But he did not look round as he spoke, and Sir Wilton gripped his stick
without occasion. Carlton's blood was boiling none the less. The enemy
had surprised him at his worst. He was, for the first time, attempting
single-handed the work of several men; and he might be going about it in
a very ridiculous way. He could not tell till he tried; and it was one
thing to experiment in private, but quite another thing to court open
discomfiture of the very nature which would most delight the looker-on.
And the man was worn out with hard and unaccustomed labour, dyspeptic
from evil feeding, nervous and irritable from both causes combined. Sir
Wilton Gleed could hardly have chosen a worse moment for renewing the
duel.
In Carlton the longing to do something violent suddenly outweighed his
desire to raze the east end of the church. He poised his pole and fixed
both eyes on the one remaining mullion of the east window. If the
mullion went, he still thought that the whole fabric should collapse,
forgetting the inherent independence of arches; and his mind dwelt
wistfully on the effect of the crash upon Sir Wilton Gleed. But his aim
was not the less accurate, nor did his anxiety hinder him from utilising
every muscle in his body at the ideal moment. The end of the ram smote
the mullion fairly and powerfully, where it was already cracked. The
mullion flew asunder; a quatrefoil shifted a little, robbed of its
support. The whole wall seemed to shudder; but that was all.
"You remind me of Don Quixote," said Sir Wilton's voice.
Carlton spun round. The pole trailed behind him from his right hand. He
took fresh hold of it, lower down, and there was no mistaking his look.
"You go about your business," said he, fiercely.
"I've come about it," was the bland reply. "I'm not trespassing either;
don't put yourself in the wrong. Remember your own advice; and let's
have a civil answer to a civil question. My good friend, what do you
think you're trying to do?"
The artificial geniality of address, the settled malice underneath, the
tone that people take with a wilful child, all galled and goaded the
tired man beyond endurance.
"You had better go," he said.
"Do you really propose to rebuild the church with your own ten fingers?"
inquired Sir Wilton, not to be daunted by a threat.
"You proposed it. I mean to do it."
Sir Wilton shook his head with a venomous smile. "Oh, no, you don't! You
mean to pretend to try. You mean to pose."
Carlton flung the pole from him, and strode forward, swinging open
hands.
"I'm not going to talk to you," he said, "and you sha'n't make me strike
you; but if you don't go out you'll be put out, Sir Wilton."
Gleed smiled again. His collar was seized. He smiled no more, but lashed
out with his stick. The stick was wrenched away from him. It whistled in
the air. And Robert Carlton had his enemy at his mercy, still held by
the collar, in the place where he had preached goodwill to men. For he
was much the taller of the two and an old athlete, whereas the other was
only an elderly sportsman. Carlton could have whipped him like a little
dog. He did almost worse: released him without a cut, and handed him his
stick without a word.
And at that moment there came the crash that would have saved this
collision a few seconds before. Both men turned, rubbing their eyes; a
cloud of yellow dust had filled them as it filled the chancel. The cloud
dispersed, and wall and window were gone from sill to gable; what
remained was nowhere higher than a man could reach.
"Now leave me in peace," said Carlton, "for I shall have my hands full;
and don't trouble to come again, because I sha'n't listen to you. You've
had two chances. I promised to live away and only find the money and the
men; you wouldn't have it. I invited you to build the church yourself;
you wouldn't hear of that. No; you would force me to do my duty, having
tied my hands! You would take me at my word. I am taking you at yours.
I should try fresh ground, if I were you; meanwhile you could sue me
for assault."
Gleed had fully intended doing so, but the scornful suggestion killed
the thought, and for once he had no last word. But his last look made
amends.
XII
A FRESH DISCOVERY
His son was waiting for him at the gate.
"The man's mad!" cried Sir Wilton with a harsh laugh.
"What's he been doing? What was that row?"
Sidney's manner with his father was subtly disrespectful; he seldom
addressed him by that name, enjoyed arguing with him (having the clearer
head), and argued in slang. Yet his tongue was as dexterous and
plausible as it was always smooth, and he was a difficult boy to convict
of a specific rudeness.
"There's some method in his madness," was his comment on the father's
account of the work accomplished under his eyes.
"But he says he's going to build it up again!"
