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PECCAVI
BY E. W. HORNUNG
AUTHOR OF "THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN," "MY LORD
DUKE," "YOUNG BLOOD," ETC.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK 1901
COPYRIGHT, 1900, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
All rights reserved
THE CAXTON PRESS
NEW YORK.
CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. Dust to Dust 1
II. The Chief Mourner 11
III. A Confession 18
IV. Midsummer Night 29
V. The Man Alone 45
VI. Fire 51
VII. The Sinner's Prayer 66
VIII. The Lord of the Manor 77
IX. A Duel Begins 89
X. The Letter of the Law 100
XI. Labour of Hercules 115
XII. A Fresh Discovery 125
XIII. Devices of a Castaway 131
XIV. The Last Resort 137
XV. His Own Lawyer 150
XVI. End of the Duel 162
XVII. Three Weeks and a Night 186
XVIII. The Night's Work 193
XIX. The First Winter 209
XX. The Way of Peace 230
XXI. At the Flint House 249
XXII. A Little Child 262
XXIII. Design and Accident 275
XXIV. Glamour and Rue 291
XXV. Signs of Change 306
XXVI. A Very Few Words 316
XXVII. An Escape 323
XXVIII. The Turning Tide 335
XXIX. A Haven of Hearts 348
XXX. The Woman's Hour 362
XXXI. Advent Eve 378
XXXII. The Second Time 390
XXXIII. Sanctuary 397
PECCAVI
I
DUST TO DUST
Long Stow church lay hidden for the summer amid a million leaves. It had
neither tower nor steeple to show above the trees; nor was the
scaffolding between nave and chancel an earnest of one or the other to
come. It was a simple little church, of no antiquity and few exterior
pretensions, and the alterations it was undergoing were of a very
practical character. A sandstone upstart in a countryside of flint, it
stood aloof from the road, on a green knoll now yellow with buttercups,
and shaded all day long by horse-chestnuts and elms. The church formed
the eastern extremity of the village of Long Stow.
It was Midsummer Day, and a Saturday, and the middle of the Saturday
afternoon. So all the village was there, though from the road one saw
only the idle group about the gate, and on the old flint wall a row of
children commanded by the schoolmaster to "keep outside." Pinafores
pressed against the coping, stockinged legs dangling, fidgety hob-nails
kicking stray sparks from the flint; anticipation at the gate,
fascination on the wall, law and order on the path in the
schoolmaster's person; and in the cool green shade hard by, a couple of
planks, a crumbling hillock, an open grave.
Near his handiwork hovered the sexton, a wizened being, twisted with
rheumatism, leaning on his spade, and grinning as usual over the
stupendous hallucination of his latter years. He had swallowed a
rudimentary frog with some impure water. This frog had reached maturity
in the sexton's body. Many believed it. The man himself could hear it
croaking in his breast, where it commanded the pass to his stomach, and
intercepted every morsel that he swallowed. Certainly the sexton was
very lean, if not starving to death quite as fast as he declared; for he
had become a tiresome egotist on the point, who, even now, must hobble
to the schoolmaster with the last report of his unique ailment.
"That croap wuss than ever. Would 'ee like to listen, Mr. Jones?"
And the bent man almost straightened for the nonce, protruding his chest
with a toothless grin of huge enjoyment.
"Thank you," said the schoolmaster. "I've something else to do."
"Croap, croap, croap!" chuckled the sexton. "That take every mortal
thing I eat. An' doctor can't do nothun for me--not he!"
"I should think he couldn't."
"Why, I do declare he be croapun now! That fare to bring me to my own
grave afore long. Do you listen, Mr. Jones; that croap like billy-oh
this very minute!"
It took a rough word to get rid of him.
"You be off, Busby. Can't you see I'm trying to listen to something
else?"
In the church the rector was reciting the first of the appointed psalms.
Every syllable could be heard upon the path. His reading was Mr.
Carlton's least disputed gift, thanks to a fine voice, an unerring sense
of the values of words, and a delivery without let or blemish. Yet there
was no evidence that the reader felt a word of what he read, for one and
all were pitched in the deliberate monotone rarely to be heard outside a
church. And just where some voices would have failed, that of the Rector
of Long Stow rang clearest and most precise:
_"When thou with rebukes dost chasten man for sin, thou makest his
beauty to consume away, like as it were a moth fretting a garment: every
man therefore is but vanity._
_"Hear my prayer, O Lord, and with thine ears consider my calling: hold
not thy peace at my tears._
_"For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner, as all my fathers
were._
_"O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go
hence, and be no more seen . . ."_
The sexton was regaling the children on the wall with the ever-popular
details of his notorious malady. The schoolmaster still strutted on the
path, now peeping in at the porch, now reporting particulars to the
curious at the gate: a quaint incarnation of conscious melancholy and
unconscious enjoyment.
"Hardly a dry eye in the church!" he announced after the psalm. "Mr.
Carlton and Musk himself are about the only two that fare to hide what
they feel."
"And what does Mr. Carlton feel?" asked a lout with a rose in his coat.
"About as much as my little finger!"
"Ay," said another, "he cares for nothing but his Roman candles, and his
transcripts and gargles."[1]
[Footnote 1: Transepts and gargoyles.]
"Come," said the schoolmaster, "you wouldn't have the parson break down
in church, would you? I'm sorry I mentioned him. I was thinking of
Jasper Musk. He just stands as though Mr. Carlton had carved him out of
stone."
