This interview left Carlton’s mind more a blank than ever. It might have been an hour later, or it might have been in ten minutes, that the thought occurred to him — if his dearest disciple felt thus, what must the enemy feel? And he was a man with enemies enough in the parish, having followed the old order of country parson, and that with more vigour than diplomacy. In eighteen months his reforms had been manifold and drastic beyond discretion. It is true that his preaching had won him more followers than his priestcraft had turned away. Yet a more acute ecclesiastic would have tapped the wedge instead of hammering it; the consummate priest would have condescended further in the direction of a more immediate and a wider popularity. Carlton had gone his own way, consulting none, attracting many, offending not a few. And he expected the speedy settlement of many a score.
Nor had he long to wait. Lamp in hand, he was locking up the house as mechanically as he had fed his body; but one thing had pricked him in the performance, and he tingled still between gratitude and fresh grief. He had a Scotch collie, Glen by name, a noble dog, that was for ever at its master’s heels. So, during any service, the chain was a necessary evil; but straight from his vestry, in cassock and biretta, the rector would march to his backyard to release the dog. To-day he had forgotten; nor was it till the master’s round brought him to the back premises that the poor beast barked itself into notice. Then, indeed, the dazed man realized that his outer ear had been calmly listening to the barking for some time; and, with a small thing to be sorry for again, and one friend behind him, he continued his round, a sentient being once more.
It was upstairs that the dog barked afresh, causing Carlton to snatch his head from the basin of cold water in which he had sought to assuage its fever, and to go over to his open window, towel in hand. No sooner had he reached it than he started back, and stood very still with the water dripping from his beard. When he did dry his face it was as though he wiped all colour from it too. And it was six feet of quivering clay that returned on tip-toe to that open window.
The new moon was setting behind the trees towards Linkworth; there was no need of its meagre light. Lanterns, bright lanterns, were closing in upon the rectory: at first the unhappy man had seen lanterns only, swinging close to the ground, swilling the lawn with light. Stealthy legs, knee-deep in this light, he remembered after his recoil. But not till he had driven himself back to the window did he see the set faces, or realize the fury of his people, kindled against him by his own confession of his own guilt.
When he saw this his nerve went, and he stood with clasped hands, the perspiration bursting from his skin. And the lanterns shook out into a chain along the edge of the lawn, and were held up to search the face of the house, all as yet without a word.
“That’s his room,” whispered one at last; “that — where the light is!”
It was the voice of the schoolmaster, himself a churchwarden, and withal an honest creature who was merely as many things as possible to as many men. His part had been a little difficult lately. “This has simplified it,” thought the rector; and the twinge of bitterness did him good.
He was a man again for one moment; the next, “He’s in his room,” cried another, aloud; “that’s him standing at the window!”
And there burst forth a howl of execration, that rose to a yell as the delinquent disappeared and in his panic put out the light.
“You coward!”
“Ah, you skunk!”
“Bloody Papist!”
“Hypocrite!”
They were the better names; each shot his own, and capped the last; the schoolmaster, mad with excitement, blaspheming with the best.
“Come down out of that, ye devil!”
“Do you show yourself, you cur!”
And this command Robert Carlton obeyed, his manhood rising yet again. But no sooner was he at the window than both panes crashed to powder over his head, and the surrounding bricks rang with the volley. The clergyman had a scratch from the falling glass, and a stone stung him on the hand. The blood bubbled in his veins.
“Cowards and curs yourselves!” he shouted down, shaking his fists at the crowd; and in ten seconds he was at the front door, with a couple of walking-sticks snatched from the stand. But he himself had turned the key and shot the bolt within the last few minutes, and this gave him time to think.
“Quiet, sir — quiet!” he cried to the dog at his heels. “They’ve right on their side,” he groaned, “after all! Quiet, old doggie; come back; it’s all deserved. And it’s only the beginning of what we’ve got to bear!”
So he bore it, sitting on the stairs, where no window overlooked him, and soothing Glen with one hand, restraining him with the other; and yet, for his sin, despising his forbearance, even while he continued telling himself it was his duty to forbear.
