Joan smiled at his enthusiasm on her behalf, then kissed him and went to bed; while he, mixing up his prayers, his last pipe, and his final glass of spirits according to his custom, sat the fire out while he drank deeper and prayed harder than usual in the light of his triumph.
"Polly couldn' do it, not for all her brains an' godliness," he murmured to himself, "yet 'twas given to an auld simple sawl like me! An' I have. I've led her slap-bang into the hand o' the Lard, an' the rest be His business. No man's done a better day's work inside Cornwall to-day than what I have—that's sure!"
CHAPTER TWELVE
FROM JOE
Since her visit to the church at Newlyn, Joan had been in no place of worship save the chapel of the Luke Gospelers. What might be the nature of the service before her she did not know, nor did she care. But the girl kept her promise and drove in the market-cart to Sancreed with her uncle and cousin when Sunday came. The little church lay bowered in its grove of sycamores, and, around it, a golden-green concourse of quivering shadows cooled those who had walked or driven from Drift—an outlying portion of the parish—approached through lanes innocent of all shade. Mr. Chirgwin put up the horse and presently joined his nieces in church. Then Joan saw him under interesting and novel conditions. He wore glasses with gold rims; he covered his bald head with a little velvet cap; at the appointed time he took a wooden plate and carried it round for money. Mary found the old man's places for him and sang in a way that fairly astounded Joan. The enormous satisfaction brought to herself by these vocal efforts was apparent. Her soul appeared mightily lifted up. She amused chance visitors to the church, but the regular congregation liked to hear Mary; and Joan, seeing the comfort her cousin sucked from singing, wished she had heart to join. That, however, she wholly lacked. Moreover, the words were strange to her.
The quiet service, brightened by music, dragged its slow length murmuringly along. The sermon, delivered by a visitor, was not of a sort to hold Joan, and, indeed, could hardly be expected to attract many in such a congregation. The preacher had lately been reading old Cornish history, and, overcome by the startling fact that the far west of England—Cornwall and Devon—were Christian long before Augustine saw Kent, dwelt upon the matter after a very instructive fashion in ears unlikely to benefit from such knowledge. That the Cornu-British bishops preached Christ while yet Sussex, Wessex, Hampshire, Berks and other districts worshiped Woden, Freya, the Queen of Heaven, the Thunder God, and other deities whose altars were set up after the Conquest, did not interest Joan for one or Mr. Chirgwin for another. But the girl woke up at the mention of Irish and Welsh and Breton saints. Pleasant to hear was the utterance of names which she had loved once but of late almost forgotten. They came back now, and, the service having turned her heart to softness, she welcomed them gladly as friends returned from afar. For the rest, the Litany it was which roused Joan to deepest interest and opened her mind to new impressions. Here was a prayer, gigantic in length, universal, all-embracing, catholic beyond the compass of anything her thoughts had heretofore conceived. From the Queen upon her throne to Joan herself, from the bishops, the princes and the Lords of the Council to Uncle Chirgwin and his fruits of the earth, that astounding petition ranged with equal vigor and earnestness. Nothing was too high, nothing was too low for it; all the world was named, and the people cried for a hearing or for mercy between each supplication and each prayer. The overwhelming majesty of such praying impressed Joan much; as, indeed, it impresses all who come adult thereto and do not associate it with their childhood, with weary hours dragging interminably out, with sleepy buzz of voices, with sore knees or a breaking back, with yearnings stifled, with devices for passing time, with the longed-for sunshine stealing inch by inch eastward on the church walls.
"A power o' larnin' in a small headpiece," commented Uncle Chirgwin as he drove home with the girls sitting side by side on his left. "A braave ch'ice o' words an' a easy knowledge o' the saints as weern't picked up in a day. Tis well to hear a furriner now an' again. They do widen the grasp of a man's mind, looking 'pon things from a changed point o' view. Not as us could be 'spected to be Latiners, yet I seem 'tis very well to listen to it as chance offers. 'Tis something to knaw 'twas Latin, an' that did I, though I doubt some o' the good neighbors couldn' tell it for what 'twas, by no means."
Joan said little about the service, but she praised the Litany from her own peculiar attitude toward it.
"That be fine prayin'," she said, "with nobody forgot, an' all in black print so's wance said 'tedn' lost."
After dinner, when Mary had gone to see a friend and the farm people were dawdling abroad till evening milking-time, Joan made her uncle read the service through again. This he did comfortably between the whiffs of his pipe, and Joan answered the responses, cooing them in her sweet voice as softly as the red and blue pigeons crooned on the roof outside. Drift was asleep under a hot blaze of afternoon sunshine. Sometimes a child's keen voice in the road cut the drowsy silence and came to Joan's ears where she sat, in the best parlor with Uncle Thomas; sometimes slow wheels rumbled up the hill toward Buryan. Other sounds there were none. The old people slept within their cottages after the extra baked meats of Sunday's dinner; many of the young paired and walked where pathways ran over meadows and through yellowing wheat; while others, more gregarious and unattached, had tramped away to Penzance to join the parade by the sea and meet their friends from the shops.