"The wonder is that he can stand there at all," retorted the fellow with
the flower, "to hear what he don't believe read by a man he don't
believe in. A funeral, is it? It's as well we know--he'd take a weddun
in the same voice."
The schoolmaster turned away with an ambiguous shrug. It was not his
business to defend Mr. Carlton against the disaffected and the undevout.
He considered his duty done when he informed the rector who his enemies
were, and (if permitted to proceed) what they were saying behind his
back. The schoolmaster made a mental mark against the name of one
Cubitt, ex-choirman, and, forthwith transferring his attention to the
audience on the wall, put a stop to their untimely entertainment before
returning softly to the porch.
In Long Stow churchyard there was shade all day, but in the church it
was dusk from that moment in the forenoon when the east window lost the
sun. This peculiarity was partly temporary. The church was in a
transition stage; it was putting forth transepts north and south;
meanwhile there was much boarding within, and a window in eclipse on
either side. The surrounding foliage added its own shade; and each time
the schoolmaster stole out of the sunlight into the porch, to peer up
the nave, it was several moments before he could see anything at all.
And then it was but a few high lights in a sea of gloom: first the east
window, as yet unstained, its three quatrefoils filled with summer sky,
the rest with waving branches; next, the brass lectern, the surplice
behind it, the high white forehead above. Then in the chancel something
gleamed: that was the coffin, resting on trestles. Then in the choir
seats, otherwise deserted, a figure grew out of the shadows, a solitary
and a massive figure, that stood even now when everybody else was
seated, finely regardless of the fact. It was a man, elderly, but very
powerfully built. The hair stood white and thick upon the large strong
head, less white and shorter on the broad deep jowl. The head was
carried with a certain dignity, rude, savage, indomitable. The eyes
gazed fixedly at the opposite wall; not once did they condescend to the
thing that gleamed upon the trestles. One great hand was knotted over
the knob of a mighty stick, on which the old man leant stiffly. He was
dressed in black, not quite as a gentleman, yet as befitted the most
substantial man but one in the parish. And that was Jasper Musk.
The parson finished the lesson, and his white brow bent over the closed
book; the face beneath was bearded and much tanned, and in it there
burnt an eye that came as a surprise after that formal voice; and the
hand that closed the book was sensitive but strong. Stepping from the
lectern, the clergyman declared his calibre in an obeisance towards the
altar, then led the way slowly down the aisle. Bearers rose from the
shades and followed with the coffin; they were almost at the porch
before Jasper Musk took notice enough to limp after them with much noise
from his stick. The congregation waited for him, swarming into the aisle
in the big man's wake. So they came to the grave.
And there broad daylight revealed a circumstance that came as a shock to
most of those who had followed the body from the church, but as an
outrage to the officiating clergyman: the coffin bore no plate. Mr.
Carlton coloured to the hair, and his deep eye flashed upon the chief
mourner; the latter leant upon his stick and replied with a grim glare
across the open grave. For a moment the wind washed through the trees,
and every sparrow made itself heard; then the rector's eyes dropped to
his book, but his voice rang colder than before. And presently the earth
received its own.
Mr. Carlton had pronounced the benediction, and a solemn hush still held
all assembled, when a bicycle bell jarred staccato in the road; a moment
later, with a sharp word for some children who had tired of the funeral
and strayed across his path, the rider dismounted outside the saddler's
workshop, a tiny cabin next his house and opposite the church. The
cyclist was a lad in his teens, dark, handsome, dapper, but small for
his age, which was that of high collars and fancy ties; and he rode a
fancy bicycle, the high machine of the day, but extravagantly nickelled
in all its parts.
"Well, Fuller," said he, "who are they burying?"
Fuller, the saddler, who enjoyed a local monopoly in the exercise of his
craft, but whose trade was the mere relaxation of a life spent in
reading and disseminating the news of the day, was spelling through the
_Standard_ at his bench behind the open window. He dropped his paper and
whipped the spectacles from a big dogmatic nose.
"Gord love yer, Mr. Sidney, do you stand there and tell me you haven't
heard?"
"How could I hear when I'm only home from Saturdays to Mondays? I'm on
my way home now. Old Sally Webb--is it--or one of the old Wilsons?"
"No, sir," said the saddler; "that's no old person. Gord love yer," he
cried again, "I wish that was!"
"Who is it, Mr. Fuller?"
"That's Molly Musk," said Fuller, slowly; "that's who that is, Mr.
Sidney."
The boy had not the average capacity for astonishment; he was not, in
fact, the average boy; but at the name his eyebrows shot up and his
mouth grew round.
"Molly Musk! I thought nobody knew where she was? When did she turn up?"
"Tuesday night, and died the next."
"But I say, Fuller, this is interesting!" Perhaps the average boy would
have been no more shocked; he might not even have found it interesting.
This one leant his bicycle against the wall, and his elbows on the bench
within the open window. "Where's she been all this time?" he queried,
confidentially. "What did she die of? What's it all mean?" And there was
a knowing curl about the corners of his mouth.
"Mean?" said the saddler; "there's more than you want to know that, Mr.
Sidney, but want must be their master. That old Jasper, _he_ know, so
they say; but I'm not so sure. It was he fetched her home, poor old
feller; got the letter Monday morning, had her home by Tuesday night.
