THE PERVERSION OF GABRIEL HIRST.
A mile and a half due west of Marshcotes, on the highroad that takes
you straight to the Lancashire border, lies another village--little
more than an overgrown hamlet it is--which is just as compact as its
neighbour is straggling. Marshcotes runs down one hill and up another,
branching off into queer little streets on the way: but Ling Crag
stands square to the moor-top winds, and gets a sight of the sun long
after the shelter-seeking Marshcotes houses are greying with twilight.
To this day they are a people to themselves, the villagers of Ling
Crag, and, though you come but a league's distance from their
boundaries, they account you a foreigner. Slow to speak well of a
neighbour, and quick to help him in need; keen as can be when a bargain
is toward; more respectful to their conceptions of tangible, everyday
duty than to class distinctions; assured, beyond reach of doubt or
argument, that their village is the hub of the universe--of such sort
are the people of Ling Crag.
A generation or two ago, however, they were a rougher folk than now,
leading rougher lives. A soul-searching, hell-fearing Methodism was the
dominant note of their existence; and Methodism has ever since been a
vital force with them, though it has changed with the change it has
wrought in the people. With their rugged strength, their fearlessness
of purpose, it was only natural that religion, when first it came
into the midst of their wild, strenuous lives, should fit itself in a
measure to the soil. They were harsh by example of the winds and the
storms that had reared them, generation after generation, and the
religion that sought to teach them must also be harsh in its precepts.
So their preachers went in and out, and spoke the language of the
folk they had to deal with, and led them, little by little, into the
quieter places of charity and long-suffering. But Ling Crag was young
to religion then, and fear was the larger part of their faith. They
were much addicted to superstition, too, these upland folk; and when
they sinned, they sinned with groanings of the spirit and retrospective
shakings of the head at the old Adam who was responsible for it all.
There is one biggish house in Ling Crag, planted down shoulder to
shoulder with its cottage neighbours. It stands on the right hand
of the road as you come from Marshcotes; the strip of front garden,
with its boundary wall, round-topped and sombre, gives it an air that
narrowly escapes haughtiness by contrast with the other dwellings in
the hamlet. The Hirsts had lived here almost as long as the Lomaxes
had held Marshcotes Manor. They were roysterers once, and the family
fortunes were like to evaporate in cards and drink and horseflesh,
when old Tom Hirst, luckily for his only son, "took religion"--took it
whole-heartedly: he pondered hourly upon his latter end, and fell to
crying loud "Amens" in Ebenezer Chapel whenever a gathering was toward,
and laboured hard to bring up Gabriel, the child of his old age, in
the way of godliness. Gabriel was born just when the reformation heat
was strongest, and old Hirst, in the choice of his son's name, thought
to hall-mark him for life with the brand of piety. At ten the boy
had already learned to believe himself singled out by the Almighty,
with peculiar care, for the receipt of punishment; had learnt to
pray against the lusts of the flesh; had learnt to feel himself the
loathliest and most persistent sinner of all God's creatures. As he
grew up, he trained himself more and more to pit his gaining strength
against the devil, and wrestled mightily by night and day.
Old Tom died, and his wife followed him a twelvemonth after; and
Gabriel, each time that he stood by the grave-side in the wind-swept
burial-ground, longed to bury his own flesh also out of sight; the
worms of earth, it seemed to him, were gentler than that other Worm
that dieth not, and longer life meant but a longer space in which to
sin. But Heaven shut its ears to his prayers, and would not give him
that coveted six-by-three of rest. He walked in perpetual fear--a fear
that sometimes wrung the sweat from his body--and could lay his hands
to nothing; he could only stride restlessly across the sheep-tracks of
the moor, or ride like a madman along the naked upland highways. He
avoided chapel and the society of his fellows, feeling himself a leper
among clean men; he was like to go mad from isolation and self-commune.
