The Little White Horse (8 page)

Remembering some ugly things that she had seen in London — tumbledown houses and ragged children and poor barefoot beggars — Maria said to herself: ‘This is how it ought to be. This is how it always
must
be in Silverydew. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do to keep Silverydew always like this.’ And she braced her shoulders and tilted her chin and looked very determined indeed.

‘Now we are at the lych-gate,’ said Sir Benjamin. ‘Miss Heliotrope — Madam — let me give you my hand.’

He helped her out of the carriage and offered one arm to her and the other to Maria, and with slow dignity they passed together under the old carved lych-gate and up the steep path through the churchyard to the church porch. Over their heads the bells were pealing joyously such glorious bell-music as Maria had never heard before.

The bells were actually speaking, though just now she was too confused by happiness to catch the words. She looked up to the tall church tower, bright in the sunlight, and then up to the slopes of Paradise Hill beyond, and then up to the bright blue sky above, and was so happy that she thought she would burst.

The church was as lovely inside as it was outside, with beautiful soaring pillars like the trunks of trees and arches that sprang upwards like a shout of joy to meet the grand upward curve of the vaulted roof. The windows glowed with the deep rich colours of very old stained glass, and the sun shining through them painted the flag-stones below with all the colours of the rainbow.

To the left of the chancel steps was a tall pulpit, and to the right was a very old small stone chantry with a small doorway, through which Maria could just make out the figure of a knight in armour lying upon his tomb. At sight of him her heart missed a beat, because she knew, without being told, that the chantry was a Merryweather shrine and that he was her ancestor.

Under the east window there was a simple stone altar, spread with a clean white linen cloth, and upon the altar step below was a great earthenware pitcher, filled with the first catkins and branches of glorious golden gorse. Though, of course, ladylike behaviour forbade the turning of her head to look, Maria was aware from the sounds of the scraping of chairs, the muffled voices, and the soft tunings of strings, that over the western doorway there was a gallery, and that the village choir, with the fiddles and cellos and Digweed’s double bass, had already arrived.

And in the tall boxed-in wooden pews many worshippers were gathered, the bonnets of the women and the bare heads of the men just visible to Maria as she passed. Presently, when the villagers they had seen outside had come in also, the church would be quite full. For the people of Silverydew loved their church.

They were at the door of the Merryweather pew, exactly underneath the pulpit, and Sir Benjamin was motioning to her to follow Miss Heliotrope inside. He followed her and shut the door with a click, and now she couldn’t see anything of the church any more, except the roof and the tops of the arches and the upper
part of the pulpit, for so high were its walls that the pew was like a little room.

There was space on the cushioned seat that ran along the back wall for quite a family; a father and mother and ten children could have sat upon it in a row quite easily, Maria thought, so long as some of the children were quite tiny. And when she came to count the hassocks that stood in a row in front of the seat, she noted that there were twelve of them in order of size — a great big one for the father of the family, and a tiny one, hardly bigger than a toadstool, for the youngest child. A broad shelf ran the length of the wall opposite the seat, broad enough for the father and the sons to put their hats on and the mother and daughters their reticules and parasols.

It was all, in fact, most comfortable and homelike, and kneeling down upon a medium-sized hassock, letting her muff swing on its chain, and laying her prayer-book upon the shelf in front of her, she covered her face with her mittened hands and was glad, because in this pew, as well as in the manor-house, she felt that she had come home.

‘All people that on earth do dwell, sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.’

The tremendous voice pealing out over her head nearly made her jump out of her skin. It sounded like a great trumpet announcing the end of the world, and she scrambled up from her knees in alarm, almost expecting to see the roof of the church splitting open like a peapod and the blue sky above rolling up like a scroll to let the angels down. But it wasn’t anything of that sort. It was only the Parson announcing the first hymn.

