Georgie was a short head taller, and no pinafore concealed the glories of his sailor suit; but it was still the same baby face, round as the eyes that greeted all comers with the same friendly gaze. His sentences were longer and more ambitiously constructed; but he still said "somekin" and "I wish I would," and, when excited, "my Jove!" And his lady once more danced attendance by the hour and day together; for Sir Wilton and Lady Gleed were paying visits until September; and Sidney was still understood to be making up for lost time at Cambridge.

Gwynneth had enjoyed the child's society the year before; now she seemed dependent upon it. She would have him with her daily on one pretext or another, sometimes upon none at all. She said she liked to hear him talk, and that was well, for Georgie's tongue only rested in his sleep. But now there was often an intrinsic interest in his conversation. He gave Gwynneth many an item of village news which was real news to her. Thus it was from his own lips that she first heard of his accident, on seeing the scar through his hair.

"Course I was in bed," swaggered Georgie; "I was in bed for years an' years an' years – in bed and sensible."

"Oh, Georgie, do you mean insensible?"

"No, sensible, I tell you."

"Did you know what was going on?"

"Course I di'n't, not a bit. How could I fen I was sensible?"

"My poor darling, it might have killed you! How ever did you do it?"

But, as so often happens in such cases, that was what Georgie had never been able to remember. So Gwynneth turned to Jasper Musk, who sat within earshot; it was in the Flint House garden, on the very afternoon of her return.

"That was my fault," said Jasper, gruffly enough, yet with such a glance at Georgie that Gwynneth was sorry she had broached the subject, and changed it at once.

But she reverted to it as soon as she had Georgie to herself. Who had looked after him when he was ill? She was feeling very jealous of somebody.

"Granny did."

"No one else?"

"An' grand-daddy."

"Was that all, Georgie?"

Gwynneth was very sorry she had ever gone abroad.

"Course it wasn't all," said Georgie, remembering. "There was the funny old man from the church."

"Mr. Carlton?"

"Yes."

"So he came to see you?"

"Yes, he often. I love him," Georgie announced with emphasis; "he makes lovely, lovely, lovely faces!"

"And does he ever come now?"

"No, not now, course he doesn't; he's too busy buildin' his church."

"So he's building still!"

"Yes, 'cos he builds wery nicely," Georgie was pleased to say; "better'n me, he builds, far better'n me."

"And is he still alone?"

"All alone," said Georgie; "all alonypony by his own little self!"

And the inconsequent nonsense sent him off into untimely laughter, louder and more uproarious than ever, quite a virile guffaw. But Gwynneth could not even smile. And now when neither listening to Georgie nor haunted by her engagement, Gwynneth began to think of the lonely outcast behind those trees, as she had begun indeed to think of him the spring before last, while her mind and life were yet unfilled by the motley interests which this last year had brought into both.

The thought afflicted her with a sense of personal hardness and cruelty; there was this lonely man, doing the work of ten, not spasmodically, but day after day, and year after year, still unaided and unforgiven by the very people in whose midst and for whose benefit those prodigies of labour were being performed. Gwynneth knew now that there had been some mysterious wickedness before the burning of the church. It was all she cared to know. What crime could warrant such hardness of heart in the face of such devotion, skill, patience, consummate endurance, and invincible determination? These were heroic qualities, no matter what vileness lay beneath or behind them; and the generous capacity for hero-worship was very strong in Gwynneth. She would have honoured this man for his splendid pertinacity, and have wiped all else from the slate. That his own parishioners continued to dishonour him, and that she perforce had to do as they did, made her indignant with them and dissatisfied with herself. So far as Gwynneth was honestly aware, this feeling was a purely impersonal one. It would have been excited by any other being who had achieved the like and been thus rewarded. It is noteworthy, however, that Gwynneth found it necessary to explain the position to herself.

It was strange, too, how her life had impinged upon his, strange because the points of contact had in each case left a disproportionate impression upon her mind. She often thought of them. There was once in the very beginning, when she had actually stopped him in the village to ask the name of the poem from which he had quoted on Sunday. Gwynneth had never told a soul about this, she was so ashamed of her unmaidenly impulse; but she still remembered the look of pleasure that had flashed through his pain, and the kind sad voice which both answered her question and thanked her for asking it. That must have been only a day or two before the fire; the same summer there was the silent scene between them in the drawing-room, when she longed to shake hands with him, to show him her sympathy, but did not dare. Then came the finding of Georgie in the stonemason's shed, only the spring before last; but Gwynneth found that she had been gauche as usual even then, that she had never risen to any of these occasions, but that her one small attempt to express her sympathy had been nothing less than a piece of tactless presumption on her part. And yet she felt so much!