It was then that the Wesleyan minister at Marshcotes got hold of
him, and drew him a comforting picture of the joys of being saved.
He went to a Revival; he heard men and women all about him crying
on God that they were saved--others groaning in the throes of their
final wrestling-bout with the Adversary--others again laughing with
hysterical delight. His soul kindled to the spiritual fire. He felt
himself lifted on mighty pinions; the sound of swinging chants of
praise was in his ears, the swirl of countless rushing angels fanned
his cheeks. He closed his eyes, and a great sob broke from him. He was
saved.
From that day onward he began to preach; his long experience of such
sort of fight lent him substance for his sermons, and his inborn
strenuousness of character made an orator of him. He did not join the
regular ministry, but became established as a local preacher. His fame,
little by little, grew big among the congregations of such chapels
as lay on the line of his quarterly circuit, till in time "Gabriel
Hirst" grew to be a name to conjure with. All Marshcotes and Cranshaw,
every scattered hamlet for miles around, knew Gabriel "by sight and by
speech," and the Ling Crag folk were mightily proud of their preacher.
Things have altered with Methodism since then, but in those days it was
a matter of course that Gabriel should have a special band of admirers
who would go as far even as Ludworth to hear him preach on a Sunday
morning. So devoted, indeed, was the preacher's "following," that it
was much as if he had a regular congregation of his own; whether he
held forth in Ling Crag or Marshcotes, Ludworth or Cranshaw, always
the same knot of familiars grouped themselves round the chapel doors
after service, and estimated to a nicety the amount of Gabriel's recent
inspiration. Indeed, when the fire of certain newly-roused passions
began to drive him into the wilderness, the change might be gauged with
tolerable accuracy by listening to such comments on his sermons.
If a young man were reluctant to amend his ways, or a maiden showed
herself over-flighty, Gabriel Hirst's sermons were the infallible
remedy. He could invoke the thunders of God, and paint hell-fire, with
greater vigour than any of his fellows, and even the most careless
of sinners quailed before his description of the judgment in store
for them. Perhaps the maidens of Ling Crag were less satisfied with
the preacher than his piety warranted. He was well off, "straight set
up," and had good looks of a rugged kind. Had he asked one of them
to marry him, she would probably have given favourable consideration
to the proposal. But Gabriel scarcely seemed to understand that they
were women. They might don their best hats and infuse rough coquetry
into their glances, but he was not aware of it; they were just
fellow-sufferers with himself in a world whose keynote was original
sin, and they gained interest in his eyes only through the effort that
was necessary to keep them in the right path.
Yet, underneath it all, Gabriel Hirst had the faults and the virtues
of his own folk developed to their furthest extremes. The old moor
blood, pagan to its last drop, was quick in his veins. Reared to the
conviction that he had a "call," he strove night and day to keep the
spirit working within him, strove to deaden the voice of the moor wind
at his ear and the cry of remoter fathers in his heart. He was a strong
man, and a passionate man, and for the five years since his first
sermon he had, with an energy almost savage, forced his strength into
the service of his religion.
For the rest, Gabriel was a gentleman farmer, who delegated most of
his work in this direction to one Jose Binns, a godly, lean-flanked
man, who was wont to class Betty his wife, the master, and the
uncertainty of hay-crops, all as dire responsibilities sent to him by
the Lord as a punishment for his overwhelming sinfulness. Yet Jose
managed the farm excellently, and was a rare hand at "selling or
swopping a beäst."
Griff Lomax and the preacher had run about the countryside together
as boys, and many a time of late, when Lomax came home to the Manor
for his brief spells of holiday, Gabriel had striven to save him as a
brand from the burning. London, the devil, and an artistic life were
synonymous to Gabriel Hirst, and it was torture to him to think that
the friend of his boyhood was going the way of perdition. He loved
Griff, now that they had left boyhood well behind, with a certain wild
adoration which no effort could stifle; and, just as he prayed his
hardest and painted hell in its most vivid colours when the yearning
for freedom was strongest upon him, so he would avoid Lomax for a week
at a time, would refuse to walk across to Marshcotes in search of him
until he was persuaded that he had a genuine call to attempt conversion
once again.
