When those of us who are still left of that band of children who played
long years ago in the old orchard and walked the golden road together
in joyous companionship, foregather now and again in our busy lives and
talk over the events of those many merry moons--there are some of our
adventures that gleam out more vividly in memory than the others, and
are oftener discussed. The time we bought God’s picture from Jerry
Cowan--the time Dan ate the poison berries--the time we heard the
ghostly bell ring--the bewitchment of Paddy--the visit of the Governor’s
wife--and the night we were lost in the storm--all awaken reminiscent
jest and laughter; but none more than the recollection of the Sunday
Peg Bowen came to church and sat in our pew. Though goodness knows, as
Felicity would say, we did not think it any matter for laughter at the
time--far from it.
It was one Sunday evening in July. Uncle Alec and Aunt Janet, having
been out to the morning service, did not attend in the evening, and we
small fry walked together down the long hill road, wearing Sunday attire
and trying, more or less successfully, to wear Sunday faces also. Those
walks to church, through the golden completeness of the summer evenings,
were always very pleasant to us, and we never hurried, though, on the
other hand, we were very careful not to be late.
This particular evening was particularly beautiful. It was cool after a
hot day, and wheat fields all about us were ripening to their harvestry.
The wind gossiped with the grasses along our way, and over them the
buttercups danced, goldenly-glad. Waves of sinuous shadow went over the
ripe hayfields, and plundering bees sang a freebooting lilt in wayside
gardens.
“The world is so lovely tonight,” said the Story Girl. “I just hate the
thought of going into the church and shutting all the sunlight and music
outside. I wish we could have the service outside in summer.”
“I don’t think that would be very religious,” said Felicity.
“I’d feel ever so much more religious outside than in,” retorted the
Story Girl.
“If the service was outside we’d have to sit in the graveyard and that
wouldn’t be very cheerful,” said Felix.
“Besides, the music isn’t shut out,” added Felicity. “The choir is
inside.”
“‘Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,’” quoted Peter, who was
getting into the habit of adorning his conversation with similar gems.
“That’s in one of Shakespeare’s plays. I’m reading them now, since I got
through with the Bible. They’re great.”
“I don’t see when you get time to read them,” said Felicity.
“Oh, I read them Sunday afternoons when I’m home.”
“I don’t believe they’re fit to read on Sundays,” exclaimed Felicity.
“Mother says Valeria Montague’s stories ain’t.”
“But Shakespeare’s different from Valeria,” protested Peter.
“I don’t see in what way. He wrote a lot of things that weren’t true,
just like Valeria, and he wrote swear words too. Valeria never does
that. Her characters all talk in a very refined fashion.”
“Well, I always skip the swear words,” said Peter. “And Mr. Marwood said
once that the Bible and Shakespeare would furnish any library well. So
you see he put them together, but I’m sure that he would never say that
the Bible and Valeria would make a library.”
“Well, all I know is, I shall never read Shakespeare on Sunday,” said
Felicity loftily.
“I wonder what kind of a preacher young Mr. Davidson is,” speculated
Cecily.
“Well, we’ll know when we hear him tonight,” said the Story Girl. “He
ought to be good, for his uncle before him was a fine preacher, though a
very absent-minded man. But Uncle Roger says the supply in Mr. Marwood’s
vacation never amounts to much. I know an awfully funny story about old
Mr. Davidson. He used to be the minister in Baywater, you know, and he
had a large family and his children were very mischievous. One day his
wife was ironing and she ironed a great big nightcap with a frill round
it. One of the children took it when she wasn’t looking and hid it
in his father’s best beaver hat--the one he wore on Sundays. When Mr.
Davidson went to church next Sunday he put the hat on without ever
looking into the crown. He walked to church in a brown study and at the
door he took off his hat. The nightcap just slipped down on his head, as
if it had been put on, and the frill stood out around his face and the
string hung down his back. But he never noticed it, because his thoughts
were far away, and he walked up the church aisle and into the pulpit,
like that. One of his elders had to tiptoe up and tell him what he
had on his head. He plucked it off in a dazed fashion, held it up, and
looked at it. ‘Bless me, it is Sally’s nightcap!’ he exclaimed mildly.