Well, it was something that Musk had opened his doors to him, if only under pressure of a harrowing occasion; even then it was much, very much, in the prime infidel of the parish. It was a beginning, an example; it might show others the way. Gwynneth presently discovered that it had.

She had not brought Georgie to see the saddler this time, and she was trying to follow that thinker's harangue as though she had really come to him for political instruction; but all the while the sound from among the trees distracted her attention and mystified her mind. It was neither the ringing impact of iron upon iron, nor the swish of a sharp steel point through the soft sandstone. It was the drone of a saw, as Gwynneth knew well enough when she asked what the sound was in the first opportunity afforded her.

"That's the reverend," said the saddler, dryly.

"It sounds like sawing," said disingenuous Gwynneth. "Has he reached the roof?"

"Gord love yer, miss, not he!"

Gwynneth was consumed with an interest that she feared to show, especially with the saddler looking at her through his spectacles as others had done when Mr. Carlton supplied the topic of conversation. It was a look that seemed to ask her how much she knew, and it always offended her. She did not want to know what he had done; all her interest was in what he was doing, alone there behind the trees. Yet now she felt that speak she must, if it was only to soften a single heart, in the very slightest degree, towards that unhappy man; and she had come to the saddler with no other purpose.

"Does no one go near him yet?" she asked point-blank.

The saddler leant across his bench; the girl had refused the only chair in the little workshop, and was standing outside at the open window, as all his visitors did.

"You won't tell Sir Wilton, miss?"

"I shan't go out of my way to make mischief, Mr. Fuller, if that's what you mean. But you had better not tell me any secrets," said Gwynneth, with a coldness that cost her an effort; however, the saddler's skin was in keeping with his calling.

"Then you can keep that or not," said he, "as you think fit; but I go and see him now and then, and, what's more, I'm not ashamed of it."

"I should think not!" the girl broke out; and Fuller sunned himself in the warmth of fine eyes on fire. "I mean," stammered Gwynneth, "after all this time, and all he has done!"

"What I said to myself last Christmas, miss; and I'm the only man that say it to-day, in this here village full of old women and hypocrites; if you'll excuse my blunt way o' speaking to a young lady like you. 'This here's gone on long enough,' thinks I; 'an' it's the season of peace an' good-will,' I says to myself; 'darned if I don't step across the road to cheer up the poor old reverend, an' Sir Wilton can turn me out of house an' home if he find out an' think proper.' Don't you mistake me, miss; I wasn't thinking of Sir Wilton in what I said just now, and ought not to have said to a young lady like you. No, miss, Sir Wilton has his own quarrel with the reverend; and I had my quarrel, as far as that go; but, Gord love yer, a man of my experience can afford to forgive an' forget, an' be generous as well as just. There isn't a juster man alive than me, Miss Gwynneth; and not a soul in this parish, or out of it, that can say I'm not generous too."

"I'm sure of it, Mr. Fuller. But did you go over to the rectory?"

"There and then," cried Fuller; "there – and – then. And I told him straight that I for one – but that's no use to go over what I said and he said," observed the saddler, hastily. "I can only tell you that in ten minutes we were chattun away as though nothun had ever come between us. And what do you suppose, miss? What do you suppose?"

Gwynneth shook her head, unable to imagine what was coming, and anxious to hear.

"He hadn't seen a newspaper in all these years! Hadn't so much as heard of that there Home Rule Bill of old Gladstone's, and didn't even know there'd been a war in the Sowd'n!" Gwynneth looked equally ignorant of this. "You know, miss? The Sowd'n, where General Gordon was betrayed and deserted by them varmin you'd stick up for. But we won't quarrel no more about that: only to think of the poor old reverend knowun no more about it than the man in the moon until I told him! Why, I had to tell him one of the Royal Family was dead an' buried; it would have been just the same if it had been the Queen herself, God bless her!"

"So he has been absolutely shut off from the world," Gwynneth murmured.

"There you've hit it, miss! 'Shut off from the world,' there you've put it into better language than I did," said the saddler, with his most complimentary air. "Gord love yer, miss, it used to be the reverend that passed his Standard on to me; but ever since last Christmas it's been me that's taken my East Anglian over to him; so the boot's been on the other leg properly; and right glad I've been to do anything for him, and to take my pipe across now and then as though nothun had ever happened. Not that he fare to care much for that, neither; he've been so long alone, I do believe he've got to like his own society as well as any. Yes, miss, shut off from the world he have been and he is; but he won't be shut off from the world much longer!"

"Oh?"

Gwynneth's interest was re-awakened.

