“But you know!”
“How dare you say that?” cried Carlton; and a flash of anger played for an instant on his pallor.
“I see it in your face; but I’ll have it out of you! I’ll have it out of you,” roared Musk, in a sudden frenzy, striking his stick to the floor, “if I have to tear your smooth tongue out along with it! So smooth you could read over that murdered girl, and know all the time who’d murdered her, and think to keep that to yourself! But you sha’n’t; no, that you sha’n’t; not if I have to stand here till midnight. You know! You know! Deny it if you can!”
“I shall deny nothing,” retorted the other. “No, I shall deny nothing!” he reiterated as if to himself. “But think for a minute, Mr. Musk — I entreat you to think calmly for one minute! Suppose I could tell you what you ask, could it serve any good end for you to know?”
“Good end!” cried Musk. “Why, you know it could. I could kill the man who’s killed my daughter — and kill him I will — and swing for him if they like. That’ll be a wonderful good end all round!”
“Then is it for me to throw temptation in your way? Is it for me to spoil a life, if not to end it? For all you know, Mr. Musk, it may be a life otherwise honest, useful, and of good report. Nay!” exclaimed Mr. Carlton, as if suddenly impatient of his own reticence, “I’ll go so far as to say that it once was all three. And the man would do such duty — make such amends — —”
A groan admitted that there were none to make, and finished a sentence to which Musk had not listened; the one before was sufficient for him; and his broad face shone with the satisfaction of a point gained.
“Come,” said he, “that’s fairer! So you do know him, and you say so like a man. I always took you for a man, sir, though there’s been no love lost between us; and I’ll say I’m sorry I spoke so harsh just now, Mr. Carlton; for I had a hold of the wrong end o’ the stick — I see that now. It was the man that confessed — it was the man. Sir, if you’re the Christian gentleman that I take you for, and this here Christianity o’ yours ain’t all cant an’ humbug, you’ll tell me that man’s name; for I can’t call to mind a single one she so much as looked at — unless it was that young Mellis.”
“No, no; poor George is innocent enough, God knows!”
“He’s like to be, for all I hear. They say he carries a cross for you o’ Sundays — but I won’t say no more about that. If he’s your right hand in the parish, as they tell me he is, at least I should hope he’d be straight.”
A puff of wind came through the open window. It lifted the newspaper from the open book, but the rector’s hand fell quickly upon both. And there it rested. And his wretched eyes rested upon his hand.
“So I’ve never thought twice about George Mellis. I’d as soon think o’ you, sir. Then who can it be?”
Mr. Carlton bounded to his feet, white as his collar, and quivering to his nostrils.
“You want to know?”
“I mean to know, sir.”
“And to kill him — eh?”
“I reckon I’ll go pretty near it.”
“Ah, don’t do it by halves!” cried Carlton in a strange high voice. “Kill him now!” His hands fell open at his side; his head fell forward on his breast; and he who had sinned grossly against God and man, yet was not born to be a hypocrite, stood defenceless, abject, self-destroyed.
Moments passed; became minutes; and all the sound in the rectory study came from the rattling of its inner door, or through the outer one from the garden. Then by degrees a hard breathing broke on Robert Carlton’s ears; but he himself was the next to speak, flinging back his head in sudden misery.
“Why don’t you strike?” he cried out. “You’ve got your stick; strike, man, strike!”
It seemed an hour before the answer came, in a voice scarcely recognizable as that of Jasper Musk, it was so low and calm; yet there was an intensity in the deep, slow tones that matched the fearful intensity of the fixed light eyes; and the massive face was still and livid from the short steel beard to the virile silver hair.
“Oh, yes, I’ll strike!” hissed Musk. “I’ll strike! I’ll strike!” And he struck with his eyes until the other’s fell once more; until the guilty man collapsed headlong in his chair, his arms upon the table, and his face upon his arms. “But I’ll strike in my own way, thank you,” Musk went on, “and in my own good time. You shall smart a bit first — learn what it’s like to suffer — taste hell upon earth in case there’s no hell for bloody murderers beyond! How I wish you could see yourself! How I wish your precious flock could see you — and they shall. Whited sepulchre . . . filthy hypocrite . . . living lie!”