And now breaking glass and barking dog made night a nightmare in the dark and empty house: the infuriated villagers were smashing the rectory windows one by one. Where the blind was up, the glass spread, and the stone flew far into the room; where the blind was down, stone and glass rattled against it, and fell in one heap with one clatter. So dining-room and drawing-room were wrecked in turn, at short range, with the heaviest available metal, and much interior damage. And still the master of the house sat immovable within, nodding grimly at each crash; wincing more at the curses; and once releasing the dog to stop his ears altogether.
It was no use; curiosity compelled him to listen; he was forbidden to shirk one stripe. And that was a communicant, that cursing demon; this was the schoolmaster, yelling like one of his own boys; the other Palmer, of the Plough and Harrow, a very old enemy, hoarse as a crow with drink and triumph. Young Cubitt, again, who cheered each crash, was one of the disaffected; but till to-night most of this howling mob had been his flock. Now all the good work was undone, was stultified, the good seed poisoned in the ground; and not for the first, and not for the fiftieth time that week, the confessed rake asked himself whether more harm than good would not come of his confession.
Meanwhile, of all the voices that he heard and could distinguish, only one diverted his self-contempt for an instant. This was the soft, passionless voice of a young gentleman, evidently not himself engaged in the stone-throwing, pointing out panes still to break to those who were. This was the voice of Sidney Gleed.
The thing had gone on for ten minutes or more when the outcry altered in character: an interruption had occurred: was it the police? No, the rector of the parish was too well acquainted with the character of its solitary constable. He would come up when all was over. Then who could this be?
The shower of stones had ceased as suddenly as it had begun. New oaths were flying in a new direction, and a voice hitherto unheard was heaping abuse on the abusers; with a strange thrill, the clergyman recognised it as the voice of Tom Ivey, the young contractor who was building the transepts; and he could remain no longer on the stairs. Stealing into the drawing-room, he stumbled across a crackling drift of glass, and, unnoticed now, stood in the wrecked bow-window, with the fresh air upon his face once more.
Lanterns were skipping right and left, their erratic rays giving momentary glimpses of a stalwart figure in pursuit, a stick whirling about his ears, and resounding on the backs and shoulders of the retreating rabble. Some stayed to stone the new foe before they ran; and one, Palmer the publican, set his lantern on the gravel and squared up in style. Robert Carlton never saw what followed; for at this moment his maddened dog, which had been tearing about the house in search of an outlet, bounded past him through the shattered window; and, when the rout was complete, the inn-keeper’s lantern was a solitary star in the nether darkness. Then the gate clattered, a swinging step approached, and Tom Ivey caught up the lantern in his stride.
Carlton sprang through the window to meet him, every other emotion sunk for the moment in one of overflowing gratitude.
“Tom,” he cried, “how can I thank you — —”
“Keep your thanks to yourself.”
&n
bsp; “But — Tom — —”
“Don’t ‘Tom’ me! Keep your distance too. Do you think I haven’t heard about it? Do you think I’d lift a finger for you — let alone a stick? No, sir, I’d liefer take that to your own back; but I fare to mind when the Rector of Long Stow was a good man, who didn’t preach too tall, but acted up to what he did preach; and I won’t see the house he lived in wrecked and ruined because a blackguard’s followed him.”
“I am all that,” said Mr. Carlton. “Go on!”
The other stared, not so much disarmed as confounded.
“I’m sorry to open so wide, and you know I’m sorry,” he at length burst out. “‘Tain’t for me to call you over, sir, and I won’t tell you no more lies. I couldn’t bear to see them snarling curs setting on you the moment you was down, and that’s the truth! But it wasn’t what I come back to say,” continued Ivey doggedly. “I come back to say you can get another party to go on with that there building, for I won’t work no more for you. The plant’s yours; you found that for the job; you can find more men. I throw up the contract: take the law of me if you like.”
