“He came in yesterday afternoon at dusk,” she resumed, “when I was holding my Bible Class. ‘And what has been the course of instruction to-day, Miss Timmens?’ asked he, as mild as new milk, all the girls gaping and staring around him. ‘It has been reading, and writing, and summing, and spelling, and sewing,’ said I, giving him the catalogue in full: ‘and now I’m trying to teach them their duty to Heaven and to one another. And according to my old-fashioned notion, sir,’ I summed up, ‘if a poor girl acquires these matters thoroughly, she is a deal more fitted to go through life in the station to which God has called her (as the catechism says), than she would be if you gave her a course of fine mincing uppishness, with your poetry and your drawing and your embroidery.’ Oh, he gets his answer from me, ma’am.”
“Mr. Bruce may be kind and enlightened, and all that,” spoke Mrs. Todhetley, “but he certainly seems inclined to carry his ideas beyond reasonable bounds, so far as regards these poor peasant children.”
“Reasonable!” repeated Miss Timmens, catching up the word, and rubbing her sharp nose with excitement: “why, the worst is, that there’s no reason in it. Not a jot. The parson’s mind has gone a little bit off its balance, ma’am; that’s my firm conviction. This exalted education applied to young ladies would be all right and proper: but where can be the use of it to these poor girls? What good will his accomplishments, his branches of grand learning do them? His conchology and meteorology, and all the rest of his ologies? Of what service will it be to them in future?”
“I’d have got my living nicely, I guess, if I’d been taught them things,” satirically struck in Molly, unable to keep her tongue still any longer. “A fine cook I should ha’ made!—kept all my places a beautiful length of time; I wouldn’t come with such flighty talk to the Squire, Miss Timmens, if ’twas me.”
“The talk’s other people’s; it isn’t mine,” fired Miss Timmens, turning her wrath on Molly. “That is, the notions are. You had better attend to your baking, Molly.”
“So I had,” said Molly. “Baking’s more in my line than them other foreign jerks. But well I should have knowed how to do it if my mind had been cocketed up with the learning that’s only fit for lords and ladies.”
“Is not that my argument?” retorted Miss Timmens, flinging the last word after her as she went out to her oven. “Poor girls were sent into the world to work, ma’am, not to play at being fine scholars,” she added to Mrs. Todhetley, as she got up to leave. “And, as sure as we are born, this new dodge of education, if it ever gets a footing, will turn the country upside down.”
“I’m sure I hope not,” replied the mother in her mild way. “Take another tart, Miss Timmens. These are currant and raspberry.”
II.
The company began to arrive at four o’clock. The snow had ceased to fall; it was a fine, cold, clear evening, the moon very bright. A large store-room at the back of the house had been cleared out, and a huge fire made in it. The walls were decorated with evergreens, and tin sconces holding candles; benches from the school-house were ranged underneath them. This was to be the principal play-room, but the other rooms were open. Mrs. Hill (formerly Mrs. Garth, who had not so very long before lost poor David) and Maria Lease came up by invitation to help Miss Timmens with the children; and Mrs. Trewin would have come but for her fall on the slide. Miss Timmens appeared in full feather: a purple gown of shot silk, with a red waist-band, and red holly berries in her lace cap. The children, timid at first, sat round on the forms in prim stillness, just like so many mice.