Deliberately chosen, with long pauses between, with many a rejection of the word that came uppermost — the worse word that was too strong to sting — these measured epithets carved round the heart that unbridled abuse would have stabbed and stunned. Carlton could hide his face, but he quivered where he sprawled, and the other nodded in savage self-esteem.
“Not that I had ought to be surprised,” continued Musk; “it’s what might have been expected of a Jesuit in disguise; the only wonder is I didn’t suspect you from the first. I never set up for being a charitable man; but that seems I was a damned sight too charitable towards you. I thought no wrong, whatever else I may have thought of you and your ways. No; I may have jeered, I may have been vexed, but my mind wasn’t nasty enough for that. God! that I can keep my stick off you, when I remember the choir practices, and the organ practices, and the Bible classes, and the Young Women’s Christian Association. Sounds well, don’t it? Young Women’s Christian Association! Now we know what it meant; now we know what it all means, church and parsons, religion and all; a sink of iniquity and a set of snivelling, whining, licentious — —”
“Stop!” cried Carlton, manned at last, and on his feet to enforce the word. “Say what you please of me, do what you will to me. Nothing is too bad for me — I deserve the very worst. But abuse my Church you shall not, in my hearing.”
“His Church!” sneered Musk. “A lot you’ve done to make me respect it, haven’t you? My God, can you stand there looking at me as if I were in the wrong instead o’ you? Do you know what you’ve done, and confessed to doing? You’ve murdered my girl, just as much as though you’d taken and cut her throat, you have: more, you’ve murdered her body and soul, you that snivel about the soul! And you can stand there and whine about your Church! Is that all you’ve got to say for yourself — to the father of the woman you’ve ruined to her grave?”
“That is all I have to say to you, Mr. Musk. I will not insult you by asking your forgiveness, much less by attempting to make the shadow of an excuse; there could be none; nor can there be any forgiveness for me from you or your wife; nor do I look for any mercy in this parish, or this world. Go, spread the news, and ruin me in my turn; it’s what I deserve, and mean to bear.”
“Not so fast,” said Musk— “not so fast, if you please. So I’m to spread the news, am I? And do you think I’m so proud that’s the reverend? By your leave, Mr. Carlton, I’ll keep that same news to myself till I’ve had all I want from it.”
“Any refinement you like,” said Carlton. “It will not be too bad for me — or too much — please God!”
Jasper Musk put on his hat, but came close up to the clergyman before taking his leave.
“I wish I knew you better!” he ground out through his teeth. “I wish I’d made up to you like the women, instead of giving you the wide berth I have. Do you know why? Because I’d have known how to hit you hardest,” said Musk, hissing like a snake; “because I’d have known where to hurt you most!”
Carlton stood a trifle more upright: his enemy’s malice ministered subtly to his remnant of self-respect.
“I wish I’d been a church-goer,” continued Musk; “but it’s never too late to mend! I may be there to-morrow to hear you preach; maybe I’ll have a word to say myself; maybe I shall not. You’ll know when the time comes, and not before.”
Carlton quailed, for the first time at a threat, and his visible terror seemed to intoxicate the other. Seizing him by the shoulder as he had seized his wife, clutching him like a wild beast, and thrusting his great face to within an inch of that of the unhappy clergyman, Jasper Musk spat lewd names, and foul insult, and wanton blasphemy, until breath failed him. All the vileness he had heard in sixty years, and could recall in half as many seconds, poured from him in a very transport of insensate ribaldry; words that had never left his lips before, crowded to them now; and were still ringing in a swimming head when Robert Carlton woke to the fact that he was once more alone.
