a few sound ones had been scraped and relaid; here and there an entirely
new stone had been cut to fit the place of one charred out of shape; but
in the lower courses such instances were rare, too rare to suit his own
creative taste, but Carlton was determined to deal with the lowest
courses first, and to raise all the walls to his own height before
finishing one. In the case of those which were to contain windows, it
might be well to pause at the sill; the windows alone might take him a
couple of years. Meanwhile these were the walls which had suffered
most, and first let him reach the sills: if he did that within the next
six months Carlton thought he would be lucky. For his progress was as
that of the insect which builds the reef; it was often imperceptible
even to himself; yet always the work was going on.
The man was all muscle now; spare at his best, he had scarcely an ounce
of mere flesh left. Yet, for his work's sake, he made wonderfully
regular meals, often with a relish; and twice in the autumn killed a
sheep, having cold mutton for many days in the colder weather. But the
preliminary tragedy and the ultimate waste were equally disgusting, and
his normal needs seemed better met by predatory visits to the hen-yard.
Practice made him a fair baker and a moderate cook; but, as he had never
been particular about his food, and his only object was to maintain
bodily strength, he sometimes defeated his end, and added the dejection
of dyspepsia to all other ills. Otherwise the physical life suited
Carlton; he was out all day long; and the worst discomforts rarely
followed him into the open air. At his work, for instance, he was always
warm; indoors, only when he went to bed. He never had a fire, except to
cook by; thus he still had a few coals left, but he doubted whether
anybody would sell him any more. There was, however, all the half-burnt
woodwork of the church; most of this would burn again; and, with
economy, might keep him in firing throughout the term of his suspension.
Meanwhile, lamp, rug, and overcoat gave all the heat that Carlton would
allow himself in the study. Once, when his stock of paraffin had run
out, he had to tramp for fresh supplies into a town where his face was
unknown; and that experience made him more than ever economical of such
fuel as he had.
Unparalleled position for an endowed clergyman of the Church of England,
the incumbent of an enviable living, an Oxford man, a man of family, a
zealous High Churchman, an enlightened and alluring preacher, towards
the latter end of the nineteenth century! Scandalous priest though he
had also proved himself, his case was as pitiable as unique; a pariah in
his own parish; the outcast of his own people; an inland Crusoe, driven
to the traditional expedients of the castaway, and living the very life
of such within sight and hail of a silent and unseeing world. It was a
position which few men would have faced for an instant. This man
maintained it throughout the winter. And throughout the winter his work
went on. And the spring found him technically sane.
But his brain bore it better than his heart. Some vital part of him was
certain to suffer. His brain escaped altogether, his body for a time;
but his heart was hard within him; all his prayers could not soften it;
and presently he lost the power even to pray.
This was the meaning of the changed face seen from the road, in the days
and weeks succeeding the Long Stow celebration of the battle of
Tel-el-Kebir. Thereafter it was the face of one in the coils of
malignant despair. But the more gradual and substantial change, in such
a man, was terrible beyond deduction from its mere outward shadow.
Here was no sudden and sweeping infidelity; no plucking of loose roots
from a shallow soil. Shallow this man was not, nor easily shaken in the
least of his convictions. His general tenets stood intact. He still
believed in the efficacy, under God, of earnest and worthy prayer. But
he could no longer believe in the efficacy of his own prayers. They were
not worthy: that was the whole truth. They were earnest enough, but
utterly unworthy, and it was better not to pray at all.
His most passionate prayers had been for his own forgiveness, for the
restoration of his own peace of mind, for the blessing of God upon his
own little labours; selfish prayers, one and all; and he saw the
selfishness at last. It shocked him. He tried to stamp it out, this new
and obtrusive egoism; but he failed. Denied all contact with his
fellow-creatures, with only his own wishes to consult, his own work to
do, his own heart to probe, his own life to discipline, the man was an
egoist before he knew it; and it was only through his prayers that he
ever discovered it at all. They were not only unanswered; they no longer
brought their own momentary comfort, as heretofore. Of old it had been
much more than momentary; now it was no comfort at all. There must be
some reason for this; he asked himself what reason; and the answer was
this revelation of the true character of his prayers. They were poisoned
at the fount. He tried to purify them, but all in vain. Self would creep
in. So then he prayed only for a renewal of the faculty of pure and
unselfish prayer. And this was the most passionate of all his prayers.
