The bishop arrived on the Saturday afternoon. He was still the same little old man, with the side-whiskers and the long mouth, the queer voice and the ungainly limp; and Robert Carlton found him neither more nor less cordial than at their last dread interview; but he asked to see the church before it was too dark.

All was in readiness at last. But the cocoanut matting in the aisle and transepts, and the maroon axminster in the chancel, had only been laid that day. As yet there was no stained glass, and only the east window and the west were mullioned as of old; but through the latter a wintry sun poured thick red beams, already too much aslant to touch the floor, but just falling upon the altar with its glimmering candlesticks, its rich green cover, its violet frontal, all three gifts from the hall. The bishop heard this without remark, his mouth a mere seam. But he approved of the rows of rush-seated chairs in place of pews, and he admired the simple pulpit of pitch pine. There was a pleasant smell of pitch pine in the church. All the woodwork was of this wood, including the ceiling and all panelling; and the pores of the fragrant timber were not stopped up with varnish. The new red hassocks looked very bright under each chair, and the new black prayer-books shone like polished jet on the book-rests behind them. In the south transept, a space was boarded off for the new organ; and here chaos had still a corner to itself; nor was either the lighting or the heating apparatus quite complete. Oil-stoves were already burning, however, at various points, and their odour compared unfavourably with that of the pitch pine.

"I do not want you to catch cold to-morrow," said Carlton, as he locked the door behind them when they left.

"Tut!" said the bishop, "I am not such an old man that you need coddle me."

Nor did he look a day older for all these years, as they went out together into the raw red sunset. But Robert Carlton seemed almost to have caught him up: he had come back from London so haggard and hollow-eyed.

They talked very little until the evening. Carlton had servants now, that very widow who had been the first to desert him being head and chief once more; and she signalised the occasion by serving one of the soundest meals of her career. But it was in the long low study, now a study pure and simple, and an infinitely tidier one than aforetime, that the bishop smoked his after-dinner pipe like any deacon, while Carlton also tasted his first tobacco for five years and a half. And still they were strangely silent, until the occurrence of an incident, little in itself, but great with suggestion.

There was a tiny patter on the worn carpet, and all at once the bishop beheld a big brown mouse seated upright within a few inches of his companion's boot. The bishop exclaimed, and the mouse fled with a scuttle and a squeak.

"I tamed him," Carlton explained with a slight access of colour. "The house is overrun with them, but this fellow lets none of the others in here."

The bishop was slow to follow up his exclamation. He certainly was a man of fewer words than formerly.

"You ought not to have made yourself such an anchorite," he said at last. "You might have smoked your pipe – you say that's your first – and written to me sooner!"

So that still rankled. Carlton was not altogether surprised.

"My lord," said he, "how could I? You had advised me to live anywhere else, and yet here I was!"

"The circumstances justified you, Mr. Carlton. I could not foresee such circumstances, I assure you. I heard of them, however, at the time."

Carlton had never written till the five years were nearly up, when it became a necessary preliminary to the resumption of those offices from which he had been debarred; but, when he did write, he had done so to such effect that certain other preliminaries had been foregone.

"Though you did not write," continued the bishop, "Sir Wilton Gleed did. We had some correspondence about you, and we disagreed; that is one reason why I declined his invitation and accepted yours. I would not mention it, only you are now such excellent friends. And I understand that he himself makes no secret of his former attitude towards you."

"On the contrary, he has expressed the most generous regret for the line he took."

"He may well regret it," said the bishop.

But Carlton had accepted his old enemy's aid, and would not hear ill of him, whatever he might think. "It was natural enough," he murmured.

"What! To prevent you from making the one reparation in your power? To have you boycotted right and left? To trump up a criminal charge? To force you, a clergyman, to remain in your own parish, labouring like a convict by the year together? To trample the cloth underfoot in the eyes of all the world?"

"Oh," groaned Carlton, "it was I who did that! I alone am to blame for that – I alone!"

He leant his elbows on the chimney-piece, his face in his hands; for stand he must if he was only to hear harsh words – that night of all nights! Carlton was unprepared for such severity at this stage; and infinitely hurt; for at his worst, when he deserved no sympathy at all, the bishop had shown much more. But behind his back the blazing eyes were quenched, and the long mouth relaxed.

"No, no," a softer voice said; "you have done just the opposite – just the opposite. You have been hard enough upon yourself; but the world was harder on you – once."

