundred yards; not a glimmer to right or left, with the single exception of a lattice window over the post-office, where the bed-ridden Mrs. Ivey lay as she had been lying for many months. Carlton saw the shadow of a flower-pot on the widow's blind; no doubt it was the geranium he had taken her in early summer; he remembered placing it on the sill. His pace quickened. He was now at the long lane leading to the Plough and Harrow; and there at last were the missing lights. The inn was lit up in every window, and not only the unmistakable sound, but the very smell of feasting travelled to the road, where Robert Carlton hesitated longer than his wont. He might as well go home. It was quite bad enough to face his people piece-meal. On the other hand, there was the dog; a characteristic fixity of purpose in its owner; and a natural curiosity to know more of the entertainment that could empty every home.
The front of the inn revealed nothing after all. The brilliantly lighted parlour was deserted by all but a single attendant behind the bar; the scene of revelry was audibly the barn at the back. The inn itself hadonce been a farm-house, and this barn came in for all the festivals.
Carlton peered through the parlour window, and nodded to himself. The face within was new to him, but that might well prove an advantage. It was the florid face of a stout young man, passing the time with a newspaper and a cigar, the first of which he threw aside to answer the incomer's questions.
No, he had seen nothing of any collie dog; but he was a stranger himself, only come to lend a hand for the night. Black and tan collie, but more black than tan? No; the only dogs he had seen all day were the governor's tyke and a thoroughbred bitch belonging to the young gentleman at the hall.
"But have a drink," said the stout young man, reaching for a tankard.
Carlton declined civilly, though not without betraying some astonishment.
"That's free beer to-night, old man," explained the other.
"Indeed?"
"I'm here to serve ut. Change your mind?"
"No, thank you."
"Then I will."
And the young man drew a foaming pint, while a burst of revelry came through the inner doors, but slightly deadened by its passage through the open air.
"May I ask what is going on?" inquired Carlton.
"That's the biggest spread ever seen in Long Stow," said the stout youth, drawing his sleeve along his lips and turning a shade more florid than before.
"Not the harvest-home already?"
"No; that's a dinner given by the squire to every sowl in the parish—men, women, an' kids—all but one."
The questioner stood absorbed.
"All but one," repeated the temporary barman with knowing emphasis. And he winked as he leant across the bar.
"Ah!"
"Their reverend ain't here—not much!"
"I don't suppose he is. And why is the squire doing this sort of thing on this scale?"
"Why, in honour of the victory, to be sure."
"What victory?"
"Why, the one we've just had in Egypt. Tel-el——but here that is, in theBury Post, and a fair jaw-breaker, too."
It was the first newspaper which Robert Carlton had seen for several weeks. HisStandardsubscription had run out at mid-summer; he had never renewed it. The world had renounced him utterly, and so must he renounce the world. To live as he was living, and yet to have an ear for the busy hum—he could not do it. For already he recognized the startling truth: it was its very completeness which rendered his isolation endurable.
Yet his eyes glistened as he ran them down the stirring columns, and his tanned face wore a coppery glow as he returned the paper across the bar.
"Thanks very much," he said. "I am glad to have seen that."
"Is it the first you've heard of it?"
"Yes; I don't often see a paper."
The young barman was eyeing him up and down, from the old tweed trousers to the old cloth cap.
"On the tramp, are you?"
Carlton did not choose to reply.
"Yet you seemed to know all about their reverend here!"
"Who does not?" cried the man in tweeds, with involuntary bitterness.
"Ah, you may well say that! And what doyouthink of him?"
"I think the same as everybody else."
"That he's the biggest blackguard unhung?"
"Indeed, one of them!"
"That's what the young gentleman from the hall say, when he was in here this afternoon. But the governor, Master Palmer—O Lord! how he do hate him! 'Unhung?' he say. 'Why, hangun's too good for him.' An' so it is, come to think of it: to go and do whathedone, an' to top all by settun fire to his own church!"
"Come," said Carlton, "that wasn't proved."
"But everybody know it, bless you!"
"Though the charge was dismissed in open court?"
