WAS it really the last day of Visitation? Punishment or Consequence, would there be no more?

Punishment or Consequence, it matters little which. One thing more happened on this eventful day. It came in a telegram from the ancestral housekeeper.

“Please come down as soon as you can. There is a change.”

A change! When a man is ninety-five what change do his friends expect? Leonard carried the telegram to Constance.

“I think,” he said, “it must be the end.”

“It is assuredly the end. You will go at once—to-day. Let me go with you, Leonard.”

“You? But it would only distress you.”

“It will not distress me if I can take him, before he dies, a simple message.”

“You sent me a message. How did you know that it was a message?”

“I knew it was a message, because I saw it with my mind’s eye written clear and bright, and because I heard it plain and unmistakable. It came to me in the night. I thought it was a dream. Now I think it was a message.”

“You said that all the misfortunes were over. Like your message, it was a dream. Yet now we get this telegram.”

“Why—do you call this a misfortune? What better can we desire for that poor old man but the end?”

They started at once; they caught a train which landed them at the nearest station a little before seven. It was an evening in early spring. The sun was sinking, the cloudless sky was full of peace and light, the air was as soft as it was fragrant; there was no rustle of branches, even the birds were hushed.

“It is the end,” said Constance softly, “and it is peace.”

They had not spoken since they started together for the station. When one knows the mind of his companion, what need for words?

Presently they turned from the road into the park. It was opposite the stile over which, seventy years ago, one man had passed on his way to death, and another, less fortunate, on his way to destruction.

“Let us sit down in this place,” said Leonard. “Before we go on I have something to say—I should like to say it before we are face to face with that most unhappy of men.”

Constance obeyed and sat down upon the stile.

“When we came here before,” he began, with a serious voice and grave eyes, “I was fresh from the shame and the discovery of the family misfortunes. And we talked of the sins of the fathers, and the eating of sour grapes, and the consolation of the Prophet——”

“I remember every word.”

“Very well. I think you will understand me, Constance, when I say that I am rejoiced that I made the discovery of this fatal family history with all that it entailed—the train of evils and shames—yes, even though it has led to these weeks of a kind of obsession or possession, during which I have been unable to think of anything else.”

“What do you think now? Are the sins of the fathers visited upon the children, or was the Prophet right?”

“I see, with you, that it is impossible to avoid the consequences of the father’s life and actions. The words ‘Third or Fourth Generation’ must not be taken literally. They mean that from father to son there is a continual chain of events linked together and inseparable, and always moulding and causing the events which follow, and this though we know not the past and cannot see the connecting links that form the chain. In a higher stage humanity will refrain from some things and will be attracted by other things entirely through the consideration of their effect upon those who follow after. It will be a punishment self-imposed by those who fall that they must, in pity and in mercy, have no children to inherit their shame.”

“You put my own thoughts into words. But about the children I am not so sure; their very shames may be made a ladder such as Augustine made his sins.”

“There is nothing so true as the inheritance of consequences, except that one does not inherit the guilt. Even with the guilt there is sometimes the tendency to certain lines of action. ‘Nothing so hereditary as the drink craving,’ says the physician. So I suppose there may be a hereditary tendency in other directions. Some men—I have known some—cannot sit down to steady work; they must lie about in the sun; they must loaf; they have a vitium, an incurable disease, as incurable as a humpback, of indolence, mind and body. Some seem unable to remain honest—we all know examples of such men; some cannot possibly tell the truth. What I mean”—Leonard went on, clearing his own mind by putting his wandering thoughts into argumentative array—“is that the liability to temptation—the tendency—is inherited, but the necessity which forces a man to act is not inherited; that is due to himself. What says the Prophet again? ‘As I live, saith the Lord God’—saith the Lord God. It is magnificent; it is terrible in its depth of earnestness. He declares an inspiration; through him the Lord strengthens His own word—veritably strengthens His own word—by an oath, ‘As I live, saith the Lord God.’ Can you imagine anything stronger, more audacious, but for the eternal Verity that follows?”

The speaker’s voice trembled; his cheek, touched by the setting sun, glowed; the light of the western sky filled his eyes. Constance, woman-like, trembled at the sight of the man who stood revealed to her—the new man—transformed by the experience of shames and sorrows.

