Mr. Moor was not a member of meeting, though he attended pretty regularly. He was a large, fleshy man, not exactly fat, but full looking. He had a smooth, goodly face and straight iron-grey hair, brushed straight back from his forehead and behind his ears. I never heard him say an unkind word or saw him in anything but a cordial mood. He was always full of jests and quaint turns of speech, and never failed to shake Tom heartily by the hand whenever he met him; yet for all that Tom did not like him. He had an oily, unctuous way, that was not pleasing to him; he was always so goodly that he did not seem sincere, and always so cordial that it did not seem as though he meant his cordiality.
Such were the two men that were talking together by the meeting-house door, and each welcomed him in his own manner.
“How is thee, Thomas?” said Isaac, dryly.
“Why! It’s Thomas Granger! Bless my soul! Back again like a bad penny, eh?” said Mr. Moor, and he shook Tom by the hand with great warmth.
In the meantime, Tom’s father and his two brothers, John and William, came over from the horse shed, where they had been hitching their horses, and joined the group, and then they all went into the meeting-house together, taking their seats on the hard wooden benches within.
That morning they held a silent meeting, no one speaking for all the hour between ten and eleven o’clock. Now and then the wind would rush in little puffs through the open window and across the gloom of the building. A fly buzzed against a window pane, and once a robin outside burst into a sudden gush of song.
No other sound broke the silence, saving for the rustling of a dress, as one of the women Friends would move in her seat, or the restless sighing of some poor boy in the back part of the building. The overseers sat ranged along on the raised bench facing the meeting, and amongst them was Isaac Naylor. All of them sat with their hats on, motionless, with downcast eyes, buried in serious thought: but no one spoke.
At such a time every one is supposed to address a sermon to his own heart, but I am very much afraid that Tom Granger addressed none to himself, for his thoughts flew here and there and everywhere, and his mind was never still a moment in the chase of them. Now and then he shifted himself uneasily on the hard wooden bench, trying to find a more comfortable position than the one in which he was sitting, but the seats in Friends’ meeting were not made with a thought to comfort in those days. There was a long partition that ran down the length of the meeting, separating the men’s from the women’s side.