Part 14

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.

His steps took the old direction of their own accord. In a minute he was there, at the church, and seated on the very wall which he had been building a fortnight before, surveying his work.

Had some one been carrying it on in his absence? Or was it only that one noticed no difference from day to day, but all the difference in the world after an unaccustomed absence? Yes, this was it; and he drew the deep breath which his first idea had checked.

Still it was wonderful: one wall seemed so much higher, another so much cleaner than before; and yet there was no stone either laid or scraped which Carlton did not recognize at a glance, with sudden memories of special travail; and the string was still where he had stretched it to keep the line. He had under-estimated his progress at the time; that was all; but again it was as though the sap was rising in his heart.

The very tangle of blackened timber, which still cumbered nine-tenths of the inner area, no longer struck Carlton as the unconquerable chaos it had appeared on that bitter day which seemed so many days ago; yet, when he laid white hands upon such a beam as he had easily shouldered then, he could not lift it an inch. Ah, that day! It would take him weeks to undo its evil work. The wet feet and the cutting wind, he could feel them both again, with the sweat freezing on his body, and every pore an open door to death. There was the ridge of red-stemmed firs, too far east to blunt the cold steel of that deadly wind; and here beneath him the barrier he had been building last, and must finish now before he did another thing. How firm and true was this top course, that he had laid that day with the bony fingers at his throat! Well, he would have died with a good day's work behind him . . . It must have been a very near thing . . . he wondered how near when the sexton came, and why the sexton had come at all. The man had never given a good reason. He had only just fared to think there might be something wrong.

On the way indoors, the invalid stopped at a tree. It was one of the horse-chestnuts; and already every delicate extremity was swollen and sticky to the touch; and the birds sang of summer in the branches. Carlton passed on with the short, quick steps of a feeble person in a hurry. Rivers were running in his heart; he wanted to be where he could kneel.

XX

THE WAY OF PEACE

Three years later the man was still alone, and the church still growing under his unaided but untiring hand. Indeed, from one end, it looked almost ready for the roof, the west gable rising salient through the trees, with the original window intact underneath. But this window was the exception, the sole survivor from the fire, and for the past year the rest had been one long impediment. Even now, only the three single lights, in either transept and to the right of the porch respectively, had been wrought to a finish from sill to arch; a mullioned window was just begun; the remainder all yawned to the sky in ragged gaps of varying width. But the village looked daily on the one good end, flanked by the west walls of either transept, which happened not to have a window between them, and were consequently finished. And the village was softening a little towards its outcast, though no man said so above his breath; nor was a living soul known to have been near him all these years, unless it was the new sexton to dig a grave, or a Lakenhall curate to make an entry in the parish register.

There had, however, been one or two others; the first knocking at the study door on the evening of the first funeral, some months after Carlton's illness.

Carlton was reading at the time. His heart stopped at the sound. It was repeated before he could bring himself to open the door.

"Tom Ivey!"

"That's me, sir; may I come in?"

"Surely, Tom."

The hulking mason entered awkwardly, and refused a chair. His large frame bulked abnormally in a ready-made suit of stiff black cloth. He seemed to take up half the room, as he stood and glowered, a full-length figure of surly embarrassment and dark resolve.

"There was a funeral to-day," he began at last.

"I know."

"That was my poor mother, Mr. Carlton."

"Yes, I heard. Tom, I'm so sorry for you!"

Their hands flew together, and were one till Carlton winced.

"There's nothun to be sorry for," said Tom, with husky philosophy. "Her troubles are over, poor thing. So's one o' mine! You can start me to-morrow."

"Start you, Tom?"

"Yes, sir, I mean to work for you now. I'd like to see the man who'll stop me! You've shown 'em all the man you are; now that's _my_ turn."

And the broad face beamed and darkened with alternate enthusiasm and defiance. Carlton beheld it with parted lips and startled eye; and so they stood through a long silence, till Carlton sat down with a smile. It was a singularly gentle smile, as he leant back in his worn old chair, and the lamplight fell upon his face.

"After all these months," he murmured; "after all these months!"

"I fare to hide my face when I count 'em up," admitted Ivey, bitterly. "But what was the good of comun when I couldn't come for good? And how could I in poor mother's time? It'd have meant--there's no sayun what that wouldn't have meant."

"You mean as regards Sir Wilton?"

"I do, Mr. Carlton."

"He will have been a good friend to you?"

"Oh, yes."

"Did those repairs, did he?"