But it also was unanswered. So he prayed no more.
He was unforgiven: so Carlton explained it to himself. And a little
brooding convinced him of his idea. If God had forgiven him, He would
have shown some sign of His clemency through men. But what had men done?
They had broken his windows; they had burnt his church; they had closed
up every avenue to such poor atonement as was in his power; they had
forced him into a position which he had never sought, though for a
little it had consoled him; then tried, by false accusation, to force
him out of it; and now they had cut him off from themselves, had set him
apart as a thing eternally unclean, had even stooped to destroy the one
dumb being that clung to him in his exile!
The murder of the dog was no little thing in itself; coming at the foot
of such a list, at the bitter end of a night of bitterness, it was the
last drop that petrified a truly humble and a strenuously contrite
heart.
But it did not petrify his hand; and the work of that hand went on
without ceasing, save on that day which was now the Day of Rest
indeed--and nothing more. The other six, his energies were redoubled. If
he was now more than ever a traitor to his Master, well, there was still
this one thing that he could do for the Master's sake. And he did it
with all his might.
No day was too wet for him; no day was too cold. His fingers might turn
blue, his moustache might freeze; it is beside the point that the winter
chanced to be too mild for the latter contingency. While five fingers
could control the chisel, and the other hand strike true, no weather
could have deterred him. And no weather did.
So the New Year came, and the work went on through January and February
without a break. But the month of March, as it often will, made late
amends for the insipidity of its predecessors. A spell of colourless
humidity was broken by bright skies and a keen wind; the latter grew
bitter with the day; the former darkened before it was time. And when
Robert Carlton opened his study doors next morning, to air the room
while he took his bath, a little snowdrift came tumbling in through the
outer one.
Carlton looked forth upon a white world in dazzling contrast to the
clear dark grey of a starless sky; at first there was no third tint. But
every moment seemed lighter than the last, and presently the trees
showed brittle and black as ever against the sky; for the drifted snow
lay everywhere but on their waving branches; and the wind blew hard and
bitter as before.
Carlton bathed grimly in broken ice; he was not going to be baffled by a
little snow. He was very gradually rebuilding the east end, using the
old stones where he could, but cutting more new ones than he had
bargained for. He could not help it. This wall was going up. It was too
near the lane. It should hide the builder's head before he left it for
another wall. It was up to his thighs already.
So all that day he laboured with his feet in the snow, and only his legs
entrenched against the cutting wind. The stones were ready; he now
prepared them by the course. They had only to be carried from the shed
with mortar mixed expressly overnight; but to avoid dropping them in the
slush and snow, each stone was laid out of hand; and a considerable
muscular exertion thus followed by a prolonged niggling with trowel and
plummet and transverse string, and this in the fangs of the wind, as
often as twice or thrice an hour. It was the hardest day yet. But it was
also the most successful. The entire course was laid by half-past three
in the afternoon.
In earlier days Carlton would undoubtedly have given way to that
spontaneous elation for which he had been wont to pay so dearly; now a
tired man crept back to his bed, without a thought beyond the next
hour's rest (he had seldom been so tired), and the meal that he must
then prepare as mere munition of war. Yet on his study threshold he
paused and turned, as doomed men may at the door of the dreadful shed.
There was little in the scene itself to stamp it on the mind. Already
the snow was beginning to disappear; but the sky was still hard and
clean; and the east wind cut to the bone. The ridge of firs, cresting
the ploughed uplands beyond the lane, notched the bleak sky with dark
cockades on russet stems; white clouds floated above, a white moon hung
higher. A robin hopped in the snow at Carlton's feet; he was a good
friend to the birds, and had not forgotten them that morning. Somewhere
a blackbird sung him indoors; somewhere a starling smacked its beak. And
this was all; but Robert Carlton carried the impression to his grave.
Instead of sleeping for an hour, he slept far into the night; and spent
the rest of it in misery between bouts of shivering and of intolerable
heat. His throat was on fire, to quench it he coughed, and already his
cough hurt queerly. In the morning the man was ill enough to know that
he was going to be worse. He took characteristic measures while he
could.
