That you never heard before.
There was the French waltz-song, Sous les Ponts de Paris, of which he only knew a few words here and there, and these he pronounced abominably; but its romantic wistful tune suited his voice. Sometimes, too, he would sing Zulu songs that reminded Teresa of Spanish coplas sung by Seville gipsies; and sometimes the Scottish psalms and paraphrases in metre; and their crude versification and rugged melodious airs struck her, accustomed to the intoning of the Latin Psalter, as almost ridiculous. They had lost all of what Sir Philip Sidney calls, “the psalmist’s notable prosopopœias when he maketh you, as it were, see God coming in His majesty”; and they made one see, instead, a very homely God, who, in the cool of the evening, would stroll into the crofter’s cottage, as though it had been the tent of Abraham, and praise the guidwife’s scones, and resolve the crofter’s theological difficulties.
All this showed a robustness of conscience—he had none of the doctrinairism and queasiness of the ordinary convert; what mattered it to him that the songs he sang were often very secular, the version of the Psalms heavy with Presbyterianism?
But she was often conscious of the decades that lay between them, the leagues and leagues, of which the milestones were little cultured jokes at Chelsea tea-parties, and Cambridge epigrams, and endless novels and plays. The very language he spoke was twenty or thirty years behind her own; such expressions as “a very refined lady,” or “a regular earthly Paradise,” fell from his lips with all their pristine dignity. And yet she could talk to him simply and spontaneously as to no one else.
Since he had been there she had left off reading mediæval books, and her brain felt like a deserted hive.
4
Easter was very late that year, and the Catholics at Plasencia were wakened very early on Easter morning to an exquisite, soft, scented day, almost like summer.
Teresa, looking out of her window as she dressed, saw that her parents were already walking in the garden. She gazed for some seconds at her father’s sturdy back, as he stood, as if rooted to the earth, gazing at some minute flower in the border.
St. Joseph of Arimathea, she thought, may have been just such a kindly self-indulgent person as he; dearly loving his garden. And if her father had been asked to allow the corpse of a young dissenter to lie in his garden, though he might have grumbled, he would have been far too good-natured to refuse. And, if that young dissenter had turned out to be God Almighty, her father would have turned into a Saint, and after his death his sturdy bones would have worked miracles. She smiled as she pictured the Doña’s indignant surprise at finding her husband chosen for canonisation—the College of Cardinals would have had no difficulty in obtaining an advocatus diaboli.