A summer Sunday two years later. Alma and her child in a cornfield, listening to bells ringing for Cyril's homecoming with his bride. All the softness and youth gone from Alma's tragic face, and the last gleams of penitence from her heart, since her perjury. Jealousy is prompting her to go and tell Marion all. But Judkins comes and interrupts these wild thoughts. He offers marriage, rehabilitation, and a home in America. She hesitates. She is shunned by all, and can get no work in Malbourne, but has not been destitute; money has found its way mysteriously to her cottage. So for the child's sake she accepts.
Tea on the rectory lawn. Lilian is thinking of the prisoner, Lennie wondering aloud, "How does Alma like having to go to hell for lying about Henry?" Cyril is terribly agitated at this. He has scarcely yet recovered from his long mental illness after Henry's sentence. Marion is not happy--she may never allude to Henry. The slightest reference to him makes Cyril ill. Later, in the moonlight, Ingram Swaynestone asks Lilian, whom he has always loved, to marry him. He cannot believe that she is secretly engaged to Henry. She points towards Henry's prison. "I am all that man has on earth, and I love him!" she says.
Nine years later. Convicts pulling down the old walls of Portsmouth. An officer's funeral passes by. No. 62--Henry--overhears people speaking of the manner of the officer's death, and his name, Major Everard. Tears fall on the convict's hands as he works. No. 62's father is port admiral. Alma's perjury in court had revealed all to Henry, and reduced him to apathetic despair. "There is no God--no good anywhere!" he cried. But in time Lilian's periodic letters gave him heart and hope, and he had accepted his fate bravely, trying to lift up and cheer his fellow-prisoners. In the darkness and uproar of a thunderstorm he escapes from the guarded works. His adventures, during which he comes accidentally and unrecognized in contact with his brother's widow, his sister, and her children, who prattle of family matters in his hearing, and, after a few weeks' wandering, by his being recaptured while lying on the roadside unconscious from hunger and exhaustion. This part of the story concludes with the reception of this news by Lilian and Cyril, whose unintentional neglect has caused the miscarriage of a letter that would have enabled Henry to escape.
IV.--"I Will Confess my Wickedness"
Everard is free, and, wearing the grey suit of a discharged prisoner, is travelling from Dartmoor to London by train. Marion, his brother, Leslie, Mrs. Maitland, and the admiral are all dead. Everything is strange and changed to him. Liberty is sweet and bitter. He is prematurely aged and broken down; the great future that had been before him is now for ever impossible. His still undeveloped scientific theories and discoveries have been anticipated by others. He feels the prison taint upon him; he will not see Lilian until it is removed, and he has become accustomed to the bewilderment of freedom.
After a few days' pause he starts from London for Malbourne, stopping at Belminster, through which he had made his last free journey with Cyril, when he told him that "an ascetic is a rake turned monk." Passing the gaol in which he had suffered so much, he goes to the cathedral. He asks who is now Dean of Belminster.
The verger is surprised. "Where have you been, sir, not to have heard of the celebrated Dean Maitland?" The great dean! The books he has written, the things he has done! All the world knows Dean Maitland, the greatest preacher in the Church of England.
The deanery interior. Cyril, charming and adored as ever, is considering whether he shall accept the historic bishopric of Warham. A strange youth from America is announced, and asks the dean to give him a university education--"because I am your son." "Since when," returns the dean tranquilly, "have you been suffering from this distressing illusion?" The youth bears a letter from Alma. She is dying in Belminster, and implores him to come to her. She cannot die, she writes, till she has cleared Everard. After this terrible scene Cyril is in agony, and nearly commits suicide. "But one sin in a life so spotless!" he moans. The same evening Everard, overwhelmed with accounts of Cyril's good deeds and spiritual counsels, and examining with mingled awe and pity the numerous books he has written, goes to hear one of the Anglican Chrysostom's lectures to working men in the cathedral.
The music heard by Cyril during his mental conflict there years before is being played. Cyril thinks Lee's death and Henry's suffering the work of Fate, since in wearing Everard's clothes he had no thought of impersonating him, but only of avoiding the publicity of clerical dress; nor had he dreamed of meeting or of struggling with Ben Lee. Meaning to go to Alma, who is already dead, later on that night, Cyril preaches upon the sin of Judas, with great power and passion. "I charge you, my brothers, beware of self-deception!" Everard pities him; he feels that his own eighteen years' sufferings were nothing in comparison with Cyril's secret tortures. Suddenly the preacher stops with a low cry of agony. He has caught Everard's eye. He wishes the cathedral would fall and crush him. "I am not well," he says, leaving the pulpit. Everard writes him a letter that night, saying he has long known and forgiven all; he asks Cyril to use his own secret repentance and unspoken agony for the spiritual help of others.
The dean receives and reads the letter at breakfast next morning. He then shuts himself alone in his study for several hours. Then he takes leave of his blind son and only surviving daughter--all the other children died in infancy--and sends them away to a relative. Everard, after waiting vainly for Cyril's answer, goes to Malbourne. He travels in the same carriage as the judge who had sentenced him, and tells him that he was innocent, but is unable to clear himself. Nobody recognises him at Malbourne. He hears his case discussed at the village inn, where he stops an hour, too much agitated to go to the rectory. "He never done it," is the general verdict.