Summary. It was the Reverend Simeon Gaunt who kept that appointment, and he kept it for no reason baser than conscience: he judged Wat Frew's whole manner of living a catalogue of sin, and he imposed death upon him as a penance, a righteous execution rather than any act of self-interest. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The room told the tale before any person did. Wat left the supper-table shortly after ten with an appointment to keep, and he kept it in the one chamber of that house fitted for such a purpose in a certain man's eyes — the disused chapel-room, with its cold altar, past the linen-room, far from both the smoking-room and the séance parlour, a place no one wandered into by accident but a place a penitent might choose on purpose. Dr Quill set the death between eleven and midnight and was particular that the marks were those of a flogging, not a fall or a blade, and the instrument confirmed it: a flagellant's weighted, knotted scourge, of a kind kept for the discipline of one's own flesh, not a length from the house stores nor a sailor's tarred cord. Whoever used it left it in plain view, and whoever laid Wat out after — hands folded, coat straightened, candle lit, PENITENT chalked above his head — did the work slowly, without the haste of a man expecting discovery. That is not the manner of a frightened hand striking out at a blackmailer. That is a man completing a rite he believes lawful in a higher court than mine.

Nearly the whole table had cause to wish Wat ill, and that is precisely what obscured the matter rather than illuminating it. Effie Strange bought her comfort from him alone and had been begging him for a withheld delivery — but she never once loosed her neighbours' hands in Lavinia's closed circle through the death window, and in any case he was her only supply; she had every reason to want him alive and threatening, not dead and silent. The Colonel had been paying Wat to keep quiet about a private grief and certain payments, and had called him a rat to his face — but Cecil sat with brandy in hand alongside Xerxes and Aziz in the smoking-room the whole while, and his declared remedy was the law he had openly threatened, not a scourging in a cold chapel. Xerxes and Aziz accounted for each other from eleven onward, served without a break by the footman, and neither went near the east passage. Lady Lavinia held her sitting from a little after eleven with three sitters joined hand to hand until the alarm was raised, and Dr Quill was one of that ring himself — his opportunity closes with hers, and besides, the unhurried reverence of the laying-out is no work of a physician's frightened improvisation. Wat's knowledge of Lavinia's stage career and her sittings gave her cause enough for fear, but fear held by joined hands cannot cross a house.

That leaves the one man who wanted nothing from Wat and had spoken his mind at supper before the whole table, asking who would answer for such a man's soul — a question I confess I took at the time for a clergyman's excess, and did not weigh as I should have. He alone declined the sitting and withdrew, by his own word, to pray; no other soul set eyes on him from the rising of the party to the finding of the body. He carries the scourge for his own discipline, which is a fact half the household could have told me and none thought to, since a man beating himself in private is thought merely eccentric, not dangerous to his neighbour. It very nearly slipped my notice altogether — that the same cord serves for penance turned inward or outward, and that a man convinced of his own righteousness sees no difference in the object, only in the sinner before him. Wat Frew, who lent and squeezed and supplied to the weak by design, was as full a catalogue of sin as Gaunt was ever likely to meet under one roof, and Gaunt did what he believed his office required. He did not hide the cord because he does not believe he has committed a crime; he believes he has discharged one. I have charged the Reverend Simeon Gaunt with the wilful killing of Wat Frew, and the file may close on that.

Gaunt took his cord to the chapel and prayed,
Then summoned poor Wat, whom the house long obeyed,
And beat down the sinner with knots of his scourge,
While servants slept on and the candles would merge,
The moral, we're certain, burns bright as the flame:
That righteous hands falter—but not without shame.