When Will became attentive again, it was a new voice testifying, and the matter seemed quite sensational.
“They used to be carried away and buried in a day. But when our Brother Bundock’s boy got it, we had a special prayer-meeting, and even the marks were light!”
Oh! So it was only the postman’s smallpox. He looked round in vain for Her Majesty’s servant: indeed a general consciousness that the hero of the story was ungratefully absent, damped its appeal—only the man with the mutton-chop whiskers called out with unabated ardour, “Glory!” Will felt that the glory was to Bundock, thus valiantly sticking to his lack of convictions. More than even during the last week, life at Little Bradmarsh seemed impossible, as impossible as in his boyhood; better had he rushed with the mob of his mates to California; even now it was probably the best thing to do with his ninety pounds, unmanly though it were to flee and leave this girl carrier with her arrogance unbroken.
In her absence, if only one of the females would get up! That would be at least a change. But no! The sex was shy to-day, though the forenoon was, he remembered, the traditional time for its testifyings. Perhaps it was the presence of this stalwart young stranger that tongue-tied it.
But the males seemed to be telling their soul-stories at him, challenging his eye, appealing to his black jacket—or was that only a morbid impression of his? An outsider might have been touched by the thread of spiritual poetry in these outwardly commonplace lives, but Will, being of them, had the familiarity that breeds boredom, if not contempt. And contempt, too, was not wanting to this elegantly clad and much-travelled connoisseur of men and women and creeds, who had seen even French cathedrals in Canada, and knew that Roman Catholics were not the scarlet beasts his infancy had somehow imagined them. Once he caught Mr. Charles Mott’s eye fixed upon him with a curious, wondering gaze, which seemed to change to a wink as eye met eye. Will’s eye, however, remaining serious, a flush overspread the ex-potboy’s face, and he looked away.
But Will’s contempt passed into alarm when, at a sudden pause in the testifyings, all other eyes unquestionably converged on him. He turned as red as Charley Mott, and glued his eyes to his hymn-book, not daring to look up till another voice indicated that the Spirit had found a more willing tongue for its organ. But his relief was mixed with disgust, for it was the dry voice of the original grey-haired reader, and it seemed bent on a sermon which had not even the mitigated brightness of a confession. Then, autobiography seemed suddenly to break through it, for Will’s wandering thoughts were fixed by an anecdote about riding to Rochester seven miles on a donkey on a winter’s evening. “Lord bless me!” interpolated the nasal voice, so distracting Will that he never understood how the story led up to a doctor’s remark: “I must have your leg off,” a design the medical materialist appeared to have carried out.
Will tried to peer under the table to see the preacher’s peg, but failing to perceive any signs of corkiness, concluded that the anecdote was not personal. He gathered that after this melancholy amputation by impotent Science, Faith had sufficed to keep the rest of the man together. Medicine had subsequently proclaimed he was in a galloping consumption, “but he ain’t dead yet—he’s still sound and whole,” cried the preacher paradoxically, to the applausive “Glory!” of the tireless commentator.
Another illustrious example of regeneration—the preacher kept Will awake by recounting—had begun life as a parson. But none is beyond hope; even in the sacristy one is not safe from the Spirit, and unable to go any longer through the flummeries and mummeries of the Established Church, he had given up his living and fallen—at one time—so low that he was glad to become a potman in a public-house.
All eyes were here turned towards the unfortunate Charley Mott, and from his squirming figure to Mother Gander, sitting so stern and stiff; but the tension relaxed when the preacher—perhaps tactfully—went on to mention that it was at “The White Hart” in Colchester: where the landlord and landlady had both “parsecuted” him. They were now both dead. (“Glory!” from the nasal punctuator.) “I am sorry they are dead,” said the preacher magnanimously. “But the Lord’s arm is not short.” And while they were well dead, Will learnt that their poor, persecuted potman had now a chapel of his own, where he preached “Full Salvation.” Twenty or thirty were, it appeared, saved regularly and punctually every Sunday evening. “Glory!” trumpeted the nasal voice, and again Will, sullen and glowering, felt that the whole congregation was palpitating with expectation that he would leap to his feet and declare himself similarly saved, or at least not lost during his long absence. But he was not going to make a fool of himself, he told himself harshly. He would sooner face the ordeal of escape, of running the gauntlet of the Brothers and Sisters, and he looked round wildly towards the door, perceiving with satisfaction that the late youth had left it slightly ajar. Then, to his joy and the congregation’s disappointment, another worshipper took the word, or was taken by it; Bidlake, the bargee, with his dog-eyes now shining and his shaggy face sublimated, who declared with touching fervour that he would praise God as long as breath was in him, and with the death-rattle in his throat he would cry: “You can do, Gord, what you like with me!” Ephraim recalled the coup by which he had converted his wife, whom family sorrows had made an infidel. “Ef you won’t goo to heaven with me, says Oi, Oi’ll goo to hell with you!” Now they both pulled and poled together and were happy—so happy, despite family losses and troubles. “Most men ain’t fit to live nor ready to die. Just drifters. Throw ’em the life-line—the life-line afore they drift away!” And with a vivid gesture he threw an imaginary rope. By accident or design it was in Will’s direction, and again the poor young man, with a stifling sense of being lassoed, became the cynosure of every eye. But, fortunately for him, Ephraim Bidlake did not pause here, and his rhapsody poured on; “Glorious truth”—“one generation to the tother”—“the prayer of roighteousness”—“come as you are”—“wain to trust in man”—a veritable cascade of phrases that, falling on Will’s head, gradually lowered it in sleep. An impromptu speech is usually one the speaker cannot wind up, and the worthy bargee went on tangling himself up more and more, till it looked doubtful if he would ever have come to a stop, had not something happened which stole even his breath away.
Through the interstice of the door came suddenly sidling a little white dog. But this accession to the congregation produced no joy, merely a sense of profanity as it pattered up the central parting, leaving, moreover, wet prints of its paws. Springing without hesitation or apology upon the sleeper’s best trousers, it curled itself up comfortably with a grunt. Assuredly Will was not fated to-day to escape the centre of the stage.