CHAPTER XXIII

THOU HAST SAID

ON

N THIS golden Sabbath morning, Padanaram was buzzing with the strange story that Tom Blanket told at the post office the evening before, and was now repeating with the keen relish of a seasoned gossip. Barnaby's trunk and carpet-bag were still at the railway station, unclaimed. Barnaby himself had failed to appear at the cross-road where the stage awaited him. Barnaby himself had been seen by no one since he left the Widow Marlow's on Tuesday.

More than one who heard the tale, "pooh-poohed," and affirmed it a mare's nest. To this party the minister inclined, dismissing the tale as something not to be given a second thought belonging to the sacred day. Barnaby undoubtedly had gone another way and would send in his own good time for his luggage. To the mass of the community, however, the story opened too large an event in their simple lives for them not to have a sense of wrong against those who sought to rob it of its dimensions.

All Padanaram was at service, mainly because it was the custom, incidentally to learn the meaning of the warning all had felt in the clergyman's words of the previous Sunday. The current of their lives ran through channels so shallow and uneventful that the promise of the slightest refreshing came as a shadow in a barren land.

Ashgrave came, spurred by a restlessness that grew

with the deepening sense of horror and mystery which dwelt for him in the little chamber under the eaves. As much beyond his power as it seemed to tear himself from the farm, he dared not stay wholly away from the village and the message of warning it might have for him. It was the memory of Craig's words, which he alone, save the living dead man who was his guest, had rightly interpreted, that finally decided his halting purpose. It rung as a challenge to his awakened memory, and he decided upon the crazy project of daring the clergyman in his priestly office.

When he went to Barnaby's chamber that morning, the scene of Friday was reenacted. For forty-eight hours had he been expecting it, and he held himself less under open surprise than before. In secret, however, it shook him even more than the first reviving had done. The period of unconsciousness had been briefer by a day than the former one, there was a better colour and a deeper flush of health in the strange face than when first he saw it, and it seemed to him that the difference in likeness to Barnaby was greater. In part, at least, this latter fact might be due to the softly curling beard and moustache which each day of the absence of the razor was thickening; but deeper than this, Ashgrave felt that there was a difference and that it was becoming more and more pronounced. He admitted to himself that, had he not known it was Barnaby who lay there, he would not have recognised him during the hour of his consciousness.

This impression he confirmed, when Barnaby reappeared in the unconscious being. The beard was still there, but so was Barnaby; and he was not the creature, soft-voiced and strange, who had been with him for an hour and had answered his offices of help with the eyes

of a grateful dog. It came to him startlingly and beyond the possibility of contradiction, that he had two men to deal with; the one, a corpse that he must hide at all costs from curious eyes; the other, a something, almost helpless, wholly gentle and lovingly grateful. It was the corpse he left in the bed in the locked room when he went, driven by resistless restlessness, to the service at Padanaram Church.

After the usual service, Craig came down from the pulpit and took his seat by the communion table, on which were the plates and urn, holding the bread and wine, and the glass goblets, covered with a white cloth. A hymn was sung, the scriptural account of the Last Supper read, and a brief prayer said. Then Craig uncovered the elements and gave the plates containing the bread to the deacons, who were to pass it to the members of the congregation, seated in their several places. As the deacons passed down the aisles, Craig repeated passages from the scriptures, still retaining his place at the end of the communion table.

There was a thrill of suppressed excitement in the congregation. Everyone felt that a crisis was impending, and each waited under sense of it such as would have fitted a larger issue in a larger community. As the deacon who bore the plate on the side of the church where Ashgrave sat approached his place, Craig had his eye fixed on the culprit, as questioning whether he would dare partake. Ashgrave sat, with head erect in conscious defiance, that made it clear that the issue had come. Craig's deep voice sounded through the church: "Then Judas, which betrayed him, answered and said, Master is it I? He said unto him, Thou hast said." Ashgrave's hand, already extended to take of the bread, was checked, suspended in air, by something in

the clergyman's tone. With the utterance of the words, "Thou hast said," it seemed as if the strain under which the congregation rested suddenly broke. Women sobbed, men turned to each other with a gasp of breath, and Ashgrave, dropping his hand, seized his hat and rushed out of the church. Craig sat calm and implacable at the communion table, unmoved by the terrible judgment he had pronounced.

In a more sophisticated community, the suspicion would have arisen that the clergyman had planned with a view to the dramatic qualities of the scene. Whatever the New Englander had discarded, the final essential fact of priesthood was not of it. It still remained a living thing, as always where any shred of absolute religion dwells, that, when the priest spoke in his priestly essence, as distinct from his individuality, God spoke. In no other way could he speak so absolutely as a priest as in forbidding a church member the communion, that outward and visible token of membership in Christ. That when he so spoke, however he might choose his words, the guilty one would not recognise and yield to the authority, it no more entered Craig's mind to conceive than it entered the minds of his parishioners to question the act, upon which had been set the seal of the sinner's submission. When Ashgrave left the church, it was the final evidence of the personal interposition of God in enforcement of the sentence of His minister, and the act received the stamp of eternal righteousness, while the place became for the time the Holy of Holies, overshadowed with the very presence of the Lord of Hosts.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE CONFESSION

ALONE of all present, Amanda Seagrave failed to

understand the meaning of the scene. For her it carried so great a personal note that she had no place for other concept. She had come to service in a state bordering on actual hysteria, impressed that God was about to demand of her public acknowledgment of her sin of unchastity, and to lay on her public punishment. To the method He would select, she gave no thought; but Paul went to Rome no more surely foreseeing his martyrdom than she went that bright Sabbath morning of the nineteenth century to Padanaram Church.

The experience of the preceding Sunday; her selfsurrender to Ashgrave, and his brutal repulse; the sudden joy of Barnaby's declaration, and the revulsion that came with the conviction that she had doubly sinned; the vague rumours that had been circulated regarding Barnaby's disappearance these were the steps by which she had come to this supreme hour, which was to blast her reputation, drive her from the circle of the elect, and bind her fate irrevocably with Ashgrave's.

Her mother who, with all her harsh New England utilitarianism and devotion to the gospel of the practical, was a woman still, felt the atmosphere that emanated from the girl, and without understanding it, knew her to be in a highly nervous state. She went so far, in token of her apprehension, as to suggest that Amanda remain at home and rest; but the girl had passed beyond the