Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

“Me set fire to it, Master Sidney? Me set a church afire? He! he! you allus fare to have yer laugh.”

  “It will be no laughing matter for you when you’re run in for it, Busby.”

  “Go on, Master Sidney; you know better than that.”

  “I wish I did. They hang for arson, you know! But I say, Busby, how’s the frog?”

  The wizened face grew grave, but only as the screen darkens between the pictures; next instant it was alight with the ineffable joy of gratified monomania. The sexton hobbled nearer, clawing his vest.

  “Oh, that croap away; that’s at that now! Would ‘ee like to listen, Master Sidney?”

  “No, thanks, Busby; don’t you undo a button,” said the young gentleman, hastily. “I can hear it from where I am.”

  The sexton went into senile raptures.

  “You can hear it? You can hear it? Do you all listen to that: he can hear it, he can hear it from where he sit. The little varmin, to croap so loud! That must be the fire. That fare to make him blink! An’ Master Sidney, he can hear him from where he sit!”

  The sexton hurried off to spread his triumph; but he boasted to deaf ears. There was a sudden light below the sharp horizon between black roof and slaty sky, yet no flame rose above the roof. It was as though the southern eaves had caught. Ivey rushed out of the north transept. Mr. Carlton followed, axe in hand. His chest and arms were smudged and inflamed, his blinking eyelids were burnt bare, and the sweat stood all over him in the red light leaping from the shivered windows.

  “It’s no use, lads!” he called to those still running with the buckets; “the boards have caught on the other side. Come and help me smash them in, and we may save the chancel yet! Every man who is a man,” he shouted to the group across the fence, “come — lend a hand to save God’s sanctuary!”

  And he led the way with his axe, stinging to the waist in the open air, but drunk with battle and the battle’s joy. And there was no more talking behind the rectory fence; not a man was left there to talk; even Sidney Gleed had dropped his cigarette to follow the inspired madman with the axe.

  The south transept was a stage less advanced than the north. Carlton got upon one low wall, ran along it to that of the nave, and swung his axe into the burning wood to his right. A rent was quickly made; he leapt into the transept and improved it, his axe ringing the seconds, the muscles of his back bulging and bubbling beneath the scorched skin. Men watched him open-mouthed. It seemed incredible that such nerve, such sinew, such indomitable virility, should have hidden from their vengeance that very night.

  “A ladder!” he cried. “There’s one behind the shed.”

  The wood screen was rent, but not to the top. Below, the fire was checked, but above it still crawled east. Waiting for the ladder, Carlton employed himself in widening the gap that he had made; when it came, he had it held vertically against the eaves, left intact above the boarding, and ran up to finish his own work with the axe held short in his left hand. A couple of planks were smashed in unburnt. He stayed on the ladder to see whether the flames would leap the completed chasm, stayed until the rungs smoked under his nose. When the burning boards fell in on his left, and those on his right did not even smoulder, he returned quickly to the ground.

  Throats which had groaned that night were parching for a cheer. The time was not ripe. A shrill cry came instead: the boarding upon the other side had ignited in its turn.

  “Round with the ladder,” cried the rector; “we’ll soon have it out. We know more about it now. We’ll save the chancel yet! Find another axe; we’ll begin top and bottom at once.”

  And now the scene was changing every minute. A sky of slate had become a sky of lead. The tens who had witnessed the first stages of the fire had multiplied into hundreds. Frightened birds were twittering in the trees; frightened horses neighed in the road; every kind of vehicle but a fire-engine had been driven to the scene. Among the graves stood a tall and aged gentleman, with the top-hat of his youth crammed down to his snowy eyebrows, and an equally obsolete top-coat buttoned up to his silver whiskers, in conversation with Sidney Gleed.

  “The damned rascal!” said the old gentleman. “But how the devil did it come out?”

  “Musk seems to have smelt a rat, and went to him after the funeral. And he owned up as bold as brass; the servants heard him. There he goes, up the ladder again on this side. Keeps the fun to himself, don’t he? Who’s going to win the Leger, doctor? Shotover again?”

