At Large

by E. W. Hornung

The old church was roomy, twilit, and consequently cool. Strong light never found its way inside those old stone walls, for the narrow windows were pictorial, one and all. Dusk lingered in these aisles throughout the longest days; upon them day broke last of all; they met nightfall half-way.

After a long, hot, tiring walk there could have been no more grateful retreat than this church of All Saints at Melmerbridge. The senses were lulled in the very porch, nor were they rudely aroused when the quiet peal had ended and the quiet service began. Everything was subdued and inoffensive, even to the sermon: a vigorous discourse from the dark oak pulpit would have grated on the spirit, like loud voices in a death-chamber.

As for Mrs. Parish, she was soon sleeping as soundly and reverently as the oldest parishioner. Alice, on the other hand, gave her whole mind to the service, and her mind filled with peace. Her sweet clear voice chimed in with every response (at which the parish clerk, with the fine old crusted dialect, who enjoyed a monopoly in the responses, snorted angrily and raised his tones), while in the first hymn it rose so high and clear that the young curate peered over his book through the dusk, and afterwards lost his place in the Litany through peering again.

Miles, for his part, looked about him with a pardonable curiosity. He thought that he might have been christened in some church as an infant; he had certainly been married in one as a comparatively respectable blackleg—but that was not a pleasant thing to recall to-day. He had since been once in a little iron Bush chapel, on a professional visit with his merry men, the object of which visit was attained with such complete success that all Australia thrilled with indignation. In London, the Bristos had insisted on taking him to St. Paul's and the Abbey. This was the full extent of his previous church-going. He was interested for a little while in looking about him. His interest might have lasted to the Benediction had there been less subjective food for thought, or, perhaps, if he had been sitting there alone.

In the hush and the dusk of this strange place, and the monotonous declamation of phrases that conveyed no meaning to him, Miles set himself deliberately to think. Wild and precarious as his whole life had been, he felt its crisis to be within arm's length of him now at last—he joined hands with it here in this peaceful Yorkshire church. Even the past few years of infamy and hourly risk contained no situation so pregnant with fate as the present. He ran over in his mind the chain of circumstances that had led up to this crisis.

The train of thought took him back to Queensland, where, with Nemesis holding him by the throat at last, he had wrenched himself from her tightening grip, and escaped. He had tumbled upon English soil with a fair sum of money, a past dead and buried, a future of some sort before him; by chance he had tumbled upon his feet. Chance, and that genius in the water that had crowned his escape by drowning him in the eyes of the world, had combined at once, and helped him to save an unknown gentleman's life. Mother-wit and the laws of gratitude enabled him to dupe the man he had rescued, become his close friend, live upon him, draw upon him, extract with subtle cunning the last farthing of salvage, and all the while he guessed—pretty correctly—that his pursuers were arriving to learn his death and take ship back to Australia.

Thus far everything had worked out so prettily that it seemed worth while turning thoroughly honest and beginning this second life on entirely different lines from the old one. Then he fell in love and believed that his love was returned, a belief that was not fostered by his own fancy unaided; now more than ever he desired to improve on the past, and to forget all ties and obligations belonging to the past. Edward Ryan was dead; then Edward Ryan's wife was a widow; Miles the Australian was a new unit in humanity; then why should not Miles the Australian marry?

Up to this point he could look back on every step with intense satisfaction; but here his reflections took a bitter turn. To go on calmly recoiling step after step, beginning with the month of July, was impossible: he tried it; but to remember that night in the park—to remember subsequent weeks spent in scheming and plotting, in rejecting plot after plot and scheme after scheme, in slowly eating his heart out in the solitude of a London lodging, in gradually losing all taste for fresh enterprise and all nerve for carrying it out—to remember all this was to pour vitriol on the spirit. He would remember no more; he would shut the gate on memory; he would annihilate thought; he would make his mind a blank. Yet he was powerless to do any of these things.

In his helplessness he looked down on the white figure at his side. The second hymn was being sung. He had stood, and sat, and knelt or leant forward with the rest, by mere mechanical impulse. He was even holding the book which she held without knowing it. When he realised this, his hand shook so much that the hymn-book was almost jerked from his fingers. At this she looked up, and caught his eyes bent down upon her.

Now Miles was at the end of the pew, next the wall, and in shadow. Alice noticed nothing in his expression, and went on singing without pause or break. But either her face, as she raised it, came in direct line with the skirt of some saint, in the window above Miles, and the sun, or else the sun chose that moment for a farewell gleam; in any case, the girl's pale face was instantly flooded with a rich, warm, crimson glow. Miles looked down, and this warm glow caught in his heart like a tongue of live flame.