remarked, it seems to have been a fatal date for me. It has arisen so
many times in the course of this case! This, however, is not the precise
moment for enumerating those occasions; let us first finish with each
other. Did you, Sir Wilton Gleed, on the eighteenth day of this present
month, have separate or collective conversation with the witnesses
Busby, Fuller, and Ivey?"
"Yes, I did," said Gleed, hot, white, and glaring.
"Separate or collective? Did you speak to them one at a time or all
together?"
"Both, if you like!" cried the witness, wildly. "I can't remember.
Better say both!"
"You interviewed these witnesses, separately and collectively, on the
very day that the other witness, Frost, laid an information against me
before yourself as Justice of the Peace?"
"I said it was that day. You ask the same question again and again!"
The man was fuming, trembling, near to tears or curses of mortification
and blind rage.
"I have but two more questions to ask you, and I am done," rejoined
Carlton. "Did the witness Fuller tell you of the light in the church,
and the witness Ivey of what _he_ saw later on, during these
conversations of the fatal eighteenth?"
"They did."
"And was this the first you had heard of those experiences?"
"It was."
"That is my last question, Sir Wilton Gleed."
The justices put none. Gleed glared at them as he left the box.
"I think," said he, "that this is the most scandalous incident--most
disgraceful thing I ever heard of in my life!"
"I quite agree with you," whispered Wilders.
"And I also," said Mr. Preston, in a different tone.
But no word fell from Rhadamanthus. His small eyes did not leave
Carlton's face for above one second in the sixty. But their expression
was inscrutable.
"May I now claim the indulgence of the court for a very few minutes?"
asked the clergyman in the dock.
The clergymen on the bench looked at the clock and at each other. It was
already past the hour for luncheon.
"Better go on," urged Preston, "and get it over."
"If you mean what you say," said Wilders to the accused, "we will hear
you now; if you proceed to treat us to a mere display of words, I shall
adjourn the court. Meanwhile it is my duty to remind you that whatever
you say will be taken down in writing, and may be given in evidence
against you upon your trial."
"In the event of my committal," returned Robert Carlton, "I am prepared
to stand or fall by every word that I have uttered or may utter now; and
I shall not detain you long. I am well aware how I have trespassed
already upon the time of this court, but I will waste none upon vain or
insincere apology. I came here to answer to a very terrible charge; it
was and it is my duty to do so as fully and as emphatically as I
possibly can. Yet I have little to add to the evidence before you; a
comment or two, and I am done.
"It seems to me that the witnesses called by the police have between
them produced but three points of any weight against me, or worthy of
the serious consideration of this or any other court of law. I will
take these three points in their proper order, and will give my answer
to each in the fewest possible words in which I can express my meaning
to your worships.
"Arthur Busby has sworn that on the morning before the fire I ordered
him to fill the lamps with paraffin, though it was extremely unlikely
that any artificial light would be required in church next evening. But
on the man's own showing he was wearying and distressing me beyond
measure at the time--a more terrible time than this!" cried Carlton from
his heart; and was brought to pause, not for effect (though the effect
was marked) but by the very suddenness of his emotion. "And on the man's
own showing," he continued in a lower key, "he had once omitted this
important duty of filling the lamps, and I was 'for ever at him' on the
subject. What more natural than to tell him to go away and fill his
lamps, as one had told him a dozen times before, but this time without
thinking and simply to get rid of the man? On the other hand, if the
paraffin had been wanted for the felonious purpose suggested, could
anything be more incriminating and incredible than the suggested method
of obtaining it? I submit these two questions, with the highly important
point involved, to the consideration of the bench; and I do so with some
confidence.
"The next point, I confess, is more difficult to dismiss. I shall not
attempt to dismiss it from any mind in court. I shall simply leave it to
the consideration of your worships as men of the world and students of
the human heart. It is near midnight. I am not to be found at the
rectory, and a light is seen in the church. I admit that I was in the
church, and that I lighted one of the lamps.
"Here I am forced to allude to another matter: a matter in which, God
knows, I have never denied my guilt, as I do deny my guilt of the crime
of arson: a matter in which I have never sought to defend myself, as I
have been compelled to do in this court for a very long day and a half.