"Yes," sighed Ivey, "he was better than his word about them; you would hardly know the place now. It made a lot of difference to mother. And I had the job."

"Oh!"

"He's kept me busy, I must say. I've never wanted work."

"Until now, I suppose?"

"To tell you the truth, sir, I'm at work for him still."

"For Sir Wilton Gleed?"

"Yes--odd jobs about the estate."

"Then my good fellow, what do you mean by offering yourself to me?"

"Mean?" exclaimed Ivey, his black determination leaping into flame. "I mean as I've made up my mind to give him the go-by for you. I'd have done that long ago if it hadn't been for mother; but better late than never. You've shown 'em the man you are, and now that's my turn. Look at what you've done with your own two hands--there'll be other two from to-morrow! You shan't work yourself right to death before my eyes. Why, your hair's white with it already!"

Carlton wheeled further from the lamp.

"Not white," he murmured.

"But that is, sir. When did you look in a glass?"

"I don't know."

"Then do you look to-morrow. That's white as snow. And your beard's grey."

"It's certainly too long," said Carlton, covering half with his hand.

"And your hand--your hand!"

It was scarred and horny as the mason's own. Carlton removed it from the light, but said nothing.

"That's done its last day's work alone," cried Tom. "I start with you to-morrow, whether you want me or not. I'll show 'em! I'll show 'em!"

And he stood nodding savagely to himself.

"My dear fellow, you can't behave like that."

The words fell softly after a long silence.

"Why can't I?"

Carlton gave innumerable reasons.

"It would put us both in the wrong," was the last. "Go on working for Sir Wilton--at any rate for another year. You owe it to him, Tom. And don't you fret about me; I am a happier man than I ever deserved to be again. Last winter it was different; but God has shown me infinite mercy and compassion. And now He has sent you to me, as a sign that even man may forgive me in the end! That is enough for me, Tom. You cannot do more for me than you have done to-night. But your duty you must do, by God's help, as long as it is as clear as it is now. Don't bother your head about me! I am getting into the knack. Perhaps by the time I come to the roof--if I ever do--the want of a church may induce others to help me finish mine. Then, if you like, you shall come back; but I won't have you made an outcast on my account; one is enough."

There were no more visits from Tom Ivey. This one came to the ears of Sir Wilton; and that diplomatist instead of playing into the enemy's hands by discharging his man, capped all his kindness to the mason by getting him the offer of an irresistible berth in that London district for which he himself sat. Thus Sir Wilton removed a wavering ally, and at the same time renewed the lease of his allegiance.

Carlton heard of it some months later, when there was another funeral, and the Lakenhall curate came in again to make the entry. This curate was a gentleman. He had a good heart and better tact. He not only conversed with Carlton as with the perfectly normal clergyman, in perfectly normal circumstances, but he would prolong these conversations as far as he deemed possible without exciting a suspicion of the profound pity which inspired him. He would bring bits of local gossip, or the latest national event; once he let fall that Sidney Gleed was up at Cambridge, and said to stand a chance of "coxing the eight," while Lydia was now a Mrs. Goldstein, the mistress of a splendid mansion in Holland Park, and another up the Thames. It was from the same source that Carlton obtained belated news of George Mellis, who had come through two campaigns without a scratch, yet never been back to play the hero on his native heath. In a word this curate, who was a very young and rather commonplace fellow, came soon to stand for the outside world, the world of newspapers and talk, to Robert Carlton, who liked him none the less because his older eye saw through the artless arts with which the lad sought to mask his charity.

The visitations of this curate, who also conducted the one weekly service in the village school, was a little arrangement between those fast friends, Sir Wilton Gleed and Canon Wilders, who would have been interested to learn the way in which their delegate improved the rare occasion of a funeral. For marriages and baptisms the Long Stow folk had taken to walking across the heath to Linkworth.

Early in the second year there came a visitor whom Robert Carlton knew at a glance, though he had never before seen him in the flesh. This was a person with the appearance of a rather dissipated sporting man, who tooled tandem through the village, and pulled up at the ruins in broad daylight. The thing was thus a scandal from the first moment of its occurrence, and the cockaded groom was beset by horrified rustics before his master's red neck had disappeared among the low and ragged walls.

Carlton had withdrawn into the invisible seclusion of the west end, where he was nervously scraping at the nearest stone when the visitor appeared, only to stop short with a whistle.

"I thought this was the church the parson was building with his own hands?"

"So it is, my lord."

"And you are what he calls his own hands!"

"No, I am he."

The visitor stared.

"You the parson?"