At last Stokes began again heavily, as if he had been reflecting on the answer,—
“’Twould be a dale better if it warn’t you. That’s arl I’ve got to say, and I’ve said it a dale better.”
There was another silence before David spoke, with a fire of purpose contrasting strangely with the other man,—
“I don’t pretend that I don’t know what your words mean, and I don’t say they haven’t got something on their side. I suffered myself to be misguided by my own stubborn heart when I spoke of love to Faith. I should have known that this is no time for marrying and giving in marriage, with souls crying out of the darkness. It was a snare of the enemy to withhold me, and I was weak and feeble, instead of plucking out the eye, and cutting off though it were the right hand. I thought much of my own love, and that maybe we were called to work together in the vineyard, never rightly taking home to myself what was the sacrifice the Lord had called on me to make—”
David stopped suddenly with a tremor in his strong voice. Stokes was always slow of speech, and for a few moments there was no sound but that of the heavy steps trampling through mud and dead leaves.
“I doan’t know nowt of what ye’re talking up,” said the elder man at last, doggedly. “It’s my Faith as I’ve got to think of. Nowt else.”
“You’ve got your soul, and the souls of others, if you’d only see it,” said the other. But Stokes shook his head.
“Noa, I ain’t,” he said, “that’s the passon’s business. I bain’t no passon, nor yet no pracher, nor I doan’t think much o’ prachers as comes and takes t’ bread out o’ passon’s mouth. I ain’t nowt to do wi’ souls. I goes to choorch, and a’ll be buried up thyur comfor’able, and us doan’t want no prachers to Thorpe.”
“That’s the teaching of the enemy,” said Stephens, vehemently. “Don’t you ever think of the sin and wickedness about you? What of Tom Andrews, and Nathaniel Wills, and that poor girl at Peters’s farm? Don’t you believe that if their hearts have been stirred by a faithful messenger they might have been saved from their sins?”
“Noa, I doan’t,” said Stokes, with a persistent force of opposition. “That thyur Tom Anders has been a bad un ever since he wor a little chap, and stealed tummerts out o’ my basket before my very eyes. I told his feyther then as he’d be hanged before a’d done with un, and so a wull. And Nat Wills is another poor lot. Leave ’em aloan, and us’ll soon see th’ last of ’em. That’s watt I says.”