At breakfast, finding her grandfather abnormally restless, she asked him a little maliciously if he had slept all right.
“Oi’ll sleep better to-night,” he said, and chuckled a little. He seemed indeed very happy at having his treasure so well warded, and though his exuberance was alarming, she felt that the excitement of happiness was a lesser danger than that long depression of penuriousness. If the defeat of the coach had seemed to give him a second lease of life, what might not his new wealth do for him? He might really become an Old Parr, and poor Will be kept waiting till the twentieth century!
It was thus with only a moderate uneasiness that she left him, stealing with her basket to the rendezvous at the hut. In the wood she met Ravens hurrying to find breakfast, and he sang out that Martha and Will had relieved him, and that Uncle Lilliwhyte was better. As she approached the clearing, she saw the old woman come out of the hut with a bottle in her hand and a face absolutely transfigured. The whining, peevish, latter-day Martha was gone: a radiance almost celestial illumined her features—it seemed to transcend even the bonnet and to rim it with a halo. This was a woman walking not on the dead dank leaves of a frost-grey wood, but through the streets of the New Jerusalem. Behind her came Will, with a little cynical smile playing about his mouth till he espied Jinny, when his face took on the same ecstatic glow as his mother’s. Jinny could not but feel enkindled in her turn by all this spiritual effulgence, and it was three glorified countenances that met on this March morning.
“He’s broken bread with me,” breathed Martha, “and I’ve helped him put on the Saving Name.” She displayed her bottle with drops of water beaded on the mouth. She had baptized—albeit only by an unavoidable reversion to sprinkling—her first convert. The dream of years had been fulfilled at last, and the apostolic triumph had lifted her beyond humanity, fired her with a vision in which, a conquistador of faith, she was to turn all Little Bradmarsh, nay, Chipstone itself, into one vast synagogue. This were indeed the New Jerusalem. “And it was Will that led my feet,” she said, kissing him to his disconcertment. “And go where he may now, Jinny, he can’t take that away from me. And I shall always have his letter to inspire me to win other souls.” She touched the left side of her bodice, and poor Jinny, suddenly reminded that her grandfather had robbed her of her last chance of keeping Will in England, felt envious of Martha’s exalted source of consolation.
“I’ve got to go now and cook Flynt’s dinner,” said Martha. “But he won’t have much appetite for it if he’s got any right feeling left, when he hears that another man, a stranger, has been before him in the path of righteousness. Maybe you’ll write to the Lightstand, Willie, to say there’s a new brother in Little Bradmarsh.”
“I’ll tell ’em the Ecclesia has doubled its membership,” said Will, with a faint wink at Jinny, to which the girl did not respond. “Do you think, mother,” he asked with mock seriousness, “the New Jerusalem will come down in Australia same as here?”
“Of course,” said Martha.
Again Will winked at Jinny. But she frowned and shook her head. Her study of Australia had instructed her sufficiently that it was on the other side of the globe, and she knew that Will was having fun with the idea of the golden city coming down two opposite ways at once, but she felt it criminal to break Martha’s mood, and indeed was not certain she herself understood how the Australians escaped falling off into space. Discouraged by her stern face, Will murmured he’d put his mother on the road and be back. She smiled and nodded at the promise, but her heart was heavy with a sense of inevitable partings as she went in to the lingering ancient.
The death-bed conversion was evidently a success, for she found him almost as radiant as Martha, though with a more unearthly light, while the gleaming as of dewdrops on his dishevelled hair, and the stains of damp over his bolster seemed to convict his spiritual preceptress of a dangerous recklessness. But he was probably beyond saving in any case, Jinny reflected, and what other medicine could have given him that happy exaltation? The logs roared in the stove, and all was joy and warmth that rimy morning.
“Oi’ve tarned a Christy Dolphin!” he announced jubilantly.