"Consider my case on the night of the fire. I will not dwell upon it; it
is surely within the knowledge or the imagination of most present. . . .
There was my church. I had held my last service there. I felt that I
could never hold another. And, whatever I had been, I loved my church!
You upon the bench . . . you Members of Christ's Church . . . I ask not
for your sympathy but for your insight. Can you think that I went into
the church I loved, wilfully and deliberately to burn it to the ground?
Can you not conceive my going there, in the dead of that dreadful night,
to look my last upon it--to bid my church good-bye?"
His emotion was piteous, but never pitiful. It shook nothing but his
voice. It neither bowed his head nor dimmed the brilliance of an eye
turned full upon his fellows. And so he stood silent for a space, and
none other spoke; then through Tom Ivey's evidence with a lighter touch.
It was evidence in his favour: he scorned to enlarge upon it. The one
adverse point was lightly--perhaps too lightly--dismissed. He had been
seen to throw something into the flames. Did the prosecution suggest
that he had thrown fresh fuel? Other points, already made in
cross-examination, were left to take care of themselves: the paraffin on
the pews, to which he himself had called Ivey's attention, was one.
Indeed, in the whole course of the prisoner's speech, it was never
admitted that the church had been purposely set fire to at all; the
suggestion had been made in the heat of cross-examination, but it was
not made again. It even seemed as though Robert Carlton had grown either
certain, or careless, of the result of the inquiry--and the impression
was not removed by the close of his remarks.
"And now," he said, "I have to deal with the evidence of Sir Wilton
Gleed. I shall endeavour to deal with that evidence as dispassionately
as I can, and as summarily as it deserves. Sir Wilton Gleed is a man
with a genuine grievance, which you all know and I have never denied.
But I do not propose to enter into the matter at issue between Sir
Wilton Gleed and myself, or to suggest for an instant that he was
anything but right in determining to rid his village of one who had
brought himself to bitter but merited sorrow and disgrace. I am not here
to defend my sins; nor have I defended them elsewhere; nor have I shrunk
from suffering from anything I have done. But here have I been brought
to book for something I never did--taken prisoner and brought to you on
a criminal charge and no other. And I tell you that this criminal charge
is as false as another was true, but for which this one would never have
been made. But enough of mere assertion; let me crystallise some of the
evidence that has come before you.
"The witnesses swear to three or four suspicious circumstances between
them. Yet they seem scarcely to have opened their lips--nobody seems to
have heard of those circumstances--until Friday of last week. On Friday
last--my fatal date--these witnesses open their mouths with one accord.
And, curiously enough, it is in Sir Wilton Gleed that they are one and
all led to confide!
"But there is a still more curious and informing coincidence. Sir Wilton
Gleed and I have several very stormy interviews, in which he tries,
first by one artifice, then by another--all frankly admitted in his
evidence--to drive me from a position which I have finally refused to
resign. My refusal may be just as obdurate and indefensible as you are
pleased to think it; that is not the point at all. The point is this
contest of tenacity on his part and on mine, culminating in a final
interview between us on the eve of the day upon which all these
witnesses break their more or less complete silence concerning my
movements on the night of the fire, and break it in the ear of Sir
Wilton Gleed!
"I invite you to consider the obvious inference. My enemy has tried
every other means of dislodging me. He has threatened and insulted me.
He has set every builder and mason in the neighbourhood against me. He
has deprived me--as he thinks--of the means of building my church, and
then he turns round and tells me to build it or take the consequences! I
make a beginning in spite of him; he has to think of some new method of
expulsion; so, with infinite ingenuity, he trumps up this present charge
against me."
Wilders opened his lips, but the prisoner's hand flew upward in
arresting gesture.