“As the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is Mine; but if a man doeth that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, saith the Lord God.”

“‘Saith the Lord God!’” Leonard repeated. “What must have been the faith of a man who could so attribute his words? How to sound the depths of his faith and his insight?”

“He verily believed that he heard the voice of the Lord.”

“We live for and by each other,” Leonard returned. “We think that we stand by ourselves, and we are lifted up by the work of our forefathers; we talk as if we lived alone, and we are but links in the chain; we are formed and we form; we are forged and we forge. I have been like unto one who stands in a crowd and is moved here and there, but believes all the time that he is alone on a hill-top.” He was silent for awhile. Presently he went on. “All that has followed the crime,” he said, “has been in the nature of consequence. The man who committed the act retired from the world; he deserted the world; he gave up his duties; he resigned his children to others. One of them went to sea; he was drowned; others were drowned with him—that was but a consequence. His daughter, neglected and ill educated, ran away with a vulgar adventurer whom she took for a gallant gentleman—that was a consequence. His son found out the dreadful truth and committed suicide; his boys had no father; two of them fell into evil ways—that was a consequence. My own father died young, but not so young as to leave me a mere infant—that was a misfortune, but not a consequence. In other words, Constance, the sins of that old man have been visited upon the children, but the soul of the son has been as the soul of the father. That is the sum and substance of the whole. The consequences are still with us. That poor lady in the Commercial Road is still in the purgatory of poverty which she brought upon herself. Her son is, and will continue, what he is. Her daughter rises above her surroundings. ‘She shall surely live, saith the Lord God.’ My two uncles will go on to the end in their own way, and so, I suppose, shall I myself.”

He stopped; the light went out of his eyes. He was once more outwardly his former self.

“That is all, Leonard?”

“That is all. I want you to understand that at the end—if this is the end—I desire to feel towards that old man no thought or feeling of reproach, only of pity for the fatal act of a moment and the long punishment of seventy years—and you, whose ancestor he smote——”

“Only with forgiveness in the name of that ancestor and of pity akin to yours and equal to yours. Come, Leonard: perhaps the end has come already.”

They entered the Park by the broken gate and the ruined Lodge.

“I have been looking for some such call,” said Constance. “This morning I sent you that message. I knew it was a true message, because there fell upon me, quite suddenly, a deep calm. All my anxieties vanished. We have been so torn”—she spoke as if the House was hers as well—“by troubles and forebodings, with such woes and rumours of woes, that when they vanished suddenly and unexpectedly I knew that the time was over.”

“You are a witch, Constance.”

“Many women are when they are interested. Oh, Leonard! what a happiness that there is always an end of everything—of sorrow, nay, of joy! There must come—at last—the end, even of Punishment or of Consequence.” She looked up and round. “The evening is so peaceful—look at the glories of the west—it is so peaceful that one cannot believe in storm and hail and frost. It seems to mean, for us, relief—and for him—forgiveness.”

Everything was, indeed, still—there was no sound even of their own footsteps as they walked across the springy turf of the park, and the house when they came within view of it was bathed in the colours of the west, every window flaming with the joy of life instead of the despair of death. Yet within was a dying man.

“Death is coming,” said Constance, “with pardon upon his wings.”

The news that there was a “change”—word meaning much—at the Hall had reached the village. The pride of the people, because no other village in England entertained a recluse who lived by himself in a great house and allowed everything to fall into decay, was to be taken from them. No more would strangers flock over on Sunday mornings from the nearest town and the villages round, to look over the wall at the tall stalwart figure pacing his terrace in all weathers with the regularity of a pendulum. In the village house of call the men assembled early to hear and tell and whisper what they had heard.

Then the old story was revived—the story which had almost gone out of men’s memories—how the poor gentleman, then young, still under thirty, with a fine high temper of his own—it was odd how the fine high temper had got itself remembered—lost in a single day his wife and his brother-in-law, and never held up his head again, nor went out of the house, nor took notice of man, woman, or child, nor took a gun in his hand, nor called his dogs, nor rode to hounds, nor went to church.