"Bah! 'Not guilty, but don't do that again!'"
And the stout youth nodded sagely over his tankard's rim.
"So that's the opinion of the neighbourhood, is it?"
"That is, and that's not likely to change."
Carlton was not astonished. He had foreseen thiseven from the prisoner's dock, in that pause of the proceedings when he had felt ashamed of his facility in self-defence, a haunting doubt of the propriety of his defending himself at all. And yet the virile instinct which had inspired him then was not yet dead in his breast; he could not let all this pass; the conversation was none of his seeking, yet he must say something more.
"I have never stuck up for him," he began; "but give even him his due! What possible object could a man have in burning down his own church?"
"What I asked the governor," replied the barman. "'Dog in the manger,' he say; 'didn't want the next man to reap where he've sowed. What's more, that give him an excuse for stoppun in the place,' he say."
Carlton was under no temptation to confute these arguments; his only difficulty was to suppress a smile.
"So his people don't think any the better of him for getting himself off, eh?"
"The better? That's made them right mad! The governor here, he say that was the gift of the gab and nothun else; all parsons have their fair share; but this here reverend, he do seem to be a holy terror, an' no mistake. A gentleman like Sir Wilton Gleed haven't a chance agen him; so they're all a-sayun, all but Sir Wilton himself. The young gent who was in here this afternoon, he was a-sayun as how the squire wouldn't have the reverend's name so much as spoken at the hall; and he's never been heard to name it himself since the day of the trial, he's that mad. But have you heard the latest?"
Carlton had heard quite enough, and his hand was on the latch, nor did he withdraw it as he turned his head.
"Against the reverend?" inquired he.
"That's it," said the young barman with renewed gusto. "And I nearly let you go without tellun you!"
"What has he been doing now?"
Carlton was curious to hear.
"That's not what he've been doün, but what keep comun o' what he've done," his informant said ominously. "The latest is that some young chap would go to the devil because the reverend had, so he 'listed, and he've been in the very battle there's all this to-do about!"
Of Mellis's enlistment Carlton had heard; the rest was news indeed; and his hand tightened on the latch.
"Has anything happened to him, then?" he faltered, sick at heart.
"Not as we know on yet," said the stout youth, hopefully. "But the lists ain't in, and, if this young chap's killed, everybody says it'll be another death at the reverend's door."
"So they want his blood!" exclaimed Carlton. "But what they say is true."
As he opened the door a burst of cheering came round from the barn.
"That's for the squire," he left the barman saying. "He've been on his legs these ten minutes."
The outcast had shut the door behind him, and was groping his way in a darkness no deeper thanbefore, though perfectly opaque after the strong light within.
"And one cheer more!" screamed a voice from the barn.
Carlton need scarcely have left his rectory to have heard the final roar. Yet it was not the end.
"And three groans . . ."
This voice was hoarse; the name was lost in the night; but the outcast well knew whose it was. And he stopped instinctively, standing firm upon his feet while the groans were given—as though they lashed him like wind and rain. Then he turned his face to the storm. He could not help it. There was more clapping of the hands. Something further was to come; he might as well hear what.
The barn was a clash of violent lights and impenetrable shade. Its outlines were inseparable from the sky; but its great doors had been flung flush with their wall, which gaped twenty feet from jamb to jamb. This space, illumined by slung lanterns and naked candle-light, and streaked with tables, which ran the full length of the barn, stood out like the lighted stage of a darkened theatre. Outside hovered the unworthy element which the smallest community cannot escape, or the largest charity embrace; these vagabonds were absolutely invisible to those within; and were themselves too dazzled and disgusted to take note of each addition to their number.
Sir Wilton Gleed, on his legs once more, at the high table furthest from the doors, was making that preliminary pause which is a little luxury of thehabitual orator and an embarrassing necessity to the novice. He was supported by the schoolmaster on one side and by his own son on the other. The former wore the shiny flush which was the badge of every reveller visible from without; but that was not many while all heads were turned towards the squire.