"With infinite ingenuity, your worship, but not necessarily in bad
faith. I have never yet questioned the _bona fides_ of Sir Wilton Gleed;
nor do I now. On the contrary, I am convinced that he honestly and
sincerely believes me capable of any crime in the calendar; but my
capability, again, is not the point; and belief and proof are very
different things. If your worships hold that this horrible charge has
been proved against me--proved sufficiently for this court--then send me
to a higher one as your duty dictates. But if you think that hatred and
prejudice, however deserved, have played the part of genuine and
spontaneous suspicion; that facts have been distorted to fit a
preconception, and the wish, however unconsciously, allowed to father
the thought; that, in short, an honest man has been quite honestly
blinded and misled by very loathing of me and all my doings; then I
implore your worships to dismiss this charge against me--and let me get
back to the work I left to meet it!"
The last words came as an after-thought, but they came from the heart,
and as no anti-climax to those who knew the nature of the work named. In
absolute silence Carlton availed himself of the chair in the dock,
dropping all but out of sight, and bending double, his heart throbbing,
his head singing, his hot hands pressed across his eyes. It was the
sudden hum of talk which told him that the justices had retired; days
passed in his brain before a hush as sudden announced their return.
Meanwhile there were the scraps of conversation that found their way to
his ears. Hearing all, he could distinguish little; but now and then a
familiar phrase leapt home, as familiar faces declare themselves afar.
"The gift of the gab" was one, and "He'd argue black was white" another.
But some one said, "Give the devil his due"; and with that single crumb
of justice Robert Carlton had to crouch content until his present fate
was sealed.
But the hush came at last, and sank to profound silence as the
magistrates took their seats--Rhadamanthus keen and grim--the clergymen
plainly angry with each other. Preston's honest face hid no more of his
feelings than heretofore, but the chairman cloaked annoyance with the
fraction of a smile, and only his voice betrayed him as he addressed the
prisoner.
"After a long and patient hearing," said Wilders, "the bench find this a
case of ve-ry con-sid-er-able doubt in-deed. But, upon the whole, and
taking all the cir-cum-stances into care-ful con-sid-er-ation, they are
of o-pin-i-on that there is not enough ev-i-dence to justify them in
sending the case to the assizes. The charge is therefore dis-missed. I
should like, however, to add one word in respect to a witness, who
might, had he been a less chiv-al-rous opponent--a less mag-nan-i-mous
man--have sat here upon the bench instead of entering the witness-box to
suffer the remorseless cross-questioning of a personal enemy. I could
wish, indeed"--with covert meaning--"that Sir Wilton Gleed had seen fit
to take his proper place in this court! I need hardly say that he quits
it without stain or slur, of any sort or kind, upon his character; and
that he does so with the heartfelt sympathy of one, at all events, of
his colleagues upon the bench."
Rhadamanthus turned his back to hide his face, but James Preston did not
rise till he had finished as he begun. He caught Carlton's eye, and
nodded once more to him, but this time unblushingly and with much
vigour. There was a little hissing as the prisoner vanished, a free man;
and some hooting in the street, in which he reappeared, contrary to
expectation, within a minute. It was like his brazen face, so they told
him as he strode through the little crowd as one who neither heard nor
saw a man of them. But no hand was lifted, no missile thrown, for the
deaf ear is no earnest of physical passivity, and it was notorious that
this man could take care of himself with his hands as well as with his
tongue. Such a very deaf ear did he turn, however, that a flyman had to
follow him to the outskirts of the town, and shout till he was hoarse,
before Robert Carlton paid more heed to him than to his revilers. And
all the time it was a decent man from Linkworth, only begging him to
jump in, as the clergyman at last discovered with instant suspicions of
the truth.
"Who sent you after me?"
"Mr. Preston, sir; leastways, he told me to be here all day, in case you
wanted me."
"God bless Jim Preston!" muttered Carlton, and jumped into the fly
forthwith.
But presently they were at some cross-roads. And the driver drew rein
with a troubled face. He wanted to go a long way round, but his reasons
were wild and unintelligible. Carlton, however, divined the real reason,
and whose it was, and he himself pulled the other rein.
"No, no," said he; "drive me through my own village! They drove me
through it on Saturday; take me back as they took me away. But it was
like Mr. Preston to think of it. Tell him I said so, and that I'll never
forget his kindness as long as I live!"
