‘ ’Tis the old trouble, Sebastian—you do not see what I mean.—Ah! let her grow up a gentlewoman.’
‘I’ll do my best, Emma,’ he said.
‘I pray you to send her to church each Lord’s Day,’ pursued Mrs. Shepley. ‘Send her with Charlotte; you have ever been careless of the Church and its mysteries.’
‘To church she shall go,’ said Sebastian—‘if that will make her a gentlewoman,’ he added to himself.
So Mrs. Shepley, with her little gentilities and punctilios, her tactless ways and her zeal for ordinances, went the way of all flesh.
Sebastian was not broken-hearted, though the house felt empty enough, he thought, without poor Emma; and Carrie, after the first solemn months of mourning were over, missed her mother sadly little.
She lived a perfectly happy unconstrained existence, which accorded well with her simple nature. Sebastian, who was nothing if not truthful, sent her to church weekly with Lady Mallow, and these were the dreariest hours of Carrie’s otherwise unclouded childhood. Each Sunday morning Lady Mallow appeared with horrible regularity, driving in a singularly gloomy-looking coach, which seemed to Carrie to swallow her up as she entered it. In silence they drove through the crowded streets (which on Sunday had a way of looking very gloomy too), and the coach drew up before the door of that sad little building, the church of St. Mary Minories. Lady Mallow occupied one of those carved oak pews which to this day you may see mouldering away in the church, and there in its genteel obscurity Carrie sat, with a sinking heart, counting the slow-passing minutes till she could breathe the fresher air of the everyday world again. Patty had once told her that ‘persons of quality was buried in ’eaps under the floor in St. Mary Minories,’ and Carrie’s imagination hovered over this gruesome thought. She somehow connected that damp old smell which clings about the church with the ‘heaps an’ heaps of persons of quality’ lying in their shrouds under the chancel, and each day as she asserted her belief in the resurrection of the body, found herself wondering how the poor dead people would ever work their way up through those slabs of stone. So Carrie required all the fortitude and cheerfulness which she inherited from her father to sustain the ordeal of Sunday’s gloom.
Service once over, however, she stepped into the auntly coach with a much lighter heart. The drive home seemed an altogether different matter from the drive to church, and each step of the way Carrie’s spirits mounted higher and higher, till, when the coach drew up before the door, she could have danced for joy. Bidding a decorous adieu to her aunt, Carrie was handed out by the man-servant, and mounted the steps to the door with the greatest propriety. But it was well that the departing rumble of the wheels hid from Lady Mallow’s ear that whoop of joy which Carrie uttered as she raced into the parlour and flung her arms round her father’s neck, crying out,
‘ ’Tis done—done for another week, sir!’
Mrs. Shepley had never permitted such demonstrative greetings—they were indeed considered a great breach of decorum in those days; but I fear many polite rules were broken in upon by Carrie and her father, who neither of them cared as much as they should have done for the generally received ideas of the society of their day.