That's a man I never liked, Mr. Sidney. I've said it to his face, and
I'll say it as long as I live; but, Gord love yer, I'm sorry for him
now! That's given _him_ a rare doing and no mistake, and less wonder. A
trim little thing like poor Molly Musk! Not that I'm so surprised as
some; a man of my experience don't make no mistake, and I never did care
for the breed. But there, even my heart bleed when that don't boil; as
for the reverend here, he feel it as much as anybody else, and that _I_
know. That young Jim Cubitt, he come by just now, and says he, 'He's
taking the service as if it was a wedding.' 'You've been kicked out of
the choir,' I says; 'that's what's the matter with you still, or you
wouldn't want a man to be a woman. Thank goodness there's one live man
in the parish,' I says, 'though I don't fare to hold with him.' And no
more I do, Mr. Sidney; but, Gord love yer, that make no difference to
men of our experience. I like the reverend's Popery as little as the
squire like it, and I tell him so, yet he go on bringing me the
_Standard_ every day when he've done with it. Is there another clergyman
that'd do the like to a man that went against him in the parish? Would
the Reverend Preston at Linkworth? Would the Reverend Scrope at Burton
Mills? Or Canon Wilders, or any other man Jack of 'em? No, sir, not
one!"
"But if he doesn't read them himself," said the boy, "it doesn't amount
to so very much." And he laid his hand on three more _Standards_,
unopened, with the parson's name in print upon the wrapper.
"What I was coming to," cried the saddler; "only when I get on the
reverend my tongue will wag. They say he don't feel. I say he do, and I
know: all this week I've had no _Standard_, so this morning I was so
bold as to up and mention it, and there was all six unopened.
'Reverend,' I says, 'you must be ill--with that there Egyptian Question
to argue about'--for we're rare 'uns to argue, the reverend and me--'and
no trace yet o' them Phoenix Park varmin!' But he shake his head. 'Not
ill, Fuller,' he says; 'but there's tragedy enough in this parish
without going to the papers for more. And I haven't the heart to argue
even with you,' he says. So that's my answer to them as says our
reverend don't feel."
The boy had been patiently pricking the bench with a saddler's punch;
now he raised his deliberate dark eyes and looked at the other
point-blank.
"You talk about a tragedy," he said, "but you won't say where the
tragedy comes in. What has killed the girl?"
"I hardly like to tell a young gentleman like you," said the saddler;
"though, to be sure, you'll hear of nothing else in the village."
"Perhaps," said the boy, with a rather sinister smile, "I'm not quite so
innocent as I ought to be. Come on, out with it!"
"Well, then, the poor young thing was brought home in trouble," sighed
the saddler. "And in her trouble she died next night."
The boy looked at the man through narrow eyes with a knowing light in
them, and the curves cut deep at the corners of his mouth.
"In trouble, eh? So that's why she disappeared?" he said at length.
"Molly--Musk!"
II
THE CHIEF MOURNER
Jasper Musk remained some minutes at the grave, alone, and more than
ever a mark for curious eyes; his own were raised, and his lips moved
with a significance difficult to mistake, but in him yet more difficult
to accept. The infidelity of the man was notorious, and, indeed, the
raised face was not the face of prayer. It was flint bathed in gall, too
bitter for faith, too savage for sorrow; it was a frozen sea of wrinkles
without a single ripple of agitation. Yet the lips moved, and were still
moving when Jasper Musk passed through the crowd now assembled about the
gate, erect though halt, a glitter in his eyes, but that was all.
As the folk had waited and made way for him in the church, so they
waited and made way outside. Thus, as he limped down into the road, Musk
had the village almost to himself. He turned to the right, and the west
wind blew in his face, strong and warm, with cloud upon cloud of yellow
dust; overhead the other clouds flew high and white and broken, a
flotilla of small sail upon the blue. But Musk was done gazing at the
sky, neither did he look right or left as he trudged in the middle of
the road. So the saddler's place, and then the woody opening of the road
to Linkworth, with the white bridge gleaming through the trees, and the
ripe leaves purling in the wind like summer surf, all fell behind on the
left; as, on the right, did the rectory gate, terminating that same
flint wall which had been the children's grand stand. Rectory, church,
and glebe stood all together, an indivisible trinity, with open uplands
east and north. Westward began the cottages, buff-coloured, thatched;
and it was cottages for half a mile, but healthy cottages, with plenty
of space between, here a wheatfield, there a meadow; for every
householder of Long Stow has also his holding of land, and there is no
more independent parish in East Anglia. Of private houses that are not
cottages, however, the village has only three: the rectory at one end,
the hall near the other, and the Flint House between the two.
The Flint House now belonged to Jasper Musk. Report said that he had
bought it outright for nine hundred pounds, with the meadow he was now
passing on his left, and the wild garden reaching to the river.
Originally part and parcel of the Long Stow estate, the place had been
let for years, with a good slice of land, to London sportsmen who spent
just two months of the twelve there. Musk had been the lessee's bailiff,
and had feathered his nest so well that when the whole estate changed
hands, and the part went with the whole, the ex-bailiff was in a
position to buy a house and grounds for which the new squire had no use.
