"We're hard folk up here, Ebenezer, an' softness is nowt i' our way."
"Hard folk we be, an' all th' more call there is for a bit o' softness now an' again. If religion warn't gi'en us to soften our hearts, what mak o' use is't, Jose Binns?"
"Ay, ay, tha'rt right there," chimed in another voice. "Ye mark my words, lads. I'm fourscore year an' ower, an' I've seen what I've seen, an' I tell ye, there'll a day come when all this shutting up o' th' gooid side o' human natur—fair as if 'twere summat to be shamed on—'ull pass away for gooid an' all. Ye willun't listen to th' preachers 'at wants to leäd instead o' frightening ye, though we've a mony as 'ud be glad for ye to hear 'em. Ye mun ha' nowt but judgment an' wrath, an' ye willun't bide owt softer. What do Gabriel Hirst know o' th' better side o' things? He's nobbut a kittling yet, as hes niver known th' love of a woman."
"Shame on thee, shame on thee!" growled Jose Binns. "An old man like thee to be talking o' love an' sich-like lightness, when a man o' God has just been telling thee to shun th' sinful flesh an' all its warks. Dost call thyseln a Methodist?"
"Ay, lad; I call myseln a Methodist, an' there's nowt i' th' doctrine what forbids a man to see th' gooid i' hisseln as well as th' bad. Thee bide till th' little pracher hes getten his hand round th' heft of a straight love for a woman—they're th' best that God has gi'en us, is women, when all's said—an' tha'll find his praching summat godlier, like, nor it hes been."
"Women!" said Jose Binns, turning down the corners of his wry old mouth.
"Women's better nor th' men, ony way," put in Mrs. Binns, sharply. "An' what call hast tha, Jose, to go making fooil's faces at thy own wedded wife? I've a mind to dress thy jacket for thee, that I hev."
Old Binns retreated into the background a little; he no longer felt a prophet in his own country. And a laugh went up from the group, and they fell to talking of this and that, in a hushed, Sabbath fashion.
But the preacher saw no one, heard no one. He staggered out of the graveyard and into the road. He turned through an open gate on his left, and crossed some scanty, sheep-shaven pasture land; the half-starved sheep looked blankly at him, and a bare-ribbed cow stared at him in surprise over a neighbouring wall. Gabriel Hirst awoke to reality; he saw the sunlight on the ridges, and the warm shadows in the hollows; he felt the fresh wind on his face; he heard the call of a linnet from a village garden behind him: and one and all were agony to the would-be man of God. He felt himself full of the lusts of the flesh—a vague, idealistic flesh whose boundaries were infinite, whose sinfulness knew no limits; he could not understand the sunshine, save as a light to search out his own evil-doing; and he magnified his worthlessness, because he could remember no tangible sin by which to reduce his wild imaginings to a sober standard.
He went through a gap in the wall which confronted him, and stood looking dreamily down on a little wooded dell, through which a moor stream bubbled its way to the river. On a sudden his body grew rigid, his eyes lost their glow of introspection and fixed themselves on a rounded basin of the stream. A girl was paddling in the water, and was singing a love-ballad, in a rich, south-country voice that contrasted oddly with her northern surroundings.