Sir Wilton began by observing, with sparkling eyes, that he was very sorry to hear that name: he himself would have preferred such an occasion to pass over without a reminder of the fact that they had a leper in their midst. It was many moments before the speaker was suffered to proceed; then he repeated the successful epithet at the top of his voice, and drove it home with a synonym; recovering his own composure during a second outburst, and continuing with conspicuous self-restraint. Now that the matter had come up, he would not let it drop, even upon that inappropriate occasion, without one word from himself; but, he promised them, it should be his last public utterance on the subject, in that parish at all events, as it was most certainly his first. And another deliberate pause ended in a sudden gesture and a new tone.
"What's the use of talking?" exclaimed the squire. "The law of England is against us; there's no more to be said while the law remains what it is. I'm not thinking of my brother magistrates' decision the other day; it would ill become me to pass one single syllable of comment upon that. No, gentlemen, I confine my criticism to that law which empowers a clergyman, convicted of the vilest villainy, to retainhis living in the teeth of every protest, and to continue poisoning the clean air of this parish by wilfully remaining in our midst."
"Shame! Shame!"
"Shame or no shame," cried Sir Wilton, "I intend to bring the matter before Parliament itself"—a further outburst of vociferous approval—"intend to lay this very case before the House of Commons at the earliest possible opportunity. And I think that I can promise you some amendment of the law before another year is out. Meanwhile"—and Sir Wilton raised his hand to quell renewed enthusiasm—"meanwhile let us respect the law while it lasts. In signifying our detestation of this monstrous wrong, let us be careful not to drift into the wrong ourselves. There must be no more broken windows, mind!"
And it was now a single finger that Sir Wilton Gleed held up.
"But," he continued, "what we can do—what we are justified in doing—what it is our bounden duty to do—is henceforth to ignore this man's very existence in our midst."
"Don't call him a man!"
"That's a devil out of hell!"
"Man or devil," cried Sir Wilton, "let us absolutely ignore his existence among us. Don't go near him; don't even turn to look at him as you pass. There he is—pretending to rebuild the church—posing as a martyr—really laughing in his sleeve and crowing over all right-minded men. We shall see who laughs last! Meanwhile, take no notice of him, one way or the other; forbid your children thechurchyard, if not that end of the village altogether; nothing that can feed the morbid appetite for notoriety which makes me sometimes think the man's a lunatic after all. But if he dares to show his nose among you, that's another thing; hunt him out of it as you would hunt a mad dog! He won't show himself twice. But for the present my advice to you is to leave the cur in his kennel, and the lazar in the lazar-house!"
The unseen listener left amid the musketry of prolonged clapping, mingled with a banging of tables, and a dancing of glass and silver, that followed him into the outer darkness as a sound of cymbals and big drums. He was not sorry to have heard what he had heard: in his position it was a distinct advantage to know the worst that was being said. Certainly he would not go into the village again without necessity—as certainly as he would do so the moment such necessity arose. It was as well, however, to go prepared. The present experience might rank as a narrow escape; but Robert Carlton would not have been without it if he could.
He began to think better of his opponent. So he was going to Parliament as the final court! That was legitimate; that he could admire. There is infinite stimulus in the man who does not know when he is beaten—to an adversary resembling him in that respect. And this seemed to be the one characteristic common to Mr. Carlton and Sir Wilton Gleed.
Yet the outcast felt a little hardened. And his critical faculty, always keen, though only of himself unsparing, went insensibly to work upon the newmaterial, even as he strode on through the deserted village, not to give up his dog just yet.
"I believe he had that speech by heart, for all its opening. It came too pat."
That was Carlton's first conclusion. The next made him stop dead.
"I'll be shot if the whole function wasn't a peg to hang that speech on!"
And on he went with a short laugh of scornful conviction; there was no doubt whatever in his mind; but the speech was not worth a second thought. There was Glen to find, and there was George Mellis to think about, since think he must. Poor lad! Yes, that was his fault again; the people were right; he would be blood-guilty if the boy fell. One thing, however, was quite certain: if the worst news came it could be trusted to come to him; meanwhile he could pray for his friend, as his heart was praying now, a clean sky above him, and the untrammelled air of an open country all around.
