Jake was so excited at finding himself by a curious accident once
more face to face with the man who, as he had happily confessed to his
friends, had produced so great an impression upon him as to change the
whole course of his life, that he began to talk to him in his usual
rapid way, as though Mr. Wesley and himself were the only persons in the
room.
The miller remained on his feet. The blacksmith was also on his feet. He
had assumed a professional air. After all, he was likely to be the most
important person present. The girl in the chair remained with her hands
folded on her lap. She had the aspect of a schoolgirl who has broken out
of bounds and awaits an interview with the schoolmistress. She had heard
during her visit to Bath of this Mr. Wesley and his views--at least such
views as were attributed to him by the fashionable folk who assembled to
have their gossip and intrigue flavoured by the sulphur of the waters.
He was not so easy-going as the clergymen at Bath. She could not doubt
that he would esteem it his duty to lecture her on her levity. It was
known that he abhorred playgoing. He was naturally abhorred by the
players. They had the best of reasons: when he was preaching in any town
that had a theatre, the players remained with empty pockets.
The appearance of Mrs. Pendelly announcing that supper was ready was a
great relief to her.
She jumped up with alacrity. Jake Pullsford came back to earth. He was
breathing hard. The visitor had signified his intention of resuming his
journey, if his horse could be shod. Jake was entreating him to pass the
night at his house, only a mile up the valley.
The miller was beginning to feel awkward. He was hospitably inclined,
but he was not presumptuous. The blacksmith was fast losing his
professional bearing; a sniff of the salmon steaks had come through the
open door.
It was the visitor whose tact made the situation easy for everyone.
“Sir,” he said to the miller, “I have arrived here so opportunely for
myself that I will not even go through the pretence of offering to go to
the wayside inn, which our good friend Jake Pullsford tells me is some
miles away. I know that I can throw myself on your hospitality and that
you would feel affronted if I hurried on. I have no mind to do so--to be
more exact, I should say no stomach.”
“Sir, if your reverence will honour my house I can promise you a
wholesome victual,” said the miller. “Even if you was not a friend o'
my friend Jake here, who might, I think, have named my name in your ear,
you would still be welcome.”.
“I know it, sir,” said Wesley, offering the miller his hand. “I thank
you on behalf of myself and my good partner whose bridle I hung over
your ring-post. A feed of oats will put new spirit in him in spite of
the loss of his shoe.”
“The horse shall be seen to, Mr. Wesley. Susan, the stable bell,” said
the miller, and his daughter set a bell jangling on the gable wall.
“Again my thanks, good friend,” said Wesley.
“May I beg your leave to be presented to my fellow-guests at your table,
sir?”
He shook hands with the farmer, the water-finder and the smith, saying a
word to each. Then he turned to where the two young women had been.
They had fled through the open door, Nelly having been the one to judge
of the exact moment for flight.
They appeared at the supper table, however, but not taking their seats
until they had waited upon all the others of the party. That was the
patriarchal custom of the time. Nelly Polwhele only wished that the
severe discipline of a side table for the serving girls had been in
force at the Mill. Remote from the long oak table on which generations
of her family had dined, she might have had a pleasant chat with her
friend Susan, and then steal off, evading the lecture which she felt was
impending from the strict Mr. Wesley. As it was, the most she could do
for herself was to choose an unobtrusive place at the further end from
the clergyman.
She hoped that the excellence of the salmon which she had carried
through the valley of the Lana would induce him to refrain from asking
any questions in regard to the game that was being played at the moment
of his entrance.
But Mr. Wesley was vigilant. He espied her before he had finished his
salmon, and had expressed his thanks to her for having burdened herself
with it. It was his thirst for information of all sorts that had caused
him to enquire how it was possible to have for supper a fish that must
have been swimming in the sea, or at least in a salmon river, which the
Lana was not, a few hours before. Was not Porthawn the nearest fishing
village, and it was six miles away? Then it was that Mrs. Pendelly had
told him of Nelly's journey on foot bearing her father's gift to his
friend the miller.
