‘Oh, Mr Llewellyn, if you loved the people as I do, you would find it quite as easy as talking to your family at home. I do think of what I wish to say to them; sometimes the thought walks with me, as you might say, all day long; but I seldom use the words I’ve been dreaming of. I go to the spot with my mind full of some set speech, but when I see the people who wait for me—all of them old neighbours or children whom I’ve seen grow up amongst us—and most of them dear friends, I feel as if my very soul went out to meet them, yearning to gather them all safe into the fold. The words in which to warn and entreat them come too quick then to my lips for utterance, and sometimes I’ve had to swallow down my sobs before I could find a voice with which to speak. The difficulty is not to speak, Mr Llewellyn. The hard part is to keep silence, when one sees so many whom one loves living for nothing but to eat and to drink, and as if there were no God in the world.’
The farmer and his wife had been regarding Hugh Owen during this speech with open-eyed amazement—Nell, with a scared look, half fear and half annoyance.
‘Eh, lad,’ said Mr Llewellyn, ‘but it’s a rare gift, and you’ve got it, there’s no doubt of that. But as for living to eat and drink, we must do it, or we shouldn’t live at all, and we do it for others as well as ourselves. What would become of my missus there, and Nell now for the matter of that, if I didn’t see after the ploughing and reaping, and wife after the dairy and the bakehouse. We’d all be dead of starvation by the end of the year if I took to preaching in the fields like you, instead of farming them.’
‘Indeed, yes, Mr Llewellyn, you quite mistake if you think I consider it part of religion to neglect the work we have been given to do. But we can live to God and do our duty at one and the same time. It seems so difficult to me,’ continued the young enthusiast, as he flung his hair off his brow, and lifted his dark eyes to Nell’s face, ‘to live in the country, surrounded by God’s works, and not remember Him. Why, a countryside like Usk is a continual church-going. Every leafy tree is a cathedral—the flowery meadows are altar carpets—each wild bird singing in its thankfulness a chorister. God’s face is reflected in the least of His works. How can we look at them and forget Him?’
‘Ay, ay, my lad,’ responded the farmer, as with a glance at his wife, as much as to say, ‘he’s as mad as a March hare,’ he rose to quit the house for the stables.
Hugh directed his attention more particularly to Nell.
‘I hope I haven’t worried you,’ he said sweetly. ‘I do not often introduce these subjects into my ordinary conversation, but your father drew me on before I was quite aware of it. I have brought you a book to read, which cannot fail to interest you, Livingstone’s Travels in Africa. Have you seen it yet?’
She took the volume listlessly, and answered ‘No.’
‘How I should love to travel amongst those wild tribes,’ continued Hugh enthusiastically; ‘to make friends with them, and bring them to a knowledge of the truth. The fauna and the flora, too, of strange climates, how interesting they must be. To have undertaken such a journey—to have left such a record behind one—would almost satisfy the ambition of a lifetime.’
‘You should be a missionary,’ said Nell; ‘you are cut out for it.’