It was the red-gold heart of the August afternoon, and the shrill little
choir of the ruined church sang a welcome to the friend who had never
sinned against them; and Glen came bounding and barking defiance at the
outside world; and the unfinished stone, the first stone that Robert
Carlton was to dress and to lay with his own hands, it was just as they
had made him leave it on the Saturday evening. But the story of his
return was still being bandied from door to door, when a new sound came
with the song of birds from the ruin in the trees, and a new ending was
given to the story.
The sound was the swish, swish, swish of the mason's axe, with the
stiletto's point, through sandstone as soft as cheese.
XVII
THREE WEEKS AND A NIGHT
Carlton completed that historic stone within another hour, and actually
laid it that night. Jaded in body and brain, with every nerve exhausted,
he must needs do this or drop in the attempt. It was the first stone in
the new church. It was finished at last. He touched it here and there
with the straight-edge. He felt its angles with the square. This stone
would do. He whipped out his foot-rule and measured carefully. The stone
was eleven inches all ways but one. It was the exact depth for the lower
courses, but it was seventeen inches long. A seventeen-inch gap must
therefore be found or made for it. And Carlton went prowling round the
blackened walls, with his foot-rule and his dog, before resting from his
labours. The job should be finished this time, the first stone should be
laid that night.
A place was found in the base of the east end, over a stable portion of
the plinth; the situation was of sacred omen, and Carlton cleared away
the old mortar with immense energy. Then his difficulties began. There
was new mortar to make; this was an altogether new undertaking. It had
been Tom Ivey's affair. Carlton had tried his hand at most branches of
the masonic art, but he had never attempted to mix the mortar. He
barely knew how to begin. There was a heap of sand at one end of the
shed, and a load of lime under cover. These were the ingredients. That
he knew; but it was not enough.
Suddenly, he remembered his _Building Construction_ in two volumes; the
bulkier of the two treated of materials. In a minute the book was found,
deep in dust, and carried to the shed for consultation on the spot. And
there was only too much about mortar; the subject monopolised a column
of the index; its vastness oppressed Carlton, who nevertheless attacked
it then and there. A great disappointment was in store: so he was to
begin by "slaking" his lime. He had forgotten that step; now he had a
dim recollection of the process. According to the book it took two or
three hours at least; even this minimum presupposed that the lime was a
"fat lime," whatever that might be. Carlton, lacking all means of
deciding such a point, gave his inclination the benefit of the doubt,
and left his shovelful of quicklime under water and sand for exactly two
hours and a half.
This check came in the nick of time. It reminded Robert Carlton of the
flesh, whose needs he had once more neglected, though now he would have
cooked and eaten if only to have killed an hour. He lit a fire. He put
on the kettle. He toasted some very stale bread; he boiled an egg warm
from the hen-house, then another; and having eaten he rested while he
must. The sun set; the new moon whitened in the sky, but as yet could
not light a man at his work when it was really dark. And that was why
the lantern stood so long upon the ground outside the shed, in a whirl
of tiny wings, while the mortar was being mixed at last.
But the lantern stood longer still upon a salient fragment of the razed
east end, while the trowel rang, and the mortar flopped, until all lay
smooth and glistening in its light. Then Carlton knelt, and lifted his
handiwork with bursting muscles; and the mortar spattered his waistcoat
as the great stone dropped into place. A wrench, a push, a tap with the
trowel; a finishing touch with its point, a word of thanksgiving before
he rose; and Robert Carlton had laid the first stone of a new church,
and of his own new life.
Next morning he began systematic work, rising at five, lighting his
fire, making his bed, sweeping, dusting, pumping, rinsing, all before
the day's work started after breakfast, with the gentler arts of
scraping and re-pointing, and all in strict obedience to the schedule
which Carlton had drawn up before his arrest. The working day ended, as
then arranged, with a violent assault upon that black disorder which had
been the nave; but this also acquired system as the days closed in;
while the influence of time was not less apparent in the gradual
disappearance of that tendency to morbid reaction which had been
inevitable in the first days of bodily and spiritual strain, of
incessant and excessive hardship, of a solitude consummate and profound.