On the Friday after Griff's return for the winter, the preacher caught
sight of him at a bend of the road that ran from Marshcotes to Ling
Crag. He hastily slipped under shelter of a barn and let him pass.
He dared not go out to meet him, because the desire was too strong
upon him; but when he reached home, and learned from Betty Binns, his
housekeeper, that Griff had been in search of him, he sorrowed over the
meeting which he had lost of his own free will. Then he dined off tea
and dry bread, lest the Adversary should turn stronger food to his own
ends, and set off in the rain, and walked the moors for six hours. When
he returned, his Sunday morning's sermon was prepared.
With Sunday the short Michaelmas summer began; the clouds had been
squeezed dry of rain, and the morning was clear and fresh. Gabriel was
down on the circuit plan to preach both morning and evening at the Ling
Crag Chapel.
He preached for fifty minutes in the morning--preached himself into
a frenzy--thundered and bellowed and cried from the little pulpit of
unpolished deal, until his hearers felt the leaven of damnation working
to their finger-tips.
"Eh, but it war grand, grand!" passed from mouth to mouth, as the
congregation gathered round the door after service.
The softer sort of Methodists were to be found here and there; but
these rarely lifted their voices after service, being quiet men and
women who did not care to entangle themselves in argument.
This morning, however, the harsher spirits were not having things all
their own way. Old Jose Binns had just had his say about the sermon.
"There's a deal o comfort i' listening to the likes o' yon," he had
said, in his tone of grudging praise. "Ye could see by th' face on him
'at t' Sperrit war moving him, an' proper. There's not a mony like
Gabriel hereabouts."
"He can preach, can th' lad, an' there's no denying it," spoke up a
tall, spare man on the outskirts of the group. "But's he's ower young,
to my thinking, to ponder so mich on th' dark side o' this world an'
th' next, an' niver gie us a taste o' th' gooid there is about. He mud
be softer by th' half, an' niver be th' war for't."
Old Binns screwed up his mouth a shade tighter.
"We're hard folk up here, Ebenezer, an' softness is nowt i' our way."
"Hard folk we be, an' all th' more call there is for a bit o' softness
now an' again. If religion warn't gi'en us to soften our hearts, what
mak o' use is't, Jose Binns?"
"Ay, ay, tha'rt right there," chimed in another voice. "Ye mark my
words, lads. I'm fourscore year an' ower, an' I've seen what I've
seen, an' I tell ye, there'll a day come when all this shutting up
o' th' gooid side o' human natur--fair as if 'twere summat to be
shamed on--'ull pass away for gooid an' all. Ye willun't listen to th'
preachers 'at wants to leäd instead o' frightening ye, though we've a
mony as 'ud be glad for ye to hear 'em. Ye mun ha' nowt but judgment
an' wrath, an' ye willun't bide owt softer. What do Gabriel Hirst know
o' th' better side o' things? He's nobbut a kittling yet, as hes niver
known th' love of a woman."
"Shame on thee, shame on thee!" growled Jose Binns. "An old man like
thee to be talking o' love an' sich-like lightness, when a man o' God
has just been telling thee to shun th' sinful flesh an' all its warks.
Dost call thyseln a Methodist?"
"Ay, lad; I call myseln a Methodist, an' there's nowt i' th' doctrine
what forbids a man to see th' gooid i' hisseln as well as th' bad. Thee
bide till th' little pracher hes getten his hand round th' heft of a
straight love for a woman--they're th' best that God has gi'en us, is
women, when all's said--an' tha'll find his praching summat godlier,
like, nor it hes been."
"Women!" said Jose Binns, turning down the corners of his wry old mouth.