There was kindness in the rasping voice, but no enthusiasm. None other had made so little of the mere physical feat of this man; and to him the tone was unmistakable.

"I know what you mean," said Carlton, turning round, his own eye alight. "You think the world is going to the other extreme!"

"It generally does," replied the bishop. "I do not mean to be unkind."

"You are not, my lord – unless you think I haven't seen this for myself!"

The bishop nodded gravely to himself.

"You would see the danger. I am sure of that. You must want to hear the last of what you have done; superhuman and heroic in itself – I am the first to admit it – it is nevertheless the last chapter of a book which you must want to close once and for all. The last chapter recalls the first. Close the book; put it behind you; start afresh."

Robert Carlton stood looking down with a curious smile upon his haggard face.

"That is exactly what I am going to do," said he.

"But the parish must do the same; they must help you. Let them also think no more of the past, either remote or immediate."

"They must think of what they will," rejoined Carlton, queerly. "They cannot help me much longer, nor I them. I am resigning the living, my lord."

"Resigning it?" cried the bishop.

"I intend to do so to-morrow night. It always has been my intention. But you are the first whom I have told."

"I'm glad to hear that!" the bishop exclaimed, as he scrambled to his feet another being. "You have taken my breath away! My dear fellow, let me dissuade you from any such course."

Carlton shook his head.

"My work here is done."

"It is just beginning!"

"No, it is done. I have given my parishioners the church I owed them, since they lost their last church through me. I set them once an example for which I shall pray to be forgiven till my life's end; but now, please God, I have at least shown them that because a man falls it need not be utterly and for ever. He can rise; or, at any rate, he can try. God knows I have tried; and they know it; and it may help them in their own day of bitter trouble. But it was you, my lord, who first helped me, by bidding me never despair. I have tried to teach your lesson; that is all."

"But you have not finished," the bishop urged, gently. "Go on teaching it – go on."

"No. It is no sudden thought. I undertook in the beginning, when Sir Wilton Gleed wanted to turn me out forcibly, to go of my own accord when I had built the church. He may forget it, but I do not."

"Then I devoutly hope he will not accept your resignation!"

"He must. I have made my arrangements. There is need of clergy in the far corners of our empire, greater need than here. There was an Australian at the hotel I have been staying at in London, and he has shown me my field. I am going out to offer my services to the Bishop of Riverina, and I am relying upon a word from you for their acceptance. I hope to sail at the beginning of next month; my passage is already taken."

"I suppose you took it when you were in town?" the bishop grumbled. Carlton coloured in an instant.

"I did – but I had long been thinking of it," he said, hastily. "Oh, my lord, in my place you would do the same! How could I continue here to be smiled on by these poor people? It was easier when they looked the other way, when I lived in this room alone, doing everything for myself, and not a soul came near me. How can I settle down again to a prosperous life – here of all places – with my child in the parish, and his poor mother.. That is what they all forget in the generous warmth of their reaction; but the more they forget, the more keenly I remember. Ah! do you think I ever have forgotten – for an hour – for a moment – since I left off working with my hands?"

One of these was stretched in the direction of the churchyard; and the bishop read its touching testimony for the first time.

"There," whispered Carlton, in strange excitement, "there lies one.. whose ruin and whose death are at my door. I don't forget – I never have forgotten. I have paid, and I will pay till the end. And there shall be no other woman."

His tongue failed him; his face was grief-stricken; the whole man was changed. So then the human being, his bishop, knew that there was another woman in his heart already; recalled the most terrible part of this man's confession to him, years before; and presently plucked him by the sleeve. And the voice that Robert Carlton heard, as he leaned once more with his elbow on the chimney-piece, and his face between his hands, was the voice of their last interview, at the bishop's palace, in the blank forenoon of a wet summer's day.

"Forgive me," it said, "for I also have misjudged you in my turn. But now I see – but now I see, and am ashamed.. Your life has been hard, my brother, but it has been brave! You have been through the depths, but you have also touched the heights, and I think that God must be very near you to-night. I see now that you are right to go; you are both nobler and wiser than I thought; may happiness, and peace, and love itself go with you first or last. Let us kneel together before I leave you, and humbly pray that it may still be so!"

When the bishop retired, Robert Carlton returned to his study, and prayed by himself until a knock at the outer door brought him to his feet, much startled; for it was eleven at night.

