FullReads

Among all the people who assembled on that day the brother clergymen were the least interested. Their minds were haunted by a spirit in kerseymere in the evening they walked together in the fields.

‘She’s all right,’ said Joshua. ‘But here are you doing journey-work, Cornelius, and likely to continue at it till the end of the day, as far as I can see. I, too, with my petty living–what am I after all? . . . To tell the truth, the Church is a poor forlorn hope for people without influence, particularly when their enthusiasm begins to flag. A social regenerator has a better chance outside, where he is unhampered by dogma and tradition. As for me, I would rather have gone on mending mills, with my crust of bread and liberty.’

Almost automatically they had bent their steps along the margin of the river; they now paused. They were standing on the brink of the well-known weir. There were the hatches, there was the culvert; they could see the pebbly bed of the stream through the pellucid water. The notes of the church-bells were audible, still jangled by the enthusiastic villagers.

‘Why see–it was there I hid his walking-stick!’ said Joshua, looking towards the sedge. The next moment, during a passing breeze, something flashed white on the spot to which the attention of Cornelius was drawn.

From the sedge rose a straight little silver-poplar, and it was the leaves of this sapling which caused the flicker of whiteness.

‘His walking-stick has grown!’ Joshua added. ‘It was a rough one–cut from the hedge, I remember.’

At every puff of wind the tree turned white, till they could not bear to look at it; and they walked away.

‘I see him every night,’ Cornelius murmured . . . ‘Ah, we read our Hebrews to little account, Jos! [Greek text]. To have endured the cross, despising the shame–there lay greatness! But now I often feel that I should like to put an end to trouble here in this self-same spot.’

‘I have thought of it myself,’ said Joshua.

‘Perhaps we shall, some day,’ murmured his brother. ‘Perhaps,’ said Joshua moodily.

With that contingency to consider in the silence of their nights and days they bent their steps homewards.

December 1888.