The village had been left behind; the Lakenhall road followed for half a mile, then left at a tangent in its turn; and this open country, upon which Carlton of all men had the audacity to trespass, was the vast rabbit-warren of Sir Wilton Gleed. The dog might be caught in one of the traps; that was at once its master's fear and hope; for a broken leg would mend, and his one friend think twice before deserting him again. Carlton could even enjoy the prospect of the cripple's complete dependence upon himself: it would be something to be indispensable to living creature now. But meanwhile he could neither seenor hear anything of his dog, though he walked, and stopped, and whistled till he was tired, and then called, "Glen! Glen! Glen!" No sound came back to him in reply; not even the echo of his own voice; and at midnight he gave up the search.
At midnight also the Long Stow festivities culminated in the National Anthem, its secular companion, and much hoarse roystering on the way home; all this as Carlton approached the village; and for once he was deterred. To march into the middle of a tipsy crowd, freshly inflamed against himself, was to provoke a brawl at best. He would go round instead by the river that flowed parallel with the village street. So he crossed at the lock near the mill at this end of Long Stow, and recrossed by the white wood bridge on the Linkworth road at the other end. But this was an hour later; for three-quarters had been wasted opposite the Flint House, with its river frontage of trim mead and wild garden, and a very faint light in one back room.
By this time all was so still that the returning rector became the earlier aware of an erratic lantern and tell-tale voices in the road ahead; and he was walking slowly to let these people pass the rectory gate, when in the light went lurching before his eyes. He hurried softly. The intruders were half-way up the drive, whispering thickly, but leaving a continuous sound in their wake, from something or other that they had in tow. Carlton followed on the grass, a horrible suspicion already in his heart; but he recognised their voices first.
"Where shall we plant ut? Which is his winder?"
"That there near the end. O Lord, what a lark!"
"Yes—to think he come talkun to me while you was all in the barn. The cheek! But here's his answer for him."
The first and last speaker was the stout young barman from the Plough and Harrow; the other was Jim Cubitt, an unworthy character who had been turned out of the choir some months before. And Robert Carlton's "answer" was his missing dog, lying dead in the lantern's light, with particles of gravel glistening in his lacklustre coat.
At this, the climax of his long night's search, with its ironic interludes—all as honey matched with this—a very madness seized on Carlton, so that he sprang out of the dark into the lighted area where these two young ruffians stood, and fell upon them like a fiend. Not a word was said; there was no time even for a cry. But Cubitt came first, and had the muddled senses shaken out of him and new ones kicked in before his comrade could so much as attempt a rescue. This, however, the young barman did so gamely that the ex-chorister was flung in a heap and his champion sent tripping over him with a boxing crack upon the jaw. And Carlton towered breathless, his fists still doubled, waiting for the fallen youths to rise and fall again.
The one from the public-house merely sat upright, ruefully and sullenly enough, but with a sound discretion which the Long Stow lout had the wit to imitate.
"Wenever 'urt your dorg," the former vowed. "He was dead before I see him, and I don't know now who done ut. I never knew anything about that till after you was in to-night, when I heared who it must ha' been."
"I don't care!" cried Carlton, in a fury still. "You helped to drag it here—my poor dog! You would spite me like that, you whom I never saw before to-night! You're worse than Jim Cubitt; he at least had an old grievance against me; and you're both of you worse than the man who did this foul thing, whoever he may be, and I don't want to know. Out of my sight, both of you, and spread this as far as you please: what you got from me, and what you did to get it. You'll find yourselves the martyrs of the countryside!"
"I'm sorry," said the young barman, getting up. "I'm sorry, and I can't say no fairer, 'cept that I must ha' been an' got right tight. But I ain't tight now. I'm not a Long Stow chap, sir, and I shall tell them, where I come from, that you're a man, whatever else you are. But as to spreadun, I don't think I shall do much o' that; what do you say, mate?"
"I never killed his dog," said the former choirman.
