Under the Mendips: A Tale

by Emma Marshall

Mrs. Falconer and the squire, with their family, were never absent from their places, and Mr. Watson, the squire's agent, acting as sidesman, was also regular in his attendance.

But it was a lifeless mechanical service on the part of both minister and people; and the loud Amens of the old clerk were the only responses to be heard. The Psalms at the end of the book of Common Prayer were used, accompanied by a strangely-assorted band in the worm-eaten gallery, and two or three men and boys supplemented the scraping of the fiddle and bassoon with singing, which might well be called bawling.

Nor was Fair Acres an isolated instance of country parish churches; and city churches, too, at this date. The great tide of the evangelical movement had, it is true, set steadily in, and was soon to cover the kingdom with its healing and reviving waters; but its streams did not penetrate into the heart of the hills, and small outlying villages went on, with no schools and no resident clergymen, and were contented because they were asleep.

Of course the sound of "the waters of Siloah" were heard in Somersetshire as, one by one, Hannah More's schools grew and flourished, and, one by one, her enemies became her friends. But the apathy at Fair Acres on the part of the clergyman, and the determination of Mrs. Falconer to set her face like a flint against all innovations, was thought to be praiseworthy, and to show a laudable desire to resist methodism in whatever form it took.

Gilbert Arundel's home-training had been very different from that of his friend. His mother had early in life been brought in contact with several of the fathers of the evangelical school, and the spirit had quickened her faith into living heart service.

"How my mother would admire her!" Gilbert thought, as he carried away with him from the church the picture, in his mind, of the squire's young daughter, as she followed the Psalms in the big prayer-book on the desk, and with her arm round Piers to steady him, pointed with her finger to the words, reading the alternate verse with old Simkins, the clerk, in a voice which Gilbert could barely catch, though he strained his ears to do so.

There was an entire absence of self-consciousness in Joyce; and if the undulations of the small mirror over her high chest of drawers, permitted her to discern anything like the real reflection of her lovely face, she did not give it much thought.

Brothers are not wont to admire their sisters or to tell them they are fair to look upon, and Joyce would have been very much surprised if she had heard that her brother Melville said, she only wanted the accessories of fashionable dress to be accounted a belle at Bath or Clifton, nay, even likely to make a sensation in the great world of London life.

She was a hopeless rustic now, but he saw in her capabilities which few girls possessed.

He had said nothing about Joyce's beauty to Mr. Arundel, because he was, in his folly, ashamed to confess how devoid Joyce was of the ornaments which went so far to form his own estimate of a woman, and Mr. Arundel's silence about Joyce, since that first day at the cathedral, seemed to him to show that he only praised her at first, because she was his sister out of courtesy, and that he was, as every man of taste must be, disappointed with her on nearer acquaintance. Superficial and foolish himself, he was almost unable to appreciate the earnest sincerity of his friend, and on this particular Sunday his temper had been tried by the arrival of a letter from the Palace at Wells, brought over on the previous evening by a special messenger, in which the Lord Bishop of Bath and Wells requested the pleasure of Mr. Arundel's company at dinner on the following Monday, but made no mention of him. He inwardly voted the bishop "a stupid old bat," as every one must be who was blind to his perfections!