But here time was assisted by the good sense and the strong will of
Carlton himself, who knew how little virtue there is in mere remorse,
and who struggled against it with all his might. It was a long time,
however, before even he was master of himself in this regard. One day,
in the exaltation of overwork, the high excitement of nervous and of
physical exhaustion, he was actually heard whistling at his walls, and
it was all over the village before he caught himself in the act; but
none seemed to hear how suddenly he stopped at last; none saw the raised
face, the clasped hands, the lips moving in meek apology for an
instant's joy. Nor did any man dream how this one would still mortify
himself, after such a lapse, with deliberate dwelling on the past. There
was but one link, indeed, in all the mournful chain of recent events,
upon which Robert Carlton would never permit his thoughts to
concentrate; that was his successful conduct of his own case before the
magistrates, culminating in his final triumph over Sir Wilton Gleed. He
had made the rule in the hour of his release, and he called in all his
strength of mind to its rigorous observance.
It was now three weeks since he had spoken to a human being, none having
come near him to his knowledge; then one morning the air was full of
whispers, though the yellowing elms hung stagnant in an autumn mist; and
the outcast, looking over the wall which he was scraping, beheld a bevy
of school-children perched on that of the churchyard.
He bent a little lower to his work. The wall was that thirteen-foot
strip, to the left of the porch, upon which he had spent the first
morning of all in getting rid of the unsound upper courses. It was still
his own height in most places; so the children could not watch him at
his work; but the sound of them was enough. Poor little children! To
grow up with such an example and such knowledge as would be theirs! His
heart had seldom smitten him so hard.
"_Then said He unto the disciples, It is impossible but that offences
will come: but woe unto him through whom they come!_
"_It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck,
and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little
ones._"
The text came unbidden; it cut the deeper for that. Woe unto him,
indeed! Of all men, woe unto him! Hammer and chisel slipped from his
hands; he hid his face. His thumbs went to his ears, but were drawn
back. The children's voices were more than he could bear, so he bore
them for his sin until another aspect of the case was driven home to his
intelligence. Next moment he appeared in the porch, and the children
were vanishing from the wall.
"Don't run away," he called. "Come back, you bigger ones!"
It was his old voice, come unbidden like the text; he might have been
using it all these weeks. The children had never disobeyed that quiet
but imperious summons. They did not begin to-day.
"Why aren't you all at school?"
There was silence, broken eventually by some bold but still respectful
spirit.
"Please, sir, it's a holiday."
"Not Saturday, is it?"
He was beginning to lose count of the week-days; once already the
Sabbath school-bell had nipped a day's work in the bud.
"No, sir, it's an extra holiday."
"Then spend it better. Get away into the fields, or down the river. I
won't have you hanging about here. There's nothing for you to
see--nothing that will do you any good. Run away all, and forget who has
spoken to you. But don't let me have to speak again!"
There was no need for another word. And the workman went back to his
wall; but his hands had lost their cunning; his heart was as heavy as
the stones themselves.
Why had he never been harassed in this way before? He had not to think
very long. He was without that friend of friendless man, his dog. The
good Glen, his second shadow in these days, had chosen this one to
desert him; and Carlton was glad, for nothing else would have made him
appreciate the dog at his true worth. Now he thought of it, how often
the faithful brute had gone barking to wall or gate, and come back
wagging his tail! Preoccupied with his work, he had taken no thinking
heed at the time. But now he remembered and understood.
Instead of working all the afternoon, he went in search of Glen. It
surprised him to find how much he missed a companion whose presence he
had often ignored for hours together; he felt as though he could do no
good without the animal now; its dumb sympathy seemed to have had no
small share in all that he had done as yet. That wag of the tail, how
well he knew it after all! It was like the grasp of a good man's hand.
That wistful eye, watching over him at his work, was it a blasphemous
conceit to think of it as the mild eye of the All-seeing, shining
through the mask of one of His humblest creatures, upon another as
humble, and countenancing the work if not the man? If this was
blasphemy, then Robert Carlton blasphemed for once in his heart; and had
his deserts in an unsuccessful quest.