He paused. There was a moment of tense silence.
“And Thine shall be the glory, Amen,” he faltered forth brokenly. He had no further words; the advocate had pleaded for his cause. He waited the voice of the judge. There followed a longer pause fraught with the emotion of a great need.
Sidney’s heart ached for these people; a thousand inarticulate pleas entered the wide gate of his sympathies and demanded utterance at his lips. A sultry breath entered the open window fraught with the odour of parched earth and burnt-up grass. The old priest and his three grey-haired elders, standing amid the kneeling people, seemed to him like brave standards ready to prop up a falling faith till its ruin crushed them, willing sacrifices for the people; they were mute, but their very presence standing thus was eloquent. Surely the God of their Fathers would remember the children of these men who had indeed “given up all and followed Him” out to the western wilderness? Long ago he had led forth His people out of Egypt. They had murmured against Him yet He had not left them to perish in their sins; was the hand that had given water from the rock and corn from Heaven empty now?
Long ago the great progressive miracle of Nature’s processes was inaugurated; were the wheels of God’s machinery clogged?
A shrill, trembling treble voice rose brokenly. For a few ineloquent phrases it continued, and then died away in sobs expressive of mortal need. It was Tom Shinar’s wife; their farm was to be sold at mortgage sale in the autumn. Mary Shinar had gone herself to plead with the lawyer in Brixton through whom the mortgage had been placed. Mary sat on the edge of a chair in an agony of nervousness whilst the perky clerk went in to state her business, and the lawyer came out of his comfortable office and told her they could stay on the farm “till the crop was off the ground,” he did not know the terrible irony of his mercy.
In the light of ordinary day Tom Shinar and his wife bore themselves as bravely as possible. Their neighbours asked them questions as to next year’s crops to force them to betray what was a secret only by courtesy. All the community knew the facts of the case, and when Tom, forced into a corner by questions, said “he ’lowed he’d be movin’ in fall,” every man knew what he meant. When Mary, in a like position, said she “reckoned they wouldn’t have to bank up the cellar that winter, ’cos Tom was thinking of changing,” the women said to each other afterwards: “They’re to be sold out in October—Mr. Ellis is takin’ the farm.”
