of fire that a vigorous man might have beaten out with his coat. Yet one
in the full vigour of his manhood stood thinking a score of thoughts
while the flames bit through the varnish into the wood. Nor was this the
fascination of horror: the fire looked such a little fire at the first
glance. It was rather the obsession of an astounding puzzle: what in the
world could have caused a fire at all?
A guilty feeling came in answer: he must have dropped the match with
which he lit that lamp. The feeling escaped in the simultaneous
discovery that the lamp in question had been extinguished, but that it
and others were slightly awry, and one or two still swaying on their
chains, as though all the lamps had been rudely meddled with. And now
horror came. The flames were spreading with curious facility, shooting
their blue tongues over the woodwork before the yellow fangs took hold,
but all so quickly that the burning area seemed to have doubled itself
in these few seconds, while from the heart of it there came the crisp
crackle of quicker fuel, culminating in a blaze as though a rick had
caught; and, sure enough, as these flames leapt high, their source was
revealed in a pile of the rector's new straw hassocks.
The puzzle was one no more: plainer work of incendiary was never seen.
Through the smoke now swinging in black coils to the roof, the east
window showed in holes made within the last hour, obviously to promote
the draught that blew in Carlton's face as he rushed back to the open
door and laid hold of all the bell-ropes at once.
The bells were small and jangling; a new peal, and a tower to hang them
in, were among the things which the rector had said that he would have
some day. But as the old bells clanged for the last time, in the dead of
that summer night, they were heard at Linkworth, a mile and a half
across the wind, but down the wind they rang up half Bedingfield, which
is three good miles from Long Stow.
The first inhabitant to reach the scene was the fleet and sturdy Tom
Ivey, whose mother kept the post-office in the middle of the village; as
he ran the ringing stopped, and the first glass smashed with the heat,
flame and smoke making a mouthpiece of the mullioned window in the north
wall as Tom dashed up by the short cut through the rectory garden. He
was greatly alarmed at finding no one in the churchyard, and rushed into
the church with the full expectation of discovering the ringer senseless
at his post. What he did find was the rector, standing within the
church, to windward of the conflagration, his back to the door,
absorbed, as it seemed, in a perfectly passive contemplation of the
fire.
"Mr. Carlton!" shouted Tom.
Before replying, the clergyman spun something into the heart of the
flames; in the thickening smoke it was impossible to see what; but the
same second he was round upon his heel, coughing and choking, his face
black, his eyes fires themselves, purpose and determination in every
limb.
"Tom? Thank God it's you! We must get this under. Out of it before we
suffocate!" And with his own rush he carried the builder into the open
air.
"What's done it, sir?"
"Done it? Wait till we've undone it! We can if we work together. Ah!
here are more of you. Buckets, men--buckets!" cried Carlton, rushing to
meet a half-dressed medley at the gate, and commanding them as though
there had been no other meeting earlier in the night. "You who live
near, run for your own; the rest into my kitchen and find what you can;
buckets are the thing! One of you pump; the rest form line from my well
to the church, and keep passing along. You see to it, Mr. Jones!"
And for a while the schoolmaster and churchwarden, carried away as usual
by his feelings and self-importance, was as busy enforcing the rector's
orders as he had made himself in breaking his windows an hour or two
before.
"Let one man ride or run for the Lakenhall engine; not you, Tom!"
exclaimed the clergyman, seizing Ivey by the arm. "They'll be all night
coming, and I can't spare you."
"I'll stay, sir."
"Water's no use to windward of a fire; it's spreading straight up the
church. We want to be on the other side to stop it."
"The aisle's not afire!"
"But they couldn't get the water to us, even if we got through alive.
No; where the walls are down for the transepts--that's the place. Which
side's boarded strongest?"
"Both the same, sir."
"Then we'll hack through the nearest! A saw and an axe, and we'll be
through by the time the first bucketful's ready for us."
And, friends again, but both unconscious of the change, they rushed
together to the shed of which Robert Carlton had so lately taken leave:
in the fever of the moment even that leave-taking was forgotten.
It was the north transept which faced the shed. Already the walls were a
dozen feet high, but a doorway had been left. The greater gap between
transept and nave was vertically boarded over within the church, and on
these boards fell the rector with his axe, to make an opening for Tom's
saw. They had light enough for their work. The interstices between the
boards were as the red-hot strings of a colossal harp; quickly a couple
were cut, and the boards beaten in; and it was as though the wind had
come down a smoking chimney. The pair fell back on either side of the
black stream that gushed out like water. Then cried Carlton in his voice
of command:
"Look here! you stay where you are, Tom."
"With you, sir?"
"No, I must have a look; but one's enough."