  “Damn the Leger,” said Dr. Marigold, whose sporting propensities, bad language, and good heart were further constituents in the most picturesque personality within a day’s ride. “To think I should have stood at her death-bed,” he said, “and would have given ten pounds to know who it was; and it’s your High Church parson of all men on God’s earth! The infernal blackguard deserves to have his church burnt down; but he’s got some pluck, confound him.”

  “Sucking up,” said Master Sidney: “playing to the gallery while he’s got the chance.”

  “H’m,” said the doctor; “looks to me pretty badly burnt about the back and arms. If he wasn’t such a damned rascal I’d order him down.”

  “He’s doing no good,” rejoined the young cynic, “and he knows it. He’s only there for effect. Look! There’s the roof catching, as any fool knew it must; and here’s the Lakenhall engine, in time for ‘God save the Queen.’”

  Dr. Marigold swore again: his good heart contained no niche for the heir to the Long Stow property. He turned his back on Sidney, his face to the sexton, who had been at his elbow for some time.

  “Well, Busby, what are you bothering about?”

  “The frog, doctor. That croap louder than ever.”

  “You infernal old humbug! Get out!”

  “But that’s true, doctor — that’s Gospel truth. Do you stoop down and you’ll hear it for yourself. Master Sidney, he heard it where he sit.”

  “Did he, indeed! Then he’s worse than you.”

  “But that steal every bit I eat; that do, that do,” whined the sexton. “I’ve tried salts, I’ve tried a ‘metic, an’ what else can I try? That fare to know such a wunnerful lot. Salts an’ ‘metics, not him! He look t’other way, an’ hang on like grim death for the next bit o’ meat. That’s killin’ me, doctor. That’s worse nor slow poison. That steal every bite I eat.”

  “Well, it won’t steal this,” said the doctor, dispensing half-a-crown. “Now get away to bed, you old fool, and don’t bother me.”

  And neither thanks nor entreaties would divert his eyes from the burning church again.

  The antiquated doctor was one of Nature’s sportsmen: his inveterate sympathies were with the losers of up-hill games and games against time; and this blackguard parson had played his like a man, only to lose it with the thunder of the fire-engine in his ears. The roof had caught at last; in a little it would be blazing from end to end; and half-a-dozen country fire-engines, and half a hundred Robert Carltons, could do no good now. Carlton came slowly enough down his ladder this time, and stood apart with his beard on his chest.

  “Hard lines, hard lines!” muttered Dr. Marigold in his top-coat collar; and “Those slow fools! Those sleepy old women!” with his favourite participle in each ejaculation.

  A sky of lead had turned to one of silver. Across the open uplands, beyond the conflagration, a kindlier glow was in the east. And in the broad daylight the fire reached its height with as small effect as the firemen plied their water. Nothing could check the roof. Ceiling, joists, and slates burnt up like good fuel in a good grate. Now it was a watershed of living fire; now an avalanche of red-hot ruin; now a column of smoke and sparks, rising out of blackened walls; a column unbroken by the wind, which had fallen at dawn with a little rain, the edge of a shower that had shunned Long Stow.

  When the roof fell in there were few of the hundreds present who had not retreated out of harm’s way. Only the helmed firemen held their ground, and two others with bare heads. Of the pair, one was standing dazed, with his beard
on the rough coat thrown about him, and an ear deaf to his companion’s entreaties, when the crash came and the sparks flew high and wide through rent walls and gaping windows. The sparks blackened as they fell. The first smoke lifted. And the dazed man lay upon his face, the other kneeling over him.

  Dr. Marigold came running, for all his years and his long top-coat.

  “Did anything hit him, Ivey?”

  “Not that I saw, sir; but he fared as if he’d fainted on his feet, and when the roof went, why, so did he.”

  Marigold knelt also, and a thickening ring enclosed the three.

  “He’s rather nastily burnt, poor devil.”

  And the old doctor lifted a leaden wrist, felt it in a sudden hush, examined a burn upon the same arm, and looked up through eyebrows like white moustaches.

  “But not dangerously, damn him!”

