The servant who had followed me staggered back shuddering, and dropped to his knees.  “Oh, my God!” he said, “it’s Sir Percival!”

As the words passed his lips the clerk joined us, and at the same moment there was another and a last grating turn of the key in the lock.

“The Lord have mercy on his soul!” said the old man.  “He is doomed and dead.  He has hampered the lock.”

I rushed to the door.  The one absorbing purpose that had filled all my thoughts, that had controlled all my actions, for weeks and weeks past, vanished in an instant from my mind.  All remembrance of the heartless injury the man’s crimes had inflicted—­of the love, the innocence, the happiness he had pitilessly laid waste—­ of the oath I had sworn in my own heart to summon him to the terrible reckoning that he deserved—­passed from my memory like a dream.  I remembered nothing but the horror of his situation.  I felt nothing but the natural human impulse to save him from a frightful death.

“Try the other door!” I shouted.  “Try the door into the church!  The lock’s hampered.  You’re a dead man if you waste another moment on it.”

There had been no renewed cry for help when the key was turned for the last time.  There was no sound now of any kind, to give token that he was still alive.  I heard nothing but the quickening crackle of the flames, and the sharp snap of the glass in the skylight above.

I looked round at my two companions.  The servant had risen to his feet—­he had taken the lantern, and was holding it up vacantly at the door.  Terror seemed to have struck him with downright idiocy—­ he waited at my heels, he followed me about when I moved like a dog.  The clerk sat crouched up on one of the tombstones, shivering, and moaning to himself.  The one moment in which I looked at them was enough to show me that they were both helpless.

Hardly knowing what I did, acting desperately on the first impulse that occurred to me, I seized the servant and pushed him against the vestry wall.  “Stoop!” I said, “and hold by the stones.  I am going to climb over you to the roof—­I am going to break the skylight, and give him some air!”

The man trembled from head to foot, but he held firm.  I got on his back, with my cudgel in my mouth, seized the parapet with both hands, and was instantly on the roof.  In the frantic hurry and agitation of the moment, it never struck me that I might let out the flame instead of letting in the air.  I struck at the skylight, and battered in the cracked, loosened glass at a blow.  The fire leaped out like a wild beast from its lair.  If the wind had not chanced, in the position I occupied, to set it away from me, my exertions might have ended then and there.  I crouched on the roof as the smoke poured out above me with the flame.  The gleams and flashes of the light showed me the servant’s face staring up vacantly under the wall—­the clerk risen to his feet on the tombstone, wringing his hands in despair—­and the scanty population of the village, haggard men and terrified women, clustered beyond in the churchyard—­all appearing and disappearing, in the red of the dreadful glare, in the black of the choking smoke.  And the man beneath my feet!—­the man, suffocating, burning, dying so near us all, so utterly beyond our reach!