Nor did Carlton ever actually know, or seek finally to ascertain, the author of a deed even more detestable than it had appeared at first sight. For when the study lamp had been brought out into the still night, the first thing it revealed was that the poor beast had been neither shot nor poisoned; itsbrains had been beaten out. And Carlton felt as though his own heart had been beaten out with them, as he fetched a spade from the shed, and dug a grave by lamplight a few yards from his study door.
The last leaf had filtered from the elms; the horse chestnuts had long been bare. And now there was no more cover for the blackened stump of Long Stow church, in its ring of rotting leaves, and its meshes of trunk and twig, than for the guilty genius of this mournful spot. All the world could see him now, and gauge the crass pretence of his preposterous task; there was no deceiving such a wise little world; but it had been requested not to look, and was accordingly content with passing glimpses of a drama in which its interest was indeed upon the wane. There were some things, however, which even a docile and phlegmatic community could not help noticing as winter set in. It might not be honest work, but it was making a thin man thinner. And he was always at it. Yet it no longer seemed to give him any pleasure. Indeed, his face was changed. Its dominant expression was grim and dogged. There were no more lights and shadows. It was the face of a workman who has lost interest in his work. Nevertheless, the work went on.
It went on in all weathers. At first Carlton had tried devoting the wet days to indoor work. He had cleaned his house from top to bottom, emptied mostof the rooms, stored furniture in the others, and covered with sheets like a careful housewife. Not that he cared greatly for his things; but his hermitage should not grow foul. The two rooms which he retained in use were the kitchen and his study (in which Carlton slept), with the flagged scullery for his bath. The rest of the house he shut up, after robbing his picture-frames to patch the broken windows, which he treated so ingeniously that they looked quite wonderful from the road; but on windy nights the constant rattle and the occasional crash were one long outcry for putty and a glazier. There was no more to be done indoors. And still it rained. So one day he marched through the village (unmolested after all), and it was duly ascertained that he had taken a return ticket to Felixstowe, of all places, apparently for change of air. But through the very next day's rain he could be seen (and heard) very busy at his walls: in a suit of oilskins and a sou'wester. Thus the work went on once more.
By Christmas every stone that was to stand had been scraped and pointed; a few sound ones had been scraped and relaid; here and there an entirely new stone had been cut to fit the place of one charred out of shape; but in the lower courses such instances were rare, too rare to suit his own creative taste, but Carlton was determined to deal with the lowest courses first, and to raise all the walls to his own height before finishing one. In the case of those which were to contain windows, it might be well to pause at the sill; the windows alone might take him a couple of years. Meanwhile these were the walls which had sufferedmost, and first let him reach the sills: if he did that within the next six months Carlton thought he would be lucky. For his progress was as that of the insect which builds the reef; it was often imperceptible even to himself; yet always the work was going on.
The man was all muscle now; spare at his best, he had scarcely an ounce of mere flesh left. Yet, for his work's sake, he made wonderfully regular meals, often with a relish; and twice in the autumn killed a sheep, having cold mutton for many days in the colder weather. But the preliminary tragedy and the ultimate waste were equally disgusting, and his normal needs seemed better met by predatory visits to the hen-yard. Practice made him a fair baker and a moderate cook; but, as he had never been particular about his food, and his only object was to maintain bodily strength, he sometimes defeated his end, and added the dejection of dyspepsia to all other ills. Otherwise the physical life suited Carlton; he was out all day long; and the worst discomforts rarely followed him into the open air. At his work, for instance, he was always warm; indoors, only when he went to bed. He never had a fire, except to cook by; thus he still had a few coals left, but he doubted whether anybody would sell him any more. There was, however, all the half-burnt woodwork of the church; most of this would burn again; and, with economy, might keep him in firing throughout the term of his suspension. Meanwhile, lamp, rug, and overcoat gave all the heat that Carlton would allow himself in the study. Once, when his stock of paraffin had run out, he had to tramp for fresh supplies into a town where his face was unknown; and that experience made him more than ever economical of such fuel as he had.
