“Hallelujah to the Lamb,
Who has purchased our pardon!
We will praise him again
When we pass over Jordan.”
If we talk of heaven on earth, surely they talk of earth in heaven; and if the angels are glad when a sinner repents, they must also feel joy in the joy and justification of the righteous. And though Martha and Ben’s friends and neighbors were rough and illiterate, they sang the songs of Zion, and spoke the language of the redeemed, and they gathered round the happy son and mother with the unselfish sympathy of the sons and daughters of God. Truly, as the rector said, when speaking of the meeting, “There is something very humanizing in Methodism.”
“And something varry civilizing, too, parson,” answered the squire; “if they hedn’t been in t’ Methodist chapel, singing and praising God, they ‘ud hev been in t’ ale-house, drinking and dancing, and varry like quarreling. There’s no need to send t’ constable to a Methodist rejoicing. I reckon Mary Clough’ll hev to marry Ben Craven in t’ long run, now.”
“I think so. Ben is to open the mill again, and to have charge of it for Mary. It seems a likely match.”
“Yes. I’m varry glad. Things looked black for Ben at one time.”
“Only we don’t know what is bad and what good.”
“It’s a great pity we don’t. It ‘ud be a varry comfortable thing when affairs seemed a’ wrong if some angel would give us a call, and tell us we were a bit mistaken. There’s no sense i’ letting folks be unhappy, when they might be taking life wi’ a bit o’ comfort.”
“But, then, our faith would not be exercised.”
“I don’t much mind about that. I’d far rather hev things settled. I don’t like being worritted and unsettled i’ my mind.”
The squire spoke with a touching irritability, and every one looked sadly at him. The day after Antony’s frank statement of his plans, the squire rode early into Bradford and went straight to the house of old Simon Whaley. For three generations the Whaleys had been the legal advisers of the Hallams, and Simon had touched the lives or memory of all three. He was a very old man, with a thin, cute face, and many wrinkles on his brow; and though he seldom left his house, age had not dimmed his intellect, or dulled his good-will toward the family with whom he had been so frequently associated.