"I wonder if he will," speculated Sidney.
"What--by himself?"
"Yes."
"Of course he won't. No man could. He's a lunatic."
They were walking home. Sidney said nothing for some paces. Then he
asked an innocent question. It was a little way of his.
"I suppose one man could finish one stone, though, father?"
Sir Wilton conceded this.
"And fix it in its place, shouldn't you say?"
A gruffer concession.
"Then I'm not sure that he couldn't do more than you think," said
Sidney. "The windows might stump him, and the roof would; but he could
do the rest."
"Nonsense!" cried Sir Wilton. "You don't know what you're talking
about."
"Of course I don't," admitted Sidney readily. "That was why I asked
about the one man and the one stone."
Sir Wilton had not half his boy's brain. The cold-blooded little wretch
would boast that he could "score off the governor without his knowing
it." Sir Wilton's merit was his tenacity of purpose.
"I tell you the man's mad," he reiterated; "and if he doesn't take care
I'll have him shut up."
"A great idea!" cried Sidney. "But, I say, if that's so we oughtn't to
be too rough on him!"
"In any case I'll have him out of this," quoth Sir Wilton through his
teeth; but his mind dwelt on the shutting-up notion: it really was "a
great idea." And Carlton himself had given him another: he just would
"take fresh ground."
He sought it that evening by a painful path. Jasper Musk and Sir Wilton
Gleed were not friends; they had not spoken for years. Sir Wilton had
not been long in the parish before he discovered that Musk had "cheated"
him over the Flint House. The word was much too strong; but some little
advantage had no doubt been taken. The quarrel had lasted to the
present time; but Sir Wilton had often felt that Musk must hate the
common scourge even more bitterly than he did himself, and that he would
be a very valuable ally. He was a strong man and solid, the one powerful
peasant in the neighbourhood. Unfortunately, sciatica had bound him to
his chair from the very day of his daughter's funeral. It would have
been comparatively easy to accost the old fellow in the open, and to
disarm him with instantaneous expressions of sympathy and of
indignation. It was more difficult for the lord of the manor to knock at
the door of an enemy who was not a tenant--a door opening on the very
street, and a door that might be slammed in his face for all Long Stow
to see or hear. So Sir Wilton went after dinner, on a dark night; was
admitted without demur; and stayed till after eleven.
Next day he went again; he was also seen at the village constable's; and
the village constable was seen at the Flint House; and Sir Wilton
happened to call once more while he was there. The afternoon was rich in
developments, and duly murmurous with theory, prophecy, speculation. The
schoolmaster was summoned from the school, the saddler from his bench:
it was the latter who fetched Tom Ivey from the room that he was adding
to his mother's cottage at Sir Wilton's expense. Meanwhile the village
whisper became loud talk; but its arrows, shot at a venture, flew wide
of any mark. For through all his dark disgrace, as now when the odium
attaching to him was gathering like snow on a rolling snowball; from the
night of the fire to this eighteenth day of August; there was one thing
of which Robert Carlton had never been suspected by those who had loved
or feared him for a year and a half.
Naturally the excitement penetrated to the hall, where Sir Wilton kept
dinner waiting, but, very properly, did not refer to the unsavoury
subject at that meal. He was, however, in singularly high spirits, and
drank a vast amount of excellent champagne; yet his own wife left the
table in ignorance of what had happened. Now Lady Gleed was a very
particular person, a great stickler for restraint, her own being
something strenuous and exotic. She seldom spoke of ordinary things
above a whisper, and would have dealt with the village scandal in dumb
show if she could. To her daughter she had genuinely preferred never to
mention it at all.
But Lydia Gleed--it should have been Languish--was a more modern type.
She was frankly interested in the affair. It had given quite a zest to
what would otherwise have been an insufferably dull month for Lydia. The
girl had the makings of a perfect woman of society, and yet the end of
her second season found her still an unknown distance from the first
step to the realisation of that ideal. Proposals she had received, but
none such as an heiress of her calibre was entitled to expect. She had
actually been engaged to an adventurer; but that had only retarded
matters.