It was a fine instinct which had inspired him to economise his coal; now
was the time when that little hoard might save his life. But he had only
one scuttle, and for the moment felt baffled; then he dried his bath,
and put the coals in that, thus eventually getting them to the study in
one load. These exertions hurt Carlton like his cough. In both cases it
was as though his body had been transfixed. His head swam with the pain.
Yet next moment he was reeling back for wood; and not less than ten
infernal minutes did he spend on such errands, a furious fever alone
sustaining him. It was constructive suicide, yet not to have these
things was certain death. Now it was all the alcohol in the house, in a
bottle that had lasted nearly a year; now a basin of eggs, of which he
had always a fair store indoors; now pail upon pail of water for his
kettle. Carlton had been a great visitor of the sick, and seen many a
death from the disease he was preparing to resist. He had therefore a
rough idea of what to do for himself; he was only doubtful as to how
long he might be able to do anything at all. The lightest breath had now
become a pang. Already he was alarmingly ill, and must inevitably grow
much worse. But he did not intend to die. He trusted the constitution of
a lean and hardy race, and he trusted his own nerve.
At last the fire was alight, a full kettle mounted, and the spout
trained upon the pillow, the bed itself being drawn up close to the
fire. Under the bed was the bath full of coals, and within as easy reach
the eggs, the whisky, a breakfast-cup, and the pails of water. But even
now the sick man was not in his bed; he was lying in a heap upon the
floor, where he had fallen the moment he could afford to faint.
On recovering he shook off half his clothes, crawled between the
blankets, and beat up an egg with whisky. This was all he took that day.
And there he lay, breathing needles and coughing daggers until he slept.
"I'm not going to die. They shan't get rid of me like that. I don't die
like a rat in his hole!"
That seemed to be the burden of his thoughts for many days; in reality
the time was forty-eight hours. And whenever the determination rose
afresh in his heart, and the dry lips moved with its expression, the
whole man would rouse himself to an effort beside which the building of
the church was pastime. He would sit up and put on more coals with a
hand black from the constant operation. Then he would lean as close as
possible to the singing kettle, and inhale the steam until the gaunt arm
supporting his weight could do so no more. Even then he would make a
still longer arm before lying down, and replenish the kettle from one of
the pails, using the breakfast-cup for a dipper. So the kettle would
cease singing for a time, and, each occasion entirely exhausting the
spent man, the chances were that he would fall into a sleep that was
half a swoon. But he never slept very long. He would dream that the fire
was black, and start up to mend it--often before the kettle had
recovered its voice. So far from the fire going out, for sixty hours it
never went down. Carlton would mend it almost in his sleep. Even on the
third day, when a kind delirium destroyed sensation for some hours, he
never forgot his fire; the lean black hand would still feel its way to
the bath beneath the bed, and there grope weakly for the smaller coals.
All lucid thought and all delirious whispers were gradually monopolised
by the fire. It became the sick man's life. He would not let it out
while he lived. And live he would. When the fire died out, then so would
he. But he was not going to die this time.
"Their latest dodge to get rid of me, is it? Trust to Général
Février--no, March! Never mind; he shan't lay his bony finger on me
. . . You'll burn 'em if you try! . . . I tell you the law's on my
side."
Delirium grew from the exception into the rule. The kettle sang no
longer; the bottom was out and the whole thing red-hot; for the fire had
never been so good. The fender was inches deep in ashes. With or without
his reason Carlton knew enough to thrust the poker through and through
the lower glow. It was a clear fire all the time.
And the heat of it at such a range! It singed the sheets; it flayed the
face; but it also helped incalculably to keep this stricken body and
this strenuous soul together.
The crisis came before its time. Carlton grew too weak to hold the poker
or to lift a coal, but cruelly clear in his mind. Thus far he had never
prayed. He had abandoned prayer with all deliberation and in all his
vigour. It needed more than the fear of death to make him pray again,
least of all for mere life. Now that the fire was going out, and
recovery no longer possible, the case was changed; and this erring
servant broke his long silence with God, to pray both for forgiveness
and for a speedy issue out of his afflictions. And in the same hour came
the seeming answer, as if to assure him that even his prayers had still
some value in the eyes of the Most High. For delirium had dwindled into
coma, with these few lucid minutes between, and the fever and the pain
had passed away.