"Women's better nor th' men, ony way," put in Mrs. Binns, sharply. "An'
what call hast tha, Jose, to go making fooil's faces at thy own wedded
wife? I've a mind to dress thy jacket for thee, that I hev."
Old Binns retreated into the background a little; he no longer felt a
prophet in his own country. And a laugh went up from the group, and
they fell to talking of this and that, in a hushed, Sabbath fashion.
But the preacher saw no one, heard no one. He staggered out of the
graveyard and into the road. He turned through an open gate on
his left, and crossed some scanty, sheep-shaven pasture land; the
half-starved sheep looked blankly at him, and a bare-ribbed cow stared
at him in surprise over a neighbouring wall. Gabriel Hirst awoke to
reality; he saw the sunlight on the ridges, and the warm shadows in
the hollows; he felt the fresh wind on his face; he heard the call of
a linnet from a village garden behind him: and one and all were agony
to the would-be man of God. He felt himself full of the lusts of the
flesh--a vague, idealistic flesh whose boundaries were infinite, whose
sinfulness knew no limits; he could not understand the sunshine, save
as a light to search out his own evil-doing; and he magnified his
worthlessness, because he could remember no tangible sin by which to
reduce his wild imaginings to a sober standard.
He went through a gap in the wall which confronted him, and stood
looking dreamily down on a little wooded dell, through which a moor
stream bubbled its way to the river. On a sudden his body grew rigid,
his eyes lost their glow of introspection and fixed themselves on a
rounded basin of the stream. A girl was paddling in the water, and was
singing a love-ballad, in a rich, south-country voice that contrasted
oddly with her northern surroundings.
The preacher pressed one hand close upon his heart, and let his eyes
note the slender lines of the girl's figure, fast ripening towards
womanhood. She seemed fresh and sweet as the wind and sun and water
that played with her. Gabriel Hirst looked at the lassie's face, and
his pulses leaped to a new delight. He lost his rigid set of body, and
stretched out both arms wide to the moors; this was his apology for
past misrepresentations.
Down the steep hillside he went, stumbling into rabbit-holes, pricking
his ankles with thistle-needles, falling and picking himself up again.
The girl became aware of an intruder: she glanced up the hill, and left
the water, and seated herself on a pine-log that lay beside the stream.
By the time that Gabriel Hirst had reached the brook and jumped it, her
little white feet were safely under cover. He stopped; the inspiration
that had led him here was at an end, and he had no knowledge of the
things that young men say to maidens.
"Why didn't you turn back when you saw me?" demanded the girl. A red
flush, of shame and anger mixed, had risen to her cheeks.
Not a word spoke Gabriel Hirst. His late fervour at the chapel, his
lifetime of repression and battling against the vital part of himself,
seemed to have been swept clear away; he could do nothing but wonder at
this new-found form of Grace.
She laughed, a little, musical, defiant laugh.
"I thought I was safe for a good half-hour yet, Mr. Hirst. You keep
them so long at chapel when you preach, and I counted on that.
Besides, I was only watching the path up the Dene; no one ever comes
the way you came just now."
He winced, and the girl laughed again.
"I--I preached for close on an hour," he said slowly.
"Gracious! I'm glad I was not there. But is it really so late? Time
seems to pass so quickly, when one is being a sinner."
"_A sinner!_" gasped the preacher. It had been so clear, a moment ago,
that sin was at an end; and now the old battle-cries were beginning to
ring in his ears; they clashed with that rounded, human laugh.
"Did you preach well?" she asked, after a pause. There was irony in her
tones.
The preacher passed a hand across his eyes, and shuddered.
"I--thought so--at the time," he murmured.
"Ah, well, I have missed something, then. Some day--when the sunshine
is gone--I am coming to hear you. You are in love with Hell, aren't
you?"
