Chapter Twenty Seven.
“It was in and about the Mart’mas time
When the green leaves they were falling.”
Old Ballad.
That afternoon, when Captain Orde fell in with David Stephens, the two men had walked together to within a hundred yards of the Red House. Here, for it was almost dark, Captain Orde struck into one of the fields which would take him to Hardlands, and the other, standing for a moment as if lost in thought, went on through the red mud and the quantities of fallen leaves which had dropped from the hedge-row elms by his side.
As he passed along the wall enclosing Mr Mannering’s garden, a door opened, and Stokes came out, locking the door after him. David had stopped, and his peculiar figure probably marked him sufficiently even in the waning light, for the gardener said in a slow and rather injured voice,—
“That’s you, is it?”
“Yes, it’s me.”
“And you’m going to see Faith?”
“Yes, I am,” said Stephens; and the two men walked on side by side in silence.
At last Stokes began again heavily, as if he had been reflecting on the answer,—
“’Twould be a dale better if it warn’t you. That’s arl I’ve got to say, and I’ve said it a dale better.”
There was another silence before David spoke, with a fire of purpose contrasting strangely with the other man,—
“I don’t pretend that I don’t know what your words mean, and I don’t say they haven’t got something on their side. I suffered myself to be misguided by my own stubborn heart when I spoke of love to Faith. I should have known that this is no time for marrying and giving in marriage, with souls crying out of the darkness. It was a snare of the enemy to withhold me, and I was weak and feeble, instead of plucking out the eye, and cutting off though it were the right hand. I thought much of my own love, and that maybe we were called to work together in the vineyard, never rightly taking home to myself what was the sacrifice the Lord had called on me to make—”
David stopped suddenly with a tremor in his strong voice. Stokes was always slow of speech, and for a few moments there was no sound but that of the heavy steps trampling through mud and dead leaves.
“I doan’t know nowt of what ye’re talking up,” said the elder man at last, doggedly. “It’s my Faith as I’ve got to think of. Nowt else.”
“You’ve got your soul, and the souls of others, if you’d only see it,” said the other. But Stokes shook his head.
“Noa, I ain’t,” he said, “that’s the passon’s business. I bain’t no passon, nor yet no pracher, nor I doan’t think much o’ prachers as comes and takes t’ bread out o’ passon’s mouth. I ain’t nowt to do wi’ souls. I goes to choorch, and a’ll be buried up thyur comfor’able, and us doan’t want no prachers to Thorpe.”
“That’s the teaching of the enemy,” said Stephens, vehemently. “Don’t you ever think of the sin and wickedness about you? What of Tom Andrews, and Nathaniel Wills, and that poor girl at Peters’s farm? Don’t you believe that if their hearts have been stirred by a faithful messenger they might have been saved from their sins?”
“Noa, I doan’t,” said Stokes, with a persistent force of opposition. “That thyur Tom Anders has been a bad un ever since he wor a little chap, and stealed tummerts out o’ my basket before my very eyes. I told his feyther then as he’d be hanged before a’d done with un, and so a wull. And Nat Wills is another poor lot. Leave ’em aloan, and us’ll soon see th’ last of ’em. That’s watt I says.”
“Ay, what you all say, and the most any of you can do,” David said bitterly. “Parson and people all alike. He sits in his arm-chair and expects those poor sinners to come up to him, and preaches fine sermons in church, when there’s not one of those as wants the sermons most there to hear him. I walked twenty mile yesterday, and fetched Nat Wills home with me, and I’ve got him at my lodgings now; but if I hadn’t gone after him, do you think he’d have come to me?”
“Then you was a fule,” said Stokes, promptly. “He’ll never do you no good. An’ now you’ll be convertin’ him, and setting un up for a saent. I doan’t hold by they thyur doings.”
They had come into Thorpe by this time; a bright light streamed out from the blacksmith’s forge at the corner, where three roads met. A man who was standing there, with his face turned towards the fiery sparks struck out with every blow upon the anvil, looked round as he heard the advancing steps.