His first sensation was one of overwhelming nausea. His very vitals writhed; and he reeled heavily against an open bookcase, casting an arm along one of the upper shelves, and resting his face upon the sleeve. For a few moments all his weight was upon that arm; then he opened his eyes, and the titles of the books engaged his dazed attention. None was apt, but all were familiar, and the familiarity maddened the stricken man. He stood glaring from one low wall to another, filled with those doubts which are the cruel satellites of transcendent anguish. Had it really happened after all? The room was so unchanged, from the few things on the walls to the many in the chair! All was so homely, so intimate, so reassuring; and no visible trace of Musk! Had he ever been there at all?
Ah, yes, for he had gone! In the distance a gate had squealed, and shut with a rattle; the sound had lain in his ear; now it sank to the brain. Now, too, another sound, intermittent all this time, but meaningless hitherto, assumed a like significance. This was the continued rustling of a newspaper, as the wind whisked in at the open door and out by the open window in invisible harlequinade. The man’s mind fled back a little lifetime of minutes. And he recalled the last puff and rustle, and the quick falling of his own hand upon the paper, which lay on his desk, as the last event of a past era of his existence — the last act of Robert Carlton, hypocrite!
And what was the peril that had made the final demand upon his caution and his cunning? It was a new irony to perceive at once that it had existed chiefly in guilty imagination; to remove the paper, and to reveal nothing more incriminating than the parish register of deaths, with an unfinished entry in his own hand, a spatter of ink in place of a name, and some round white blisters lower down the leaf. Yet this it was that had brought Carlton to his knees an hour ago; and it brought him to his knees again, not at the desk of formal prayer, but here at his table as before.
“Father have mercy on me,” he prayed, “for I neither deserve nor desire any mercy from man!”
IV
MIDSUMMER NIGHT
And while he knelt the situation was developing, with unforeseen and truly merciful rapidity, in an utterly unsuspected quarter; thus an aggressive knock at the inner door came in a sense as an answer to the prayer it interrupted.
The rectory servants consisted at this time of a small but entire family employed wholesale out of pure philanthropy. And this was the mother, red-hot in her cheap crape, to say that she had heard everything — could not help hearing — and that house was no longer any place for respectable women and an honest lad — no, not if they had to sleep in the fields. So the lad had got their boxes on a barrow, but he would bring it back. And they would go, all of them, to Lakenhall Union, sooner than stay another hour in that house of shame.
Mr. Carlton produced his cash-box without a word, and counted out a month’s wages for each in addition to arrears. The poor woman made a gallant stand against the favour, but, submitting, returned to her kitchen of her own accord, and to her master’s study in a quarter of an hour, to tell him she had laid the table, and there was a wire cover over the meat.
“And may God forgive you, sir!” cried she at parting. “I couldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t heard it from your own lips with my own ears!”
There was much that Carlton himself could not believe. He sat half stupefied in his deserted rectory, like a man marooned, his one acute sensation that of his sudden solitude. What was so hard to realize was that the people knew! that the whole parish would know that night, and his own family next week, and the whole world before many days. He was well aware of the certain consequences of this scandal and its disclosure; he had faced them only too often during the nightmare of the past week, imagining some, ascertaining others. What seemed so incredible was that he had made the disclosure himself, that the very father had not suspected him to the end!
The last reflection convulsed him with self-contempt. What a hypocrite he must be! What an unconscious hypocrite, the worst kind of all!
Here he was eating his supper; he had no recollection of coming to the table; yet, now that he had caught himself, the food did not choke him, he was not sick with shame; he only despised himself — and went on.
It was dusk. He must have lit the lamp himself; as he lifted it from the table, having risen, he caught sight of its reflection and his own in the overmantel, and set the lamp upon the chimneypiece, and by its light had a better look at himself than he could remember having taken in his life before. There was no vanity in the man; he was studying his face out of sheer curiosity, from a new and quite impersonal point of view, as that of an enormous hypocrite and voluptuary.
