"I'll swear you are not listening, and have scarce heard a word of it," Patty would exclaim, stopping midway in her account of the last event that had startled the town. A rich old Mrs. Somebody who was going to marry a boy; or a high-born Iphigenia sacrificed to an octogenarian bridegroom.
Antonia had left off caring what people did, or what became of them.
Even the doings of her duchesses had ceased to interest. They had sent affectionate notes and messages, and she had responded civilly. The Duke of Cumberland had sent an equerry with his card, and tender inquiries. The Princess had sent one of her ladies. And all that Antonia desired in her present mood was to be forgotten. She was glad that Lady Margaret Laroche, whom she liked best of all of her fashionable friends, was spending the winter in Paris; since she could hardly have denied herself where she was under so many obligations.
She read the papers every day, wondering whether she would ever come upon George Stobart's name in the news from America; but the name had not appeared, nor had Mr. Stobart been heard of at his own house at the beginning of the year, when she sent a servant to inquire of the woman in charge there. It was a bitter cold winter; but London was full of movement and gaiety while Antonia sat alone in the library at the back of the great solemn house, where the shutting of one of the massive doors reverberated from cellar to roof-tree in the silence. Never had there been a gayer season. It seemed as if the noise of all the crackers and squibs that had been burnt after the news from Quebec was still in the air. The cold weather killed a good many old people, and there were the usual number of putrid sore throats and typhus fevers in the fine West End mansions; but the herd went on their way rejoicing and illuminating, and praising God for the triumph of English arms on land and sea, since the victories of the great year '59 were being briskly followed up in the year that had just begun—the thirty-third of his Majesty's illustrious reign. His Majesty was waxing old and feeble, and the hero of Dettingen was soon to follow that other old lion in the Tower; and most people's eyes were turned to the mild effulgence of the rising star, the young Prince of Wales, or to the Prince's mother, and his guardian, my Lord Bute, who might be supposed to direct that youthful mind. Soon, very soon, the great bell would be tolling, the muffled drums beating, and the pomp of a royal funeral would fill the night with torches and solemn music.
That bitter winter was over, and the river was running gaily under April skies, when George Stobart came up the Thames to the Pool of London. What an insignificant river it seemed after the St. Lawrence! what a poor little flat world lay all around him, as his eyes looked out upon his native land—melancholy eyes, that found no joy in anything, no pleasure in that aspect of familiar scenes which delights most wanderers in their home-coming. Duty brought him home, while inclination would have kept him in Georgia, whither he had made his way by a difficult and perilous journey, from the snow-fields and frozen rivers of Canada to the orange groves and sunny sea of the South, after a weary time in the hospital at Quebec. There had been much for him to see in the little colony established by the philanthropic Oglethorpe five-and-twenty years before, a refuge and a home for poor debtors from the English prisons. He had preached several times in one of the school-rooms at Savannah; and the fire and fervour of his exhortations had won him a numerous following, black and white. He had gone among Whitefield's slaves; but although he found them for the most part well-used and contented, he loathed a condition which Whitefield justified, and against which Wesley had never lifted up his voice. To Stobart this buying and selling of humanity was intolerable. True that in these pious communities the African was better off than many a slave of toil in Spitalfields or Whitechapel; but he lived under the fear of the lash, and he knew not when it might suit his owner's convenience to sell him into a worse bondage.
It was with a willing heart that the soldier-priest laid down the sword and took up the Bible. In his hours of despair, in all the longing and regret of a hopeless love, his faith had remained unshaken. There was still the terror, and there was still the hope: the fear of everlasting condemnation, the hope of life eternal. Among the ignorant throng whom the great evangelist awakened to a sense of sin and a yearning for pardon, there were numerous backsliders; but the men of education and enlightenment who followed John Wesley seldom fell away. To them the things unseen, the promise and the hope, were more real than the bustle and strife of the world that hemmed them round. They walked the streets of the city with their eyes looking afar off, their thoughts full of that heavenly kingdom where life would put on a loveliness unthinkable here below. Sickening at the horrors of a world in which there were such things as the gallows at Tyburn, with its batch of victims ten or a dozen at a time—men, women, boys and girls, children almost; the Fleet prison; Bedlam, with its manacles and scourges, and Sunday promenades for the idle curious; Bridewell, Newgate. Sickening at such a world as this, the Methodist turned his ecstatic gaze towards that Kingdom of Christ the Lord, where there should be no more tears, no more war, no more oppression, no more grinding poverty or foul disease, and where all the redeemed should be equals in one brotherhood of heavenly love.
George Stobart went back to his mission work as faithful a believer as in the day of his conversion. He had not been an idle servant while he was with his regiment. He had preached the gospel wherever he could find hearers, had been instant in season and out of season; but his persistence had not been of a noisy kind, and although his superior officers were disposed to docket him as a religious monomaniac, after the manner of Methodists, they had never found him troublesome or insubordinate.
"Mr. Stobart is a gentleman," said the major. "And if expounding the Scriptures to a parcel of unbelieving rascals can console him for short rations, and keep him warm in a temperature ten degrees below zero—why, who the deuce would deny him that luxury? If he's a saint at his prayers, he's a devil in a mêlée; and he saved my scalp from the redskins when we were fighting in the dark in the marshes before Louisburg."
Stobart landed at the docks, had his luggage put on a hackney coach, and drove to his house at Lambeth, without a shadow of doubt that he would find all things as he had left them more than two years ago. Lucy's last letter had been written in a cheerful spirit. She was elated at Georgie's good luck in pleasing his grandmamma, and she prophesied that he would inherit Lady Lanigan's fortune and become a person of importance. Her father's drunken habits and persecuting visits were her only trouble. Her health was good, and her last maidservant was the best she had found since she began housekeeping. True that this letter had been written more than half a year ago; but the idea of change or misfortune in the quiet life at home hardly entered into the mind of the man who had so lately passed through all the perils of the siege of Quebec, from the first disastrous attack on the heights of the Montmorenci to the daring escalade and the battle on the Plains of Abraham, to say nothing of minor dangers and adventures which had made his life of the last two years a series of hairbreadth escapes. He counted on his wife's smiling welcome; and in the tediousness of the voyage he had been schooling himself to his duty as a husband, to give love for love with liberal measure, to make his wife's future years happy.