Whiteladies

by Mrs. Oliphant

The two principal sides of the square, facing each other—the gate side and the chapel side—had each a faction of its own. The chapel side was led by old Mrs. Matthews, who was the most prayerful woman in the community, or at least had the credit among her own set of being so—the gate side, by Sarah Storton, once the laundress at Whiteladies, who was, I fear, a very mundane personage, and did not hesitate to speak her mind to Miss Augustine herself. Old Mrs. Tolladay lived on the south side, and was the critic and historian, or bard, of both the factions. She was the wife of the old clerk, who rang the chapel bell, and led with infinite self-importance the irregular fire of Amens, which was so trying to Dr. Richard; but many of the old folks were deaf, and not a few stupid, and how could they be expected to keep time in the responses? Old Mrs. Matthews, who had been a Methodist once upon a time, and still was suspected of proclivities toward chapel, would groan now and then, without any warning, in the middle of the service, making Dr. Richard, whose nerves were sensitive, jump; and on Summer days, when the weather was hot, and the chapel close and drowsy, one of the old men would indulge in an occasional snore, quickly strangled by his helpmate—which had a still stronger effect on the Doctor’s nerves. John Simmons, who had no wife to wake him, was the worst offender on such occasions. He lived on the north side, in the darkest and coldest of all the cottages, and would drop his head upon his old breast, and doze contentedly, filling the little chapel with audible indications of his beatific repose. Once Miss Augustine herself had risen from her place, and walking solemnly down the chapel, in the midst of the awe-stricken people, had awakened John, taking her slim white hand out of her long sleeves, and making him start with a cold touch upon his shoulder. “It will be best to stay away out of God’s house if you cannot join in our prayers,” Miss Augustine had said, words which in his fright and compunction the old man did not understand. He thought he was to be turned out of his poor little cold cottage, which was a palace to him, and awaited the next Monday, on which he received his weekly pittance from the chaplain, with terrified expectation. “Be I to go, sir?” said old John, trembling in all his old limbs; for he had but “the House” before him as an alternative, and the reader knows what a horror that alternative is to most poor folks.

“Miss Augustine has said nothing about it,” said Dr. Richard; “but John, you must not snore in church; if you will sleep, which is very reprehensible, why should you snore, John?”

“It’s my misfortune, sir,” said the old man. “I was always a snoring sleeper, God forgive me; there’s many a one, as you say, sir, as can take his nap quiet, and no one know nothing about it; but, Doctor, I don’t mean no harm, and it ain’t my fault.”

“You must take care not to sleep, John,” said Dr. Richard, shaking his head, “that is the great thing. You’ll not snore if you don’t sleep.”

“I donnow that,” said John doubtfully, taking up his shillings. The old soul was hazy, and did not quite know what he was blamed for. Of all the few enjoyments he had, that Summer doze in the warm atmosphere was perhaps the sweetest. Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care—John felt it to be one of the best things in this world, though he did not know what any idle book had said.

At nine o’clock every morning James Tolladay sallied out of his cottage, with the key of the chapel, opened the door, and began to tug at the rope, which dangled so temptingly just out of the reach of the children, when they came to see their grandfathers and grandmothers at the almshouses. The chapel was not a very good specimen of architecture, having been built in the seventeenth century; and the bell which James Tolladay rung was not much of a bell; but still it marked nine o’clock to the village, the clergyman of the parish being a quiet and somewhat indolent person, who had, up to this time, resisted the movement in favor of daily services. Tolladay kept on ringing while the old people stumbled past him into their benches, and the Doctor, in his surplice, and little Mrs. Richard in her little trim bonnet—till Miss Augustine came along the path from the gate like a figure in a procession, with her veil on her head in Summer, and her hood in Winter, and with her hands folded into her long, hanging sleeves. Miss Augustine always came alone, a solitary figure in the sunshine, and walked abstracted and solemn across the garden, and up the length of the chapel to the seat which was left for her on one side of the altar rails. Mrs. Richard had a place on the other side, but Miss Augustine occupied a sort of stall, slightly raised, and very visible to all the congregation. The Austin arms were on this stall, a sign of proprietorship not perhaps quite in keeping with the humble meaning of the chapel; and Miss Augustine had blazoned it with a legend in very ecclesiastical red and blue—“Pray for us,” translated with laudable intentions, out of the Latin, in order to be understood by the congregation, but sent back into obscurity by the church decorator, whose letters were far too good art to be comprehensible. The old women, blinking under their old dingy bonnets, which some of them still insisted upon wearing “in the fashion,” with here and there a tumbled red and yellow rose, notwithstanding all that Mrs. Richard could say; and the old men with their heads sunk into the shabby collars of their old coats, sitting tremulous upon the benches, over which Miss Augustine could look from her high seat, immediately finding out any defaulter—were a pitiful assemblage enough, in that unloveliness of age and weakness which the very poor have so little means of making beautiful; but they were not without interest, nor their own quaint humor had any one there been of the mind to discover it. Of this view of the assemblage I need not say Miss Augustine was quite unconscious; her ear caught Mrs. Matthews’s groan of unction with a sense of happiness, and she was pleased by the fervor of the dropping Amen, which made poor Dr. Richard so nervous. She did not mind the painful fact that at least a minute elapsed between John Tolladay’s clerkly solemnity of response and the fitful gust with which John Simmons in the background added his assisting voice.