In that moment Gabriel feared, not for his retreating faith, but for
the girl's safety. The years were slow to loosen their hold on him, and
he could not see how impiety--childish though it was--could escape the
summary vengeance of Heaven. But nothing happened to the girl-woman who
was seated on the pine-log, her feet gathered under her skirts; and
the preacher breathed more freely. Old habit rushed in, and the words
slipped out of his mouth.
"Greta Rotherson," said he, "are you prepared to die? Have you ever
thought of eternal flames----"
"Ready to die? Not a bit. I'm much too fond of life."
Gabriel Hirst could find no answer. But he looked at her face, and he
knew she could _mean_ no wrong.
"Can I come to see you?" he said abruptly.
"Come to see us? Yes. We are dull in this stupid village of yours,
where every one looks on us with suspicion, just because we come from
the south. But--Mr. Hirst--you won't mind my saying something?"
Her tone was graver now, almost supplicating. "Father doesn't want
to be converted, and he won't see you if you insist upon it. Do you
understand? Come just as a friend, and talk like--like a man."
Without knowing it, she had protruded one white and coral foot beyond
the protecting skirt. Gabriel Hirst saw it, and stood irresolute. Then
he cried--a bitter, stifled cry, as of a dumb creature in pain--and
raced for his life down the bank. At the end of the wood he ran into
the arms of Griff Lomax.
"Hallo, what brings you here? Why, man, you look as if you had seen a
ghost!" cried Griff.
The preacher was not so strong as he once had been. Tea and bread, his
exclusive diet for days at a time, were beginning to tell on him. The
excitement of the sermon, the more violent frenzy that had followed it,
the clean pair of heels which he had finally shown to temptation, all
had their effect. He was breathless, and the sweat was trickling down
his face. His body was shaking as with ague. He leaned heavily against
a gate; Griff saw that his eyes looked hunted.
"I've lost my ghosts, Lomax," he said brokenly. "They were what I
lived by; my father handed them down to me, and I never thought to let
them go. I can't see them any more, Griff--the Spirit coming down with
a sweep of wings, and the Avenging Angel with a bloody sword in his
hands, and the red hell flames licking at the unclean lips of the evil
doers. They're lost--all lost."
He left the gate and began to pace up and down the path. Lomax put a
strong arm through his.
"You're talking nonsense, old fellow!" he said quietly.
The preacher grew calmer for a while; the muscular grip on his arm, and
the big voice telling him not to be a fool, gave him a childish feeling
of security. He let his friend take him up through the wood and out
among the moors on the other side; he opened his mouth wide and drank
in great gulps of the wind. Then, on a sudden, he remembered the full
measure of his sinning, and he shut his mouth with a click, and he
groaned in bitterness of spirit.
"Griff," he said gravely, "you don't know what I've done. I came out
of the chapel wrestling with the Devil: man, I could hear God rebuking
me for my sins one minute and cheering me on to the fight the next.
And then--I fell away. I saw a woman's face, and I lost every other
thought, and I tumbled down the hillside like a madman."
Lomax gave a low mutter of surprise; he glanced sharply at the other's
face, and saw that remorse was cutting deep furrows across the brow and
beneath the eyes.
"But that is not the worst," went on the preacher, with desperate calm.
"I listened to the woman's voice, talking of Hell as if--as if it was
a joke, almost; _and I felt no anger_. I was only afraid that Heaven
would strike her dead, and take her out of my reach. Man, it's fearful,
fearful! I tried to rebuke her--when fear for her life had passed--but
the words might as well have come out of a tin kettle, for all the
heart that went with them. I can't believe any longer, Lomax."
The preacher's agony was so real, and it was all about so trifling a
matter from his friend's standpoint, that Griff could have laughed
aloud. That a man should have come to Hirst's age, and be frightened by
one overmastering impulse of love--surely there was something absurdly
askew in it. But he did not laugh: he just tightened his grip of the
other's arm, and--
"Gabriel Hirst," said he, "you've been preaching too much and eating
too little. You're going to listen to me now, whether you like it or
not. I take my painting about as seriously as you take your religion; I
eat it, and live it, and breathe it every moment of my life."