“Be that you, Tom?” he asked, peering into the darkness.
“What’s brought you in from Wesson this time o’ day?” said Stokes, answering one question by another in his slow deliberate way.
“Th’ old missess is tooked so bad, master fetched the doctor hisself, and sent me right off for the passon. I’m to bide hyur for un, and go back in his trap.”
“So th’ old woman’s come to her end at last, and has sent for the passon? Hyur’s Stephens been tryin’ to set down passons and choorch, and arl the rest o’t.”
“Ay; he’d like to have it a’ under his own thumb, for a’ he’s so smarl,” said Stringer, who, like most of the people about, knew David, and had nodded to him across Stokes. He did not mean to offer any offence by his words; it was only stating facts when he alluded to the young man’s personal appearance. “That’s the way wi’ the Methodists. My mawther wor wan, and she never gived poor feyther no quiet. But wann they’m took bad, they likes a rale minister. I take it very kindly o’ Passon Brent to turn to at this time o’ night.”
“Yes, he’ll go,” said Stephens, gravely, “and flatter with smooth words. But what has he done for that old woman’s life? Hasn’t she a name through the country for her hard, wicked, grasping ways? Has he ever been to her, and pleaded with her, and been faithful with her sin? Do you think the Lord’s Apostles were content to go and say a prayer over the poor souls that were dying?”
“Been and pladed with her?” said Stringer, at once. “You’d ha’ had a kettle of boiling water over you, if you’d tried that on wi’ the old missess. Noa, noa,—I doan’t say as passons is bound to ran risks wi’ the wommen, such as that. But they’ve been going on wi’ their ways for a good bit, and it bain’t so strange to they as’t is to you dissenters, as think you’ve found out something new, and must go runnin’ arl over the country a talking about it.”
“That’s it, Dannel, that’s it,” said the gardener, moved to a chuckling delight by his friend’s acuteness. “Passon knowed arl about it before you was born,” he added, turning on Stephens.
“It must be a new thing to you and me, though, before it can work on our hearts,” said the young man, almost passionately. “You think it’s enough for another man to know it, and to preach about it, but I tell you that you must feel its burning power in yourselves, and then it will give you no peace until you tell it out to others.”
At this moment there was a sound of wheels coming along the wet road, and Mr Brent drove up in his rough dog-cart. He pulled up sharply,—he did everything sharply,—and called out in the same tone,—
“Come, Stringer, are you there? Get up behind as fast as you can. As it is, with these roads we shall be a longer time than I can spare getting to Weston. Is that you, Stokes? The master has been complaining of Samuel again. The boy’s doing no good whatever at school.” And without waiting for an answer, or taking any notice of Stephens, who was standing in the full light of the forge, Mr Brent drove quickly off towards the farm.
Burge the blacksmith, who had come out to the door, and stood, lifting his cap with one hand, and passing the other through his straight black hair, was the first to make a remark upon the last-comer.
“He bain’t such a pleasant-spoken gentleman as old Passon Miles.”
“P’raps he bain’t,” said Stokes, gruffly; divided between injury on behalf of the culprit Samuel, and a fear of weakening what he looked upon as his late victory over Stephens and the dissenters. “P’raps you and me shouldn’t be so pleasant nayther if us had to turn out to Wesson, wann us had done our day’s work, to plaze the old missess.”
“Day’s work!” said the blacksmith, coughing violently, and going back to his labour. “I’d give something to kep your hours. I sim, sometimes, a smith ain’t got no hours. He’s at everybody’s call, worse luck to me.”