But what a noise! She had thought Sir Benjamin had a powerful voice, but it was nothing to the Parson’s. And at first sight she had thought Sir Benjamin an odd-looking elderly gentleman, but in oddness he couldn’t hold a candle to the old man in the pulpit. Standing just below him, quite collected and demure again now, her muff still swinging on its chain, and her mittened hands holding her prayer-book, she looked straight up into his face and
he looked straight down into hers with a keen searching look rather like Sir Benjamin’s when they had first met. He gave a flashing smile, and she smiled back, and from that moment Maria Merryweather and the Parson of Silverydew were firm friends.

But there was no doubt about it, he was a very extraordinary old man, more like a scarecrow than anything else. He was very tall and very thin, and he had a brown clean-shaven weatherbeaten face, fine and keen and proud, and beautifully shaped brown hands with very long fingers, and snow-white hair that nearly touched his shoulders. He wore a black cassock and white bands beneath his chin.

He must have been very old, yet the dark eyes beneath his bushy white eyebrows flashed fire, and his voice — well, for power and volume it was enough to waken the dead. It was wonderfully clear-cut and articulate too, with just the faintest trace of some foreign intonation that gave it charm and originality. He gesticulated with his hands when he spoke, so that they seemed speaking too.

‘Now then, good people of Silverydew,’ he cried, his flashing eyes passing over the packed congregation, ‘with all your hearts and souls and voices sing praises.’ Then he raised his head and glanced at the choir in the gallery. ‘And you up there, keep in tune for the love of God.’

Then he suddenly whisked up a fiddle from somewhere inside the pulpit, tucked it under his chin, raised his right arm with the bow clasped in his thin brown fingers, brought it down upon the strings with superb artistry, and swung his people into the winging splendour of the Old Hundredth, with something of the dash and fire of a cavalry officer leading his men to the charge.

What a row! Up in the gallery the fiddlers and the cellists and Digweed played like men possessed. Though she could not see them, Maria could picture their red perspiring faces, and their arms sawing back and forth, and their shining eyes almost popping out of their heads
with eagerness and joy. And every man and woman and child in the congregation was singing at the top of his or her voice.

Maria herself sang till her throat ached, with Sir Benjamin upon one side of her bellowing like a foghorn and Miss Heliotrope upon the other trilling like a nightingale. Miss Heliotrope’s trilling astonished Maria. She had never heard Miss Heliotrope trill before. She hadn’t even known she could trill.

And it seemed to Maria, her imagination running riot to a shocking extent, that beyond the walls of the church she could hear all the birds in the valley singing, and the flowers singing, and the sheep and deer and rabbits singing in the park and woods and fields, and up on the slopes of the great hills. And somewhere the waves of the sea that she had not seen yet were rolling into Merryweather Bay, and crying Amen as they broke upon the shore.

And up there in the tall pulpit stood the Parson playing the fiddle as Maria had never heard a fiddle played before, and never would again, because no one in all the world ever had, or ever would, play the fiddle as superbly as the Parson of Silverydew.

The hymn ended and, with a soft rustling of Sunday skirts and petticoats and a creaking at the seams of Sunday coats that were a bit too tight, the congregation sank upon its knees, with the Old Parson, laying aside his violin and standing very straight with his lean brown hands clasped upon his chest, closed his eyes, lifted his head and began to pray, his tremendous voice slightly lowered now, but so clear and true that if any members of his congregation missed a word here and there no excuse could be made for them unless they were stone deaf.

Maria had never heard anyone pray like this Old Parson, and the way that he did it made her tremble all over with awe and joy. For he talked to God as if he were not only up in heaven, but standing beside him in the pulpit. And not only standing beside him but beside every man, woman, and child in the church — God came
alive for Maria as he prayed, and she was so excited and so happy that she could hardly draw her breath.

And when the Old Parson read the Bible to his people, he did not read it in the sing-song sort of way that the parsons in London had read it, a way that had made one want to go to sleep. He read it as though it were tremendously exciting; dispatches dictated on a battlefield, or a letter written only yesterday and bringing great news. And when he preached, taking as his subject the glorious beauty of the world, and the necessity for praising God for it every moment of the day or else standing convicted of an ingratitude so deep that it was too dreadful even to be spoken of, it was as thrilling as a thunderstorm. In London Maria had always thought about her clothes in the sermon or taken an interest in other members of the congregation, but today she only patted the pleats in her pelisse and stroked her muff a very few times, and only once craned her neck in a futile attempt to see a little something over the top of the pew door.