Robert Carlton was back in his study. It was the one front room which had escaped inviolate; the open lattice had saved it; not a pebble added to the old disorder. The rector sighed relief as he held up the lamp on entering; then he shot the rubbish out of the big arm-chair, and himself lay back in it like the dead. A bloody smear, where the glass had grazed his cheek, enhanced his pallor; his eyes were closed; no muscle moved. And yet his wits clung to him like wolves, till presently the white brow wrinkled, the heavy eyelids twitched.
“May I come in, reverend?” said the saddler’s voice.
Carlton assented with a sigh, but did not raise himself to greet the visitor, who came in mopping his forehead, reversed the chair at the writing table, and seated himself with ominous deliberation. Then he mopped again, and was slow to speak; but his scornful expression prepared the clergyman for more of that which he was resolved to bear.
“Pharisees!” cried Fuller at last. “Humbugs and hypocrites!”
The words were precisely those which Robert Carlton expected and must endure, but against the plural number he felt bound to protest. “We are not all alike, Mr. Fuller,” he said; “thank God, I am but one out of many thousands.”
“You?” cried the saddler. “Gord love yer, reverend, did you think I meant you? No, sir, it’s the stupid fools and canting cowards I mean, that take and hit a man as soon as ever he’s down; not the man they hit.”
Mr. Carlton sat silent, astounded, and tingling between pain and pleasure. He fancied he had run through the gamut of the emotions, but here was a new one that he feared to dissect.
“Not the man,” proceeded the saddler in raised tones— “not the man who is worth the rest of the parish put together — saint or sinner — guilty or innocent!”
Yes, it was pleasure! It was pleasure, acute and lawless, wicked, ungovernable, and yet to be governed. To have one man’s sympathy, how sweet it was, but how shameful in a guilty heart that would be contrite too! It had brought a colour to his face, a light to his eyes; ere the one had faded, and the other failed, Robert Carlton’s will had frozen that tiny rill of comfort at its fount.
“You mustn’t say that,” was his belated reply; but it came curt and cold enough to please himself.
“But I do say it,” cried old Fuller, “and I will say it, and I won’t say a word more than I mean. Let there be no mistake between us, reverend: I don’t deny I felt what is felt when first I heard; but when I come to think of it, that fared to break my heart more’n to make that boil; and when I thought a bit deeper, I see how easy that is to make bad worse. Not as it ain’t right bad; but that wasn’t for us to make it worse. So it was me fetched Tom Ivey. And now he tells me what he ups and says himself when all was over. ‘Gord love yer, Tom,’ says I, ‘you’ll be ashamed of that when you’re a man of my experience! You forget the good our reverend’s been doing amongst us all this time, and you think only o’ this here evil. I’ll go up,’ says I, ‘and I’ll show him there’s one fair-minded, level-headed man o’ the world in this here hotbed o’ fools and Pharisees.’”
“But Tom was right, and you were wrong.”
“Don’t tell me, reverend,” said the saddler, edging his chair nearer to the long limp figure under the lamp. “You can’t undo the good you’ve once done, not if you try. Leave religion out of it, and look at all you’ve done for the poor: look at the coal club, and the book club, and the dispensary, and the Young Man’s — —”
“Unhappily, Fuller, all this is beside the question.”
And the cold tone was no longer put on; neither did it cover an emotion which called for conscientious suppression; for these officious sallies only fretted the spirit they were intended to soothe.
“Well, then,” rejoined Fuller, “if you prefer it, and for the sake of argument, look at a poor old feller like me. What should I ha’ done without you, reverend? I don’t come to church, yet you take no offence when I tell you why, but you argue the point like a rare ‘un, and you lend me the paper just the same. The Reverend Jackson wouldn’t ha’ done it, though I durs’n’t stay away in his day; he’d have stopped my livelihood in a week. So don’t you fare to make yourself out worse than you are, reverend; you’ve done wrong, I allow, but so did Solomon, and so did David; and weren’t so quick to own up to it, either! Like them, you’ve done good, too, and plenty of it, and that sha’n’t be forgotten if I can help it. As for the poor young thing that’s gone — —”
“Don’t name her, I beg!”