‘I do not know how I could have got it on.’ Then he just stuffed it into
his pocket calmly and went on with the service, and the long strings of
the nightcap hung down out of his pocket all the time.”
“It seems to me,” said Peter, amid the laughter with which we greeted
the tale, “that a funny story is funnier when it is about a minister
than it is about any other man. I wonder why.”
“Sometimes I don’t think it is right to tell funny stories about
ministers,” said Felicity. “It certainly isn’t respectful.”
“A good story is a good story--no matter who it’s about,” said the Story
Girl with ungrammatical relish.
There was as yet no one in the church when we reached it, so we took our
accustomed ramble through the graveyard surrounding it. The Story Girl
had brought flowers for her mother’s grave as usual, and while she
arranged them on it the rest of us read for the hundredth time the
epitaph on Great-Grandfather King’s tombstone, which had been composed
by Great-Grandmother King. That epitaph was quite famous among the
little family traditions that entwine every household with mingled mirth
and sorrow, smiles and tears. It had a perennial fascination for us
and we read it over every Sunday. Cut deeply in the upright slab of red
Island sandstone, the epitaph ran as follows:--
SWEET DEPARTED SPIRIT
Do receive the vows a grateful widow pays,
Each future day and night shall hear her speak her Isaac’s praise.
Though thy beloved form must in the grave decay
Yet from her heart thy memory no time, no change shall steal away.
Do thou from mansions of eternal bliss
Remember thy distressed relict.
Look on her with an angel’s love--
Soothe her sad life and cheer her end
Through this world’s dangers and its griefs.
Then meet her with thy well-known smiles and welcome
At the last great day.
“Well, I can’t make out what the old lady was driving at,” said Dan.
“That’s a nice way to speak of your great-grandmother,” said Felicity
severely.
“How does The Family Guide say you ought to speak of your great-grandma,
sweet one?” asked Dan.
“There is one thing about it that puzzles me,” remarked Cecily. “She
calls herself a GRATEFUL widow. Now, what was she grateful for?”
“Because she was rid of him at last,” said graceless Dan.
“Oh, it couldn’t have been that,” protested Cecily seriously. “I’ve
always heard that Great-Grandfather and Great-Grandmother were very much
attached to each other.”
“Maybe, then, it means she was grateful that she’d had him as long as
she did,” suggested Peter.
“She was grateful to him because he had been so kind to her in life, I
think,” said Felicity.
“What is a ‘distressed relict’?” asked Felix.
“‘Relict’ is a word I hate,” said the Story Girl. “It sounds so much
like relic. Relict means just the same as widow, only a man can be a
relict, too.”
“Great-Grandmother seemed to run short of rhymes at the last of the
epitaph,” commented Dan.
“Finding rhymes isn’t as easy as you might think,” avowed Peter, out of
his own experience.
“I think Grandmother King intended the last of the epitaph to be in
blank verse,” said Felicity with dignity.
There was still only a sprinkling of people in the church when we went
in and took our places in the old-fashioned, square King pew. We had
just got comfortably settled when Felicity said in an agitated whisper,
“Here is Peg Bowen!”
We all stared at Peg, who was pacing composedly up the aisle. We might
be excused for so doing, for seldom were the decorous aisles of Carlisle
church invaded by such a figure. Peg was dressed in her usual short
drugget skirt, rather worn and frayed around the bottom, and a waist
of brilliant turkey red calico. She wore no hat, and her grizzled black
hair streamed in elf locks over her shoulders. Face, arms and feet
were bare--and face, arms and feet were liberally powdered with
FLOUR. Certainly no one who saw Peg that night could ever forget the
apparition.
Peg’s black eyes, in which shone a more than usually wild and fitful
light, roved scrutinizingly over the church, then settled on our pew.