Miss Augustine was too much absorbed in her own special interests to be a Ritualist or not a Ritualist, or to think at all of Church politics. She was confused in her theology, and determined to have her family prayed for, and their sins expiated, without asking herself whether it was release from purgatory which she anticipated as the answer to her prayers, or simply a turning aside of the curse for the future. I think the idea in her mind was quite confused, and she neither knew nor was at any trouble to ascertain exactly what she meant. Accordingly, though many people, and the rector himself among them, thought Miss Augustine to be of the highest sect of the High Church, verging upon Popery itself, Miss Augustine in reality found more comfort in the Dissenting fervor of the old woman who was a “Methody,” than in the most correct Church worship. What she wanted, poor soul, was that semi-commercial, semi-visionary traffic, in which not herself but her family were to be the gainers. She was a merchant organizing this bargain with heaven, the nature of which she left vague even to herself; and those who aided her with most apparent warmth of supplications, were the people whom she most appreciated, with but little regard to the fashion of their exertions. John Simmons, when he snored, was like a workman shirking work to Miss Augustine. But even Dr. Richard and his wife had not fathomed this downright straightforward business temper which existed without her own knowledge, or any one else’s, in the strange visionary being with whom they had to do. She, indeed, put her meaning simply into so many words, but it was impossible for those good people to take her at her own word, and to believe that she expressed all she meant, and nothing less or more.

There was a little prayer used in the almshouse chapel for the family of the founder, which Dr. Richard had consented, with some difficulty, to add after the collects at Morning and Evening Service, and which he had a strong impression was uncanonical, and against the rubrics, employing it, so to speak, under protest, and explaining to every chance stranger that it was “a tradition of the place from time immemorial.”

“I suppose we are not at liberty to change lightly any ancient use,” said the chaplain, “at least such was the advice of my excellent friend the Bishop of the Leeward Islands, in whose judgment I have great confidence. I have not yet had an opportunity of laying the matter before the Bishop of my own diocese, but I have little doubt his lordship will be of the same opinion.”

With this protestation of faith, which I think was much stronger than Dr. Richard felt, the chaplain used the prayer; but he maintained a constant struggle against Miss Augustine, who would have had him add sentences to it from time to time, as various family exigencies arose. On one of the days of Miss Susan’s absence a thought of this kind came into her sister’s head. Augustine felt that Miss Susan being absent, and travelling, and occupied with her business, whatever it was, might, perhaps, omit to read the Lessons for the day, as was usual, or would be less particular in her personal devotions. She thought this over all evening, and dreamed of it at night; and in the morning she sent a letter to the chaplain as soon as she woke, begging him to add to his prayer for the founder’s family the words, “and for such among them as may be specially exposed to temptation this day.” Dr. Richard took a very strong step on this occasion—he refused to do it. It was a great thing for a man to do, the comfort of whose remnant of life hung upon the pleasure of his patroness; but he knew it was an illegal liberty to take with his service, and he would not do it.