CHAPTER V
THE FRUIT OF FAITH
Matters fell out much as Hilary Woodrow desired. He returned to Dawlish in October, and soon afterwards Brendon brought his wife and child to the sea.
His master and he took long walks together among the Haldon hills, and Daniel learnt with enormous satisfaction that the other had of late experienced great changes of spirit. The big man gloried in this fact from a personal point of view, because it appeared to justify his immense faith in prayer. He had petitioned Heaven for Hilary Woodrow; and here dawned the answer. Daniel doubted not that this was the beginning of a larger and deeper conversion. He urged Woodrow to go farther.
"There's no standing still," he said. "There's no standing still for you now—no more than the light stands still when the sun rises. Brighter and brighter surely it must grow, till the full light of the Gospel of the Son of God warms your heart. Man! what's deeper than that, what shows all clearer than that—or throws a darker shadow—the shadow of our sins?"
"What a preacher you are!"
"'Tis the good tidings of what you say. They make even my slow mind move quick. 'Ye believe in God, believe also in Me'; 'tis that I'm thinking."
"Ah, Dan, that's a very different matter."
"God'll show you 'tis the same."
Thus oftentimes they talked; then work called Brendon, and he went home again. But his wife and child stopped for some weeks longer beside the sea; because little Gregory gained benefit from the change, and Sarah Jane was anxious to remain for his sake.
The old-time fires were now banked deep in Daniel's mind under the changes and chances of his life. Jealous he was, since a large power of jealousy pertained to his nature; but for Woodrow he had long since failed to feel anything but the staunch devotion of a brother. Apart from this emotion, awakened by the circumstance of the farmer's personal goodness to him, another far deeper, begot of natural instinct, told him that Hilary was harmless now. Whatever his attitude towards Sarah Jane had been, the very openness of their friendship and the close intimacy of their conversation under his own eyes and before his own ears, had convinced the husband that no shadow of danger existed in their relations. The past in truth was dead enough, and Brendon, a man of clean mind, despite jealousy, made the mistake of supposing that it had never been. He went further and, looking backward, blamed himself for an unseemly attitude, and confessed his sin to his Maker.