Human nature was very strange: he himself would never have suspected such a face. The forehead was so broad and high, the deep-set eyes so steadfast, and yet so fervid! They were the eyes of a zealot, but no visionary: wisdom and understanding were in that bulge of the brow over each. But the evil writing is lower down, unless you look for positive crime or madness; yet these nostrils were sensitive, not sensual; and the mouth, yes, the mouth showed between the short brown beard and the heavy brown moustache; but what it showed was its strength. No; neither weakness nor wickedness were there; even Robert Carlton admitted that. But to be strong, and yet to fall; to mean well, and do evil; to look one thing, and to be another: all that was to embody a type for which he himself had ever entertained an unbridled loathing and contempt.
He carried the lamp to his study, and as he entered from within there was a knock at the outer door. One was waiting to see the rector, one who had waited and knocked there oftener than any other in the parish.
Carlton drew back, and the impulse of flight was strong upon him for the first time. It needed all his will to shut the inner door behind him, and to cry with any firmness, “Is that George Mellis?”
In response there burst into the room a lad in knickerbockers, broad-shouldered, muscular, yet smooth-faced, and mild-eyed all his nineteen years; but this was the supreme moment of them all; and his woman’s eyes were on fire as he planted himself before the rector and his lamp, pale as ashes in its rays.
“Is it true?” he gasped. “Is it true?”
This lad was Carlton’s chief disciple, his admirer, his imitator, his enthusiastic champion and defender; his right hand in all good works; nay more, his acolyte, his lieutenant of the sanctuary; and, before a broad chest so agitated, and innocent eyes so wild, the culprit’s courage failed him at last, so that the truth clove to his tongue.
“It’s all over the village,” the lad continued in gasps. “You know what I mean. They’re all saying it. They say you’ve admitted it; for God’s sake say you haven’t! Only deny it, and I’ll go back and cram their lies down their throats!”
But by this Mr. Carlton had recovered himself, and was looking his last upon the anxious eager face of the lad who had loved and honoured him: his final pang was to see the eagerness growing, the anxiety lessening, his look misunderstood. And this time the admission was halt and hoarse.
What followed was also different; for, with scarcely a moment’s interval, young Mellis burst into tears like the overgrown child that he was, and, flinging himself into the rector’s chair, sobbed there unrestrainedly with his smooth face in his strong red hands. Carlton watched him by a prolonged effort of the will; he would shirk no part of his punishment; and no part to come could hurt much more than this. His fixed eyes were waiting
for the boy’s swimming ones when at length the latter could look up.
“You, of all men!” whispered Mellis. “You who have kept us all straight — me for one. Why, the very thought of you has helped me to resist things! You, with your religion: no more religion for me!”
At that the other broke out; his religion he could still defend; or thought he could, until he came to try, and his own unworthiness slowly strangled the words in his throat.
“Say what you like,” said Mellis; “it was you brought me to church; it’s you who turn me away; and I’ll go to no other after yours. Only to think — —”
And he plunged into puerile reminiscences of their religious life in common, quoting extreme points in the rich ritual in which he had been privileged to assist, as though they aggravated the case, and made it more incredible than it was already.
“If our Lord Himself — —”
It did not need the rector’s finger to check that blasphemy; but the thing was said; the thought was there.
“Yes; better go,” said Carlton, as the lad leapt up. “Go; and let no one else come near me who ever believed in me; for I can better face my bitterest enemies. Yet you — you must be one of them! After her own father, no man should hate me more!”
And there was a new pain in his voice, a new agony of remorse, as memory stabbed him in a fresh place. But the boy shook his head, and hung it with a blush.
“You think I cared for her,” he said. “I thought so, too, until she went away. I should have cared more then! It troubled me for a time; but I got over it; and then I knew I was too young for all that. Besides, she never looked at me after you came; that’s another thing I see now; and I know I ran less after her. Yes, I was too young to love a woman,” cried this village lad, “but I wasn’t too old to love you, and look up to you, and follow you in all you did. I tell you the honest truth, Mr. Carlton,” and his great eyes flashed their last reproach: “I’d have died for you, sir, I would! And I’d die now — thankfully — if it could make you the man I thought you were!”
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 182