Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  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 cease singing 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. It did 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.

  “Look what you’ve gone and done,” said Busby, reproachfully, displaying the yolk in the cup. Thereupon he received instructions which even he could follow; and at length the mess was down, stinging with the sexton’s notion of a teaspoonful of whisky. This second accident was even happier than the first; there was instant agitation in every vein. And now Busby could hear without stooping.

  “When did you find me?”

  “That fare to be an hour ago, I suppose. Ah, but I thought as how you looked bad! Soon as ever I see you, I say to myself, ‘The reverend’s found what beat him at last,’ I say; ‘he do look wunnerful bad,’ I say. And you see, I was right.”

  There was the tiniest gleam in the great bright eyes.

  “You were partly right,” said Carlton, “and partly wrong. I’m not done with yet, Busby. So then you lit the fire for me?”

  “That wasn’t wholly out.”

  “Ah!”

  “That soon burnt up. Then I went and got another kettle.”

  The great eyes flashed suspicion.

  “And told everybody you saw, I suppose!”

  “I should be very sorry,” said the sexton, significantly. “No, I come an’ went by the lane, an’ took wunnerful care that nobody set eyes on I. I thought as how you might fare to like a cup o’ tea, an’ that was a rare mess you’d made o’ your kettle.”

  “You’ve done well,” whispered Carlton. “You’ve saved my — saved my cold from getting worse. You shall never regret it, Busby; only don’t you tell anybody I’ve had one — do you hear? Don’t you tell a single soul that you found me in bed!”

  “No fear,” chuckled the sexton. “I should be very sorry to tell anybody I’d found you at all. They might hear o’ that somewhere else!”

  Carlton lay still with thought and purpose; and death itself could not have given the lower part of his face a harsher cast; but the hot eyes were fixed upon the fading diamonds of the window over the table. At last he spoke — and it was a pity there was but the sexton to hear the firm tones of so faint a voice.

  “Find my keys, Busby. I’m going to give you a sovereign — —”

  “A what?”
>
  “The first of several if you do what I want!”

  Not much later the sexton was hobbling towards Lakenhall, for the first time in many years; and the sick man lay greatly doubting whether he should ever see him again. His weakness was terrible now. The excitement of conversation had provoked a relapse as grave as it was inevitable in one so weak. The flickering lamp was only fed by the stimulus of suspense, the glow of the fire, and the man’s own indomitable will. The latter, however, never failed him for a moment.

  “I will pull through,” he would mutter at his worst. “I will — I will . . . Oh, is he never, never . . .”

  He came at last — with corn-flour, meat-extract, a bottle of port, and such other requisites as had entered the sick man’s head under the spur of his overdose of ardent spirits. And, simple and inadequate as they were, these things spelt the first syllable of recovery.

  The sexton came night after night; he also was a lonely man; and he dearly loved a pound. In a week he was richer than he had ever been before. It became difficult for him to take a disinterested view of the determined progress which the patient made towards complete recovery and consequent independence. The situation, however, had its little compensations: at all events it enabled the imaginary sufferer to crow over the real one to his heart’s content.

  “Ah, sir, you don’t fare to know what that is to be right ill, like I. You never had a fine fat frog settun in your middle an’ keepun all the good out o’ your stummick. That get every bite I eat, an’ then that cry for more. Croap, croap, croap!”

  One day brought forth an unsuspected fact. The sexton was no longer sexton at all. There had been no more burials. The school-bell was rung on Sundays, as all the week, by the schoolmaster’s son. Busby had been dismissed with a present, as long ago as the month of August; but that was not all. He had thereupon left the Church in justifiable dudgeon, and thrown in his spiritual lot with the Particular Baptists in the little flint chapel between the Linkworth turning and the Flint House. He now exhorted Mr. Carlton to do the same.

  “If you do, sir,” said Busby, “you’ll never fall no more.”

  Carlton winced. But the man had saved his life. Nothing should annoy him from the kind old imbecile who had come to his succour while the sound world stood aloof.

  “You don’t know that,” he said quietly.

  “But I do,” declared the other. “I’m like to know. God’s children can’t sin, and I’m one on ‘em.”

  Carlton opened his eyes.

  “Do you mean to tell me you never sin?”

  “I mean to tell you, sir,” said the solemn sexton, “that, since God laid his hand on me, now seven month ago, I’ve never once committed the shadder of a sin.”

  “Then, if I were you, I should remember what St. Paul says— ‘Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed — lest — he — fall.’”

  The text faltered; it was terribly two-edged; but Carlton had not perceived the pitfall until he was over the brink. He had forgotten himself in his scorn, and spoken impulsively as the man that he had been the year before. But the inveterate egotist was conveniently full of himself, and his pat retort quite free from offence.

  “Fall?” said he, with his foolish eyes wide open. “Why, I couldn’t do that if I tried; and I have tried, just to see; but I fare to have forgotten how to sin. Do you believe me, sir, I can’t even raise a swear at this little varmin what’s killun me inch by inch. Why, I’m grateful to it! But I do sometimes fare to cry to think I have to stay another day in this world o’ sin, when I know there’s a place prepared for me in heaven above.”

