And another added, “Such a power for good as he has been, all his life. Think of his having begun his wonderful work right here in our little parish.”
The door opened and the preacher himself entered in his black cassock, followed by a group of people. He was a little flushed from the handshaking reception he had been holding in the vestibule and still wore the affable smile which had gone with the handshaking. The men and women who had followed him in were still talking two or three at once, trying to get his attention, still fixing their eyes on him, unwilling to leave him, moved evidently by his mere presence.
“It’s a renewal of my youth to be here again in this dear old parish,” he said genially, using a set of inflections of his fine voice quite different from those of the sermon, “I find it all comes back to me with the utmost freshness. Ah, youth! Youth!”
He broke off to say in still another tone, “I know none of you will object to my saying also that it is an immense relief to find the parish rid of that detestable incubus Mrs. Almera Canfield. You must all breathe a happier air, since she took her mocking cynicism into another world.”
A quick shifting of eyes, lifted eyebrows, and suppressed smiles told him that he had been indiscreet. He faced the uncomfortable little situation with a well-oiled ease of manner. “Have I offended some one here?” he asked, instantly, turning towards us. Then, seeing by my expression that I was the one involved, he said gallantly, “It’s not possible that so very young a lady can have any connection with a generation so long since passed away.”
“Mrs. Almera Canfield was my great-grandmother,” I said, perhaps rather drily. Not that I cared especially about Great-grandmother, of whom at that time I knew very little, and who seemed as remote from my life as Moses. But that same hateful, contrary streak in my nature was roused to resentment by his apparent assumption that a smile and a word from him could set anything straight.
He found the fact of my relationship and of my knowledge of it very amusing, “Where, oh, where, out of Vermont could you find a modern young person who even knew the name of her great-grandmother? I’m sure, my dear, that family loyalties are outlawed by such a long interval of years. And I’m also sure by one look at you, that you are not at all like your great-grandmother.”
He seemed to think, I reflected, that I would be sure to take that as a compliment. She must have been an old Tartar.
I could think of nothing to answer, and he turned away again, to go on chatting with the people who continued to hang on his words, laughing loudly when he said something playful, nodding a grave concurrence in his more seriously expressed opinions, their eyes always fixed on his.
They all moved away, out into the church and down the aisle and I did not see him again till that evening, when, quite unexpectedly, he appeared beside me in the break-up of the company after the large public dinner.