Yet it was in this world that Robert Carlton awoke yet again, to find
his precious fire alight after all, and a dilapidated figure nodding
over it to the song of a fresh kettle. It was old Busby, the sexton. The
sick man could not speak; his little finger seemed to weigh a stone; it
was some minutes before he achieved movement enough to attract the
sexton's attention. But all this time the live coals had been warming
his soul. And already he lay convinced that he also was going to live.
The sexton turned his face at last. It was a startling face for sick
eyes at such a range. The toothless mouth, which never closed, had often
reminded Mr. Carlton of one of his own gargoyles. It did so now. And a
continual trickle of saliva added a disgusting realism to the image,
which was, however, immediately dispelled by a human grin of profound
slyness.
"And have you been bad?" inquired the sexton.
"Beat--up--an egg. I--can't--speak."
Evidently he could not, for Busby was bending a horrid ear.
"Eh? eh?"
Carlton made a fresh effort with shut eyes.
"No food . . . faint for want . . . there no eggs?"
"Eggs? Why, yes, here's one."
"Beat up for me . . . too bad to speak."
The sexton looked more sententious than ever.
"Ah, I thought as how you'd been bad," said he, with all the nods of the
successful seer. "I thought as how you'd been bad!"
"It's only been a cold," whispered Carlton, in sudden terror of the
public pity.
"Only a cold?"
"Oh, yes--that's all."
"Then you've not been as bad as me!" cried Busby, triumphantly. "Do you
mind what I had inside me last year? That's there still! I can hear
that----"
"Will you do what I ask?"
It was a peremptory whisper now.
"I would, sir, but I don't fare to know the road."
"Then give me the egg, for heaven's sake, and you hold the cup."
Carlton managed to rise a few inches in his impatience; but his fingers
had less power than those of the babe new-born, and the egg slipped
through them. With fortuitous dexterity, the sexton caught it in the
cup; there was a crack; and accident had accomplished the design.
"Look what you've gone and done," said Busby, reproachfully, displaying
the yolk in the cup. Thereupon he received instructions which even he
could follow; and at length the mess was down, stinging with the
sexton's notion of a teaspoonful of whisky. This second accident was
even happier than the first; there was instant agitation in every vein.
And now Busby could hear without stooping.
"When did you find me?"
"That fare to be an hour ago, I suppose. Ah, but I thought as how you
looked bad! Soon as ever I see you, I say to myself, 'The reverend's
found what beat him at last,' I say; 'he do look wunnerful bad,' I say.
And you see, I was right."
There was the tiniest gleam in the great bright eyes.
"You were partly right," said Carlton, "and partly wrong. I'm not done
with yet, Busby. So then you lit the fire for me?"
"That wasn't wholly out."
"Ah!"
"That soon burnt up. Then I went and got another kettle."
The great eyes flashed suspicion.
"And told everybody you saw, I suppose!"
"I should be very sorry," said the sexton, significantly. "No, I come
an' went by the lane, an' took wunnerful care that nobody set eyes on I.
I thought as how you might fare to like a cup o' tea, an' that was a
rare mess you'd made o' _your_ kettle."
"You've done well," whispered Carlton. "You've saved my--saved my cold
from getting worse. You shall never regret it, Busby; only don't you
tell anybody I've had one--do you hear? Don't you tell a single soul
that you found me in bed!"
"No fear," chuckled the sexton. "I should be very sorry to tell anybody
I'd found you at all. They might hear o' that somewhere else!"
Carlton lay still with thought and purpose; and death itself could not
have given the lower part of his face a harsher cast; but the hot eyes
were fixed upon the fading diamonds of the window over the table. At
last he spoke--and it was a pity there was but the sexton to hear the
firm tones of so faint a voice.
"Find my keys, Busby. I'm going to give you a sovereign----"
"A what?"
"The first of several if you do what I want!"
Not much later the sexton was hobbling towards Lakenhall, for the first
time in many years; and the sick man lay greatly doubting whether he
should ever see him again. His weakness was terrible now. The excitement
of conversation had provoked a relapse as grave as it was inevitable in
one so weak. The flickering lamp was only fed by the stimulus of
suspense, the glow of the fire, and the man's own indomitable will. The
latter, however, never failed him for a moment.
"I _will_ pull through," he would mutter at his worst. "I will--I will
. . . Oh, is he never, never . . ."
He came at last--with corn-flour, meat-extract, a bottle of port, and
such other requisites as had entered the sick man's head under the spur
of his overdose of ardent spirits. And, simple and inadequate as they
were, these things spelt the first syllable of recovery.