These reminiscences had been told a thousand times in the dingy little room of the village public-house. They reeked, like the room, of beer and tobacco and wet garments. For seventy years they had been told in the same words. They had been, so far, that most interesting form of imaginative work—the story without an end. Now the end had arrived, and there would be no more to tell.

The story was finished. Then the door opened, and the ci-devant scarer of birds appeared. He limped inside, he closed the door carefully; he looked around the room. He supported himself bravely with his two sticks, and he began to speak.

“We’re all friends here? All friends? There’s nobody here as will carry things to that young man? No.”

“Take half a pint, Thomas.”

“By your leave. Presently. I shall lend a hand to-morrow or next day to digging a grave. We must all come to it. Why not, therefore?”

He looked important, and evidently had something more to say, if he could find a way to say it.

“We’re all thinking of the same thing,” he began. “It’s the old Squire who will soon be lyin’ dead, how he never went out of the place for seventy long years—as long as I can remember. Why? Because there was a man murdered and a woman died. Who was the man murdered? The Squire’s brother-in-law. Who murdered him? John Dunning, they said. John Dunning, he was tried and he got off and he went away. Who murdered that man? John Dunning didn’t. Why? Because John Dunning didn’t go to the wood for two hours afterwards. Who murdered that man, I say?”

At this point he accepted the hospitality of the proffered glass of beer.

“I know who done it. I always have known. Nobody knows but me. I’ve known for all these years; and I’ve never told. For why? He would ha’ killed me, too. For certain sure he would ha’ killed me. Who was it, then? I’ll tell you. It was the man that lies a-dyin’ over there. It was the Squire himself—that’s who it was. No one else was in the wood all the morning but the Squire and the other gentleman. I say, the Squire done it; the Squire and nobody else. The Squire done it. The Squire done it.”

The men looked at each other in amazement. Then the blacksmith rose, and he said solemnly:

“Thomas, you’re close on eighty years of age. You’ve gone silly in your old age. You and your Squire! I remember what my father said, ‘The Squire, he left Mr. Holme at the wood and turned back.’ That was the evidence at the Inquest and the Trial. You and your Squire! Go home, Thomas, and go to bed and get your memory back again.”

Thomas looked round the room again. The faces of all were hard and unsympathetic. He turned and hobbled out. The days that followed were few and evil, for he could speak about nothing else, and no one heeded his garrulous utterances. Assuredly, if there had been a lunatic asylum in the village he would have been enclosed there. A fatal example of the mischief of withholding evidence! Now, had this boy made it clear at the inquest that the two gentlemen were together in the wood for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, one knows not what might have followed.

Thomas did not go home. He turned his steps in the direction of the Hall, and he hobbled along with a purpose in his face. His revelation had been received with scorn and derision. Perhaps in another place it would be received with more respect.

The housekeeper met Leonard and Constance at the open door. It had stood open all day, as if for the admission of the guest whose wings were hovering very near.

“He’s in the library,” said the woman, with the corner of her apron brushing away the tears with which women-servants always meet the approach of Azrael. “I wanted him to go upstairs and to bed, but he takes no notice. He’s been in the library nearly all day.”

“Did he go out this morning after breakfast?”

“He took his breakfast as usual, and he went out afterwards as usual, walking as upright as a post, and looking as strong and as hard as ever. After a bit he stopped and shook all over. Then he turned round and went indoors. He went into the library, and he sat down before the fire.”

“Did he speak?”

“Never a word. I offered him a glass of wine, but he only shook his head. At one o’clock I took him his dinner, but he could eat nothing. Presently he drank a glass of wine. At four o’clock I took him his tea, but he wouldn’t touch it. Only he drank another glass of wine. That’s all he’s had since the morning. And now he is sitting doubled up, with his face working terrible.”

They opened the door of the library softly and went in. He was not sitting ‘doubled up’: he was lying back in his ragged old leather chair, extended—his long legs stretched out, his hands on the arms of the chair, his broad shoulders and his great head lying back—splendid even in decay, like autumn opulent. His eyes were open, staring straight upwards to the ceiling. His face was, as the housekeeper put it ‘working.’ It spoke of some internal struggle. What was it that he was fighting in his weary brain?

