“People know me. Besides, I don’t care what they think. Now you look sharp.”
He went away, and Freda very reluctantly obeyed his injunctions, dressed herself all in black and went downstairs to the hall, where she found Nell waiting for her.
“Come along,” said the housekeeper rather crossly.
And seizing Freda by the arm, she dashed across the court-yard and the enclosure beyond, and dragged her through the open iron gates, outside which the funeral procession could be seen on its way through the churchyard. Freda felt so sick with disgust at the part she had to play in the farce, that she looked unutterably miserable, and heard sympathetic murmurs from many lips, as Nell with a strong hand half dragged her through the crowd.
“Poor little thing!” “Doan’t she look unhappy, poor lass!” and many such exclamations reached Freda’s ears and made her furious. Nell seemed to feel that there was a danger of the girl’s wrathful honesty breaking out, for she hurried her on into the church, and heaved a sigh of relief when she had pushed the girl into a square pew lined with green baize, immediately over which an old-fashioned three-decker pulpit frowned. Freda, at last distracted from her thoughts of the proceedings, looked about her in amazement.
“Is this a church?” she whispered.
Her ignorance was pardonable. Surely never yet did wild churchwardens in the frenzy of their Puritanism so run riot in a church before. Originally a plain Norman structure, erected by the monks of Presterby Abbey, and given to the townsfolk when their own Abbey church was completed, it had been transformed by later improvements into a very good copy of the interior of a ship. Clumsy little galleries had been erected wherever there was room for one, even before the old Norman chancel-arch. These galleries were entered from the outside of the church by covered flights of wooden steps, made on the model of the entrance to a bathing-machine. The roof was perforated by small cabin windows; the whole of the interior was covered with white-wash, including any small fragments of stone-work which the modern improvements had left visible; the Norman windows had all been carefully stopped up, and replaced by ordinary house windows, filled with small panes of poor glass. The only decorations were an enormous coloured coat of arms over the gallery of the chancel-arch, and a series of texts, indifferently spelt and painted coarsely on square wooden boards, which hung on the white-washed walls.
Nell scented popery in the girl’s innocent question, and answered with a frown.
“Of course it is. People don’t want tawdry fal-lals to help them to worship God, when they come in the right spirit,” she said severely. “Be quiet, here comes the Vicar.”
She thrust a prayer-book into the hand of the girl, who did not, however, follow the service, and who certainly could not understand much from the mumbling delivery of Mr. Staynes. She was shocked at the deception which was being carried out through all these solemn details, and when she was led to the side of the grave she shuddered and looked away.