"No," said Fuller, with the air of mystery in which his class delights; "no, miss, he's not one to be shut off longer than he can help. Hear that sound?"

"I do indeed."

Latterly she had been listening to nothing else.

"That's a saw!"

"Well?"

"Do you know what he's sawun?"

"No."

"Planks for benches!"

Gwynneth repeated the last word in a puzzled whisper; and so stood staring until the obvious explanation had become obvious to her. It remained inexplicable.

"I don't see the good of benches before the church is finished, Mr. Fuller."

"He mean to hold his services whether that's finished or not. And I mean to attend 'em," the saddler said with an air.

"But – I thought – "

"He was suspended for five year, and the bishop has given him leave to get to work directly the five year is up. That I happen to know."

"It must be nearly up now!"

"That's up next Sunday as ever is, and you'll know it when you hear the bell ring. He's got one of the old uns slung to a tree, for I helped him to sling it, and it's the first help he's had all this time. I wouldn't mention it, miss, for the reverend doesn't want a crowd; there'll be quite enough come when they hear the bell, if it's only to see what happens; but the whole neighbourhood 'll be there if that get about."

"And there's really going to be service in the church – just as it is – without a roof – this very next Sunday!"

It sounded incredible to Gwynneth, and yet it thrilled her as the incredible does not. The very drone of the saw was thrilling now.

"There is, miss, and I mean to be there," said the village Hampden, with inflated chest. "I can't help it if that cost me Sir Wilton's custom, the reverend and me are good friends again, and I mean to be there."

XXVI
A VERY FEW WORDS

It had been in the air all Saturday, but few believed the rumour until ten minutes to eleven next morning. At that hour and at that minute Long Stow was electrified by the measured ringing of a single bell – a bell hoarse with five years' rest and rust – a bell no ear had heard since the night of the fire.

Gwynneth was afield upon the upland, far beyond the church, a pitiful waverer between desire and indecision. Now she must go; and now she must not think of it. It was unnecessary, gratuitous, provocative, ostentatious, unmaidenly, immodest – and yet – both her duty and her desire. So the string of adjectives might be applied to her; they were no deterrent to a nature which hesitated often, but seldom was afraid. Gwynneth treated more respectfully the poignant query of her own consciousness: was she absolutely certain that she did not at all desire to show off like the saddler? She was not.

She did desire to show off, if it was showing off to honour openly the man whom she admired and wished others to admire. She gloried in the man's achievement, and possibly also in her own appreciation of it and him. That was her real point of contact with the saddler. But for Fuller there was the excuse of unconsciousness, and for Gwynneth there was not. So she read herself that Sunday morning, under an August sky without a fleck and a sun that drew the resin from those very pine-trees upon which the outcast had so often gazed. It was thereabouts that Gwynneth lingered, of self-analysis all compact. Then the hoarse bell began – came calling up to her from the clump of chestnuts and of elms – calling like a friend in pain.

Gwynneth reached church by way of the strip of glebe behind it and the gate into this from the lane, thus escaping the throng already gathered at the other gate. She saw nothing but the rude benches as she entered in; the last of these was too near for her; she shrank to the far end of it, close against the wall, and the bell stopped as she sank upon her knees. The beating of her heart seemed to take its place. Then there came a light yet measured step. It passed very near, with a subdued and subtle rustle, that might yet have meant one other woman. But Gwynneth knew better, though she never looked.

"I will arise, and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son."

Already the girl could not see; all her being was involved in an effort to suppress a sob. It was suppressed. There were no tears in the voice that so moved Gwynneth. How serene it was, though sad! It began to soothe her, as she remembered that it had done when she was quite a little girl. She was a little girl again: these five years fled.. But oh, why had he chosen that sentence of the scriptures? Gwynneth looked at her book (for now she could see) and found that some of the others would have been worse.

At last she could raise her eyes; and there was Fuller in the very front; and not another soul.

But Gwynneth cared for nothing any more except the gentle voice that it was her pride to follow in the general confession, kneeling indeed, yet kneeling bolt upright in her proud allegiance.

A strange picture, the rude benches, the ragged walls; the east window still a chasm, the hot sun streaming through it down the aisle; and over all the blue cruciform of sky, broken only by the nodding plumes of the taller elms. And a congregation yet more strange – only Gwynneth and the saddler. But this did not continue. Gwynneth heard movements in the porch behind her, and presently a stumble on the part of one driven in by the press; but no voices; not a whisper; and ere-long he who had been forced in, tired of standing, came on tiptoe and occupied the end of Gwynneth's bench.