  This stupendous speech was too much for even Mr. Carlton’s self-control. Its snivelling tone, its evident conviction (confirmed by a gargoyle’s grin of infinite self-esteem), were aggravated by the complete surprise of this spiritual revelation; and between them they awoke a dormant nerve. Robert Carlton did not exhibit that annoyance which he had determined to conceal; he did much worse. He burst out laughing in the sexton’s face. And his laughter was long, loud, high-pitched and hysterical, alike from weakness and from long disuse.

  The sexton on his legs, in a perfect palsy of horror and offence, alone put a stop to it.

  “I beg your pardon,” gasped Carlton, his eyes full of tears; “oh, I beg — —”

  And again that hysterical, high-pitched laughter got the better of him, ringing weirdly enough through the empty house.

  “Ah!” said the dotard, when it had stopped at last; and the monosyllable contented him for some moments. “Well,” he at length continued, with a brisker manner and a brighter face; “well, thank God I pulled you through; thank God I didn’t let you die in your sins and go to everlasting hell without another chance of immortal life. You wicked man! You wicked man! I’ll go and I’ll pray for you; but I’ll never come near you no more.”

  So the solitary regained his solitude; when he spoke again, it was to himself.

  “Well, he has his money,” he reflected aloud: he had paid the sexton some seven pounds in all. “And my gratitude!” he cried later. “I must never forget that I owe my life to that egregious old man.”

  Yet the greater gratitude was beginning to stir within him, as the sap was even then stirring in the trees. It was a mild, bright day, one of the last in March. The invalid had not yet been out; he would go out now. In an instant he was wrapping up.

  Oh, but it was wonderful! the feel and noise of the moist gravel under the soles of his boots; the green, damp grass; the watery sun; the beloved birds; the mild, beneficent air.

  His steps took the old direction of their own accord. In a minute he was there, at the church, and seated on the very wall which he had been building a fortnight before, surveying his work.

  Had some one been carrying it on in his absence? Or was it only that one noticed no difference from day to day, but all the difference in the world after an unaccustomed absence? Yes, this was it; and he drew the deep breath which his first idea had checked.

  Still it was wonderful: one wall seemed so much higher, another so much cleaner than before; and yet there was no stone either laid or scraped which Carlton did not recognize at a glance, with sudden memories of special travail; and the string was still where he had stretched it to keep the line. He had under-estimated his progress at the time; that was all; but again it was as though the sap was rising in his heart.

  The very tangle of blackened timber, which still cumbered nine-tenths of the inner area, no longer struck Carlton as the unconquerable chaos it had appeared on that bitter day which seemed so many days ago; yet, when he laid white hands upon such a beam as he had easily shouldered then, he could not lift it an inch. Ah, that day! It would take him weeks to undo its evil work. The wet feet and the cutting wind, he could feel them both again, with the sweat freezing on his body, and every pore an open door to death. There was the ridge of red-stemmed firs, too far east to blunt the cold steel of that deadly wind; and here beneath him the barrier he had been building last, and must finish now before he did another thing. How firm and true was this top course, that he had laid that day with the bony fingers at his throat! Well, he would have died with a good day’s work behind him . . . It must have been a very near thing . . . he wondered how near when the sexton came, and why the sexton had come at all. The man had never given a good reason. He had only just fared to think there might be something wrong.

  On the way indoors, the invalid stopped at a tree. It was one of the horse-chestnuts; and already every delicate extremity was swollen and sticky to the touch; and the birds sang of summer in the branches. Carlton passed on with the short, quick steps of a feeble person in a hurry. Rivers were running in his heart; he wanted to be where he could kneel.

  XX

  THE WAY OF PEACE

  Three years later the man was still alone, and the church still growing under his unaided but untiring hand. Indeed, from one end, it looked almost ready for the roof, the west gable rising salient through the trees, with the original window in
tact underneath. But this window was the exception, the sole survivor from the fire, and for the past year the rest had been one long impediment. Even now, only the three single lights, in either transept and to the right of the porch respectively, had been wrought to a finish from sill to arch; a mullioned window was just begun; the remainder all yawned to the sky in ragged gaps of varying width. But the village looked daily on the one good end, flanked by the west walls of either transept, which happened not to have a window between them, and were consequently finished. And the village was softening a little towards its outcast, though no man said so above his breath; nor was a living soul known to have been near him all these years, unless it was the new sexton to dig a grave, or a Lakenhall curate to make an entry in the parish register.

  There had, however, been one or two others; the first knocking at the study door on the evening of the first funeral, some months after Carlton’s illness.

  Carlton was reading at the time. His heart stopped at the sound. It was repeated before he could bring himself to open the door.

  “Tom Ivey!”

  “That’s me, sir; may I come in?”

  “Surely, Tom.”

  The hulking mason entered awkwardly, and refused a chair. His large frame bulked abnormally in a ready-made suit of stiff black cloth. He seemed to take up half the room, as he stood and glowered, a full-length figure of surly embarrassment and dark resolve.

  “There was a funeral to-day,” he began at last.

  “I know.”

  “That was my poor mother, Mr. Carlton.”

  “Yes, I heard. Tom, I’m so sorry for you!”

  Their hands flew together, and were one till Carlton winced.

  “There’s nothun to be sorry for,” said Tom, with husky philosophy. “Her troubles are over, poor thing. So’s one o’ mine! You can start me to-morrow.”