The preacher made a faint murmur of protest, but Griff's hand crushed
it out of him, still-born.
"Sometimes, old fellow, I paint too much, just as you have been
preaching too much; and I _lose my faith in art_. I go about like a
lunatic, and I think perdition has found me at last."
"Perdition has never had far to seek for you, and more's the pity."
Gabriel Hirst was beginning to tingle with fight again--which was just
what the other wanted.
"Not _my_ perdition; that only comes near when I've been playing the
fool with myself. I try not to be a muff at these times, Hirst; I go
out, and walk or ride, till I can do nothing but stumble into bed and
sleep the clock round. I generally get up _healthy_."
"You mean--you mean that I'm being a muff?" asked the preacher, in
surprise. There was no resentment in his tones.
"Yes; that's just about it. Have you to preach to-night?"
"I have; though God knows I'm not fit to do it."
"Then straight home you come with me. Mother will look to it that you
don't feed off skim-milk and a crust of bread. You'll preach to-night,
Hirst--better than ever you did in your life."
Again the preacher tried to fight, but he was exhausted; he could only
follow the lead of this overmastering pagan. Mrs. Lomax was sitting
down to dinner when they came in.
"I had given you up, Griff," she said. "You are never to be depended on
when once you get to the moors, and I was too hungry to wait. Gabriel,
I am glad to see you; what have you been doing to your face? It looks
like an old man's."
"He's been fasting, mother, and overworking himself. I put him in your
hands; I don't think you will let him starve, much as he wants to."
"No, I don't think I shall," responded the old lady, grimly.
Gabriel Hirst's father and Griff's father had been close friends;
dissimilarity of outlook upon every aspect of life had brought them
together, just as it had brought the sons together. On both counts--the
son's and the father's--Mrs. Lomax was warmly disposed towards Gabriel.
So he sat down, and ate meekly, as he was bidden, of strong meat and
apple-pie and cheese. He drank two glasses of good red port; fain would
he have asserted himself on this matter, but Mrs. Lomax reminded him of
Timothy, and he was altogether too bewildered to do battle on a point
of Scripture.
Greta Rotherson, when the preacher disappeared at the corner of the
wood, had laughed a little, and frowned a good deal, and had finally
put on her stockings and boots. "I wish he had never come," she cried.
"It is such a quiet nook, and no one has disturbed me before. I like
Gabriel Hirst, though, for all his hardness and his dangling of hell
before poor old father's eyes. _Hardness?_" She laughed again at that,
softly and musically; for she remembered how the preacher had looked at
her a few minutes ago. "He only wants taking in hand by--by a woman who
isn't afraid; he's not a fool at the bottom of him."
Then she tossed her hair back from her forehead and went briskly up
the wooded cleft of the hills, until she reached a weather-stained
corn-mill. The great wooden wheel was creaking intermittently on its
axle, as if the jar and fret of work-a-day motion were more to its
liking than this enforced Sabbath rest. Old Rotherson, the miller,
with his iron-grey hair and shrewd, clean-shaven face, was smoking
a churchwarden pipe at his door; the bees had deserted the heather
once more in favour of his bit of a garden, and a peacock-butterfly
was sunning itself on the house wall. It was hard to believe that the
Storm-God had his temple so near to this sheltered cranny of the moors.
"Well, Greta, lass, have you paddled to your heart's content?" cried
the old man, as his daughter came in sight.
"Yes, father--and a little more. Gabriel Hirst came down the hillside
before I had finished, and he would stop to talk. I had to sit on a log
with my legs tucked up under me, and I nearly got cramp before I rid
myself of him."
The miller chuckled quietly to his churchwarden.
"He'd never have noticed, child, so you might have spared yourself the
trouble. Was he as sour as ever?"
