“Brother Hall’s is a black story. There was no great likelihood of his being a favourite with me: his tongue is too smooth for my roughness, and rather inclines me to suspect than believe. Indeed, I little suspected the horrid truth; but, finding him on the reserve, I thought, he was something like Rivington, and feared me as a jester; which is a sure sign either of guilt on the one hand, or pride on the other. It is certainly true of that marriage; it will not, and it cannot come to good. He is now at a curacy in Wiltshire, near Marlborough. I have no correspondence with Kez.: I did design it after reading yours; but the hearing, that, she is gone to live with Patty and her husband made me drop my design.”
It was certainly a strange,—an almost unaccountable thing, for Kezziah Wesley to become domiciled with such a man. It is true, her venerable father had died just about the time of the ill-fated marriage, leaving both her mother and herself without a home; but the mother had found a welcome in the house of her son Samuel; who was also wishful to have Kezziah beneath his roof, if his brother John would continue to allow her £50 a year.[299] Why, then, did she go to Westley Hall’s? Samuel Wesley strongly disapproved of this; and so also did his brother Charles. Hence the following, from Charles’s Journal, written only three days after his return from Georgia:—
“1736, December 6. I spent an hour at my uncle’s, equally welcome and unexpected. They informed me, my brother Hall was gone to a curacy, very melancholy, and impatient at the mention of Georgia; and that my sister Kezzy was gone to live with him.
“Serpentes avibus geminentur, tigribus agnæ.”
Hall was a hawk among the doves of the Wesley family. There was dislike, and there was also a reasonable suspicion. A sort of truce existed; but it was hollow and uncertain. Samuel Wesley regarded Hall as a smooth-tongued hypocrite, and evidently thought his sister Kezziah had made a great mistake in making the house of Hall her domicile. Charles Wesley was equally dissatisfied, as is evident from his Latin quotation; and, yet, ten weeks after writing thus, he went to Hall’s himself, as a friendly visitor, and spent a week with the reverend coquet, and with his “sisters, Patt and Kez.”[300] Indeed, a few months afterwards, Mrs. Wesley, the widow, who had taken up her residence at the house of her son Samuel, at Tiverton, removed to Hall’s at Wootton-Rivers, where, on August 5, 1737, she wrote:—
“Mr. Hall and his wife are very good to me. He behaves like a gentleman and a Christian; and my daughter with as much duty and tenderness as can be expressed.”[301]
Shortly after this, Westley Hall seems to have removed to Salisbury. Hence the following entry in Charles Wesley’s Journal:—
“1737, December 29. I supped in Salisbury, at my brother Hall’s.”
In 1739, he came to London. In a letter, to her son Samuel, dated “March 8, 1739,” Mrs. Wesley writes:—
“I have been informed, that, Mr. Hall intends to remove his family to London, hath taken a house, and I must (if it please God I live) go with them.”[302]