And He shall feed His flock like a she-e-e-e-e-perd.
David glanced at the slim, graceful young woman standing beside him, looking gentler than she usually did, but still very remote.
She, and Jollypot’s singing, and the scent of roses, and the great stretch behind them of Sabbath-hushed English fields, brought back, somehow or other, one of the emotions of his boyhood. Not being introspective, he had never analysed it, but he knew that it was somehow connected with a vague dissatisfaction with his lot, and with a yearning for the “gentry,” and hence, because when he was a boy he thought they were the same thing, a yearning also for the English. He remembered how badly he had had it one Sunday morning when he had played truant from the service in his father’s church, and had slunk into the “wee Episcopalian chapel” in the grounds of the laird. The castle had been let that summer to an English judge and his family, and the judge’s “high-English” voice, monotonous, refined, reading the lessons in a sort of chant, pronouncing when as wen, and poor as paw, had thrilled him as the dramatic reading of his father had never done. Then some years later he had slipped into evensong, and the glossy netted “bun” at the nape of the neck of Miss Stewart (the laird’s daughter), and her graceful genuflections at the name of Jesus had thrilled him in the same way. Finally the emotion had crystallised into dreams of a tall, kind, exquisitely tidy lady, with a “high-English” voice and a rippling laugh, sitting in a tent during the whole of a June afternoon scoring at the English game of cricket ... or at a school treat, standing tall and smiling, her arms stretched out, her hands clasped in those of her twin pillar, warbling:
Oranges and lemons
Sing the bells of St. Clement’s,
while under the roof of arms scampered the hot, excited children.
Anyway, it was an emotion that gave him a strange, sweet nausea.
As to Teresa; as if her mind had caught a reflection from his, she was pondering the line:
The ancient English dower of inward happiness.
Wordsworth mourned it as a thing of the past; but had it ever been? Did Jollypot possess it? Who could say. Certainly none of the rest of them did.