‘I was never taught,’ said Joyce, with her schoolmistress air, ‘that it was a religion at all—for them that instructed me said we were all at one in our religion, and that it was only the forms of Church government——’
‘Do you hear that, Hayward! This will never do. I see she means to convert me. And that’s why she sympathises with these Sitwells and their demonstrations. You were there too. And they dragged that old boy—that big Sir Sam—to their place, by way of a little extra triumph over me—as if I cared for the soap-boiler. And, Hayward, you were there too.’
‘Elizabeth,’ said the Colonel abashed, ’as they made so great a point of it, thought we might as well go.’
‘And fly in the face of your oldest friend,’ said the Canon. ‘Look here, I am going to be great friends with this girl of yours. I’ll bring her over to my side, and she’ll help me to make mince-meat of these St. Augustine people. What is her name?—Joyce—why, to be sure, that was her mother’s——’ The Canon’s fine bass dropped into a lower key, and he broke of with a ‘poor thing, poor thing! Well, my dear, I don’t mean to stand on any ceremony with you. I mean to call you Joyce, seeing I have known your father since before you were born. You shouldn’t have taken him off to that business in Wombwell’s field, and made him take sides against me.’
‘I did not know—one side from another,’ said Joyce; ‘and besides, it was not me.’
It was very hard for her not to say ‘sir’ to him. He belonged to the class of men who are in the way of visiting schools, and to whom a little schoolmistress looks up as the greatest of earthly potentates; but she resisted the inclination heroically.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I don’t doubt both of these things are true, but you shall hear all about it. Why, I set up the man! It was I who put him in that district—it was I who got it constituted a district—you know, Hayward. They were starving in a curacy when I put them there. Not that I blame Sitwell—it’s that little sprite of a wife of his that is at the bottom of it all. A little woman like that can’t keep out of mischief. She runs to it like a duck to the water. And they thought they would make an end of me by laying hold of that old soap-boiler—old Sam! Soapy Sam, no doubt she’ll call him—that woman has a nickname for everybody. She calls me the Great Gun, do you know? If she doesn’t take care she’ll find that guns, and Canons too, have got shot in them. Why, she’s got that good old Cissy Marsham away from me—that old fool that is worth ten thousand soap-boilers.’
‘Oh no,’ said Joyce.
‘What?’ cried the Canon—‘not worth ten thousand soap-boilers? No, you are right; I meant ten million—I was under the mark.’
And then Joyce told her little story about Miss Marsham’s regrets. And the Canon’s melodious throat gave forth a soft roar of laughter, which brought a little moisture to his eyes. ‘I always knew I should have you on my side,’ he said. ‘Here’s this little schismatic extracting the only little drop of honey there was in all that prickly wilderness—and laughing in her sleeve all the time to see the Church folks quarrelling. But don’t you be too cock-sure: for I’ll have you converted and as stanch a Churchwoman as any in the diocese before Michaelmas—if that Scotch fellow leaves us the time,’ the Canon said, with another big but soft laugh.