The news of my being free on bail drove Sir Percival, as I believe, to his last resources.  The attempted attack on the road was one of those resources, and the suppression of all practical proof of his crime, by destroying the page of the register on which the forgery had been committed, was the other, and the surest of the two.  If I could produce no extract from the original book to compare with the certified copy at Knowlesbury, I could produce no positive evidence, and could threaten him with no fatal exposure.  All that was necessary to the attainment of his end was, that he should get into the vestry unperceived, that he should tear out the page in the register, and that he should leave the vestry again as privately as he had entered it.

On this supposition, it is easy to understand why he waited until nightfall before he made the attempt, and why he took advantage of the clerk’s absence to possess himself of the keys.  Necessity would oblige him to strike a light to find his way to the right register, and common caution would suggest his locking the door on the inside in case of intrusion on the part of any inquisitive stranger, or on my part, if I happened to be in the neighbourhood at the time.

I cannot believe that it was any part of his intention to make the destruction of the register appear to be the result of accident, by purposely setting the vestry on fire.  The bare chance that prompt assistance might arrive, and that the books might, by the remotest possibility, be saved, would have been enough, on a moment’s consideration, to dismiss any idea of this sort from his mind.  Remembering the quantity of combustible objects in the vestry—­the straw, the papers, the packing-cases, the dry wood, the old worm-eaten presses—­all the probabilities, in my estimation, point to the fire as the result of an accident with his matches or his light.

His first impulse, under these circumstances, was doubtless to try to extinguish the flames, and failing in that, his second impulse (ignorant as he was of the state of the lock) had been to attempt to escape by the door which had given him entrance.  When I had called to him, the flames must have reached across the door leading into the church, on either side of which the presses extended, and close to which the other combustible objects were placed.  In all probability, the smoke and flame (confined as they were to the room) had been too much for him when he tried to escape by the inner door.  He must have dropped in his death-swoon, he must have sunk in the place where he was found, just as I got on the roof to break the skylight window.  Even if we had been able, afterwards, to get into the church, and to burst open the door from that side, the delay must have been fatal.  He would have been past saving, long past saving, by that time.  We should only have given the flames free ingress into the church—­the church, which was now preserved, but which, in that event, would have shared the fate of the vestry.  There is no doubt in my mind, there can be no doubt in the mind of any one, that he was a dead man before ever we got to the empty cottage, and worked with might and main to tear down the beam.