He was still more startled when he reached the door, for there stood a soldier straight and tall, sunburnt and jaunty; a medal with clasps and the Egyptian star upon his scarlet breast; a smile behind the trim moustache; right hand at the salute. It was only after a prolonged stare that Carlton recognised the smart young man.

"George Mellis?" he cried. "Come in – come in!"

"That's me, sir," said George, entering like a machine. "But – can it be you, Mr. Carlton?"

And his smile vanished as the lamplight fell upon the grey hairs and the deep furrows which made the clergyman look nearly twice his years.

"Yes, George. I have aged a little. But so have you."

"Oh, I'm all right," said the young soldier with his fine eyes on the other's face; "but I want to kill somebody, that's all!"

"I should have thought you'd done enough of that at the wars," rejoined Carlton, smiling. "Come, George, it's you I want to hear about. Of course I have heard of you. So you enlisted in the Grenadiers, and you got straight to Tel-el-Kebir; and that's the clasp, and not the only one! And now you're a colour-sergeant, and certain of your stripes, they tell me; you're a great hero in the village, George; and yet I have heard them complain that you never even came back to show yourself after the war."

"I haven't come back to show myself now, Mr. Carlton."

And the young fellow looked rather grim above his brass and scarlet.

"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings."

"Nor have you, sir. But can't you guess why I've come back for the first time to-night?"

Carlton considered, and suddenly his hollow eyes lit up; but those of the grenadier had lighted first.

"Was it – was it really to – to be here to-morrow, George?"

"That was it, sir – and nothing else! I'd heard how you were building it up with your own – "

"Never mind that, George."

"I heard it from Tom Ivey, who found me out in barracks not long since, and gave me all the Long Stow news. That's how I came to hear of the consecration to-morrow. He said he was coming down for it, and I said I would too if I could get leave; and I did; and we've come down together to-night."

Neither of them had dreamt of intruding at that hour; but Mellis had seen the old light in the old window, and felt he must just come up to shake hands. Yes, he would come in gladly after church to-morrow. No, he had seen no one else to speak to as yet, except Mrs. Musk; and the grenadier stood confused.

"Where did you see her?"

"Driving away from the Flint House."

"That old woman at this time of night?"

"Musk is bad, and she was going for the doctor herself. I offered to go instead, but she had the girl with her, and there was no stopping them."

"Bad!" echoed Carlton. "He has been bad for weeks; he may be dying – and all alone!" He dashed from the room, but was back next moment in his wideawake. "I must go to him, George! He will hate it, but I must go. Open the door, and I'll put out the light; if he's dying I shall stay."

It was a clear keen night with a worn moon curling in the west; and the hard road rang like a drum as red-coat and black ran elbow to elbow down the village, jerking a word here and there as they went.

"Been bad long, sir?"

"Sciatica for years; only just taken to his bed."

"Sciatica shouldn't kill."

"This must be something else. The man is old – and the one enemy I have left!"

They ran on. Before the Flint House came first its meadow and then its garden wall, with the gate left open, and a rude drive twisting through trees to the side of the house. "This way," said Carlton; and in half a minute they were at the side door. This also had been left open. Carlton lowered his voice, his hand upon the latch.

"You wait here, like a good fellow. If he will not let me say one word – if he orders me out – then you must come up instead. If he is so ill that his wife goes herself at midnight for the doctor, then he is too ill to be left with no one in the house but a child of five!"

Carlton's concern was not a little for the child. Suppose he had awakened to call and call in vain – perhaps to run for succour to a corpse! The thought made Carlton shudder as he found his way through passages with which he had been permitted to become familiar after Georgie's accident. At the head of the stairs there was Georgie's room; the father had to pass it; and could not, without peeping in.

For this door was ajar, and a night-light burning on the chest of drawers. Georgie was breathing gently in his cot. Carlton approached on tip-toe, and stood gazing downward with clasped hands. Boisterous and robust upon his feet, the boy looked still a baby in his sleep; his face was so round and innocent; his hands seemed such toys; and the light hair, too seldom cut, was lightest at the roots, and still curly at the ends, as it lay upon the pillow where his last movement had tossed it. It was a sweet face, even with the great eyes closed; the eyelashes looked so much longer and darker against the pure skin; they were many shades darker than the hair; and the eyebrows were assuming a very delicate definition of their own. The mouth was beautiful. That brown little hand was perfectly shaped. Carlton bent over, and kissed the warm smooth cheek with infinite tenderness; then went upon his knees, and prayed over the child, and for him, and for his future, out of the fulness of a brimming heart. He forgot that Musk's death would make a difference to the child and to himself; for the moment he forgot that Musk was in any danger of dying, and that this was his house. He and his child were alone together once more, it might be for the last time, one never knew.