None knew how he could have come honestly by so much profit; yet he was
a man of tried integrity, but a hard man, and the last to get fair
treatment behind his back. A more genuine marvel was the way in which he
had spent his money, on a house that could scarcely fail to be a white
elephant to such a man, and a hideous house into the bargain. It abutted
directly on the road, grim and rambling, with false windows like
wall-eyes, and facets of flint so sharp that to brush against the wall
was to rip a sleeve to ribbons. There were many rooms, musty and
mice-ridden, and now only two old people to inhabit them. Musk had
driven all his sons from home, thus doing his country an unwitting
service, for there was the stuff that knits an empire in the blood. But
only one daughter had been born to him, and now he had left her in the
ground, and would wash his mind of her for ever.
The resolution was easier than its accomplishment: on his very threshold
a shrill small cry assailed and insulted Jasper Musk. And in the parlour
walked his wife, meek-spirited, flat-chested, leaden-eyed; too weary for
much grief, as he was too bitter; in her thin arms an infant not four
days old.
Musk put himself in her path.
"Stop walking!"
"That'll set him off again," sighed Mrs. Musk, though not before she had
obeyed.
"I don't care," said Jasper. "That can cry till that die," he added
brutally, as the fit returned; "and the sooner the better. Hold it up a
bit. There, now! I want to have a look at the brat. I want to see who
that's like!"
"It's like poor Molly," whimpered the grandmother, shedding tears that
she could neither check nor hide.
Musk thumped his stick on the floor.
"Molly? Molly? You let me hear that name again! Haven't I told you once
and for all never to lay your tongue to that name, in my hearing or
behind my back, as long as you live? Then don't you forget it; and none
o' your lies. That's no more like her than that's like you. But a look
of somebody it have, though I can't for the life of me think who. Wait a
bit. Give me time. That'll come--that'll come!"
But the thin shrill screaming continued till the little red face grew
livid and wrinkled almost beyond resemblance to its kind; then Musk
relinquished his futile scrutiny, and signed to his wife to resume the
walking, but himself remained in the room. And he leant on his stick as
he had leant on it at the funeral; but here in his house he wore his
hat; and from under its broad brim he followed them, backward and
forward, to and fro, with smouldering eyes.
"Do you know what I've vowed?" he presently went on. "Do you know the
oath I took, there at that open grave, when all the tomfoolery was over,
and that Jesuit jerry-builder had taken his hook?"
"I'm sure I don't," sighed Mrs. Musk, as the child lay once more still
against her withered bosom.
"I stood there," said Jasper, "and I swore I'd find the man. And I swore
I'd tear his heart out when I've found him. And I'll do both!"
His voice rose so swiftly to so fierce a pitch that the woman started
violently, and the infant wailed again. Instantly the room shook, and
with one stride, paid for by a spasm of pain, the husband towered above
the wife; and this time it was a heavy hand upon her shrunk and
shrinking shoulder that put a stop to the walk.
"Do _you_ know who it is?" he cried. "My God, I believe you do!"
"I don't, indeed!"
"She never told you?"
"God knows she did not."
"Or anybody else?"
"I don't know."
"But you think--you think! I see it in your face. Who is it you think
she may have told? I'll soon find out from him or her; trust me to wring
that out!"
For answer, the woman subsided in sobs upon the horsehair sofa, rocking
herself and the baby in her grief and terror. "You'll be that angry with
me," she moaned; "you'll be right mad!"
"Oh, no, I sha'n't," said Musk, in a kindlier voice. "I'm not so bad as
all that, though this do fare to make a man crazy. Tell away, old woman,
and don't you be afraid."
"Oh, Jasper, it was when you were gone to Lakenhall for the doctor--that
last time!"
"Well?"
"She knew the end was near. Poor thing! Poor thing!"
"What did she say?"
"That she'd die more happier if only she could speak--if only I would
send----"
"Not for Carlton?"
The wife could only nod in her fear and desperation.
"You sent for that man the moment my back was turned?"
"Oh, I knew that'd make you right wild--I knew--I knew!"
Musk controlled himself by an effort.
"That don't. That sha'n't. I'll have it out of him, that's all; he's not
the Church o' Rome yet! Go on. Go on."
"I went myself. No one knew. I left her alone time I was gone."
"And you brought him back with you?"
"Well, he got here first. He ran all the way."
"He knew better than to let me catch him. Jesuit! How long was he with
her?"
"Not long, Jasper, not long indeed!"
"And you heard nothing?"
"Not a word. I stayed downstairs. I had to promise her that before I
went. She had something to say to Mr. Carlton that nobody else must
know."
"But somebody else shall!" said Jasper grimly. "That was it, you may
depend; you should have listened at the door. But that make no matter.
Somebody else is going to know before he's many minutes older!"
And an ugly smile broadened on the thick-set face; but the woman gasped.
Quick as thought the child was on the sofa, the grandmother on her feet.
Trembling and terrified, she stood in her husband's path.
"Jasper! You're never going up to the rectory?"
"I am, though--this minute!"
"Oh, Jasper!"
"Do you let me by."
"But I promised you should never know! You've made me break my solemn
word! He'll know I've broken it!"
"Yes, I'm going to learn him a thing or two. Will you let me by?"
"_She'll_ know--too--wherever she has gone to!"
"You'd better not keep me no more."
"Jasper! Jasper! On her death-bed I promised her----"
"Out of my light!"