“I should like to have a word or two with you, my dear,” said Mr. Wesley
when he had thanked her. “I wish to learn something of the people of
Porthawn. I am on my way thither to preach, and I like to learn as much
as is possible of the people who, I hope, will hear what I have to say
to them.”
Nelly blushed and tried to say that she was afraid she could tell him
nothing that he could not learn from any other source--that was what was
on her mind--but somehow her voice failed her. She murmured something;
became incoherent, and then ate her salmon at a furious rate.
The miller, although he had felt bound to offer hospitality to the
stranger who had appeared at his door, knew that his other guests--with
the exception, it might be, of Jake Pullsford--would feel, as he himself
did, that the presence of this austere clergyman would interfere with
their good fellowship at supper and afterwards. He and his associates
knew one another with an intimacy that had been maturing for thirty
years, and the sudden coming of a stranger among them could not but
cause a certain reserve in the natural freedom of their intercourse.
The miller had a constant fear that this Mr. Wesley would in the course
of the evening say something bitter about the parsons who hunted and
bred game-cocks and fought them, laying money on their heads--on parsons
who lived away from their parishes, allowing indifferent curates to
conduct the services of the church--of parsons who boasted of being able
to drink the Squires under the table. The miller had no confidence in
his power of keeping silent when he felt that the parson with whom
he was on the easiest of terms and for whose gamecocks he prepared
a special mixture of stiffening grain food was being attacked by a
stranger, so he rather regretted that his duty compelled him to invite
Mr. Wesley, of whom he, in common with thousands of the people of the
West country, had heard a great deal, to supper on this particular
evening.
But in the course of the meal he began to think that he would have no
reason to put any restraint upon himself. He soon became aware of the
fact that this Reverend John Wesley was not altogether the austere
controversialist which rumour, becoming more and more exaggerated as it
travelled West, made him out to be. Before supper was over he had come
to the conclusion that Parson Rodney as a companion could not hold a
candle to this Mr. Wesley.
The compliment in respect of the salmon had pleased both the miller and
his wife, even though it had made Nell blush; and then a bantering
word or two was said to Hal Holmes and his fine taste for salmon, and
forthwith Mr. Wesley was giving an animated account of how he had seen
the Indians in Georgia spearing for salmon on one of the rivers. This
power of bringing a wide scene before one's eyes in a moment by the use
of an illuminating word or two was something quite new to the miller and
his friends; but it was the special gift of his latest guest. With
thin uplifted forefinger--it had the aspect as well as the power of a
wizard's wand--he seemed to draw the whole picture in the air before
the eyes of all at the table--the roar of the rapids whose name with its
Indian inflections was in itself a romance--the steathily moving red
men with their tomahawks and arrows and long spears--the enormous
backwoods--one of them alone half the size of England and Wales--the
strange notes of the bird--whip-poor-will, the settlers called
it--moonlight over all--moonlight that was like a thin white sheet let
down from heaven to cover the earth; and where this silver wonder showed
the white billows of foam churned up by the swirl of the mad river,
there was the gleam of torches--from a distance they looked like the
fierce red eyes of the wild beasts of the backwood; but coming close one
could see deep down at the foot of the rapids the flash of a blood-red
scimitar--the quick reflection in the passionate surface of the water of
the red flare that waved among the rocks. Then there was a sudden splash
and a flash--another scimitar--this time of silver scattering diamonds
through the moonlight--another flash like a thin beam of light--the fish
was transfixed in mid-air by the Indian spear!
They saw it all. The scene was brought before their eyes. They sat
breathless around the supper table. And yet the man who had this magic
of voice and eye had never once raised that voice of his--had never once
made a gesture except by the uplifting of his finger.
“Fishing--that is fishing!” said Hal Holmes. “I should like----”
The finger was upraised in front of him.
“You must not so much as think of it, my friend! It would be called
poaching on our rivers here,” said Mr. Wesley with a smile.
“Then I should like to live in the land where the fish of the rivers,
the deer of the forests, the birds of the air are free, as it was
intended they should be--free to all men who had skill and craft--I
have heard of the trappers,” said Hal. “It seems no sort of life for a
wholesome man to live--pulling the string of a bellows, hammering iron
into shoes, for plough-horses!--no life whatsoever.” Wesley smiled.
