Arrived within, she fell to her baking, in a clean kitchen with doors and windows wide. She was a notable cook, her mother having trained her before she died. Moreover, what she touched she touched like an artist. She made no useless steps or movements, she neither dallied nor hurried; all went with a fine assurance, an easy “Long ago I knew how—but if you ask me how I know—!” She sang as she worked, a brave young carolling of Allan-à-Dale and John-à-Green and Robin Hood and Maid Marian.
The good odour of the bread arose and floated out to mingle with the maytime of the little garden. Old Roger Heron, short, ruddy, and hale for all he was so clerkly, came in from his spading. “That smells finely!” he said. He dipped a cup into the well water and drank.
“Aye, and it is going to taste finely!” answered Joan.
“‘I have heard talk of bold Robin Hood,
And of brave Little John,
Of Friar Tuck and Will Scarlet,
Locksley and Maid Marian—’”
Her father put down the cup, moved to the settle, and sitting deliberately down, began with deliberation one of his talks of a thinking man. “Look you, Joan! Goodman Cole and I have been discoursing. We were talking of religion.”
“Aye?” said Joan. She spread a white cloth upon the table and set in the midst a bow-pot of cherry bloom. “Religion. Well?”
“You should say the word with a heavier tone,” said old Roger. “‘Religion.’—Things aren’t here as they were at your uncle’s—rest his soul! Modesty in religion and a decent mirth seemed right enough, seeing that the earl was minded that way and on the whole the town as well. So the old games and songs and ways went somehow on—though everything was stiffening, even there, and not like it was when I was young and the learned were talking of the Greeks. But times have changed! It seems the Lord wishes gloom, or the minister says he does. If it was begun to be felt in the castle and the town, and it was,—your uncle and I often talked about it,—it shows ten times more here. Aye, it showed three years ago, but Goodman Cole says it grows day by day, and that now if you appear not with a holy melancholy you are little else than a lost soul!”