III
A CONFESSION
The rector's study was on the ground floor, facing south. It was a long
room, but narrow, and so low that the present incumbent, who stood
six-feet-two, had contracted a stoop out of continual and instinctive
dread of the ancient beams that scored his study ceiling, combined with
a besetting habit of pacing the floor. There were two doors; one led
into the garden, providing parishioners with immediate access to the
rector when he was not to be found at the church; the other terminated
an inner passage. Both were of immemorial oak, and, like the lattice
casement over the writing table, both rattled in the least wind. Such
was the room which the Reverend Robert Carlton haunted when driven or
detained indoors: rickety, ill-lighted, and draughty when it was not
close, it was still a habitable hole enough, and picturesque in spite of
its occupant.
Optional surroundings afford a fair clue to the superficial man, but no
real key to character; thus Mr. Carlton's furniture suggested a soul
devoid of the æsthetic sense. He had the sense in all its fineness, but
it found expression in another place. Like many ritualists, Carlton was
a religious æsthete; none more fastidious in the service of the
sanctuary; on the other hand, after the fashion of his peers in two
Churches, the trappings of his own life were severely simple. They had
nearly all been purchased second-hand, those wire-covered shelves and
the books they bore, that oak settle, and the huge arm-chair filled with
miscellaneous lumber. Two baize-covered forms were there for the
accommodation of various classes which the rector held; a prayer desk
faced east in the one orderly corner of the room. Only three pictures
hung on the walls; a Holy Family and Guido Reni's St. Sebastian,
ordinary silver prints in Oxford frames, mementoes of a pilgrimage to
Rome; and an ancient cricket eleven, faded from age, and fly-blown for
long want of a glass. There were also a couple of tin shields, bearing
the heraldic devices of Robert Carlton's public school and of his Oxford
college, while a crucifix hung over the prayer desk. Among the books two
volumes on _Building Construction_ might have been remarked upon the
settle, together with a tattered copy of Parker's _Introduction to
Gothic Architecture_; among the lumber, a mason's trowel and a
cold-chisel. Lastly, the study smelt, but did not reek, of common
birdseye.
Jasper Musk, passing the open lattice, caught the parson hastily rising
from his knees, not at the prayer desk, but beside his writing table,
upon which a large book lay open. A newspaper lay on top of the book
when Musk was admitted some moments after he had knocked.
He entered with his heavy, uneven steps, but took up a position barely
within the threshold, and began by declining a seat with equal emphasis
and stiffness.
"No, I thank you, Mr. Carlton. I've never been here before in your
time, and I'm never likely to come again. I'm only here now to ask a
question--and return a compliment!"
And the visitor's eye gleamed as Mr. Carlton creased the forehead that
was so white in comparison with his face: at the moment this contrast
was not conspicuous.
"From what I hear," explained Musk, "you've done me the kindness of
coming to my house when my back was turned."
"And you have only heard of it now?"
"Within the last ten minutes; and I come here right straight. You may
think I wouldn't come for nothing, me that's never darkened your door
before to-day. I don't hold with you, Mr. Carlton, and I'm not the only
one. That's true--I'm not a religious man, and never was; but, if I ever
was to be, it wouldn't be your religion. No, sir, when I fare to want
Christmas-trees in church I'll go to Rome and be done with it; and
that's where you ought to be, Mr. Carlton, before you get a parcel of
women to confess their sins to you as though you was God Almighty!"
Mr. Carlton sat quite still under this uncalled-for criticism; he even
looked relieved, and one sensitive finger brushed the brown moustache to
either side of his mouth.
"I have never advocated auricular confession," said he, "whatever I may
think. I have merely said, to those in doubt, in difficulty, or in
trouble, I will help them with God's help if I can."
"In trouble!" cried Musk scornfully. "I know one that never might have
got herself into trouble if she'd never listened to you! And that's what
brings me here; I'll beat about the bush no more. My wife said she
fetched you the other night. I don't blame you for going, I won't go so
far as that. What I want to know, and what I mean to know, is this: did
my--that young woman lying there--confess to you or did she not?" It was
a fist that he had flung in the direction of the churchyard.
"Confess what?"
And the parson's voice was cold and constrained, as it had been beside
the grave; but that white forehead glistened like a dead man's.
"The name of the father of her child!"
Carlton took an ivory paper-knife from his desk, and the thin blade
snapped in two between his fingers. A pause followed. Musk stood like
granite, stick and hat in hand, frowning down on the clergyman seated at
his writing table. At length the latter looked up.
"I might say that is a question you have no right to ask, Mr. Musk;
what is certain, had there been any question of confession, I should
have no right to answer you. There was none. Your daughter sent for
me, to speak to me; and speak we did; but she did not tell me
that--scoundrel's--name."
"But you know!"
"How dare you say that?" cried Carlton; and a flash of anger played for
an instant on his pallor.
"I see it in your face; but I'll have it out of you! I'll have it out of
you," roared Musk, in a sudden frenzy, striking his stick to the floor,
"if I have to tear your smooth tongue out along with it! So smooth you
could read over that murdered girl, and know all the time who'd murdered
her, and think to keep that to yourself! But you sha'n't; no, that you
sha'n't; not if I have to stand here till midnight. You know! You know!
Deny it if you can!"
"I shall deny nothing," retorted the other. "No, I shall deny nothing!"
he reiterated as if to himself. "But think for a minute, Mr. Musk--I
entreat you to think calmly for one minute! Suppose I could tell you
what you ask, could it serve any good end for you to know?"