"God keep you, my own poor boy, and lead you not into temptation, but deliver you from evil, for ever and ever, Amen."

He stooped once more over the cot, pushed the long hair back, running his fingers through it gently, and kissed the pure forehead again and again. And it seemed to Robert Carlton – but the night-light was very dim – that at the last his son had smiled upon him in his sleep.

XXXII
THE SECOND TIME

In Musk's room there was more light. It lay under the closed door like a yellow rod. Carlton knocked gently. There was no answer. He knocked louder. Not a sound from within. Then the chill fell on him, and he entered ready for any discovery but the one he was to make.

Neither the quick nor the dead lay within.

A fire was burning as well as the lamp; the very bed looked warm, but was not; the sick man must have left it some minutes at least.

The lame man, the man who could not walk, had left his bed if not the house! Carlton caught up the lamp to go in search. And even on the landing a voice came hailing him from the region below.

"Mr. Carlton! Mr. Carlton! Quick, sir, quick!"

George Mellis was still at the side door, and in the lamplight the other could not see an inch beyond.

"Have you found him, George? He's not in bed!"

"Who – Musk? No, sir, no!"

"Then what have you seen?"

The grenadier had a wet skin, a quivering lip, a starting eye.

"Oh, I can't tell you, sir! I may be wrong. God grant it! But give me the lamp, and go outside and look for yourself!"

In sheer perplexity Carlton complied; and for an instant imagined some outrageous freak of nature; for the trees of the Flint House drive, black as night a few minutes before, now stood etched against the reddest dawn that he had ever seen – at midnight in December! Then a flame shot upwards, and another, and another; and Mellis was left standing, lamp in hand, a brilliant patch of light and colour, yet less brilliant every instant in the face of that unearthly glare in the east. Swift feet were pattering down the drive; and had such a start, before the soldier found his senses, that it was only in the churchyard he caught them up.

Long Stow church was on fire for the second time, and burning faster than it had burnt between five and six years before. The crackle of the pitch pine was loud as musketry already. The roof was already burning; its destruction had been the climax of the former fire.

Robert Carlton stood with folded arms heaving on his chest. The bishop was there already, in his overcoat and rug, with the whiter and the sterner face. The servants had called him: they also were there, in pitiful case, but no more had arrived as yet.

"It is no use their coming. The roof's on fire in three or four different places. He has done his work better this time; more oil for him, with those stoves!"

The voice was Carlton's, because his lips moved, and those of the bishop were compressed out of sight. Otherwise Mellis, for one, would never have recognised so sad a discord of heartbreak and devil-may-care.

"Some things might be saved," said the bishop.

"They might and shall! George, run to my study for the key; it's on a nail beside the fireplace. And to think I locked up myself lest something might happen at the last!" cried Carlton, with a single note of high hollow laughter, as the soldier vanished. "But I never thought of you! No, you have cheated me very cleverly this time. You almost deserve your triumph – over me!"

"Do you mean to say you know who has done it?" cried the bishop.

"Yes – the man who did it before."

"But was that ever known?"

"No; but I knew. I found his hat in the church."

"And you never told?"

"Nor shall I now. But I do wonder where he got in! And he was well enough to climb a ladder – my dying man!"

Carlton said no more; he was sorry he had said so much. Yet this time it was sure to come out. There was the empty bed. Mellis would speak of it, though he had not seen it with his own eyes. Was the malingerer back in it already? What hellish artifice! And the house emptied for the nonce! The man's own wife would never have suspected him.

Carlton was quite calm. There was nothing to be done. The roof was flaring at either end and in the middle. Only a fire-engine could have put it out, and there was still none nearer than Lakenhall. The mind will often puzzle over an immaterial question in the face of facts too terrible to be realised at once: the known is blinding, but the unknown is the dark, and it is a relief to grope there even for that which is useless when discovered. So Robert Carlton was still wondering how the incendiary had got in, and out, and exactly what he had done inside, when Mellis came running with the key. In a few moments they were in the church.