The sexton came night after night; he also was a lonely man; and he
dearly loved a pound. In a week he was richer than he had ever been
before. It became difficult for him to take a disinterested view of the
determined progress which the patient made towards complete recovery and
consequent independence. The situation, however, had its little
compensations: at all events it enabled the imaginary sufferer to crow
over the real one to his heart's content.
"Ah, sir, you don't fare to know what that is to be right ill, like I.
_You_ never had a fine fat frog settun in your middle an' keepun all the
good out o' your stummick. That get every bite I eat, an' then that cry
for more. Croap, croap, croap!"
One day brought forth an unsuspected fact. The sexton was no longer
sexton at all. There had been no more burials. The school-bell was rung
on Sundays, as all the week, by the schoolmaster's son. Busby had been
dismissed with a present, as long ago as the month of August; but that
was not all. He had thereupon left the Church in justifiable dudgeon,
and thrown in his spiritual lot with the Particular Baptists in the
little flint chapel between the Linkworth turning and the Flint House.
He now exhorted Mr. Carlton to do the same.
"If you do, sir," said Busby, "you'll never fall no more."
Carlton winced. But the man had saved his life. Nothing should annoy him
from the kind old imbecile who had come to his succour while the sound
world stood aloof.
"You don't know that," he said quietly.
"But I do," declared the other. "I'm like to know. God's children can't
sin, and I'm one on 'em."
Carlton opened his eyes.
"Do you mean to tell me you never sin?"
"I mean to tell you, sir," said the solemn sexton, "that, since God laid
his hand on me, now seven month ago, I've never once committed the
shadder of a sin."
"Then, if I were you, I should remember what St. Paul says--'Let him
that thinketh he standeth take heed--lest--he--fall.'"
The text faltered; it was terribly two-edged; but Carlton had not
perceived the pitfall until he was over the brink. He had forgotten
himself in his scorn, and spoken impulsively as the man that he had been
the year before. But the inveterate egotist was conveniently full of
himself, and his pat retort quite free from offence.
"Fall?" said he, with his foolish eyes wide open. "Why, I couldn't do
that if I tried; and I have tried, just to see; but I fare to have
forgotten how to sin. Do you believe me, sir, I can't even raise a swear
at this little varmin what's killun me inch by inch. Why, I'm grateful
to it! But I do sometimes fare to cry to think I have to stay another
day in this world o' sin, when I know there's a place prepared for me in
heaven above."
This stupendous speech was too much for even Mr. Carlton's self-control.
Its snivelling tone, its evident conviction (confirmed by a gargoyle's
grin of infinite self-esteem), were aggravated by the complete surprise
of this spiritual revelation; and between them they awoke a dormant
nerve. Robert Carlton did not exhibit that annoyance which he had
determined to conceal; he did much worse. He burst out laughing in the
sexton's face. And his laughter was long, loud, high-pitched and
hysterical, alike from weakness and from long disuse.
The sexton on his legs, in a perfect palsy of horror and offence, alone
put a stop to it.
"I beg your pardon," gasped Carlton, his eyes full of tears; "oh, I
beg----"
And again that hysterical, high-pitched laughter got the better of him,
ringing weirdly enough through the empty house.
"Ah!" said the dotard, when it had stopped at last; and the monosyllable
contented him for some moments. "Well," he at length continued, with a
brisker manner and a brighter face; "well, thank God I pulled you
through; thank God I didn't let you die in your sins and go to
everlasting hell without another chance of immortal life. You wicked
man! You wicked man! I'll go and I'll pray for you; but I'll never come
near you no more."
So the solitary regained his solitude; when he spoke again, it was to
himself.
"Well, he has his money," he reflected aloud: he had paid the sexton
some seven pounds in all. "And my gratitude!" he cried later. "I must
never forget that I owe my life to that egregious old man."
Yet the greater gratitude was beginning to stir within him, as the sap
was even then stirring in the trees. It was a mild, bright day, one of
the last in March. The invalid had not yet been out; he would go out
now. In an instant he was wrapping up.
Oh, but it was wonderful! the feel and noise of the moist gravel under
the soles of his boots; the green, damp grass; the watery sun; the
beloved birds; the mild, beneficent air.