"Good end!" cried Musk. "Why, you know it could. I could kill the man
who's killed my daughter--and kill him I will--and swing for him if they
like. That'll be a wonderful good end all round!"
"Then is it for me to throw temptation in your way? Is it for me to
spoil a life, if not to end it? For all you know, Mr. Musk, it may be a
life otherwise honest, useful, and of good report. Nay!" exclaimed Mr.
Carlton, as if suddenly impatient of his own reticence, "I'll go so far
as to say that it once was all three. And the man would do such
duty--make such amends----"
A groan admitted that there were none to make, and finished a sentence
to which Musk had not listened; the one before was sufficient for him;
and his broad face shone with the satisfaction of a point gained.
"Come," said he, "that's fairer! So you do know him, and you say so like
a man. I always took you for a man, sir, though there's been no love
lost between us; and I'll say I'm sorry I spoke so harsh just now, Mr.
Carlton; for I had a hold of the wrong end o' the stick--I see that now.
It was the man that confessed--it was the man. Sir, if you're the
Christian gentleman that I take you for, and this here Christianity o'
yours ain't all cant an' humbug, you'll tell me that man's name; for I
can't call to mind a single one she so much as looked at--unless it was
that young Mellis."
"No, no; poor George is innocent enough, God knows!"
"He's like to be, for all I hear. They say he carries a cross for you o'
Sundays--but I won't say no more about that. If he's your right hand in
the parish, as they tell me he is, at least I should hope he'd be
straight."
A puff of wind came through the open window. It lifted the newspaper
from the open book, but the rector's hand fell quickly upon both. And
there it rested. And his wretched eyes rested upon his hand.
"So I've never thought twice about George Mellis. I'd as soon think o'
you, sir. Then who can it be?"
Mr. Carlton bounded to his feet, white as his collar, and quivering to
his nostrils.
"You want to know?"
"I mean to know, sir."
"And to kill him--eh?"
"I reckon I'll go pretty near it."
"Ah, don't do it by halves!" cried Carlton in a strange high voice.
"Kill him now!" His hands fell open at his side; his head fell forward
on his breast; and he who had sinned grossly against God and man, yet
was not born to be a hypocrite, stood defenceless, abject,
self-destroyed.
Moments passed; became minutes; and all the sound in the rectory study
came from the rattling of its inner door, or through the outer one from
the garden. Then by degrees a hard breathing broke on Robert Carlton's
ears; but he himself was the next to speak, flinging back his head in
sudden misery.
"Why don't you strike?" he cried out. "You've got your stick; strike,
man, strike!"
It seemed an hour before the answer came, in a voice scarcely
recognizable as that of Jasper Musk, it was so low and calm; yet there
was an intensity in the deep, slow tones that matched the fearful
intensity of the fixed light eyes; and the massive face was still and
livid from the short steel beard to the virile silver hair.
"Oh, yes, I'll strike!" hissed Musk. "I'll strike! I'll strike!" And he
struck with his eyes until the other's fell once more; until the guilty
man collapsed headlong in his chair, his arms upon the table, and his
face upon his arms. "But I'll strike in my own way, thank you," Musk
went on, "and in my own good time. You shall smart a bit first--learn
what it's like to suffer--taste hell upon earth in case there's no hell
for bloody murderers beyond! How I wish you could see yourself! How I
wish your precious flock could see you--and they shall. Whited sepulchre
. . . filthy hypocrite . . . living lie!"
Deliberately chosen, with long pauses between, with many a rejection of
the word that came uppermost--the worse word that was too strong to
sting--these measured epithets carved round the heart that unbridled
abuse would have stabbed and stunned. Carlton could hide his face, but
he quivered where he sprawled, and the other nodded in savage
self-esteem.
"Not that I had ought to be surprised," continued Musk; "it's what might
have been expected of a Jesuit in disguise; the only wonder is I didn't
suspect you from the first. I never set up for being a charitable man;
but that seems I was a damned sight too charitable towards you. I
thought no wrong, whatever else I may have thought of you and your ways.
No; I may have jeered, I may have been vexed, but my mind wasn't nasty
enough for that. God! that I can keep my stick off you, when I remember
the choir practices, and the organ practices, and the Bible classes, and
the Young Women's Christian Association. Sounds well, don't it? Young
Women's Christian Association! Now we know what it meant; now we know
what it all means, church and parsons, religion and all; a sink of
iniquity and a set of snivelling, whining, licentious----"
"Stop!" cried Carlton, manned at last, and on his feet to enforce the
word. "Say what you please of me, do what you will to me. Nothing is too
bad for me--I deserve the very worst. But abuse my Church you shall not,
in my hearing."
"His Church!" sneered Musk. "A lot you've done to make me respect it,
haven't you? My God, can you stand there looking at me as if I were in
the wrong instead o' you? Do you know what you've done, and confessed to
doing? You've murdered my girl, just as much as though you'd taken and
cut her throat, you have: more, you've murdered her body and soul, you
that snivel about the soul! And you can stand there and whine about your
Church! Is that all you've got to say for yourself--to the father of the
woman you've ruined to her grave?"
"That is all I have to say to you, Mr. Musk. I will not insult you by
asking your forgiveness, much less by attempting to make the shadow of
an excuse; there could be none; nor can there be any forgiveness for me
from you or your wife; nor do I look for any mercy in this parish, or
this world. Go, spread the news, and ruin me in my turn; it's what I
deserve, and mean to bear."
