"I am," said Kettle exultantly. "I've chucked the sea for good. I've taken a farm in Wharfedale, and I'm going to it this very week."
"Then," said Mr. Isaac sardonically, "if you've taken a farm, don't let me wish you any further ill. Good-morning."
But Kettle was not to be damped out of conceit with his life's desire by a few ill-natured words. He gave Mr. Isaac Bird his final blessing, commenting on his ancestors, his personal appearance, his prospects of final salvation, and then pleasantly took his leave. He was too much occupied in the preliminaries of his new life to have much leisure just then for further cultivation of the gentle art of insult.
The farm he had rented lay in the Wharfe Valley above Skipton, and, though its acreage was large, a good deal was made up of mere moorland sheep pasture. Luckily he recognized that a poetical taste for a rural life might not necessarily imply the whole mystery of stock rearing and agriculture, and so he hired a capable foreman as philosopher and guide. And here I may say that his hobby by no means ruined him, as might reasonably be expected; for in the worst years he never dropped more than fifty or sixty pounds, and frequently he ran the place without loss, or even at a profit.
But though it is hard to confess that a man's ideal comes short of his expectations when put to the trial, I am free to confess that although he enjoyed it all, Kettle was not at his happiest when he was attending his crops or his sheep, or haggling with his fellow farmers on Mondays over fat beasts in Skipton market.
He had gone back to one of his more practiced tastes--if one calls it a taste--the cultivation of religion. The farm stood bleak and lonely on the slope of a hillside, and on both flanks of the dale were other lonely farms as far as the eye could see. There was no village. The nearest place of worship was four miles away, and that was merely a church. But in the valley beside the Wharfe was a small gray stone chapel, reared during some bygone day for the devotions of some forgotten sect. Kettle got this into his control.
He was by no means a rich man. The row of houses in Birkenhead were for the most part tenanted by the wives of mercantile marine engineers and officers, who were chronically laggard with their rent, and whom esprit de corps forbade him to press; and so, what with this deficit, and repairs and taxes, and one thing and another, it was rarely that half the projected £500 a year found its way into his banking account. But a tithe of whatever accrued to him was scrupulously set aside for the maintenance of the chapel.
He imported there the grim, narrow creed he had learned in South Shields, and threw open the door for congregations. He was entirely in earnest over it all, and vastly serious. Failing another minister, he himself took the services, and though, on occasion, some other brother was induced to preach, it was he himself who usually mounted the pulpit beneath the sounding-board. He purchased an American organ, and sent his eldest daughter weekly to take lessons in Skipton till she could play it. And Mrs. Kettle herself led the singing.
Still further, the chapel has its own collection of hymns, specially written, printed and dedicated to its service. The book is Captain Kettle's first published effort. Heaven and its author alone know under what wild circumstances most of those hymns were written.
The chapel started its new span of life with a congregation meagre enough, but Sunday by Sunday the number grew. They are mostly Nonconformists in the dales, and when once a man acquires a taste for dissent, he takes a sad delight in sampling his neighbors' variations of creed. Some came once and were not seen again. Others came and returned. They felt that this was the loneliest of all modern creeds; indeed, Kettle preached as much, and one can take a melancholy pride in splendid isolation.