Nothing could have been less like the corresponding impression of the former fire. Then the pews had been discovered burning; but now rush-seated chairs and pitch pine stalls stood equally intact; and a first glance did not reveal the source of the dull red light which filled the church. On the other hand, a badly-broken window in the north transept satisfied Carlton's curiosity on the immaterial point; and supplied another, pregnant with irony; for it was the window whose arch he had been building when Georgie first swam into his ken.

But now Mellis was looking straight above him, and calling to Mr. Carlton to do the same. In three places the ceiling was on fire, and burning planks beginning to drop; in another a spreading patch of brown burnt through even as they watched. Almost simultaneously came a shriek from the women and a roar from the men now gathering outside; it was Tom Ivey who came rushing in.

"There's some one overhead! He's smashing the skylight over the north transept! That's the man that done it – that's the man that done it – fairly caught!"

The saddler came on Tom's heels.

"Gord love us all, that's Jasper Musk!"

Carlton darted into the south transept without waste of words, and in an instant had disappeared in the part that was boarded off until the new organ should be established in its place there; meanwhile the very ceiling had not been carried to the end of the transept, and a ladder led to the natural loft that it formed. Up this ladder the incendiary must have climbed, and up this ladder the rector was running when Mellis and Ivey, with the rest at their heels, reached its foot.

"Come down, sir, come down, for God's sake!"

"I am not coming down alone."

"Then I'll fetch you," roared Ivey; "you are not going to risk your life for him!"

But the red-coat was first upon the ladder, and in a few seconds both young men were in the triangular tunnel between the ceiling and the roof; a space so confined that under the apex alone was it possible to walk upright; and that only for the few feet dividing them from the nearest flames.

"Look out!" cried Tom Ivey from the top rung. "It wasn't made for a floor; get on your hands and knees, and the weight won't be all in one place." So they crept into the centre of the cross; and there they knelt upright to see over a fringe of fire that burnt their eyelids bare as they gazed.

Roof and ceiling of chancel and of nave, both were in roaring flames to right and to left of them; through the flaming barrier in their faces, and the hole already burnt, they could see the pulpit and the chairs in the north transept thirty feet below; and across the gulf, Jasper Musk and Robert Carlton face to face. Carlton had made the leap; they could not; already the flames were driving them back and back.

In the steady roar and crackle they could hear no words. Musk was crouching under a skylight all too narrow for his gigantic shoulders, a tell-tale oil-tin overturned at his feet. His face was livid, but fearless, and his light eyes gleamed with hate. Carlton's back was turned to the watchers, and for a second motionless; then he looked round, saw them through smoke and flame, and clapped a hand to his mouth.

"Down, both of you," he shouted, "and round with the ladder to the outside here, and one of you fetch up an axe. The skylight's too small – we must make it bigger!"

Musk's lips moved, and his eyes flashed their own fire; the others could almost see the words.

"Well?" said Mellis.

"Come on; it's our only chance."

In an instant they were down the ladder, and had it horizontal in a minute. Then Ivey began to fume.

"It'll take some time getting through the porch!"

"Shove it through the broken window."

"Good man! Stand by, out there, to haul out this ladder!"

The red-coat ran round, his medal twinkling in the glare, while Ivey rushed for the axe.

"Up with her, comrades! That's it – altogether —now!"

The ladder was up outside. Ivey, axe in hand, had leapt upon the fourth rung at a bound, and was taking the rest two at a time. Below it was light as day; the naked trees stood brown and brittle in the glare; the upturned faces white as the curled moon. A whiter face peered through the skylight.

"Look alive with that axe, Tom; he can't breathe, and he's being roasted!"

"He deserve ut! Do you come through first, sir. There's room for you as 'tis. He can bide his turn."

The white face flushed indignant dominion.

"Unless you obey me, you are my murderer too!"

A stifled curse came from under the tiles.

"There, then! Would you save him after that? Leave him the axe and through you come, you that can, or else I'll pull you through!"

And his great arm thickened as he thrust it out, and grabbed at the straight white collar, before relinquishing the axe from his other hand; but at that moment there was a crackling groan, and a sudden unbearable weight on Ivey's hand and arm, as the frail inner roof gave way; then a blinding flame in his face, a crash below, and a cry of anguish from a hundred hearts rent as one.

The axe tumbled as Tom Ivey flung both arms round the ladder, and so descended like a drunken man, a crumpled collar still warm and tight between the clenched fingers of his right hand.