Vespers were said at three o’clock, after baptisms and more confessions; and Anthony was astonished at the number of folk who could answer the priest. After vespers he made a short sermon, and told the people something of what he had seen in the South, of the martyrdoms at Tyburn, and of the constancy of the confessors.
“‘Be thou faithful unto death,’” he said. “So our Saviour bids us, and He gives us a promise too: ‘I will give thee a crown of life.’ Beloved, some day the tide of heresy will creep up these valleys too; and it will bear many things with it, the scaffold and the gallows and the knife maybe. And then our Lord will see which are His; then will be the time that grace will triumph—that those who have used the sacraments with devotion; that have been careful and penitent with their sins, that have hungered for the Bread of Life—the Lord shall stand by them and save them, as He stood by Mr. Sherwin on the rack, and Father Campion on the scaffold, and Mistress Ward and many more, of whom I have not had time to tell you. He who bids us be faithful, Himself will be faithful; and He who wore the crown of thorns will bestow upon us the crown of life.”
Then they sang a hymn to our Lady:
“Hail be thou, Mary, the mother of Christ,”
and the old swaying tune rocked like a cradle, and the people looked up towards their Mother’s altar as they sang—their Mother who had ruled them so sweetly and so long—and entreated her in their hearts, who stood by her Son’s Cross, to stand by theirs too should God ever call them to die upon one.
The next day Mr. Brian took Anthony a long walk as soon as dinner was over, across the moors towards the north side of Skiddaw. Anthony found the old man a delightful and garrulous companion, full of tales of the countryside, historical, religious, naturalistic, and supernatural. As they stood on a little eminence and looked back to where the church-tower pricked out of the deep crack in the moors where it stood, he told him the tale of the coming of the pursuivants.
“They first troubled us in ’72,” he said; “they had not thought it worth while before to disturb themselves for one old man like my brother, who was like to die soon; but in April of that year they first sent up their men. But it was only a pair of pursuivants, for they knew nothing of the people; they came up, the poor men, to take my brother down to Cockermouth to answer on his religion to some bench of ministers that sat there. Well, they met him, in his cassock and square cap, coming out of the church, where he had just replaced the Most Holy Sacrament after giving communion to a dying body. ‘Heh! are you the minister?’ say they.
“‘Heh! I am the priest, if that is what you mean,’ he answers back. (He was a large man, like myself, was my brother.)
“‘Well, come, old man,’ say they, ‘we must help you down to Cockermouth.’
“Well, a few words passed; and the end was that he called out to Tim, who lived just against the church; and told them what was forward.