“She’s coming here,” whispered Felicity in horror. “Can’t we spread out
and make her think the pew is full?”
But the manoeuvre was too late. The only result was that Felicity and
the Story Girl in moving over left a vacant space between them and Peg
promptly plumped down in it.
“Well, I’m here,” she remarked aloud. “I did say once I’d never darken
the door of Carlisle church again, but what that boy there”--nodding
at Peter--“said last winter set me thinking, and I concluded maybe I’d
better come once in a while, to be on the safe side.”
Those poor girls were in an agony. Everybody in the church was looking
at our pew and smiling. We all felt that we were terribly disgraced; but
we could do nothing. Peg was enjoying herself hugely, beyond all doubt.
From where she sat she could see the whole church, including pulpit and
gallery, and her black eyes darted over it with restless glances.
“Bless me, there’s Sam Kinnaird,” she exclaimed, still aloud. “He’s
the man that dunned Jacob Marr for four cents on the church steps one
Sunday. I heard him. ‘I think, Jacob, you owe me four cents on that cow
you bought last fall. Rec’llect you couldn’t make the change?’ Well, you
know, ‘twould a-made a cat laugh. The Kinnairds were all mighty close, I
can tell you. That’s how they got rich.”
What Sam Kinnaird felt or thought during this speech, which everyone in
the church must have heard, I know not. Gossip had it that he changed
colour. We wretched occupants of the King pew were concerned only with
our own outraged feelings.
“And there’s Melita Ross,” went on Peg. “She’s got the same bonnet on
she had last time I was in Carlisle church six years ago. Some folks has
the knack of making things last. But look at the style Mrs. Elmer Brewer
wears, will yez? Yez wouldn’t think her mother died in the poor-house,
would yez, now?”
Poor Mrs. Brewer! From the tip of her smart kid shoes to the dainty
cluster of ostrich tips in her bonnet--she was most immaculately and
handsomely arrayed; but I venture to think she could have taken
small pleasure in her fashionable attire that evening. Some of the
unregenerate, including Dan, were shaking with suppressed laughter, but
most of the people looked as if they were afraid to smile, lest their
turn should come next.
“There’s old Stephen Grant coming in,” exclaimed Peg viciously, shaking
her floury fist at him, “and looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in his
mouth. He may be an elder, but he’s a scoundrel just the same. He set
fire to his house to get the insurance and then blamed ME for doing it.
But I got even with him for it. Oh, yes! He knows that, and so do I! He,
he!”
Peg chuckled quite fiendishly and Stephen Grant tried to look as if
nothing had been said.
“Oh, will the minister never come?” moaned Felicity in my ear. “Surely
she’ll have to stop then.”
But the minister did not come and Peg had no intention of stopping.
“There’s Maria Dean.” she resumed. “I haven’t seen Maria for years.
I never call there for she never seems to have anything to eat in the
house. She was a Clayton and the Claytons never could cook. Maria
sorter looks as if she’d shrunk in the wash, now, don’t she? And there’s
Douglas Nicholson. His brother put rat poison in the family pancakes.
Nice little trick that, wasn’t it? They say it was by mistake. I hope it
WAS a mistake. His wife is all rigged out in silk. Yez wouldn’t think
to look at her she was married in cotton--and mighty thankful to get
married in anything, it’s my opinion. There’s Timothy Patterson. He’s
the meanest man alive--meaner’n Sam Kinnaird even. Timothy pays his
children five cents apiece to go without their suppers, and then steals
the cents out of their pockets after they’ve gone to bed. It’s a fact.
And when his old father died he wouldn’t let his wife put his best shirt
on him. He said his second best was plenty good to be buried in. That’s
another fact.”
“I can’t stand much more of this,” wailed Felicity.
“See here, Miss Bowen, you really oughtn’t to talk like that about
people,” expostulated Peter in a low tone, goaded thereto, despite his
awe of Peg, by Felicity’s anguish.