“Ah, if you but knew aught of the terror of the backwoods,” said he. “If
you but knew of it--one vast terror--monstrous--incredible. A terror by
day and by night. I was used to stand on one of the hills hard by our
little settlement, and look out upon the woods whose skirts I could see
in the far distance, and think of their immensity and their mystery.
Hundreds of miles you might travel through those trackless forests
until the hundreds grew into thousands--at last you would come upon-the
prairie--hundred and hundreds of miles of savage country--a mighty ocean
rolling on to the foot of the Rocky Mountains! Between the backwoods-and
the mountains roll the Mississippi River--the Ohio, the Potomac. Would
you know what the Mississippi is like? Take the Thames and the Severn
and the Wye and the Tyne and the Humber--let them roll their combined
volume down the one river bed; the result would be no more than an
insignificant tributary of the Mother of Waters--the meaning of the name
Mississippi.”
There was more breathlessness. When Hal Holmes broke the silence
everyone was startled--everyone stared at him.
“Grand! grand!” he said in a whisper. “And your eyes beheld that wonder
of waters, sir?”
Mr. Wesley held up both his hands.
“I--I--behold it?” he cried. “Why, there is no one in England whose eyes
have looked upon that great river. Had I set out to find it I should
have had to travel for a whole year before reaching it--a year, even if
the forests had opened their arms to receive me, and the prairie had
offered me a path I spoke with an Indian who had seen it, and I spoke
with the widows of two men who had gone in search for it. Four years had
passed without tidings of those men, and then one of the Iroquois tribe
found a tattered hat that had belonged to one of them, on the borders of
the backwoods, not a hundred miles from his starting place. Of the other
nothing has yet been forthcoming. I tell you, friends, that I was used
to let my eyes wander across the plain until they saw that forest, and
they never saw it without forcing me to look upon it as a vast,
monstrous thing--but a living creature--one of those fabled dragons that
were said to lie in wait to devour poor wretches that drew nigh to it.
Nay, when I looked upon it I recalled the very striking lines in John
Milton's fine epic of 'Paradise Lost':
'With head uplift above the wave, and eyes
That sparkling blazed; his other parts besides
Prone on the flood, extended long and large,
Lay floating many a rood,--”
“One must needs be a dweller among the adventurers in America in order
to understand in its fulness how terrible a monster those backwoods
are thought to be. There it stretched, that awful mass--that monstrous
mother of that venomous brood--the huge snakes that lurk in the
undergrowth, the fierce lynx, the terrible panther, the wolf and the
wildcat. I have heard, too, of a certain dragon and the vampire--a
huge bat that fans a poor wretch asleep by the gentle winnowing of its
leather wings only to drain his life's blood. These are but a few of the
brood of the backwoods. Who can name them all? The poisonous plants that
shoot out seeds with the noise of the discharge of a musket, the
swamps made up of the decay of a thousand years--breathing fevers and
agues--the spectre of starvation lurks there unless you have weapons and
the skill to use them--fire--they told me of the prairie fires--a blast
of flame five miles broad--sometimes twenty miles broad--rushing along
driving before it beasts and birds until they drop in sheer exhaustion
and become cinders in a minute--these are some of the terrors that dwell
in the backwoods, but worst of all--most fierce--inexorable, is the Red
Indian. Tongue of man cannot tell the story of their treachery--their
torturings. Our settlers do not fear to face the beasts of the
backwoods--the rattlesnakes--the pestilence of the swamps--the most
cruel of these is more merciful than the Indian.”
They listened as children listen to a fairy tale, and they knew that
they were hearing the truth. There was not one of them that had not
heard something of the story of the founding of the settlement along the
coast of the new Continent, from the Bay Colonies and Plymouth Rock in
the North to Carolina in the South. The spirit of adventure which had
given Drake and Raleigh their crews from the men of the West country
gave no signs of dying out among their descendants. They listened
and were held in thrall while this man, who had come among them with
something of the reputation of a pioneer--a man boldly striking out a
new track for himself, told them of the perils faced by their countrymen
on the other side of that sea which almost rolled to their very doors.
