He turned and went up the steps to the door from which she had just emerged, and tried to open it, and found it locked. He threw his weight against it, but it would not yield.
Two men, standing at the street-corner, engaged in conversation, heard the pistol-shot, and saw the woman as she fell. They ran, and met the man as he lurched down the rectory steps. For a moment he held them at bay at the point of his revolver. Then he turned the weapon on himself and fired two shots in quick succession. He fell plunging to the earth. On his sprawling body and distorted face the light of the full moon struck. But, where Mary Bradley lay, the shadow of the spire of Christ Church rested, like the shadow of the hand of a pitying God.
CHAPTER XXII
AN EPISCOPAL BENEDICTION
The tragedy was now complete. Its climax had been reached when two souls were thrust, unshriven, into the Great Presence. The city gasped and shuddered, and rioted in the rehearsal of strange and conflicting stories. But at the heart of every one of them, tangled in its sordid meshes, was the name of the rector of Christ Church. The motive for the murder of Mary Bradley was known of all men. If Lamar, dead by his own hand, had lived to shout it from the housetops, it could not have been better or more widely understood. Yet no one now charged the minister with conscious guilt. His life had been too open and too clean to make that believable. It was said of him now only that he had been the victim of his own deplorable theories and his mistaken zeal. But it was plain to every one that the end had been reached. His old parishioners, friend and foe alike, admitted and declared that his further ministrations at Christ Church had become impossible. He, himself, in an hour of forced calmness and deliberate thought, had reached the same inevitable conclusion. “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” The fruits of his ministry, so far as he could now see, had been scandal, riot, bloodshed, murder, suicide, a wrecked and desolated church; an unhallowed harvest. And the future held no hope of better things.
For three days he wrestled with himself in agony. On the morning of the fourth day he boarded a train, bound for the see city, to meet a telegraphed appointment with his bishop. Twenty miles out Barry Malleson came wandering down the aisle of the car and caught sight of him.
“Why, Farrar,” exclaimed Barry, “I didn’t know you were on the train! Come into the Pullman with me.”
“No, thank you! I change at the junction, but I’d be glad to have you sit with me for a while.”
Barry needed no second invitation. He dropped into the aisle end of the seat; but when he had settled himself comfortably he had nothing to say. If the rector’s face gave evidence of the shock and strain he had undergone, Barry’s countenance and manner were still more indicative of the intense suffering he had endured.
“You’re going to New York?” asked the rector, finally.