“Bless you, boy,” said Peg good-humouredly, “the only difference between
me and other folks is that I say these things out loud and they just
think them. If I told yez all the things I know about the people in this
congregation you’d be amazed. Have a peppermint?”
To our horror Peg produced a handful of peppermint lozenges from the
pocket of her skirt and offered us one each. We did not dare refuse but
we each held our lozenge very gingerly in our hands.
“Eat them,” commanded Peg rather fiercely.
“Mother doesn’t allow us to eat candy in church,” faltered Felicity.
“Well, I’ve seen just as fine ladies as your ma give their children
lozenges in church,” said Peg loftily. She put a peppermint in her own
mouth and sucked it with gusto. We were relieved, for she did not talk
during the process; but our relief was of short duration. A bevy of
three very smartly dressed young ladies, sweeping past our pew, started
Peg off again.
“Yez needn’t be so stuck up,” she said, loudly and derisively. “Yez was
all of yez rocked in a flour barrel. And there’s old Henry Frewen, still
above ground. I called my parrot after him because their noses were
exactly alike. Look at Caroline Marr, will yez? That’s a woman who’d
like pretty well to get married, And there’s Alexander Marr. He’s a real
Christian, anyhow, and so’s his dog. I can always size up what a man’s
religion amounts to by the kind of dog he keeps. Alexander Marr is a
good man.”
It was a relief to hear Peg speak well of somebody; but that was the
only exception she made.
“Look at Dave Fraser strutting in,” she went on. “That man has thanked
God so often that he isn’t like other people that it’s come to be true.
He isn’t! And there’s Susan Frewen. She’s jealous of everybody. She’s
even jealous of Old Man Rogers because he’s buried in the best spot in
the graveyard. Seth Erskine has the same look he was born with. They say
the Lord made everybody but I believe the devil made all the Erskines.”
“She’s getting worse all the time. What WILL she say next?” whispered
poor Felicity.
But her martyrdom was over at last. The minister appeared in the pulpit
and Peg subsided into silence. She folded her bare, floury arms over her
breast and fastened her black eyes on the young preacher. Her behaviour
for the next half-hour was decorum itself, save that when the minister
prayed that we might all be charitable in judgment Peg ejaculated “Amen”
several times, loudly and forcibly, somewhat to the discomfiture of the
Young man, to whom Peg was a stranger. He opened his eyes, glanced at
our pew in a startled way, then collected himself and went on.
Peg listened to the sermon, silently and motionlessly, until Mr.
Davidson was half through. Then she suddenly got on her feet.
“This is too dull for me,” she exclaimed. “I want something more
exciting.”
Mr. Davidson stopped short and Peg marched down the aisle in the midst
of complete silence. Half way down the aisle she turned around and faced
the minister.
“There are so many hypocrites in this church that it isn’t fit for
decent people to come to,” she said. “Rather than be such hypocrites as
most of you are it would be better for you to go miles into the woods
and commit suicide.”
Wheeling about, she strode to the door. Then she turned for a Parthian
shot.
“I’ve felt kind of worried for God sometimes, seeing He has so much to
attend to,” she said, “but I see I needn’t be, so long’s there’s plenty
of ministers to tell Him what to do.”
With that Peg shook the dust of Carlisle church from her feet. Poor Mr.
Davidson resumed his discourse. Old Elder Bayley, whose attention
an earthquake could not have distracted from the sermon, afterwards
declared that it was an excellent and edifying exhortation, but I doubt
if anyone else in Carlisle church tasted it much or gained much good
therefrom. Certainly we of the King household did not. We could not even
remember the text when we reached home. Felicity was comfortless.
“Mr. Davidson would be sure to think she belonged to our family when she
was in our pew,” she said bitterly. “Oh, I feel as if I could never
get over such a mortification! Peter, I do wish you wouldn’t go telling
people they ought to go to church. It’s all your fault that this
happened.”
“Never mind, it will be a good story to tell sometime,” remarked the
Story Girl with relish.