“And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up: and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him.”
But the Gaffer had not collapsed as she expected. It only meant a spiritual saving, in case he died, Daniel Quarles maintained, unruffled: otherwise why speak of his sins being forgiven? Moreover it didn’t say you couldn’t have a doctor, too.
Crestfallen, the child wept in a corner and did not recover her spirits till at Sunday-school Elder Mawhood had supplied her for the first part of the Gaffer’s contention with Mark xvi. 18: “They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover”; while Martha, who was still at that date a Peculiar, comforted and equipped her against the second part with Asa, King of Judah, who (II Chronicles xvi) was diseased in his feet: “yet sought not to the Lord but to the physicians.” The Lord’s wishes in the matter were thus seen to be clearly indicated. “And the Lord’s the same now as then, isn’t He?” Martha wound up crushingly. “You ask your grandfather that.”
The courage to launch this counter-attack never came to her, however, and henceforward she and her grandfather lived in that kindly toleration of each other’s folly which comes from holding the proofs of it, yet letting sleeping dogmas lie. What after all was the old man’s obduracy, Jinny told herself, but part of the perverseness and obstinacy of age? The fact that she now never needed either doctors or elders saved her from any personal problem. Such waverings as she had felt at fifteen were not towards Wesleyanism, but towards Martha’s mushroom doctrine. The texts of this convert to the latest thing in creeds were certainly staggering, and her scorn for the still unconverted, sublime. “We don’t take some bits o’ the Word and leave others.” That was an argument not easy to answer, and the bits now exhumed in support of Christadelphianism by the tireless discoverer of King Asa were ever accumulating. Fortunately Jinny was far too busy for religious discussions or doubts, and the “angel mother,” softly hovering, made a restful background for the one true Faith.
VI
And a sensational episode in the history of the local Brethren came to strengthen the sect as well as to add to the number of Jinny’s homes: came too, at the very crisis when the impossibility of carrying the Carrier with her through the coming winter threatened to leave her stranded alone at “The Black Sheep” during the midday rest at Chipstone. It would have been easy enough in summer to sit in her cart in the courtyard munching her bread and cheese, while Methusalem was lost in his nosebag, and clients were coming with commissions, but the parcel-shed had no stove, and to wait in the bar or taproom or even the parlour—all alike masculine haunts where one could hardly dump the “scarecrow” or swain-chaser beside one—was not a pleasant prospect.
Jinny’s and the Brotherhood’s good fortune began—such are the ways of Providence—with the death of the landlord.
Mother Gander—so everybody called Jeff Gander’s buxom spouse—had fought like a lioness to save him. “Not a doctor for miles around,” as the paralysed old Bundock put it triumphantly from his bed-of-all-news, “but she carted him over, and set ’em all consulting and quarrelling. There was two from London, one of ’em a bart, and all wasted. Charlie the potboy, as he was then, feelingly told my boy, the postman, that he could ha’ set up a public-house with the fees. Not that I approve o’ public-houses, but leastways they give you more waluable drinks than doctors does. And when poor Jeff was gone, and Mother Gander was carrying on like crazy, comes the Parson and tells her ’tis the Lord’s will.
“ ‘Then if it’s the Lord’s will,’ says she, like lightning, for she was always quick in the uptake, ‘why do you run down the Peculiars as just begs the Lord to alter His will, instead o’ throwing their hard-earned gold to the doctors?’ That was the way her eyes opened to the Truth, and she learnt how to save her soul as well as her money.”
The Peculiars, they often lamented, were “not strong enough” in Chipstone: they looked yearningly “over the water”—to Rochford where the great Banyard himself was prophesying; or to Woodham where no less than five hundred Brethren and Sisters fevered themselves in a hall too small for the throngs that sought admission. But their own meetings, though, if we may trust Caleb, “noice things were brought out,” were numerically disheartening. The capture of “The Black Sheep”—a hostelry to which all social roads radiated—was thus an event of considerable importance.