"Not so fast," said Musk--"not so fast, if you please. So I'm to spread
the news, am I? And do you think I'm so proud that's the reverend? By
your leave, Mr. Carlton, I'll keep that same news to myself till I've
had all I want from it."
"Any refinement you like," said Carlton. "It will not be too bad for
me--or too much--please God!"
Jasper Musk put on his hat, but came close up to the clergyman before
taking his leave.
"I wish I knew you better!" he ground out through his teeth. "I wish I'd
made up to you like the women, instead of giving you the wide berth I
have. Do you know why? Because I'd have known how to hit you hardest,"
said Musk, hissing like a snake; "because I'd have known where to hurt
you most!"
Carlton stood a trifle more upright: his enemy's malice ministered
subtly to his remnant of self-respect.
"I wish I'd been a church-goer," continued Musk; "but it's never too
late to mend! I may be there to-morrow to hear you preach; maybe I'll
have a word to say myself; maybe I shall not. You'll know when the time
comes, and not before."
Carlton quailed, for the first time at a threat, and his visible terror
seemed to intoxicate the other. Seizing him by the shoulder as he had
seized his wife, clutching him like a wild beast, and thrusting his
great face to within an inch of that of the unhappy clergyman, Jasper
Musk spat lewd names, and foul insult, and wanton blasphemy, until
breath failed him. All the vileness he had heard in sixty years, and
could recall in half as many seconds, poured from him in a very
transport of insensate ribaldry; words that had never left his lips
before, crowded to them now; and were still ringing in a swimming head
when Robert Carlton woke to the fact that he was once more alone.
His first sensation was one of overwhelming nausea. His very vitals
writhed; and he reeled heavily against an open bookcase, casting an arm
along one of the upper shelves, and resting his face upon the sleeve.
For a few moments all his weight was upon that arm; then he opened his
eyes, and the titles of the books engaged his dazed attention. None was
apt, but all were familiar, and the familiarity maddened the stricken
man. He stood glaring from one low wall to another, filled with those
doubts which are the cruel satellites of transcendent anguish. Had it
really happened after all? The room was so unchanged, from the few
things on the walls to the many in the chair! All was so homely, so
intimate, so reassuring; and no visible trace of Musk! Had he ever been
there at all?
Ah, yes, for he had gone! In the distance a gate had squealed, and shut
with a rattle; the sound had lain in his ear; now it sank to the brain.
Now, too, another sound, intermittent all this time, but meaningless
hitherto, assumed a like significance. This was the continued rustling
of a newspaper, as the wind whisked in at the open door and out by the
open window in invisible harlequinade. The man's mind fled back a
little lifetime of minutes. And he recalled the last puff and rustle,
and the quick falling of his own hand upon the paper, which lay on his
desk, as the last event of a past era of his existence--the last act of
Robert Carlton, hypocrite!
And what was the peril that had made the final demand upon his caution
and his cunning? It was a new irony to perceive at once that it had
existed chiefly in guilty imagination; to remove the paper, and to
reveal nothing more incriminating than the parish register of deaths,
with an unfinished entry in his own hand, a spatter of ink in place of a
name, and some round white blisters lower down the leaf. Yet this it was
that had brought Carlton to his knees an hour ago; and it brought him to
his knees again, not at the desk of formal prayer, but here at his table
as before.
"Father have mercy on me," he prayed, "for I neither deserve nor desire
any mercy from man!"
IV
MIDSUMMER NIGHT
And while he knelt the situation was developing, with unforeseen and
truly merciful rapidity, in an utterly unsuspected quarter; thus an
aggressive knock at the inner door came in a sense as an answer to the
prayer it interrupted.
The rectory servants consisted at this time of a small but entire family
employed wholesale out of pure philanthropy. And this was the mother,
red-hot in her cheap crape, to say that she had heard everything--could
not help hearing--and that house was no longer any place for respectable
women and an honest lad--no, not if they had to sleep in the fields. So
the lad had got their boxes on a barrow, but he would bring it back. And
they would go, all of them, to Lakenhall Union, sooner than stay another
hour in that house of shame.
Mr. Carlton produced his cash-box without a word, and counted out a
month's wages for each in addition to arrears. The poor woman made a
gallant stand against the favour, but, submitting, returned to her
kitchen of her own accord, and to her master's study in a quarter of an
hour, to tell him she had laid the table, and there was a wire cover
over the meat.
"And may God forgive you, sir!" cried she at parting. "I couldn't have
believed it if I hadn't heard it from your own lips with my own ears!"
There was much that Carlton himself could not believe. He sat half
stupefied in his deserted rectory, like a man marooned, his one acute
sensation that of his sudden solitude. What was so hard to realize was
that the people knew! that the whole parish would know that night, and
his own family next week, and the whole world before many days. He was
well aware of the certain consequences of this scandal and its
disclosure; he had faced them only too often during the nightmare of the
past week, imagining some, ascertaining others. What seemed so
incredible was that he had made the disclosure himself, that the very
father had not suspected him to the end!
The last reflection convulsed him with self-contempt. What a hypocrite
he must be! What an unconscious hypocrite, the worst kind of all!
Here he was eating his supper; he had no recollection of coming to the
table; yet, now that he had caught himself, the food did not choke him,
he was not sick with shame; he only despised himself--and went on.