  VII

  THE SINNER’S PRAYER

  The bishop of the diocese sat at the larger of the two desks in the palace library. It was the thirteenth of the following month, and a wet forenoon. At eleven o’clock his lordship was intent upon a sheet of unlined foolscap, with sundry notes dotted down the edge, and the rest of the leaf left blank. The bishop’s sight was failing, but against glasses he had set his face. So his whiskers curled upon the paper; and the wide mouth between the whiskers was firmly compressed; and this compression lengthened a clean-shaven upper lip already unduly long. But the pose displayed a noble head covered with thin white hair, and the broad brow that was the casket of a broad mind. Seen at his desk, the massive head and shoulders suggested both strength and stature above the normal. Yet the bishop on his legs was a little man who limped. And the surprise of this discovery was not the last for an observer: for the little lame man had a dignity independent of his inches, and a majesty of mind which lost nothing, but gained in prominence, by the constant contrast of a bodily imperfection.

  The bishop stood up when his visitor was announced, a minute after eleven, and supported himself with one hand while he stretched the other across his desk. Carlton took it in confusion. He had expected that shut mouth and piercing glance, but not this kindly grasp. He was invited to sit down. The man who complied was the ghost of the Rector of Long Stow, as his spiritual overseer remembered him. His whole face was as white as his forehead had been on the day of the fire. It carried more than one still whiter scar. Yet in the eyes there burnt, brighter than ever, those fires of zeal and of enthusiasm which had warmed the bishop’s heart in the past, but which somewhat puzzled him now.

  “I am sorry,” said his lordship, “that you should have such weather for what, I am sure, must have been an undertaking for you, Mr. Carlton. You still look far from strong. Before we begin, is there nothing — —”

  Carlton could hear no more. There was nothing at all. He was quite himself again. And he spoke with some coolness; for the other’s manner, despite his mouth and his eyes, was almost cruel in its unexpected and undue consideration. It was less than ever this man’s intention to play upon the pity of high or low. He had an appeal to make before he went, but it was not an appeal for pity. Meanwhile his back stiffened and his chest filled in the intensity of his desire not to look the invalid.

  “In that case,” resumed the bishop, “I am glad that you have seen your way to keeping the appointment I suggested. In cases of complaint — more especially a complaint of the grave character indicated in my letter — I make it a rule to see the person complained of before taking further steps. That is to say, if he will see me; and I don’t think you will regret having done so, Mr. Carlton. It may give you pain — —”

  Carlton jerked his hands.

  “But you shall have fair play!”

  And his lordship looked point-blank at the bearded man, as he had looked in his day on many a younger culprit; and his voice was the peculiar voice that generations of schoolboys had set themselves to imitate, with less success than they supposed.

  Carlton bowed acknowledgment of this promise.

  “In the questions which I feel compelled to put” — and the bishop glanced at his sheet of foolscap— “you will perhaps give me credit for studying your feelings as far as is possible in the painful circumstances. I shall try not to leave them more painful than I find them, Mr. Carlton. But the complaint received is a very serious one, and it is not made by one person; it has very many signatures; and it necessitates plain speaking. It is a fact, then, that you are the father of an illegitimate child born on the twentieth of last month in your own parish?”

  “It is a fact, my lord.”

  “And the woman is dead?”

  “The young girl — is dead.”

  The bishop’s pen had begun the descent of the clean part of his page of foolscap; when the last answer was inscribed, the writer looked up, neither in astonishment nor in horror, but with the clear eye and the serene brow of the ideal judge.

  “Of course,” said he, “I am informed that you have already made the admission. Let there be no affectation or misunderstanding between us, on that or any other point. But as your bishop, and at least hitherto your friend, I desire to have refutation or confirmation from your own lips. You are at perfect liberty to deny me either. It will make no difference to the ultimate result. That, as you know, will be out of my hands.”

  “I desire to withhold nothing, my lord,” said Robert Carlton in a firm voice.

  “Very well. I think we understand each other. This poor young woman, I gather, was the daughter of a prominent parishioner?”

  “Of a prominent resident in my parish — yes.”

  “But she herself was conspicuous in parochial work? Is it a fact that she played the organ in church?”

  “It is.”

  The fact was noted, the pen laid down; and the little old man, who looked only great across his desk, leant back in his chair.

