The Love That Prevailed

by Frank Frankfort Moore

He shook hands with the farmer, the water-finder and the smith, saying a word to each. Then he turned to where the two young women had been.

They had fled through the open door, Nelly having been the one to judge of the exact moment for flight.

They appeared at the supper table, however, but not taking their seats until they had waited upon all the others of the party. That was the patriarchal custom of the time. Nelly Polwhele only wished that the severe discipline of a side table for the serving girls had been in force at the Mill. Remote from the long oak table on which generations of her family had dined, she might have had a pleasant chat with her friend Susan, and then steal off, evading the lecture which she felt was impending from the strict Mr. Wesley. As it was, the most she could do for herself was to choose an unobtrusive place at the further end from the clergyman.

She hoped that the excellence of the salmon which she had carried through the valley of the Lana would induce him to refrain from asking any questions in regard to the game that was being played at the moment of his entrance.

But Mr. Wesley was vigilant. He espied her before he had finished his salmon, and had expressed his thanks to her for having burdened herself with it. It was his thirst for information of all sorts that had caused him to enquire how it was possible to have for supper a fish that must have been swimming in the sea, or at least in a salmon river, which the Lana was not, a few hours before. Was not Porthawn the nearest fishing village, and it was six miles away? Then it was that Mrs. Pendelly had told him of Nelly's journey on foot bearing her father's gift to his friend the miller.

“I should like to have a word or two with you, my dear,” said Mr. Wesley when he had thanked her. “I wish to learn something of the people of Porthawn. I am on my way thither to preach, and I like to learn as much as is possible of the people who, I hope, will hear what I have to say to them.”

Nelly blushed and tried to say that she was afraid she could tell him nothing that he could not learn from any other source—that was what was on her mind—but somehow her voice failed her. She murmured something; became incoherent, and then ate her salmon at a furious rate.

The miller, although he had felt bound to offer hospitality to the stranger who had appeared at his door, knew that his other guests—with the exception, it might be, of Jake Pullsford—would feel, as he himself did, that the presence of this austere clergyman would interfere with their good fellowship at supper and afterwards. He and his associates knew one another with an intimacy that had been maturing for thirty years, and the sudden coming of a stranger among them could not but cause a certain reserve in the natural freedom of their intercourse.

The miller had a constant fear that this Mr. Wesley would in the course of the evening say something bitter about the parsons who hunted and bred game-cocks and fought them, laying money on their heads—on parsons who lived away from their parishes, allowing indifferent curates to conduct the services of the church—of parsons who boasted of being able to drink the Squires under the table. The miller had no confidence in his power of keeping silent when he felt that the parson with whom he was on the easiest of terms and for whose gamecocks he prepared a special mixture of stiffening grain food was being attacked by a stranger, so he rather regretted that his duty compelled him to invite Mr. Wesley, of whom he, in common with thousands of the people of the West country, had heard a great deal, to supper on this particular evening.

But in the course of the meal he began to think that he would have no reason to put any restraint upon himself. He soon became aware of the fact that this Reverend John Wesley was not altogether the austere controversialist which rumour, becoming more and more exaggerated as it travelled West, made him out to be. Before supper was over he had come to the conclusion that Parson Rodney as a companion could not hold a candle to this Mr. Wesley.