“Leonard,” the girl whispered, “it is not despair in his face. It is not defiance. Look! It is doubt. There is something he cannot understand. He hears whispers. Oh, I think I hear them, too! I know what they are and whose they are.” She drew down her veil to hide her tears.

The sun had now gone down. The shadows of the twilight lay about the corners of the big room, the rows of books looked ghostly; the western light began to fall, and the colours began to fade. A fire burned in the grate, as it always burned all the year round; the flames began to throw flickering lights and shadows about the room; they lit up the face of the old man, and his figure seemed to stand out clear and apart, as if there were nothing in the room but himself; nay, as if there were no room, no furniture, no house, nothing but that one sole figure in the presence—the unspeakable presence—of the Judge.

His face was changing; the housekeeper spoke the truth. The defiance and the stubbornness were going out of it. What was come to take their place? As yet, nothing but doubt and pain and trouble. As for the whispers, there was no proof that there were any whispers, save from the assurance of the girl who heard them with the ear of faith. Leonard stepped forward and bent over him.

“Sir,” he said solemnly, “you know me. I am your great-grandson—the grandson of your eldest son, who killed himself because he discovered a secret—your secret. And he could no longer endure it and live. I am his grandson.”

The words were plain, even brutal. Leonard intended that there should be no mistake about them. But, plain as they were, they produced no effect. There was not even a gleam in the old man’s eye to show that he heard.

“You are ninety-five,” Leonard went on. “It is time to speak. I have brought with me one who will recall a day—if you have ever forgotten it—of tragic memories, the day when you lost at once your wife and your brother-in-law. You have never forgotten that day, have you?”

The old man made no reply. But he closed his eyes, perhaps as a sign that he refused to listen.

“Sir, I have a message for you. It is from the man whom you saved from the gallows—the innocent man whom you saved at a trial for murder. He sent a message from his death-bed—words of gratitude and of prayer. The good deed that you did has grown, and borne fruit a hundredfold—your good deed. Let the grateful words of that man be some comfort to you.”

Again the old man made no sign.

At this point an unexpected interruption took place, for the door was opened, and a man, a villager, came clumping in noisily. Seventy years agone he was the boy who had done the bird-scaring.

“They told me”—he addressed Leonard, but he looked at the figure in the chair—“that you were here, and they said that he was going at last. So I came. I minded what you said. Did never a one suspect? That’s what you said. I don’t care for him now.” He nodded valiantly at the figure of his old master. “He won’t hurt no one—no more.”

He clumped across the room, being rheumatic, and planted himself before the chair, bringing his stick down with a bump on the floor.

“Did never a man suspect?” He looked round and held up his finger.

He suspected. And he knew.

“Old man”—he addressed himself directly to the silent figure—“who done that job? You done it. Nobody else done it. Nobody else couldn’t ha’ done it. Who done it? You done it. There was nobody else in the wood but you before John Dunning came along.”

Leonard took him by the arm, and led him unresisting out of the library. But he went on repeating his story, as if he could not say it often enough to satisfy his conscience.

“I always meant to tell him some day before I died. Now I have told him. I’ve told all the people too—all of them. Why should I go on putting of it away and hiding of it? He ought to ha’ swung long ago, he ought. And he shall too. He shall yet, though he be ninety years and more. Who done it? Who done it? Who done it? He done it. He done it. He done it, I say.”

They heard his voice as Leonard led him to the door; they heard his voice when Leonard shut the door upon him, repeating his refrain in a senile sing-song.

“What matter?” said Leonard. “Let him sing his burden all over the village. The time has gone by when such as he can hurt.”

But the old man still made as if he had heard nothing. He remained perfectly impassible. Not even the Sphinx could be more obstinately fixed on betraying no emotion. Presently he stirred—perhaps because he was moved; he pulled himself up with difficulty; he sat supported by the arms of the chair, his body bending under the weight of the massive head and broad shoulders, too heavy at last even for that gigantic frame; his head was bent slightly forward; his eyes, deep set, were now fixed upon the red coals of the fire, which burned all the year round to warm him; his face was drawn by hard lines, which stood out like ropes in the firelight. His abundant white hair lay upon his shoulders, and his long white beard fell round him to the waist.