Unparalleled position for an endowed clergyman of the Church of England, the incumbent of an enviable living, an Oxford man, a man of family, a zealous High Churchman, an enlightened and alluring preacher, towards the latter end of the nineteenth century! Scandalous priest though he had also proved himself, his case was as pitiable as unique; a pariah in his own parish; the outcast of his own people; an inland Crusoe, driven to the traditional expedients of the castaway, and living the very life of such within sight and hail of a silent and unseeing world. It was a position which few men would have faced for an instant. This man maintained it throughout the winter. And throughout the winter his work went on. And the spring found him technically sane.
But his brain bore it better than his heart. Some vital part of him was certain to suffer. His brain escaped altogether, his body for a time; but his heart was hard within him; all his prayers could not soften it; and presently he lost the power even to pray.
This was the meaning of the changed face seen from the road, in the days and weeks succeeding the Long Stow celebration of the battle of Tel-el-Kebir. Thereafter it was the face of one in the coils of malignant despair. But the more gradual and substantial change, in such a man, was terrible beyond deduction from its mere outward shadow.
Here was no sudden and sweeping infidelity; noplucking of loose roots from a shallow soil. Shallow this man was not, nor easily shaken in the least of his convictions. His general tenets stood intact. He still believed in the efficacy, under God, of earnest and worthy prayer. But he could no longer believe in the efficacy of his own prayers. They were not worthy: that was the whole truth. They were earnest enough, but utterly unworthy, and it was better not to pray at all.
His most passionate prayers had been for his own forgiveness, for the restoration of his own peace of mind, for the blessing of God upon his own little labours; selfish prayers, one and all; and he saw the selfishness at last. It shocked him. He tried to stamp it out, this new and obtrusive egoism; but he failed. Denied all contact with his fellow-creatures, with only his own wishes to consult, his own work to do, his own heart to probe, his own life to discipline, the man was an egoist before he knew it; and it was only through his prayers that he ever discovered it at all. They were not only unanswered; they no longer brought their own momentary comfort, as heretofore. Of old it had been much more than momentary; now it was no comfort at all. There must be some reason for this; he asked himself what reason; and the answer was this revelation of the true character of his prayers. They were poisoned at the fount. He tried to purify them, but all in vain. Self would creep in. So then he prayed only for a renewal of the faculty of pure and unselfish prayer. And this was the most passionate of all his prayers. But it also was unanswered. So he prayed no more.
He was unforgiven: so Carlton explained it to himself. And a little brooding convinced him of his idea. If God had forgiven him, He would have shown some sign of His clemency through men. But what had men done? They had broken his windows; they had burnt his church; they had closed up every avenue to such poor atonement as was in his power; they had forced him into a position which he had never sought, though for a little it had consoled him; then tried, by false accusation, to force him out of it; and now they had cut him off from themselves, had set him apart as a thing eternally unclean, had even stooped to destroy the one dumb being that clung to him in his exile!
The murder of the dog was no little thing in itself; coming at the foot of such a list, at the bitter end of a night of bitterness, it was the last drop that petrified a truly humble and a strenuously contrite heart.
But it did not petrify his hand; and the work of that hand went on without ceasing, save on that day which was now the Day of Rest indeed—and nothing more. The other six, his energies were redoubled. If he was now more than ever a traitor to his Master, well, there was still this one thing that he could do for the Master's sake. And he did it with all his might.
No day was too wet for him; no day was too cold. His fingers might turn blue, his moustache might freeze; it is beside the point that the winter chanced to be too mild for the latter contingency. While five fingers could control the chisel, and the other handstrike true, no weather could have deterred him. And no weather did.
So the New Year came, and the work went on through January and February without a break. But the month of March, as it often will, made late amends for the insipidity of its predecessors. A spell of colourless humidity was broken by bright skies and a keen wind; the latter grew bitter with the day; the former darkened before it was time. And when Robert Carlton opened his study doors next morning, to air the room while he took his bath, a little snowdrift came tumbling in through the outer one.
Carlton looked forth upon a white world in dazzling contrast to the clear dark grey of a starless sky; at first there was no third tint. But every moment seemed lighter than the last, and presently the trees showed brittle and black as ever against the sky; for the drifted snow lay everywhere but on their waving branches; and the wind blew hard and bitter as before.