"Not for me, Mr. Carlton. I follow you."
"Then you keep me where I am," said Carlton, sternly.
"All right, sir! You follow me!"
Next instant they were both through the breach, the builder first by the
depth of his chest. And they stood up within, but were glad to crouch
again out of the smoke. Already a dense reek hid the roof, and every
moment added to the depth of that inverted sea. It was a sea of
ineffectual currents, setting towards the smashed windows, the new
breach, the open door, but caught and diverted and sucked into the inky
whirlpool that the wind made under the roof, and escaping only by chance
fits and sudden starts. On the other hand, there was still air enough to
breathe within a few feet of the ground, and with water it seemed as if
something might yet be done. But it was no longer a very little fire: at
best the nave must be gutted now; to save roof and chancel was the
utmost hope. Yet here and there the worst seemed over. The blazing
hassocks were now only a glowing heap, and still the roof had not
caught. As the two men crouched and watched, the flames felt the front
pews with their splay blue tentacles, and the woodwork which was still
untouched glistened like a human body in pain.
"You see that?" said Mr. Carlton, pointing to this moisture.
"What is it?"
"Paraffin! Look at the lamps; he's simply emptied them----"
"Who, sir--who?"
"God knows, and may God forgive him! I have enemies enough this morning,
though not more than I deserve. If only they will be my friends for one
hour, for the sake of the church! Are they never coming with that water?
Run and tell them a bucketful would make a difference now, but cartloads
will make none in ten more minutes! And tell them what I said just now:
bid them for God's sake think of nothing but the fire till we get it
under."
He was thinking of nothing else himself, confident still of some measure
of success, only fretting for his water. In Ivey's absence he stripped
to the waist, and with his long coat essayed to beat the little flames
out as they spread and leapt, the blue and yellow surf of the
encroaching tide; but for one he extinguished he fanned a hundred, so he
retreated before he was flayed alive. And they found him stooping near
the opening, half-naked, scorched, begrimed, but not disheartened; a
strange figure in the place that knew him best in vestments, if any of
them thought of that.
The first man had a bucket in each hand, but had spilt freely from both
in his haste. Carlton would not let him in, but received the buckets
through the hole, dashed their contents over the burning pews, and
returned them empty without waiting to see results. When he had time to
look, a little steam was rising, but the fire raged with undiminished
fury. The next comer was a boy with a brimming watering-can; but it is
difficult to fling water with effect from such a vessel, and pouring was
impossible in the increasing heat. Then came Tom Ivey with two more
buckets.
"Keep outside," cried Carlton, taking them. "There's only work for one
in here. Can't they form line as I said, and pass along instead of
carrying?"
"No, sir--not enough of us for the distance."
"Not enough of you who'll put the church before the parson! That's what
you mean. The parson may deserve burning alive, but the poor church has
done no wrong!"
And he continued his exertions in a bitter spirit not warranted by the
real circumstances, for his masterful monopoly of all danger had won
some sympathy outside, and many a one who had flung a stone was running
with a bucket now. More, however, stood with their hands in their
pockets; for East Anglia is constitutionally phlegmatic, and not all the
village had joined in the indignant excesses of the evening.
The saddler came no farther than the fence in front of his house and
workshop. He was that implacable creature, the offended countryman.
George Mellis did not even see the fire; already he had shaken the dust
of Long Stow from his feet for good.
Thus, of the three types, as far removed from one another as the points
of an equilateral triangle, who had put in their individual word of
reproach, of denunciation, and of sympathy more insufferable than
either, only one was present on this lurid scene; but that one was doing
the work of ten.
"That there Tom Ivey," said one of a group on the safe side of the
rectory fence, "he fares all of a wash. Yet I do hear as how he come up
to the rectory when he'd cleared the garden and called Carlton over
somethun wonderful."
"I lay it was nothun to the calling over he had from Jasper."
"Where is Jasper?"
"Been indoors ever since: a touch of the old trouble, the missus told
Jones when he called."
"That's a pity. This would've soothed his sore."
One or two observed that that fared to soothe theirs; for there was no
reaction on the safe side of the fence. But the worst said in the
Suffolk tongue was invariably capped by a different order of voice,
which chimed in now.
"The best thing Carlton can do is to cockle up with his church. The
governor'll build you a new church and find a new man to fill it.
There's nobody keener on a change as it is. I should like to be there
when he hears . . ."
The speaker was smoking a cigarette on a barrow wheeled from the shed.
He might have been watching a display of fireworks, and one which was
beginning to bore him. His unmoved eye sought change. It found the
sexton hobbling in the glare.
"Hi, Busby! Come here, I want you. What the dickens do you mean by
setting fire to the church?"
"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?"