And thus he had been for seventy years, while his early manhood passed slowly into the prime of life, while the first decay touched his locks with tiny streaks of grey, while early age fell upon him, while his face grew furrowed, while his eyes sank and his cheek-bones stood out, while his teeth fell out and his long face was shortened and his ancient comeliness vanished. So he had remained while his neglected children grew up, while Consequences fell unheeded and unknown upon his house, ignorant of what went on in the outer world, though a new world grew up around him with new thoughts, new ideals, new standards, and a new civilisation. The Great Revolution which we call the Nineteenth Century went on around him, and he knew nothing; he lived, as he was born, in the eighteenth century, which was prolonged to the days of King George the Fourth. If he thought at all in his long life, his thoughts were as the thoughts of the time in which he was born.

Did he think at all? Of what could he think when day followed day, and one was like another, and there was no change; when spring succeeded winter unheeded; and cold and heat were alike to one who felt neither; and there was no book or newspaper or voice of friend to bring food for the mind or to break the monotony of the days?

The anchorite of the Church could pray; his only occupations were prayer and his mighty wrestling with the Devil. Since this anchorite of the Country House could not pray, there was left with him, day and night, the latter resource. Surely, after seventy long years, this occupation must have proved wearisome.

Leonard went on: “Speak.”

The old man made no sign.

“Speak, then. Speak, and tell us what we already know.”

There was still no reply.

“You have suffered so long. You have made atonement so terrible: it is time to speak—to speak and end it.”

His face visibly hardened.

“Oh! it is no use,” Leonard cried in despair. “It is like walking into a brick wall. Sir, you hear me—you understand what is said! You cannot tell us one single thing that we do not know already.”

He made a gesture of despair, and stepped back.

Then Constance herself stepped forward. She threw herself at his feet; like a Greek suppliant she clasped his knees, and she spoke slowly and softly:

“You must hear me. I have a right to be heard. Look at me. I am the great-grand-daughter of Langley Holme.”

She raised her veil.

The old man screamed aloud. He caught the arms of the chair and sat upright. He stared at her face. He trembled and shook all over, insomuch that at the shaking of his large frame the floor also trembled and shook, and the plates on the table and the fender rattled.

“Langley!” he cried, seeing nothing but her face—“Langley! You have come back. At last—at last!”

He could not understand that this was a living woman, not a dead man. He saw only her face, and it was the face of Langley himself.

“Yes,” she said, boldly. “Langley come back. He says that you have suffered long enough. He says that he has forgiven you long ago. His sister has forgiven you. All is forgiven, Langley says. Speak—speak—in the very presence of God, Who knows. It was your hand that murdered Langley. Speak! You struck him with the club in the forehead so that he fell dead. When he was brought home dead, your punishment began with the death of your wife, and has gone on ever since. Speak!”

The old man shook his head mechanically. He tried to speak. It was as if his lips refused to utter the words. He sank back in the chair, still gazing upon the face and trembling. At last he spoke.

“Langley knows—Langley knows,” he said.

“Speak!” Constance commanded.

“Langley knows——”

“Speak!”

“I did it!” said the old man.

Constance knelt down before him and prayed aloud.

“I did it!” he repeated.

Constance took his hand and kissed it.

“I am Langley’s child,” she said. “In his name you are forgiven. Oh, the long punishment is over! Oh, we have all forgiven you! Oh, you have suffered so long—so long! At last—at last—forgive yourself!”

Then a strange thing happened. It happens often with the very old that in the hour of death there falls upon the face a return of youth. The old man’s face became young; the years fell from him; but for his white hair you would have thought him young again. The hard lines vanished with the crow’s-feet and the creases and the furrows; the soft colour of youth reappeared upon his cheek. Oh, the goodly man—the splendid face and figure of a man! He stood up, without apparent difficulty; he held Constance by the hand, but he stood up without support, towering in his six feet six, erect and strong.

“Forgiven?” he asked. “What is there to be forgiven? Forgive myself? Why? What have I done that needs forgiveness? Let us walk into the wood, Langley—let us walk into the wood. My dear, I do not understand. Langley’s child is but a baby in arms.”

His hand dropped. He would have fallen to the ground but that Leonard caught him and laid him gently on the chair.

“It is the end,” said Constance. “He has confessed.”

It was the end. The Recluse was dead.