"You gi'ed me a terrible fricht. I heard the splash and thocht ye had fa'en in. Ye're a queer chiel; ye like cauld water a lot better than I do," and he drew his head back into the cave.
CHAPTER XXXII
TOILERS OF THE NIGHT
The rest and sleep of the night had done the minister good service; and though he still complained of considerable pain in the head and bore upon it the protuberant evidence of Hector's skill with his weapon, he was able to join in our conversation. In my absence Hector had told him who we were and what had happened. He had some difficulty in recognising Hector, beardless and lacking his tree-leg, but when the packman had salted his conversation with an apposite quotation from Horace, he had been compelled to admit his identity and had hailed him as an old friend.
Hector's surmise had been correct. The inhabitant of the cave was none other than Mr. Corsane, who, ousted from his charge and compelled to become a wanderer, had made it his headquarters through many a weary month. It was a hiding-place in which he could find shelter alike from the blasts of the storm and from the persecutors. Driven from his manse, his church and his parish, a man with a price upon his head, he did not remain in this cave from week's end to week's end, a craven fugitive. Constantly he had ventured out. Did sickness or sorrow visit one of the homes of his little flock, he was instant in succour, ready to bring to them at all times the spiritual help and consolation for which they looked to him. Wherefore, though he was a minister without a charge, he was not a minister without a people.
When the meal was over I besought Hector to lie down and rest; and being satisfied that the minister was now out of danger, he needed no second bidding.
The weeks and months that followed were full of interest and occupation. As always, in the annals of persecution, an hour had come when the malignity of the tyrants reached its zenith. In a wild endeavour to break the spirit of the persecuted, they applied themselves with increased fury and devilish ingenuity to render the lives of their victims intolerable.
So it came to pass that more and more of the men in the parishes round about us were driven to forsake their homes and take to the moors or the hiding-places among the hills. Little cared the persecutors if the land that should have laughed with rich crops sank into desolation since none were left to cultivate it. The malevolence of the oppressors gave Hector and myself many opportunities of service. By stratagem, and sometimes by force, at great risk, and often after lively encounters, we rescued more than one good man and true from the clutches of the troopers and spirited him away in the dead of night to a safe hiding-place. I may not here set down these high adventures. Some other pen than mine may record them. But for the greater part our deeds were works of peace. All through the months of summer we would steal out from the cave when the twilight came and, making for some farm whose good man had been compelled to flee, we would spend the hours of the night in performing those tasks in the fields which, but for us, would have been left undone.
Toiling all night through, we would steal back to the sanctuary of our cave in the grey dawn, tired, but proudly conscious that we had done something to ease the burden which was weighing upon the heart of some desolate woman. We cut the clover, we mowed the hay, we left it for a day or two to dry and then stacked it into little cocks upon the field, and when the time came, we sheared the sheep and did those thousand and one things that a husbandman does in their due season. We were careful not to be seen, though always when the night was at its darkest, Hector would make his way to the farmhouse or cottage nearest the field in which we were at work and almost invariably he would find upon the window-sill a store of food left for us. For, though the children and the superstitious might imagine that the mysterious labourers in the fields were creatures from another world who accomplished heavy tasks with the wave of a magic wand, the good-wife of the house had more than a shrewd suspicion that they were creatures of flesh and blood who toiled with the sweat on their brows and who had appetites that required satisfaction.
Nor did we confine our work to the farms near our hiding-place. In the course of his wanderings among his flock, the minister would, now and then, hear of a farm more remote that needed our care, and many a night we walked for miles before we reached the fields where our self-appointed tasks lay. I felt, as Hector did, that in this service we were doing something to help the Cause of the Covenant. And as honest work ever offers to a man the best antidote to sorrow, my heart began to be filled with a great contentment. Mary was lost to me. That thought and the sense of desolation which it provoked was ever before me, but my labours for the persecuted were some token of the love I had borne her and I knew that she would understand.