Now it was the second lesson. The rector was reading it in the same sweet voice, with all his old precision and knowledge of his mother tongue, and never a trip or an undue emphasis. No one would have believed that that voice had been all but silent for five whole years. And yet some change there was, something different in the reading, something even in the voice; the clerical monotone was abandoned, the reading was more human, natural, and sympathetic. The change was in keeping with others. The rector wore no vestments in the naked eye of heaven, but only his cassock, his surplice, and his Oxford hood. There were flowers upon the simple table behind him, such roses as still grew wild in his tangled garden, but no candle to melt double in the sun. The lectern he had done his best to burnish; but it was still a cripple from the fire. Above, the rector's hair shone like silver, for the sun swept over it, but the lean dark face was all in shadow. Gwynneth only saw the fresh trim cut of the grizzled beard, and the walnut colour of the gnarled hand drooping over the book. That speaking hand!

Now it was the first hymn – actually! So he dared to have hymns, and to sing them if necessary by himself! But it was not necessary, and not only Gwynneth joined in with all the little voice she possessed, but presently there were false notes from the other end of the bench, and the saddler was not silent. But Robert Carlton's voice rang sweet and clear above the rest: —

"Jesu, Lover of my soul,
Let me to Thy Bosom fly,
While the gathering waters roll,
While the tempest still is high:
Hide me, O my Saviour, hide,
Till the storm of life is past:
Safe into the haven guide,
O receive my soul at last."

The hymn haunted Gwynneth upon her knees, taking her mind from the remaining prayers. It was a hymn that she had loved as a little child, and now it seemed so simple and so whole-hearted to one who longed always to be both. But it was the passionate humility of it that touched and filled the heart; and yet there had been neither tremor nor appeal in the voice that led; and the humility was only in accord with one of the simplest services ever held.

The second hymn was another of Gwynneth's favourites; she could not afterwards have said which, for in the middle Mr. Carlton knelt, and then came forward to the twisted lectern at the head of the aisle.

It was not a sermon; it was only a very few words. Yet in Long Stow nothing else was talked of that day, nor for many a day to follow.

The few words were these: —

"The first verse of the nineteenth psalm:

"The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

"Though I have given you a text, my brethren, I do not intend this morning to preach any sermon. If you care to hear me again – if you choose to give me another trial – if you are willing to help me to start afresh – then come again next Sunday, only come in properly, and make the best of the poor benches which are all I have to offer you as yet. There will only be one weekly service at present. I believe that you could nearly all come to that – if you would! But I am afraid that many would have to stand.

"I cannot tell you how grieved I am that your church is not ready for you; but I hope and believe, as I stand before you here, that it will be ready soon, much sooner than you suppose. Then one great wrong will be righted, though only one.

"Meanwhile, so long as we are blessed with days like these – and I pray that many may be in store for us – meanwhile, could there be a fitter or a lovelier roof to the House of God than His own sky as we see it above us to-day? Though at present we can have no music worthy the name, have you not noticed, during all this our service, the constant song and twitter of those friends of man, as I know them to be, of whom Jesus said, 'Not one of them is forgotten before God'? And for incense, what fragrance have we not, in our unfinished church, that is the House of God all the more because it is also His open air.

"My brethren, you need be no farther from heaven, here in this place, unfinished as it is, than when the roof is up, and the windows are in, and proper seats, and when a new organ peals.. and one whom you can respect stands where I am standing now.

"My brethren – once my friends – will you never, never be my friends again?

"Oh spare me a little that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen.

"Dear friends, I have said far more than I ever meant to say. But it is your own fault; you have been so good to me; so many of you have come in; and you are listening to me – to me! If you never listen to me again, if you never come near me any more, I shall still thank you – thank you – to my dying hour!

"But let no eye be dim for me. I do not deserve it. I do not want it. If you ever cared for me – any of you – be strong now and help me.

"And remember – never, never forget – that a just God sits in yonder blue heaven above us – that He is not hard – that I told you.. He is merciful.. merciful.. merciful.

"O look above once more before we part, and see again how 'The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.'

"And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all honour, power, dominion, might, henceforth and for ever. Amen."

He had controlled himself by a superb effort. The end was as calm as the beginning; but the rather hard, almost defiant note, that might have marred the latter in ears less eager than Gwynneth's and more sensitive than those of the people in the porch, that note had passed out of Robert Carlton's voice for ever.

And there no longer were any people in the porch; one by one they had all crept in to listen, some stealing to the rude seats, more standing behind, none remaining outside. Thus had they melted the heart they could not daunt, until all at once it was speaking to their hearts out of its own exceeding fulness, in a way undreamed of when the preacher delivered his text.

And this was to be seen as he came down the aisle, white head erect, pale face averted, and so through the midst of his people – his once more – without catching the eye of one.