There may have been purer causes. Feeble and inanimate in her every-day
life, and constitutionally bored by the familiar, Miss Gleed kept her
best side for those whom she knew least; could chatter to
acquaintances, the newer the better; was in her element at parties, and
out of it at home. Even in her element, however, Lydia never forgot to
conceal as much of her appreciation as possible, and would dance
angelically with the corners of her mouth turned down, and take like
medicine the wine which really did make glad her heart. This August she
was feeling particularly _blasée_ and dissatisfied; and the romantic
downfall of the rector--whose sermons had kept her awake--was a French
novel without the trouble of reading it or the risk of confiscation.
To-night, therefore, it was Lydia who invited Gwynneth to play, and
pressed the invitation with a compliment; it was her commoner practice
to snub the much younger girl. And it was Lydia who drew her chair close
to that of Lady Gleed, and began the whispering, to which Gwynneth was
made to shut her ears with all ten fingers. Yet for once Lady Gleed was
frankly interested herself.
"But what _has_ he done?"
The music had stopped. They had not noticed it. The ungrown girl was
standing in the middle of the room. She was dressed in white, and her
face looked as white in the candle-light, but her eyes and hair the
darker and more brilliant by contrast. And the eyes were great with a
pity and a pain which were at least not less than the natural curiosity
of a healthy child.
"Mind your own business," said Lydia, bluntly.
But even as she spoke the door opened.
"What's this? What's this?" cried Sir Wilton, who was beaming, and
good-naturedly concerned to see the tears starting to his brother's
child's eyes. "Whose business have you been minding, little woman?"
"It was about Mr. Carlton," the child said with a sob. "I hear everybody
saying nothing's bad enough for him--nothing--and I thought he was so
good! I only asked what he had done. I won't again. Please--please let
me go!"
"In an instant," said Sir Wilton, detaining her with familiarity. "You
mustn't be a little goose."
"Let her go, Wilton," whispered his wife.
"Not till I've told her what Mr. Carlton has done!"
And Sir Wilton Gleed beamed more than ever upon the consternation of his
ladies.
"But, Wilton----"
Lady Gleed had risen, and was even forgetting to whisper. Lydia merely
looked unusually wide-awake, and prettier for once than the child under
the chandelier, who was terribly disfigured by her embarrassment and
distress.
"If you want to know what Mr. Carlton has done," said Sir Wilton to his
niece, "it was he who set fire to the church!"
XIII
DEVICES OF A CASTAWAY
Left in peace, Carlton threw himself into his task with redoubled
spirit, and presently forgot the existence of Sir Wilton Gleed. He had
just three hours before dark. In this time he succeeded in pulling the
rest of the east wall to pieces, even to the loosened plinth, and was
adding the good stones to his stack when night fell. It was a night not
to be forgotten in the history of Robert Carlton's case. Nothing
happened. But he had no proper food in the house, and he began to feel
really ill for the want of it. Eggs and bacon he had, but the lighting
of the fire fatigued him more than anything he had done all day, and he
fell asleep in the kitchen, and the bacon went brittle, and his attempt
at bread was become an unmasticable fossil. A very little whisky, from a
bottle that had been open for months, did him more good, and enabled him
to face the food problem in earnest before he went to bed. It was a very
serious problem indeed. Health and strength, success or failure,
continued vigour or a swift collapse, all hinged upon the inglorious
question, which engrossed till near midnight one of the plainest livers
on earth, as his labours had absorbed him since dawn. He had to reckon
with his enemies in the matter. He had not the slightest hope of
obtaining supplies in the village. But at daylight he walked some miles
to see a farmer who had sometimes trudged as many to hear him preach;
and the farmer gave him breakfast with a surly pity, which Carlton
suffered, as he accepted the meal, for his hard work's sake.
He had explained that he came on business, and after breakfast the
farmer asked him, not without suspicion, what his business was.
"Do you kill your own sheep?" inquired Mr. Carlton.
"Only for ourselves."
"When do you kill?"
"Let's see. Friday, is it? Then we kill this mornin'."
"May I wait and watch?"
The other stared.
"I want some mutton," Carlton explained.
"But I don't keep a butcher's shop," growled the farmer. "Well, we'll
see what we can do; we may be able to let you have a bit of the
neck-end."
"I should be very grateful for it. But I'm afraid I want more."
"What more?"
"A flock of sheep."
