"You may well say that, miss, for it was the second time he'd done it; and the reverend had known, all these years, and that must've been Jasper's hat he flung into the first fire when Tom Ivey come, puttun two an' two together. What make that worse, it seem old Jasper used to say he hoped to live to see the new church consecrated; and some say he'd smile as he said it; but now we know what he meant. And he used to limp up and down his room, for practice, when even the doctor thought he couldn't set foot to the ground; for the servant girl heard him at it. Yes, Miss Gwynneth, he was deep and strong and cruel, like the sea, was Jasper; that's what the bishop said himself, for I heard him; but I will say this for him, he asked no more quarter than he gave. Tom Ivey heard his last words through the skylight, and they aren't fit for a young lady like you to hear, but they were a man's words whatever else they were. The worst is that the dear old reverend could've squeezed through himself if only he'd have let Jasper slip; but that he wouldn't; so they both went through with the ceiling and were killed."
"For his enemy!" whispered Gwynneth, an unearthly radiance in her poor hard eyes.
"Yes, for the man that burnt the church down twice, and deserved to burn himself; that was the worst of it."
The listener's lips were consistently compressed, but at this they parted again.
"Oh, no, it was the best. It was the best. A great death, a glorious death!" And the pale thin face was white-hot with a pride which consumed all else.
"The bishop said his life was greater still. You should ha' heard his sermon, out here, at the open grave, when it was all over. There never was such a funeral in the countryside before, and there never will be another like it. The place was packed. I stood where you are standing now, miss. I was one o' the bearers; and Ivey, Mellis, and Jones the schoolmaster, they were the other three. Then you should have seen the clergy; there was a rare procession of the clergy from all round; the Reverend Scrope from Burton Mills, the Reverend Preston from Linkworth, and Canon Wilders, and a lot more. But the bishop was in all his toggery, and I never see a man look so fine; he's little and he's lame, but the face he preached with, across this here open grave, you'd have said that belonged to some old giant. And what a sermon! That didn't make us cry; that dried our tears, an' made us want to build churches and be killed ourselves. You might guess the text: 'Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friend.' I kept waitun for him to point out that Musk was not the reverend's friend, but his worst enemy; but he never did. I would have done; otherwise, he said just what I would like to have said myself, let alone the one thing that took the whole lot of us by surprise. And I tell you, Miss Gwynneth, the place was right black with people; not only in the churchyard, but across the fence in the medder as well; there was hardly a blade o' grass to be seen."
"What was the surprise, Mr. Fuller?"
"He'd made up his mind to resign the living! He had told his lordship. He meant to resign next night—I can't for the life of me think why!"
But Gwynneth could; and, with the second sight begotten of her love, read the dead man even in his grave, divining immediately some of the very reasons which he had given to the bishop in his last hours. She was never to divine them all.
Meanwhile the saddler, having imparted a satisfactory amount of information, was beginning to look for some return in kind, and supposed Miss Gwynneth would be going to the hall. No, they were all from home; indeed, Gwynneth had waited for that. Yet she made her answer with a candid look, the prelude to a gratuitous admission.