Greta turned her head to watch the peacock butterfly on the wall. Her
dimpled cheeks grew rosy.
"Not quite, father. He wanted to know if he could come to see us."
"Lass, lass, I wish folks would let a man's soul alone. What did you
say?" groaned the miller.
"That we were proof against conversion, and sick of it. That he might
come as a friend if he cared to, and we'd give him a hearty welcome."
"Good, good!" muttered the old man, approvingly. "But I doubt him,
Greta; he'll never be able to keep his tongue off that subject for
long."
"Well, we shall see. There's Nancy, father, coming to tell us that
dinner is ready. I'm ready, too; put down your pipe, dear."
When Gabriel Hirst mounted the pulpit of Ebenezer chapel that evening,
he felt none of the old red-hot lava of damnation rising to his lips;
he was strangely calm, and at peace with this world and the next;
the thought of little children was running, like a silver thread,
through every working of his mind. Decent food and a couple of glasses
of honest wine had much to do with it; re-action after his two wild
extremes of the morning counted for a good deal; but more powerful than
either had been those two hours he spent at Marshcotes Manor, under the
influence of Griff's cheery optimism and Mrs. Lomax's sane, practical
grip of things. He was just about to give out his text when there was a
clatter of hob-nailed boots on the stone floor, and he saw old Binns,
who was caretaker of the little chapel, showing Greta Rotherson into a
seat near the pulpit. For one moment his heart leaped into his mouth,
and he thought that it would be impossible to get the words out; but
he looked at Greta steadily, and his passion of the morning was gone,
and he wondered that the girl's presence should seem to round off some
hitherto incomplete ideas. As Griff had prophesied, he preached better
than he had ever done in his life: there was no wild denunciation, no
fever-heat of appeal, as in other sermons; it was all clear, and crisp,
and kindly; above all, it was convincing.
Greta Rotherson paused now and then, on her way out of chapel, to hear
the scattered comments of the villagers. Some were glad of the glimpse
which had been given them of a better life than their daily round of
hardness and care afforded. Others did not like their preacher under
his new aspect; they had too long been supplied with strong stuff to
descend willingly to fare on which only women and children could be
expected to thrive.
"Well, I'm saying that Gabriel Hirst is noan th' man he war this
morning," said one. "He's like as he's lost all fire; not a word o'
warm hell-fire did he gie us, an' that's noan like Gabriel."
"Thee hod thy whisht for a while," broke in another. "He war powerful
moved this morning, an' it doan't stan' to reason 'at th' Sperrit will
wark i' a man fro' morn to neet. Let him bide; he'll ingather some
thunder o' th' Lord afore another week comes round."
"Ay, but summat hes come to Gabriel sin' th' morning," said an old
woman, with a dry laugh. "I see'd him forebye th' owd corn-mill after
his preaching so fine and large about th' lusts o' t' flesh. Miller
Rotherson's daughter--ye marked her i' chapel mebbe, to-neet?--war
alongside of him, and he war just gaäping an' gaäping at her doll's
face of a woman. Gabriel is noan th' man he war, to my thinking."
"Well, now, I did think this morning, while he war fair agate wi' his
praching, an' th' words came out as thick as chaff at threshing-time, I
did think he warn't exactly what he hed been. Ay, ay, it's a sad to-do
when a man o' God goes speering after a pretty wench. An' her noan Ling
Crag born, nawther. Nay, I misdoubt th' lad, i' th' latter end. May the
Almighty keep me from women, and pardon all my sins, amen."
"Th' women'll see to that for theirseln, Ephraim; doan't thee put
thyseln about," chimed in an irreverent youngster from the rear.
Greta Rotherson had passed out of earshot before the old woman launched
her tit-bit of gossip, and she went home with a smile on her face.
She was wondering at the change in the preacher--and thinking of that
look on his face when first she came out of the water and sat on the
pine-log with her little white feet tucked up under her dress.