He carried them away with him. They breathed with him the perfume of the
backwoods and became imbued with the spirit of mystery pervading them.
He carried them away simply because he himself was carried away. He felt
all that he spoke about; this was the secret of his power. He could not
have made them feel strongly unless by feeling strongly himself.
But his aim was not limited to his desire to arouse their interest in
the romance of the backwoods. He spoke of the troubles of the young
settlement to which he had gone out, of the bravery of the settlers,
men and women--of the steadfast hope which animated them in facing their
anxieties--their dangers. What was the power that sustained them? In one
word, it was faith.
Without the least suggestion of preaching, he talked to them of Faith.
He talked as if it was not merely a sentiment--a cold doctrine to be
discussed by the aid of logic--nay, but as a real Power--a Power that
could move mountains. Such as had it had the greatest gift that Heaven
offered to mankind. It was a gift that was offered freely--all could
have it, if they so willed; and this being so, how great would be the
condemnation of those who refused to accept it!
And the people who had eagerly drunk in all that he had to say of the
mystery of the backwoods were even more interested when he talked of
this other mystery. There had been no dividing line in his subject;
the Faith of which he was now speaking with all the eloquence of
simple language that fell like soft music on their ears, was a natural
part--the most actual part of his story of the great half-known West.
They listened to him while he discoursed for that marvellous half-hour,
and the prayer that followed seemed also a part--the suitable closing
part of that story of trial and trouble and danger rendered impotent by
Faith. Surely, when such a gift could be had for the asking, they should
ask for it. He prayed that the hearts of all who were kneeling might be
opened to receive that saving grace of Faith.
“Hal, my friend,” said the miller, when they stood together at the
entrance to the lane, having seen Mr. Wesley drive off with Jake. “Hal,
for the first time these sixteen years I have seen thee rise from thy
supper without searching about for thy pipe!”
“My pipe? List, old friend, while I tell thee that to pass another such
evening I would break my pipe into a hundred pieces and never draw a
whiff of 'bacca between my teeth,” said Hal. “Moreover, a word in thy ear:
I would not have it made public; I'll smoke no more 'bacca that comes
to me by a back way. I believe that why I didn't smoke this evening was
by reason of the feeling that was in me that 'twould be a solemn sin for
me to let him have even a sniff of 'bacca that had been run.”
The miller laughed.
“Why, Hal, he did not preach to us to give the Preventive men their
due,” he said.
“No, no. If he had I might ha' been the less disposed to do the right
thing. But now--well, no more smuggled 'bacca for me.”
“Good:--good--but wherefore this honest resolve, Hal Holmes?”
“I know not. Only I seem somehow to look at some things in a new light.”
“And that light will not let your tinder be fired over a pipe o' 'bacca
that has paid no duty? That's right enough, but what I need to learn
from you is the reason of all this.”
“Ah, there you have me, friend. I can give you no reason for it; only
the notion came over me quite sudden like, that for ten year I had been
doing what I should ha' turned from, and I made the resolve now to turn
now before it was too late. That's all, and so, good-night to you, Mat,
and God bless you. I be to get that shoe on before he starts from Jake's
house i' the morn, and he said he would start betimes.”
The miller laughed again, but very gently, and held out his hand to the
other without a word. It was not until the blacksmith had disappeared
down the lane that his friend said in a low voice:
“It beats me clean. There must be a sort of magic in the man's tongue
that it works those wonders. All the time that he was telling us his
story o' the woods I was making up my mind to be a better man--to have
more charity at heart for my fellows--to be easier on such as cannot pay
all that they have promised to pay. And now here's Hal that confesses
to the same, albeit he has never gone further out of the straight track
than to puff a pipe that has paid nothing to King George's purse. And
the man gave no preacher's admonition to us, but only talked o' the
forest and such-like wild things.... Now, how did he manage to bring
Faith into such a simple discourse?... Oh, 'tis his tongue that has
the magic in it! Magic, I say; for how did it come that when he spoke I
found myself gazing like a child at a picture--a solid, bright picture
o' woods and things?... Oh, 'tis true magic, this--true!”