His mistakes, at any rate, we may hope are over now; his battles fought, his besetting sins burnt away in that fire of the Lord in whom he believed. He followed the light, when he saw it, to the best of his ability, and he fell into bogs and ditches! Was the light therefore a delusion? Was his zeal wasted? I trow not. Our martyrs are troublesome people, troublesome both to themselves and to their generation. They see through curiously coloured glasses, they have a huge capability for tilting at windmills, and tumbling into pitfalls. They spill their own blood freely, and occasionally their brothers' as well; and yet, clinging to their ideal at all costs and to the uttermost, they are still saving salt in the world, witnesses of something that is worth suffering, worth dying—worth even living for. That noble army is drawn from every nation, and its members are of every creed. They are sometimes, alas! persecutors as well as persecuted; but in one point they are alike: their lives and actions preach the gospel of endurance and courage. They lift anew symbols of sacrifice, and so draw men's hearts after them.
George Sauls never met Meg again after the interview which lost him the case. She considered herself under an everlasting debt of gratitude to him; but it was a debt which, unfortunately, could never be cancelled. Gratitude, like friendship, was "not what he wanted". She never did full justice to the nature that was so unlike her own; but then "justice" is a rather rare commodity.
"I didn't know that I had it in me to be such a soft idiot," he said to his mother curtly, when he had told her that the preacher had been acquitted and that she must forget that dream they had had about the finding of diamonds.
Mrs. Sauls looked at him, with the rare tears standing in her eyes. "My dear, the world would have been a worse place for me anyhow, if you had not had any soft spot in your heart," she said.
"Oh d——n my heart! One should be made without one," said George.
And the old lady laughed and shook her head. "It's too good to be damned, my son." And, to herself she added: "And two women can swear to that who've good cause to know".
Of her own blood relations Meg saw little in the years that followed. Her life and theirs were too wide apart for it to be practicable for her to hold both to them and to her husband. Some women might, perhaps, have managed to cling to both; but Meg was not capable of a divided allegiance. She lived and worked for and with Barnabas, giving her strength and heart and soul as entirely and ungrudgingly as ever woman gave, and finding her happiness in the giving. No doubt she found sorrow too, seeing that increased capabilities of joy mean also increased capabilities of grief; but, after all, roses are worth their thorns even in this world.
On the evening of the day following the trial she stood beside the preacher at the window of their room in Stepney. The sun was going down like a red ball, sinking slowly behind the many twisted chimney-pots. Meg looked out on the murky yellow haze, and the crowded street, and in her heart was a great thankfulness.
"I've been thinkin' ower som'ut that Tom said last night. Would ye as lief bide wi' my father a bit till I ha' got things straighter for ye?" said Barnabas.
Meg shook her head. "No, I wouldn't. What has Tom been saying?"