Miss Mackenzie's face became suddenly as red as fire, but for a moment or two she made no answer. I do not know whether I may as yet have succeeded in making the reader understand the strength as well as the weakness of my heroine's character; but Mrs Stumfold had certainly not succeeded in perceiving it. She was accustomed, probably, to weak, obedient women,—to women who had taught themselves to believe that submission to Stumfoldian authority was a sign of advanced Christianity; and in the mild-looking, quiet-mannered lady who had lately come among them, she certainly did not expect to encounter a rebel. But on such matters as that to which the female hierarch of Littlebath was now alluding, Miss Mackenzie was not by nature adapted to be submissive.
"Is there anything between you and Mr Maguire?" said Mrs Stumfold again. "I particularly wish to have a plain answer to that question."
Miss Mackenzie, as I have said, became very red in the face. When it was repeated, she found herself obliged to speak. "Mrs Stumfold, I do not know that you have any right to ask me such a question as that."
"No right! No right to ask a lady who sits under Mr Stumfold whether or not she is engaged to Mr Stumfold's own curate! Think again of what you are saying, Miss Mackenzie!" And there was in Mrs Stumfold's voice as she spoke an expression of offended majesty, and in her countenance a look of awful authority, sufficient no doubt to bring most Stumfoldian ladies to their bearings.
"You said nothing about being engaged to him."
"Oh, Miss Mackenzie!"
"You said nothing about being engaged to him, but if you had I should have made the same answer. You asked me if there was anything between me and him; and I think it was a very offensive question."
"Offensive! I am afraid, Miss Mackenzie, you have not your spirit subject to a proper control. I have come here in all kindness to warn you against danger, and you tell me that I am offensive! What am I to think of you?"
"You have no right to connect my name with any gentleman's. You can't have any right merely because I go to Mr Stumfold's church. It's quite preposterous. If I went to Mr Paul's church"—Mr Paul was a very High Church young clergyman who had wished to have candles in his church, and of whom it was asserted that he did keep a pair of candles on an inverted box in a closet inside his bedroom—"if I went to Mr Paul's church, might his wife, if he had one, come and ask me all manner of questions like that?"
Now Mr Paul's name stank in the nostrils of Mrs Stumfold. He was to her the thing accursed. Had Miss Mackenzie quoted the Pope, or Cardinal Wiseman or even Dr Newman, it would not have been so bad. Mrs Stumfold had once met Mr Paul, and called him to his face the most abject of all the slaves of the scarlet woman. To this courtesy Mr Paul, being a good-humoured and somewhat sportive young man, had replied that she was another. Mrs Stumfold had interpreted the gentleman's meaning wrongly, and had ever since gnashed with her teeth and fired great guns with her eyes whenever Mr Paul was named within her hearing. "Ribald ruffian," she had once said of him; "but that he thinks his priestly rags protect him, he would not have dared to insult me." It was said that she had complained to Stumfold; but Mr Stumfold's sacerdotal clothing, whether ragged or whole, prevented him also from interfering, and nothing further of a personal nature had occurred between the opponents.