It was dusk. He must have lit the lamp himself; as he lifted it from the
table, having risen, he caught sight of its reflection and his own in
the overmantel, and set the lamp upon the chimneypiece, and by its light
had a better look at himself than he could remember having taken in his
life before. There was no vanity in the man; he was studying his face
out of sheer curiosity, from a new and quite impersonal point of view,
as that of an enormous hypocrite and voluptuary.
Human nature was very strange: he himself would never have suspected
such a face. The forehead was so broad and high, the deep-set eyes so
steadfast, and yet so fervid! They were the eyes of a zealot, but no
visionary: wisdom and understanding were in that bulge of the brow over
each. But the evil writing is lower down, unless you look for positive
crime or madness; yet these nostrils were sensitive, not sensual; and
the mouth, yes, the mouth showed between the short brown beard and the
heavy brown moustache; but what it showed was its strength. No; neither
weakness nor wickedness were there; even Robert Carlton admitted that.
But to be strong, and yet to fall; to mean well, and do evil; to look
one thing, and to be another: all that was to embody a type for which he
himself had ever entertained an unbridled loathing and contempt.
He carried the lamp to his study, and as he entered from within there
was a knock at the outer door. One was waiting to see the rector, one
who had waited and knocked there oftener than any other in the parish.
Carlton drew back, and the impulse of flight was strong upon him for the
first time. It needed all his will to shut the inner door behind him,
and to cry with any firmness, "Is that George Mellis?"
In response there burst into the room a lad in knickerbockers,
broad-shouldered, muscular, yet smooth-faced, and mild-eyed all his
nineteen years; but this was the supreme moment of them all; and his
woman's eyes were on fire as he planted himself before the rector and
his lamp, pale as ashes in its rays.
"Is it true?" he gasped. "Is it true?"
This lad was Carlton's chief disciple, his admirer, his imitator, his
enthusiastic champion and defender; his right hand in all good works;
nay more, his acolyte, his lieutenant of the sanctuary; and, before a
broad chest so agitated, and innocent eyes so wild, the culprit's
courage failed him at last, so that the truth clove to his tongue.
"It's all over the village," the lad continued in gasps. "You know what
I mean. They're all saying it. They say you've admitted it; for God's
sake say you haven't! Only deny it, and I'll go back and cram their lies
down their throats!"
But by this Mr. Carlton had recovered himself, and was looking his last
upon the anxious eager face of the lad who had loved and honoured him:
his final pang was to see the eagerness growing, the anxiety lessening,
his look misunderstood. And this time the admission was halt and hoarse.
What followed was also different; for, with scarcely a moment's
interval, young Mellis burst into tears like the overgrown child that he
was, and, flinging himself into the rector's chair, sobbed there
unrestrainedly with his smooth face in his strong red hands. Carlton
watched him by a prolonged effort of the will; he would shirk no part of
his punishment; and no part to come could hurt much more than this. His
fixed eyes were waiting for the boy's swimming ones when at length the
latter could look up.
"You, of all men!" whispered Mellis. "You who have kept us all
straight--me for one. Why, the very thought of you has helped me to
resist things! You, with your religion: no more religion for me!"
At that the other broke out; his religion he could still defend; or
thought he could, until he came to try, and his own unworthiness slowly
strangled the words in his throat.
"Say what you like," said Mellis; "it was you brought me to church; it's
you who turn me away; and I'll go to no other after yours. Only to
think----"
And he plunged into puerile reminiscences of their religious life in
common, quoting extreme points in the rich ritual in which he had been
privileged to assist, as though they aggravated the case, and made it
more incredible than it was already.
"If our Lord Himself----"
It did not need the rector's finger to check that blasphemy; but the
thing was said; the thought was there.
"Yes; better go," said Carlton, as the lad leapt up. "Go; and let no one
else come near me who ever believed in me; for I can better face my
bitterest enemies. Yet you--you must be one of them! After her own
father, no man should hate me more!"
And there was a new pain in his voice, a new agony of remorse, as memory
stabbed him in a fresh place. But the boy shook his head, and hung it
with a blush.
"You think I cared for her," he said. "I thought so, too, until she went
away. I should have cared more then! It troubled me for a time; but I
got over it; and then I knew I was too young for all that. Besides, she
never looked at me after you came; that's another thing I see now; and I
know I ran less after her. Yes, I was too young to love a woman," cried
this village lad, "but I wasn't too old to love you, and look up to
you, and follow you in all you did. I tell you the honest truth, Mr.
Carlton," and his great eyes flashed their last reproach: "I'd have died
for you, sir, I would! And I'd die now--thankfully--if it could make you
the man I thought you were!"
This interview left Carlton's mind more a blank than ever. It might have
been an hour later, or it might have been in ten minutes, that the
thought occurred to him--if his dearest disciple felt thus, what must
the enemy feel? And he was a man with enemies enough in the parish,
having followed the old order of country parson, and that with more
vigour than diplomacy. In eighteen months his reforms had been manifold
and drastic beyond discretion. It is true that his preaching had won him
more followers than his priestcraft had turned away. Yet a more acute
ecclesiastic would have tapped the wedge instead of hammering it; the
consummate priest would have condescended further in the direction of a
more immediate and a wider popularity. Carlton had gone his own way,
consulting none, attracting many, offending not a few. And he expected
the speedy settlement of many a score.