He was willing to pay outside prices. So a bargain was struck; and the
sheep were in the glebe that night. Meanwhile he had seen one killed and
dressed, and was not the less thankful that he had neck-end chops enough
to last him that week.
The stacking of the stones was finished early on the Friday afternoon,
and Carlton determined to take the rest of that day easily. So he set
himself to retrieve the lectern from the ruins, and did finally wheel it
to the rectory, on two barrows; the first broke under its weight.
Moreover, this had consumed the entire afternoon, as another would have
foreseen at a glance, and Carlton emerged as from a pool of ink. Since
he had made himself rather hot and black, however, he thought it a pity
not to clear a little more of the interior while the light lasted. It
must be done some day; but again the task was more formidable than it
appeared to dauntless eyes still aflame with vast endeavour. The firemen
had not spared the water when all was over, so the big bones of the roof
were not burnt through. Tie-beams and principal rafters, in particular,
lay whole and heavy, and immovable less from their weight than from the
inextricable tangle in which they had fallen. There was nothing but the
saw for these, and Carlton had already sawn the lectern from its grave.
He learnt to saw with his left hand that evening; and after all had very
little but his own personal condition to show for his labour: only the
nucleus of a wood-heap near the stack of stones, and a crooked,
blackened, brass thing in the dining-room. But then he had not intended
to do much that afternoon; he went indoors, and drew the water for his
bath with that consolation.
Meat for the second time that day! Carlton began to feel a man. He paced
his study with the old rapid step; and he determined to order and
arrange his day's work so that the muscles should relieve each other in
gangs: varied exertions; that was the principle of all continuous
labour. You cannot sit down to rest when you are working hard; but you
can do something else. Carlton never rested till he went to bed. But
this evening he sat down at his desk.
A sheet of sermon paper was ruled in six columns and a margin; the
columns were headed by the days of the week; down the margin the days
were divided into three periods, a short and two long; it was the
class-room chart of his school-days over again. In future he would rise
at five; four was too early. The short period before breakfast should be
daily devoted to work in the house. The place must be made and kept
habitably clean; that could be left partly to the wet days. Then there
was the kitchen work, the preparation of food for the day, baking two
days a week, the occasional slaughter of a sheep; and here Carlton
paused to grapple with the appalling problem presented by the hungriest
of living men and the smallest of slain sheep . . . Salt seemed the
solution . . . Salt mutton? . . . At any rate all carnal cares and
menial duties should be disposed of for the day as early as possible in
the early morning; not till then would he break his fast; and the real
day's work should begin as near eight o'clock as might be, but as often
as possible on the right side of the hour. Moreover, it should begin
with the lighter labour: scraping and repointing the uncondemned walls,
for example; that would take one man weeks or months; but it would not
tire him out at the beginning of the day. Then there was the preparation
of the stones; the careful scraping of those preserved; classification
as to size for the various courses; cutting and fitting of fresh
stones; the actual building with trowel and plummet. All this went under
one head, and was for the body of the day; a long spell broken by a good
meal and a determined rest. The day should finish, for many a day to
come, with a savage attack upon the chaos within the walls. A hand too
tired for skilled labour would still be fit for that.
And as Robert Carlton reached this stage in the laying of his ingenious
plans, he leaned back in his chair, and stared at his dull reflection in
the diamond panes above his writing table, in a sudden horror of himself
and all his ways and works. He was actually happy--he! The reaction was
the same in kind as that which had come to him at the shed, in the joy
of touching hammer and chisel again, and which had driven him to the
hall next morning. But it was greater in degree: for then he had seen
how happy he might be; to-night he knew how happy he was.
"But only in my work! Only in my work!" he cried, and fell upon his
knees to crave forgiveness from the Almighty for daring to enjoy the
consolation which He had ordained for him.
The artist was dead in Carlton for that night. He rose a very miserable
sinner, every thought a whip for his poor spirit that had dared to come
to life without leave. He had committed deadly sin with deadliest
result; let him never forget it! He, God's servant----the morbid
rehearsal may be spared. But he did not spare himself. All the
aggravating circumstances were recalled, none that extenuated; all that
he had suffered he must needs suffer anew, slowly, deliberately, and in
due order; that he might not forget, that he might never forget again!
