“Now this is what I call a kind of pleasant,” said Miss Bethia. “Now let’s have a good visit before the children come home.”
“Shall I read to you?” said David, a little at a loss as to what might be expected from him in the way of entertainment.
“Well—no. I can read to myself at home, and I would rather talk if you had just as lief.”
And she did talk on every imaginable subject, with very little pause, till she came round at last to old Mr Bent’s death.
“I’d have given considerable to have gone to the funeral,” said she. “I’ve known Timothy Bent for over forty years, and I’d have liked to see the last of him. I thought of coming up to ask your papa if he wouldn’t take me over when he went, but I thought perhaps your mamma would want to go. Did she?”
No, David said; he had driven his father over.
“Your papa preached, did he?” and then followed a great many questions about the funeral, and the mourners, and the bearers, and then about the text and the sermon. And then she added a hope that he “realised” the value of the privileges he enjoyed above others in having so many opportunities to hear his father preach. And when she said this, David knew that she was going to give him the “serious talking to” which she always felt it her duty to give faithfully to the young people of the families where she visited.
They always expected it. Davie and Jem used to compare notes about these “talks,” and used to boast to one another about the methods they took to prevent, or interrupt, or answer them, as the case might be. But when Miss Bethia spoke about Mr Bent and the funeral, it brought back the sermon and what his father had said to him on his way home, and all the troubled thoughts that had come to him afterwards. So instead of shrugging his shoulders, and making believe very busy with something else, as he had often done under Miss Bethia’s threatening lectures, he sat looking out of the window with so grave a face, that she in her turn, made a little pause, of surprise, and watched him as she went on with her work.
“Yes,” she went on in a little, “it is a great privilege you have, and that was a solemn occasion, a very solemn occasion—but you did not tell me the text.”
David told her the text and a good part of the sermon, too. He told it so well, and grew so interested and animated as he went on, that in a little Miss Bethia set down the flat-iron, and seated herself to listen. Jem came in before he was through.