He immediately walked to the front and called out—
‘Gentlemen, if you wish it, Mrs. Mavor will sing.’
There was a dead silence. Some one began to applaud, but a miner said savagely, ‘Stop that, you fool!’
There was a few moments’ delay, when from the crowd a voice called out, ‘Does Mrs. Mavor wish to sing?’ followed by cries of ‘Ay, that’s it.’ Then Shaw, the foreman at the mines, stood up in the audience and said—
‘Mr. Craig and gentlemen, you know that three years ago I was known as “Old Ricketts,” and that I owe all I am to-night, under God, to Mrs. Mavor, and’—with a little quiver in his voice—‘her baby. And we all know that for two years she has not sung; and we all know why. And what I say is, that if she does not feel like singing to-night, she is not going to sing to keep any drunken brute of Slavin’s crowd quiet.’
There were deep growls of approval all over the church. I could have hugged Shaw then and there. Mr. Craig went to Mrs. Mavor, and after a word with her came back and said—
‘Mrs. Mavor, wishes me to thank her dear friend Mr. Shaw, but says she would like to sing.’
The response was perfect stillness. Mr. Craig sat down to the organ and played the opening bars of the touching melody, ‘Oft in the Stilly Night.’ Mrs. Mavor came to the front, and, with a smile of exquisite sweetness upon her sad face, and looking straight at us with her glorious eyes, began to sing.
Her voice, a rich soprano, even and true, rose and fell, now soft, now strong, but always filling the building, pouring around us floods of music. I had heard Patti’s ‘Home, sweet Home,’ and of all singing that alone affected me as did this.
At the end of the first verse the few women in the church and some men were weeping quietly; but when she began the words—