The Love That Prevailed

by Frank Frankfort Moore

Wesley dropped upon a stone and wiped his forehead, and some of the fishermen did the same, while others were loosing the tackles, in readiness to bind them on the next boat.

Nelly Polwhele was kneeling beside him in an instant—her hair had become unfastened, for she had been working hard with the other women, and fell in strands down her back and over her shoulders. Her face was wet.

“Oh, sir; this is overmuch for you!” she cried.

“Far overmuch, after all that you have gone through since morning. Pray rest you in the shade. There is a jug of cider cooling in a pail of water fresh drawn from the well. You need refreshment.”

He took her hand, smiling.

“I am refreshed, dear child,” he said. “I am refreshed.”

“Why should that man he treated different from the rest of us; tell me that,” came the voice of a man who had been watching them, and now stepped hastily forward. Wesley saw that he was Bennet. “Is there a man in the village who doesn't know that 'tis John Wesley and his friends that has brought this visitation upon us? Was there anything like to this before he came with his new-fangled preaching, drawing down the wrath of Heaven upon such as have been fool enough to join themselves to him? Was there any of you, men, that thought with trembling limbs and sweating foreheads of the Day of Judgment until John Wesley turned the head of that poor man Pritchard, and made him blaspheme, wrapping himself in Wesley's old cloak, and telling you that'twas the mantle of a prophet?”

Nelly had risen to her feet before his last sentence was spoken, but a moment afterward she sprang to one side with a cry. She was just in time to avoid the charge of a man on horseback. But Bennet was not so fortunate. Before he was aware of a danger threatening him, he felt himself carried off his feet, a strong man's hands grasping the collars of his coat, so that he was swung off the ground, dangling and scrawling like a puppet. Down the horse sprang into the water, until it was surging over the pommel of the saddle. Then, and only then, the rider loosed his hold, reining in his horse with one hand, while with the other he flung the man headforemost a couple of yards farther into the waves.

“The hound! the hound! that will cool his ardour!” cried Parson Rodney, backing his horse out of the water, while the people above him roared, and the man, coming to the surface like a grampus, struck out for a part of the beach most remote from the place where he had stood.

Wesley was on his feet and had already taken a step or two down the shingle, for Parson Rodney's attitude suggested his intention of preventing the man from landing, when he saw that Bennet was a strong swimmer, and that he, too, had put the same interpretation upon the rider's raising of his hunting crop.