Carlton bathed grimly in broken ice; he was not going to be baffled by a little snow. He was very gradually rebuilding the east end, using the old stones where he could, but cutting more new ones than he had bargained for. He could not help it. This wall was going up. It was too near the lane. It should hide the builder's head before he left it for another wall. It was up to his thighs already.
So all that day he laboured with his feet in the snow, and only his legs entrenched against the cutting wind. The stones were ready; he now prepared them by the course. They had only to be carriedfrom the shed with mortar mixed expressly overnight; but to avoid dropping them in the slush and snow, each stone was laid out of hand; and a considerable muscular exertion thus followed by a prolonged niggling with trowel and plummet and transverse string, and this in the fangs of the wind, as often as twice or thrice an hour. It was the hardest day yet. But it was also the most successful. The entire course was laid by half-past three in the afternoon.
In earlier days Carlton would undoubtedly have given way to that spontaneous elation for which he had been wont to pay so dearly; now a tired man crept back to his bed, without a thought beyond the next hour's rest (he had seldom been so tired), and the meal that he must then prepare as mere munition of war. Yet on his study threshold he paused and turned, as doomed men may at the door of the dreadful shed.
There was little in the scene itself to stamp it on the mind. Already the snow was beginning to disappear; but the sky was still hard and clean; and the east wind cut to the bone. The ridge of firs, cresting the ploughed uplands beyond the lane, notched the bleak sky with dark cockades on russet stems; white clouds floated above, a white moon hung higher. A robin hopped in the snow at Carlton's feet; he was a good friend to the birds, and had not forgotten them that morning. Somewhere a blackbird sung him indoors; somewhere a starling smacked its beak. And this was all; but Robert Carlton carried the impression to his grave.
Instead of sleeping for an hour, he slept far into the night; and spent the rest of it in misery between bouts of shivering and of intolerable heat. His throat was on fire, to quench it he coughed, and already his cough hurt queerly. In the morning the man was ill enough to know that he was going to be worse. He took characteristic measures while he could.
It was a fine instinct which had inspired him to economise his coal; now was the time when that little hoard might save his life. But he had only one scuttle, and for the moment felt baffled; then he dried his bath, and put the coals in that, thus eventually getting them to the study in one load. These exertions hurt Carlton like his cough. In both cases it was as though his body had been transfixed. His head swam with the pain. Yet next moment he was reeling back for wood; and not less than ten infernal minutes did he spend on such errands, a furious fever alone sustaining him. It was constructive suicide, yet not to have these things was certain death. Now it was all the alcohol in the house, in a bottle that had lasted nearly a year; now a basin of eggs, of which he had always a fair store indoors; now pail upon pail of water for his kettle. Carlton had been a great visitor of the sick, and seen many a death from the disease he was preparing to resist. He had therefore a rough idea of what to do for himself; he was only doubtful as to how long he might be able to do anything at all. The lightest breath had now become a pang. Already he was alarmingly ill, and must inevitably growmuch worse. But he did not intend to die. He trusted the constitution of a lean and hardy race, and he trusted his own nerve.
At last the fire was alight, a full kettle mounted, and the spout trained upon the pillow, the bed itself being drawn up close to the fire. Under the bed was the bath full of coals, and within as easy reach the eggs, the whisky, a breakfast-cup, and the pails of water. But even now the sick man was not in his bed; he was lying in a heap upon the floor, where he had fallen the moment he could afford to faint.
On recovering he shook off half his clothes, crawled between the blankets, and beat up an egg with whisky. This was all he took that day. And there he lay, breathing needles and coughing daggers until he slept.
"I'm not going to die. They shan't get rid of me like that. I don't die like a rat in his hole!"