David had not heard the other men’s remarks. He was standing at the door of the smithy where he had first stopped, with his eyes fixed upon the ground, and the red glow from the forge lighting that side of his face which was nearest it. These fits of abstraction were not uncommon with him, and, as something which they did not understand, and set down as not quite right, added to the disfavour with which he was commonly regarded by the people of Thorpe. David was quite aware of this disfavour. He was in the position of a reformer attempting to benefit society against its will. Each sin of which he heard, and each neglect, smote on his excitable nature as a crime on the part of those who might have prevented it. Driven in very much upon himself and his inward communings,—for the fervour of his opinions found as little favour in the eyes of his brother Wesleyans as in those of Churchmen, and he himself shrank in disgust from all that appeared to him to savour of worldliness and self-advancement,—the one thought that was always in his mind lost its fair proportions and grew as, alas, the best within us may grow, out of shape and out of bounds. All that opposed him seemed to be the especial opposition of the Devil, a conviction leading to its corollary, that hardly any means could be thought unlawful which tended to circumvent the evil one. He regarded Anthony Miles as the chief adversary raised up against him, and the great wrong he had done him he would not have undone, though it weighed like lead upon his conscience.
When David at length lifted his eyes, and recalled his thoughts from old Mrs Mortimer’s deathbed, where he had concentrated them with a powerful purpose, and a stern disbelief in the adequacy of the means now on the way to Weston for her assistance, he found himself alone. The gardener, who was not unwilling to shake off his companion, had taken advantage of his abstraction, and departed. He lacked the energy of old Araunah, and had not attempted to hinder Stephens from seeing Faith by more decided opposition than lay in surly ungraciousness; but he knew that his wife and father would expect more from him, and made up his mind to keep silence as to the meeting and David’s intentions. He himself regarded the latter with a sort of contemptuous dislike, mainly, no doubt, arising from his deformity, but partly from the new-fangled opinions, which were both unpleasing to his ears and disturbing from the fact of their being presented to him when he was unprepared. His own religion consisted of Sunday services, in hearing an occasional chapter read to the old man by his wife, and less frequently in listening with astonished admiration to some glib answers in the catechism repeated by his youngest “little maed.” David’s passionate and fervent appeals were as confusing to his mind as it would have been to have had his meals at other times than those to which he had been accustomed always from his childhood. He therefore disliked him, but there was a certain torpidity in his most acute feelings, and he was not likely to interfere with Faith in any manner more active than by expressing his own poor opinion of her lover.
David himself, recalled to his position, went away from the blacksmith’s shed and walked through the village towards Mrs Miles’s cottage. It was now quite dark, and wild gusts of wind were sweeping across the fields, and up the street where thatched cottages stood back in little gardens with rows of bright chrysanthemums in flower before them. The children were safe in bed, the women, many of them, out talking or buying. Quite a little knot was gathered in the little shop which provided both groceries and clothing, and from which a cheerful light gleamed out upon the wet road. The warm brightness beckoned invitingly to the young man, who, as was not unusual with him, was both tired and hungry. He stopped for a moment to look with an almost wistful gaze at the group. The women were laughing at some jest, even the pinched features were smoothed and brightened. A little bitterness surged up in his heart as he contrasted himself with these people whom he was yearning over, spending himself for, and who would have given him, perhaps, scarcely so much as a kind word. What was he to them? And what were they to him that he should wrestle for them, ay, even give up his dearest hopes in life? There was Nat Wills’s mother laughing with the rest, while David was hungry because he had shared his little with the boy whom he, and he only, had walked those weary miles to reclaim. There was a thin woman whose husband was a drunkard, there was another whose daughter had left her,—he knew all the histories of these poor sin-stained lives, and for the instant a bitter sense of injustice swept upon him. Was he forever to stay in the darkness and the cold? Must he always put from himself light and love and pleasantness for the sake of those who neither cared for nor would hearken to him? Might he not turn away and leave them to their fate?
Ah, if he, standing thus, could repel the impulse, by the might of the love which bound him to their souls, do you not think that the Greater Love which helped him in his struggle would lead him with infinite tenderness, out of his loneliness and self-deception, into the full light of the perfect truth?