Atonement -- Fiction; Clergy -- England -- Fiction; Illegitimate children -- Fiction
Meanwhile the boycott was nowhere more operative than in Long Stow
itself, and no human being came near the rectory, where the rector
subsisted on a providential store of bacon and the daily deposit of
eggs, and on strange bread of his own baking, for he would risk no more
insults in the shops. But one night a forgotten friend came back into
his life: his collie, Glen, came bounding down the drive to meet him,
and the mad uproar of that welcome was heard through half the village,
and duly became the talk. The dog had been a vagabond and a rogue for
six wild weeks, and it came back gaunt and hard, its brush clotted and
raw underneath with the spray from a farmer's gun. Carlton washed the
wound with warm water, and the two pariahs supped together, and lay that
night upon the same bed, and went abroad together next morning, to try
the last man left.
The day after that they stayed at home, and word reached the hall that
the rector had been seen among the ruins of his church; he was, indeed,
exploring them for the first time, and that both with method and
deliberation. When seen, however (from the lane that runs under the
fine east window of to-day, past the lawn-tennis court which was then a
fowl run, and the glebe that is still the glebe), he was seated on a
sandstone block in front of the little lean-to shed; and, as a matter of
fact, his back was to the ruins. He was contemplating similar blocks and
slabs of the undressed stone that lay where they had been lying on
Midsummer Day: some were still smutty from the fire, all were slightly
stained by the weather, otherwise there was no change that Carlton could
see as he sat thus. At one end of the shed rose a great yellow cairn of
material raw from the quarry--a stack of stones about as much of one
size and shape as so many lumps of sugar; enough to finish the
transepts, as matters had stood; a mere fraction of the amount required
now. Carlton looked on what he had got, and his eyes closed in a
calculation beyond his powers in mental arithmetic; he had to take a
pencil to it, and then a foot-rule to the blackened courses, and
presently a pair of compasses to the plans in the study.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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