That seemed to be the burden of his thoughts for many days; in reality the time was forty-eight hours. And whenever the determination rose afresh in his heart, and the dry lips moved with its expression, the whole man would rouse himself to an effort beside which the building of the church was pastime. He would sit up and put on more coals with a hand black from the constant operation. Then he would lean as close as possible to the singing kettle, and inhale the steam until the gaunt arm supporting his weight could do so no more. Even then he would make a still longer arm before lying down, and replenish the kettle from one of the pails, using the breakfast-cup for a dipper. So the kettle would ceasesinging for a time, and, each occasion entirely exhausting the spent man, the chances were that he would fall into a sleep that was half a swoon. But he never slept very long. He would dream that the fire was black, and start up to mend it—often before the kettle had recovered its voice. So far from the fire going out, for sixty hours it never went down. Carlton would mend it almost in his sleep. Even on the third day, when a kind delirium destroyed sensation for some hours, he never forgot his fire; the lean black hand would still feel its way to the bath beneath the bed, and there grope weakly for the smaller coals. All lucid thought and all delirious whispers were gradually monopolised by the fire. It became the sick man's life. He would not let it out while he lived. And live he would. When the fire died out, then so would he. But he was not going to die this time.
"Their latest dodge to get rid of me, is it? Trust to Général Février—no, March! Never mind; he shan't lay his bony finger on me . . . You'll burn 'em if you try! . . . I tell you the law's on my side."
Delirium grew from the exception into the rule. The kettle sang no longer; the bottom was out and the whole thing red-hot; for the fire had never been so good. The fender was inches deep in ashes. With or without his reason Carlton knew enough to thrust the poker through and through the lower glow. It was a clear fire all the time.
And the heat of it at such a range! It singed the sheets; it flayed the face; but it also helped incalculably to keep this stricken body and this strenuous soul together.
The crisis came before its time. Carlton grew too weak to hold the poker or to lift a coal, but cruelly clear in his mind. Thus far he had never prayed. He had abandoned prayer with all deliberation and in all his vigour. It needed more than the fear of death to make him pray again, least of all for mere life. Now that the fire was going out, and recovery no longer possible, the case was changed; and this erring servant broke his long silence with God, to pray both for forgiveness and for a speedy issue out of his afflictions. And in the same hour came the seeming answer, as if to assure him that even his prayers had still some value in the eyes of the Most High. For delirium had dwindled into coma, with these few lucid minutes between, and the fever and the pain had passed away.
Yet it was in this world that Robert Carlton awoke yet again, to find his precious fire alight after all, and a dilapidated figure nodding over it to the song of a fresh kettle. It was old Busby, the sexton. The sick man could not speak; his little finger seemed to weigh a stone; it was some minutes before he achieved movement enough to attract the sexton's attention. But all this time the live coals had been warming his soul. And already he lay convinced that he also was going to live.
The sexton turned his face at last. It was a startling face for sick eyes at such a range. The toothless mouth, which never closed, had often reminded Mr. Carlton of one of his own gargoyles. Itdid so now. And a continual trickle of saliva added a disgusting realism to the image, which was, however, immediately dispelled by a human grin of profound slyness.
"And have you been bad?" inquired the sexton.
"Beat—up—an egg. I—can't—speak."
Evidently he could not, for Busby was bending a horrid ear.
"Eh? eh?"
Carlton made a fresh effort with shut eyes.
"No food . . . faint for want . . . there no eggs?"
"Eggs? Why, yes, here's one."
"Beat up for me . . . too bad to speak."
The sexton looked more sententious than ever.
"Ah, I thought as how you'd been bad," said he, with all the nods of the successful seer. "I thought as how you'd been bad!"
"It's only been a cold," whispered Carlton, in sudden terror of the public pity.
"Only a cold?"
"Oh, yes—that's all."
"Then you've not been as bad as me!" cried Busby, triumphantly. "Do you mind what I had inside me last year? That's there still! I can hear that——"
"Will you do what I ask?"
It was a peremptory whisper now.
"I would, sir, but I don't fare to know the road."
"Then give me the egg, for heaven's sake, and you hold the cup."
Carlton managed to rise a few inches in his impatience; but his fingers had less power than those of the babe new-born, and the egg slipped through them. With fortuitous dexterity, the sexton caught it in the cup; there was a crack; and accident had accomplished the design.