John cast a whimsical look in his direction.
“I don’t hold with church-going,” pursued Mrs. Trimwell calmly. “Say your prayers at home if you want to say them, says I. And as for sermons,—if you’ve heard Vicar talk out of the pulpit whether you will or no, you don’t run off smiling to hear him talk in it. Leastways I don’t. There’s some as does, I know.”
“Oh!” said Corin again, and this time more feebly. (John, I fear me, was laughing inwardly.) To disagree with Mrs. Trimwell would, Corin felt, be tantamount to calling her a black kettle, setting up himself the while as a shiny brass pot, to which title he knew he possessed no manner of right. Yet to agree!—Well, Corin’s conscience, some hidden fragment of convention—call it what you will—felt a slight hint of repugnance at her sentiments.
There is your man, your male individual, all over. Dogmatic religion—however vague the dogma—church-going is often outside his own category, yet for his women folk—any women folk—to speak against it holds for him a hint of distaste. It just serves to destroy that soft light of idealism with which he loves to surround women. Every man has one woman, at least, in this idealistic shrine, or, if he has not, he is of all men most miserable. And here it is that your adherents to the old Faith—the oldest Faith in Christendom—have a pull over your so-called enlightened individual. There is always One Woman to whom those of that old Faith can turn, one for whom no shrine is too fair, too lofty,—can be bedecked with no too costly wealth of love and homage. Here, in this shrine, at her feet, may every idealistic thought of man towards woman be placed, preserved, and cherished.
Corin, as already stated, said “Oh!” an ejaculation at once feeble, utterly lacking in significance of any kind, a mere signal that his ears had received the speech.
“Miss Rosamund don’t hold with my views,” went on Mrs. Trimwell, while John’s heart gave a sudden throb. “Not that I pays over-much heed to her, being a Papist what’s bound to go to Church and obey their priests if they don’t want any little unpleasantness in the next world, which I takes it may be a considerable more unpleasantness than you nor I would suppose. Still I will say she has a wonderful way of talking a thing clear, and if I didn’t know that popery was no better than a worshipping of graven images, I might go for to believe her.”
Corin glanced anxiously in the direction of John,—John who was eating chicken with an expressionless face, though I’ll not vouch that his shoulders didn’t shake a little now and then.
“Not that Miss Rosamund talks goody talk,” pursued Mrs. Trimwell, “which is a thing I never could abide in grown-up or child, and burnt them little tracty books they give my Tilda up to Sunday-school, setting of her off to talk texes to me and her father, which we didn’t smack her for though she deserved it. But there, she’d have been thinking she was an infant prodigal and a Christian martyr if we had. No; I just said how if she was so fond of texes she could learn a few more instead of going along blackberrying with the other children, and I sets her down to get a chapter of the Gospels by heart. We didn’t hear no more of texes after that, didn’t me and her father,” concluded Mrs. Trimwell dryly.
Indubitably the corners of John’s mouth were twitching now. Then Mrs. Trimwell’s eye caught his. Laughter came, whole-heartedly to John, to Mrs. Trimwell first with a note of half apology, over which the entire humour of the reminiscence presently got the upper hand. Corin joined in somewhat relieved. He had feared lest John’s feelings might be hurt.
“When I thinks of Tilda setting there not knowing whether to sulk or pretend she liked it!” ejaculated Mrs. Trimwell after a moment. She wiped the tears of laughter from her eyes with her apron. “But there, it was coffee I was going after, and not memories of my Tilda.”