  “I am exceedingly anxious that you should have fair play. Let me say plainly that these are not my first inquiries into the matter. I am informed — I wish to know with what truth — that the young woman disappeared for several months before her death?”

  “It is quite true.”

  “And returned to give birth to her child?”

  “And to die!” said Carlton, in his grim determination neither to shield nor to spare himself in any of his answers. But his hands were clenched, and his white face glistened with his pain.

  The bishop watched him with an eye grown mild with understanding, and a heart hot with mercy for the man who had no mercy on himself. But the tight mouth never relaxed, and the peculiar voice was unaltered when it broke the silence. It was the voice of justice, neither kind nor unkind, severe nor lenient, only grave, deliberate, matter-of-fact.

  “My next question is dictated by information received, or let me say by suspicions communicated. It is a vital question; do not answer unless you like. It is, however, a question that will infallibly arise elsewhere. Were you, or were you not, privy to this poor young woman’s disappearance?”

  “Before God, my lord, I was not!”

  “I understand that her parents had no idea where she was until the very end. Had you none either?”

  “No more than they had. We were equally in the dark. We believed that she had gone to stay with a friend from the village — a young woman who had married from service, and was settled near London. It was several weeks before we discovered that her friend had never seen her.”

  “And all this time you did not suspect her condition?”

  “Yes; then I did; but not before.”

  “She made no communication before she went away?”

  “None whatever to me — none whatever, to my knowledge.”

  “And this was early in the year?”

  “She left Long Stow in January, and we had no news of her till the middle of June, when strangers communicated with her father.”

  Again the bishop leant over his foolscap.

  “Did you ever offer her marriage?” he asked abruptly.

  “
Repeatedly!”

  The clear eyes looked up.

  “Did you not tell her father this?”

  “No; I couldn’t condescend to tell him,” said Carlton, flushing for the first time. “My lord, I have made no excuses. There are none to make. That was none at all.”

  His lordship regarded the changed face with no further change in his own.

  “So you loved her,” he said softly, after a pause.

  “Ah! if only I had loved her more!”

  “If excuse there could be . . . love . . . is some.”

  It was the old man murmuring, as old men will, all unknown to the bishop and the judge.

  “But I want no excuses!” cried Carlton, wildly. “And let me be honest now, whatever I have been in the past; if I deceived myself and others, let me undeceive myself and you! Oh, my lord, that wasn’t love! It’s the bitterest thought of all, the most shameful confession of all. But love must be something better; that can’t be love! It was passion, if you like; it was a passion that swept me away in the pride of my strength; but, God forgive me, it was not love!”

  He hid his face in his writhing hands; and, with those wild eyes off him, the bishop could no longer swallow his compassion. The lines of his mouth relaxed, and lo, the mouth was beautiful. A tender light suffused the aged face, and behold, the face was gentle beyond belief.

  “Love is everything,” the old man said; “but even passion is something, in these cold days of little lives and little sins. And honesty like yours is a great deal, Robert Carlton, though your sin be as scarlet, and the Blood of our Blessed Lord alone can make you clean.”

  Carlton looked up swiftly, a new solicitude in his eyes.

  “In me it was scarlet: not in her. She loved . . . she loved. Oh, to have loved as well — to have that to remember! . . . She thought it would spoil my life; and I never guessed it was that! But now I know, I know! It was for my sake she went away . . . poor child . . . poor mistaken heroine! She died for me, and I cannot die for her. Isn’t that hard? I can’t even die for her!”

  His bodily weakness betrayed itself in his swimming eyes; in the night of his agony no tear had dimmed them before men. But his will was not all gone. With clenched fists, and locked jaw, and beaded brow, he fought his weakness, while the good bishop sat with his head on his hand, and closed eyes, praying for a brother in the valley of despair. When he opened his eyes, it was as though his prayer was heard; for Robert Carlton was bearing himself with a new bravery; and the incongruous unquenched fires, which had caused surprise at the outset of the interview, burnt brightly as before in the younger eyes. The old man met them with a sad, grave scrutiny. But the lines of his mouth remained relaxed. And, when he spoke again, his voice was very gentle.