A Man of the Moors

by Halliwell Sutcliffe

A mile and a half due west of Marshcotes, on the highroad that takes you straight to the Lancashire border, lies another village—little more than an overgrown hamlet it is—which is just as compact as its neighbour is straggling. Marshcotes runs down one hill and up another, branching off into queer little streets on the way: but Ling Crag stands square to the moor-top winds, and gets a sight of the sun long after the shelter-seeking Marshcotes houses are greying with twilight.

To this day they are a people to themselves, the villagers of Ling Crag, and, though you come but a league's distance from their boundaries, they account you a foreigner. Slow to speak well of a neighbour, and quick to help him in need; keen as can be when a bargain is toward; more respectful to their conceptions of tangible, everyday duty than to class distinctions; assured, beyond reach of doubt or argument, that their village is the hub of the universe—of such sort are the people of Ling Crag.

A generation or two ago, however, they were a rougher folk than now, leading rougher lives. A soul-searching, hell-fearing Methodism was the dominant note of their existence; and Methodism has ever since been a vital force with them, though it has changed with the change it has wrought in the people. With their rugged strength, their fearlessness of purpose, it was only natural that religion, when first it came into the midst of their wild, strenuous lives, should fit itself in a measure to the soil. They were harsh by example of the winds and the storms that had reared them, generation after generation, and the religion that sought to teach them must also be harsh in its precepts. So their preachers went in and out, and spoke the language of the folk they had to deal with, and led them, little by little, into the quieter places of charity and long-suffering. But Ling Crag was young to religion then, and fear was the larger part of their faith. They were much addicted to superstition, too, these upland folk; and when they sinned, they sinned with groanings of the spirit and retrospective shakings of the head at the old Adam who was responsible for it all.

There is one biggish house in Ling Crag, planted down shoulder to shoulder with its cottage neighbours. It stands on the right hand of the road as you come from Marshcotes; the strip of front garden, with its boundary wall, round-topped and sombre, gives it an air that narrowly escapes haughtiness by contrast with the other dwellings in the hamlet. The Hirsts had lived here almost as long as the Lomaxes had held Marshcotes Manor. They were roysterers once, and the family fortunes were like to evaporate in cards and drink and horseflesh, when old Tom Hirst, luckily for his only son, "took religion"—took it whole-heartedly: he pondered hourly upon his latter end, and fell to crying loud "Amens" in Ebenezer Chapel whenever a gathering was toward, and laboured hard to bring up Gabriel, the child of his old age, in the way of godliness. Gabriel was born just when the reformation heat was strongest, and old Hirst, in the choice of his son's name, thought to hall-mark him for life with the brand of piety. At ten the boy had already learned to believe himself singled out by the Almighty, with peculiar care, for the receipt of punishment; had learnt to pray against the lusts of the flesh; had learnt to feel himself the loathliest and most persistent sinner of all God's creatures. As he grew up, he trained himself more and more to pit his gaining strength against the devil, and wrestled mightily by night and day.

Old Tom died, and his wife followed him a twelvemonth after; and Gabriel, each time that he stood by the grave-side in the wind-swept burial-ground, longed to bury his own flesh also out of sight; the worms of earth, it seemed to him, were gentler than that other Worm that dieth not, and longer life meant but a longer space in which to sin. But Heaven shut its ears to his prayers, and would not give him that coveted six-by-three of rest. He walked in perpetual fear—a fear that sometimes wrung the sweat from his body—and could lay his hands to nothing; he could only stride restlessly across the sheep-tracks of the moor, or ride like a madman along the naked upland highways. He avoided chapel and the society of his fellows, feeling himself a leper among clean men; he was like to go mad from isolation and self-commune.

It was then that the Wesleyan minister at Marshcotes got hold of him, and drew him a comforting picture of the joys of being saved. He went to a Revival; he heard men and women all about him crying on God that they were saved—others groaning in the throes of their final wrestling-bout with the Adversary—others again laughing with hysterical delight. His soul kindled to the spiritual fire. He felt himself lifted on mighty pinions; the sound of swinging chants of praise was in his ears, the swirl of countless rushing angels fanned his cheeks. He closed his eyes, and a great sob broke from him. He was saved.

From that day onward he began to preach; his long experience of such sort of fight lent him substance for his sermons, and his inborn strenuousness of character made an orator of him. He did not join the regular ministry, but became established as a local preacher. His fame, little by little, grew big among the congregations of such chapels as lay on the line of his quarterly circuit, till in time "Gabriel Hirst" grew to be a name to conjure with. All Marshcotes and Cranshaw, every scattered hamlet for miles around, knew Gabriel "by sight and by speech," and the Ling Crag folk were mightily proud of their preacher. Things have altered with Methodism since then, but in those days it was a matter of course that Gabriel should have a special band of admirers who would go as far even as Ludworth to hear him preach on a Sunday morning. So devoted, indeed, was the preacher's "following," that it was much as if he had a regular congregation of his own; whether he held forth in Ling Crag or Marshcotes, Ludworth or Cranshaw, always the same knot of familiars grouped themselves round the chapel doors after service, and estimated to a nicety the amount of Gabriel's recent inspiration. Indeed, when the fire of certain newly-roused passions began to drive him into the wilderness, the change might be gauged with tolerable accuracy by listening to such comments on his sermons.

If a young man were reluctant to amend his ways, or a maiden showed herself over-flighty, Gabriel Hirst's sermons were the infallible remedy. He could invoke the thunders of God, and paint hell-fire, with greater vigour than any of his fellows, and even the most careless of sinners quailed before his description of the judgment in store for them. Perhaps the maidens of Ling Crag were less satisfied with the preacher than his piety warranted. He was well off, "straight set up," and had good looks of a rugged kind. Had he asked one of them to marry him, she would probably have given favourable consideration to the proposal. But Gabriel scarcely seemed to understand that they were women. They might don their best hats and infuse rough coquetry into their glances, but he was not aware of it; they were just fellow-sufferers with himself in a world whose keynote was original sin, and they gained interest in his eyes only through the effort that was necessary to keep them in the right path.

Yet, underneath it all, Gabriel Hirst had the faults and the virtues of his own folk developed to their furthest extremes. The old moor blood, pagan to its last drop, was quick in his veins. Reared to the conviction that he had a "call," he strove night and day to keep the spirit working within him, strove to deaden the voice of the moor wind at his ear and the cry of remoter fathers in his heart. He was a strong man, and a passionate man, and for the five years since his first sermon he had, with an energy almost savage, forced his strength into the service of his religion.

For the rest, Gabriel was a gentleman farmer, who delegated most of his work in this direction to one Jose Binns, a godly, lean-flanked man, who was wont to class Betty his wife, the master, and the uncertainty of hay-crops, all as dire responsibilities sent to him by the Lord as a punishment for his overwhelming sinfulness. Yet Jose managed the farm excellently, and was a rare hand at "selling or swopping a beäst."