“Very well, sir, I won’t. I’m as sorry as the rest o’ the parish; but we shouldn’t be unfair because we’re sorry. They may say what they like, but a man of my experience knows that nine times out of ten the woman’s more to blame — —”
“Out of my house!”
Carlton had leapt to his feet, was standing at his full height for the first time that night, and pointing sternly to the door. His face was white with passion. The saddler’s jaw dropped.
“What, sir?” he gasped.
“Out of my sight — this instant!”
“For sayun — —”
“For daring to say one half of what you have said! It’s my own fault. I’ve spoilt you; but out you go.”
Fuller rose slowly, amazed, bewildered, and mortified to the quick. He was a kind-hearted man, but he had all the superior peasant’s obstinacy and self-conceit: the one had helped to bring him to the clergyman’s side, the other to wag his tongue. Yet his sympathy was genuine enough; and the theory, of which the bare hint had spilled vials of wrath upon his head, was in fact his profound conviction. Smarting vanity, however, was the absorbing sensation of the moment. And for the next hour the saddler could have returned every few minutes with some fresh retort; but in the moment of humiliation he could not rise above a grumble:
“I might as well have thrown stones with the rest!”
“Better,” the clergyman cried after him. “You had a right to punish me; to pity and excuse me you had none. Least of all — —”
He broke off, and stood at his door till the quick steps stopped, and the gate clattered, and the steps died away. The night was dark, and this end of the village already very still: the Plough and Harrow was nearer the other. The wind had not fallen; a murmur of very distant thunder came with it from the west. Nearer home a peewit called, and Robert Carlton caught himself wondering whether there would be rain before morning.
V
THE MAN ALONE
At midnight he was still alone, and the slow torture of his own thoughts was still a relief. As the dining-room clock struck — he noted its preservation — and the thin strokes floated through those broken windows and in at that of the study, he gave up listening for the next step. His privacy seemed secure at last. He could abandon his spirit to its proper torments; he could enter upon another night in hell. Yet, even now, the worst was over, and there would be no more nights of secr
et grief, secret remorse, secret shame. He had confessed his sin, and thereby earned his right to suffer. No more to hide! No more deceit! He could not realize it yet; he only knew that his heart was lighter already. He felt ashamed of the relief.
Yet another night came back to him as he paced his floor: a last year’s night when the full moon shone through ragged trees. It also had been worse than this: it was the inner life that lay in ruins then. He remembered pacing till sunrise as he was pacing now: such a still night but for that; one had but to stand and listen to hear the very fall of the leaf. He remembered thus standing, there at the door, in the moonlight, and a line that had buzzed in his head as he listened.
“And yet God has not said a word!”
God had spoken now!
And the man was glad.
Glad! He almost revelled in his disgrace; it produced in him unexpected sensations — the sensations of the debtor who begins to pay. Here was an extreme instance of the things that are worse to dream of than to endure. He felt less ignominious in the hour of his public ignominy than in all these months of secret shame. He was living a single life once more. The wind roamed at will through the damaged house as through the ribs of a wreck; and its ruined master drew himself up, and his stride quickened with his blood. He was no longer lording it in his pulpit, the popular preacher of the countryside, drawing the devout from half a dozen parishes, a revelation to the rustic mind, a conscious libertine all the while, with a tongue of gold and a heart of lead. More than all, he was no longer the one to sit secure, in loathsome immunity, in sickening esteem: he, the man! The woman had suffered; it was his turn now. Woman? The poor child . . . the poor, dead, murdered child . . . Well! the wages of his sin would be worse than death; they were worse already. And again the man was glad; but his momentary and strange exultation had ended in an agony.
The poor, poor girl . . .
No; nothing was too bad for him — not even the one thing that he would feel more than all the rest in bulk. He put his mind on that one thing. He dwelt upon it, wilfully, not in conscious self-pity, but as one eager to meet his punishment half-way, to shirk none of it. The attitude was characteristic. The sacrificial spirit informed the man. In another age and another Church he had done barbaric violence to his own flesh in the name of mortification. Living in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a mere Anglican, he was content to play tricks with a fine constitution in Lent.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 183