Summary. It was the Reverend Simeon Gaunt, and he did it not for gain but for what he took to be duty, having learned that afternoon what Aziz was to the master of the house. Here is how the matter closed.

The Reckoning. The wound tells its own tale before any witness does. A great many strokes, evenly laid, patient rather than furious — that is not a struggle, and it is not a robbery. A thief does not compose the body face-down with the arms set straight, nor leave a prayer-book open on the sill of a man who kept none. And whoever came into that room left the Maharaja's Sapphire hanging at the dead man's throat, though it was worth a fortune and lay there for the taking. Robbery unmakes itself on that single fact, and with it goes Effie Strange's want, however long she'd eyed the stone through the evening — she was shut upstairs the whole night besides, vouched by her hostess and the drawn curtains. Whatever was done here, nothing was taken. The killer wanted the man, not his gems.

The house cleared itself readily enough once the hours were laid end to end. Xerxes lay drugged and witnessed in the west wing, his valet answering for the draught and the hour; he could not have held the scourge. Dr Quill was logged out at the gate at midnight and abed under his housekeeper's eye before the death window opened. Wat Frew was in the cellar with two porters and a running tally-book until near three — a man who trades in secrets, but who had learned none worth Aziz's life. Lavinia gave her sitting until near two with Effie beside her the whole while, neither able to reach the east passage. Cousin R sat unmoved in the library at half-past twelve and again near two, by a footman's own coffee-tray account, and in any case a man who reveres a secret devotion does not compose it into a corpse. The Colonel had quit the house before midnight, logged out to Cruikshank Manor and passed the night there. That leaves the house nearly emptied of hands capable of the thing — but for one.

Gaunt's room lies above the east passage; no one sat with him after midnight, and no one needed to, for none suspected him. He keeps his own scourge and his own discipline, nightly, and preaches — openly, to any who'd hear it — that the wages of sin fall due upon the sinner and upon the occasion of sin alike. That is not a general creed of self-mortification turned outward on a whim; it is a specific doctrine, and it names its object precisely: not the sinner alone, but what occasions the sin. On the afternoon before, he had pressed the housekeeper, sharply, on why the young gentleman's rooms opened upon the master's own — and gone quiet at her answer. He was seen after, standing long outside the oratory door. A man does not stand so long outside a door for idle curiosity.

What Aziz was to Xerxes is the household's own affair, and no business of this file beyond its bearing on the case — an attachment of long standing, the kind a house does not discuss above the servants' hall. What it drove Gaunt to is very much my business. Believing he had found the occasion of another man's sin under his own sister's roof, he came down after one o'clock, let himself into the latched oratory, and administered what he took to be a debt owed to Heaven — patient, even strokes, not a man in fury but a man about his office. He then laid the body out as he would lay out any penitent, arms straight, prayer-book set open though the dead man kept none, and went back up to his own devotions as though the ledger were now balanced. He touched nothing of value, because nothing of value was ever his object.

I had nearly set aside the standing-at-the-door business as a small thing, a man's private brooding and no more. But it is the hinge the whole matter turns on — it is what tells us he knew, and knew in time to act that same night. Without it, this is a case with a doctrine and no occasion for it. With it, the doctrine finds its mark.

The charge is wilful killing. Gaunt does not deny the strokes; he calls them duty. The law will call them murder, and I have written it so.

When Gaunt descended past the sleeping hall,
He found Aziz had answered duty's call,
The oratory locked in winter's grip,
The scourge fell steady from the master's lip,
And there composed, the penitent lay still—
Sin answers always to the righteous will.