Now he was confessing to Musk, now to George Mellis; poor George, where
was he? Now they were breaking his windows, and now Tom Ivey was
refusing his hand. But at last he was before the bishop; that strong,
queer voice was croaking across the desk; and all at once the croak
ended, and the voice rang like a sovereign with words of refined gold.
"Courage, brother! Pray without ceasing. Look forward, not back; do not
despair. Despair is the devil's best friend; better give way to deadly
sin than to deadlier despair!"
And he prayed again; but not in the house.
"For I will look forward," he said as he went. "But let me never again
forget!"
There was neither wind nor moon. The sparrows were still, but not the
shrill little swifts. And somewhere a thrush was singing, clear and
mellow and certain as a bell; and once a bat's wing brushed the bowed
bare head of him who prayed not for forgiveness but for the peace of a
soul; for neither was it in the ruins that Robert Carlton knelt once
more.
XIV
THE LAST RESORT
Carlton chose a fresh stone from the heap; he was going to begin all
over again. He got it in his arms, and he managed to stagger with it to
the front of the shed. The stone was at least two feet long, and its
other dimensions were about half that of the length; as Carlton set it
down, himself all but on the top of it, he trusted it was the largest
size in the heap. It was of a rich reddish yellow, roughly rectangular,
but lumpy as ill-made porridge, exactly as it had come from the quarry.
Carlton tilted it up against a smaller stone, smooth enough in parts,
but palpably untrue in its planes and angles. This was the stone that he
had been all day spoiling; it had been as big as the new one that
morning, when he had begun upon it with a view to the lower eleven-inch
courses; and now he had failed to make even a six-inch job of it. The
stone was so soft. It cut like cheese. But he was not going to spoil
another.
So he rested a minute before beginning again, and he marshalled his
tools upon a barrow within reach of his hand. It was rather late on the
Saturday afternoon. In the morning he had felt disinclined for violent
exertion, but just equal to trying his hand at that stone-dressing which
would presently become his chief labour; and his hand had disappointed
him. It had the wrong kind of cunning: as amateurs will, Carlton had
picked up his fancy craft at the fancy end: gargoyles were his
specialty, and an even surface beyond him.
"But I can learn," he had been saying all day; and most times the dog
had wagged his tail.
Ten minutes ago his tone had changed.
"I'll start afresh! I'll do one to-night! I won't be beaten!"
And that time Glen had leapt up with his master, and lashed his shins
with his tail, as much as to say, "Beaten? Not you!" and had accompanied
him to the heap, and was pretending to rest with him now. But Carlton
was constitutionally impatient of conscious rest; and this afternoon
certain sounds, louder though less incessant than those of his constant
comrades, the bees and birds, informed him that the Boys' Friendly were
not too proud to use the far strip of glebe land which the rector had
levelled for them last year. The discovery made him glad. But it also
brought him to his feet within the minute that he had promised himself;
and the hammer rang swift blows on the cold-chisel as much to drown the
music of bat and ball as to clear the grosser irregularities from one
surface of the stone.
This done (and this much he had done successfully enough before), hammer
and cold-chisel were thrown aside, and the marbling-hammer taken up,
because Tom Ivey had always used it to make the rough sufficiently
smooth. But it is a mongrel implement at best, being hammer and chisel
in one, with changeable bits like a brace, and yet with less of these
than of the pickaxe in its cross-bred composition. Like a pick you wield
it, yet lightly and with the one and only curve, or at a stroke you go
too deep.
Chip, chip, chip went the sharp seven-eighths-of-an-inch bit; and off
curved the soft yellow flakes, to turn to powder as they fell.
Chip, chip, chip along the top; and the keen bit left its mark each
time; and the finished row of these was like the key-board of a toy
piano.
Chip, chip, chip, always from left to right, a tier below, and then the
tier below that. The toy piano is becoming a toy organ of many manuals;
and the hue of the keys is not that of the rough outer surface: as they
first see the light they are nearer the colour of cigar-ash.
Chip, chip, chip--chip, chip, chip; but _swish_, _swish_, _swish_ is a
thought nearer the sound. So soft that stone, so sharp that bit, so
timorous and tentative the unpractised strokes of Robert Carlton!