Maria listened spellbound. And when they sang the last hymn, in a way that almost lifted the roof off, she found that she was not tired at all, but feeling as fresh as when the service had started.

After the last Amen had died away, the Old Parson climbed down from the pulpit, and went striding down the aisle, to stand at the west porch and greet his people as they filed out past him. Maria had never seen a parson do this before. But then she had never seen any parson in the least like this old man, or attended any service in the least like this one. Nothing in this enchanted valley seemed in the least like anything anywhere else.

The Old Parson, it seemed, was one of those people who don’t in the least mind what they say, for as she went down the aisle Maria could hear his tremendous voice scolding a farmer for beating his dog, a mother for letting her child go to school with a dirty face, a boy for robbing a bird’s nest, and a little girl for drinking the milk that had been put out for the cat.

He seemed to know what each of them had been doing during the past week, and his scoldings were so scorching that Maria thanked heaven that he could not possibly know anything of her own past peccadilloes . . . If he ever really scolded me, I think I should die, she said to herself . . .

Yet none of his people seemed to resent either his scoldings, or the fact that they were so loudly spoken that the porch echoed with them. They went as red as beet-roots, they hung their heads, and they murmured their apologies with real sorrow. In Silverydew, it seemed, the Old Parson was as privileged as though he were a king.

And he could praise too. Now and then the anger went out of his voice, and a deep note of delight stole into it, like wine poured into water. One little girl had helped her delicate mother with the washing, a young husband had minded the baby while his wife had an outing, and a boy had bound up a puppy’s injured paw, and to hear the warmth with which the Old Parson commended their deeds, you’d think that at the very least they’d saved Queen Victoria from drowning.

Then the manor-house party reached the porch and the Old Parson was holding Miss Heliotrope’s hand and Miss Heliotrope was all of a twitter. Yet she needn’t have been, for at sight of her the Old Parson’s smile flashed out over his weatherbeaten face, like sunshine over snow. ‘Welcome, Madam,’ he said, giving her much the same greeting as Sir Benjamin had given her upon her arrival. ‘This countryside is honoured by your presence here.’ Then they looked at each other most attentively, and it was obvious to the onlookers that they had taken a great liking for each other. It was with reluctance that the Old Parson relinquished Miss Heliotrope’s hand, and took Sir Benjamin’s instead.

‘Squire,’ he bellowed in a sudden wrath, ‘on Wednesday last I found a rabbit caught in a trap in your park. I have told you before, and I tell you again, that if you permit traps to be set for God’s wild creatures on your land
you will spend your eternity caught in a trap yourself!’

Sir Benjamin, whose face was red as a beetroot at the best of times and couldn’t go much redder, went a deep purple and loosened his stock. ‘It’s not my fault, Parson,’ he said. ‘Those black-hearted fellows from Merryweather Bay set traps on my land without my knowledge.’

‘I’ll put up with none of your excuses, Squire,’ boomed the old man. ‘You hold your park in trust from God, and every inch of it should be kept constantly beneath your eyes. You stand convicted, Squire, of gross laziness and neglect of duty. Take the necessary steps to see that the cruelty is not repeated.’

Sir Benjamin did not say, as he very well might, that it was quite impossible to keep his eye upon every inch of a park the size of his. He didn’t say anything. He just rubbed his great beak of a nose with his forefinger and looked most terribly worried.

Then it was Maria’s turn, and she found that she had been too optimistic in thinking that the Old Parson knew nothing as yet of her faults and failings. ‘Neatness of attire is to be commended in a woman,’ he told her, holding her hand in a grip of steel. ‘But not vanity. Vanity is of the devil. And excessive female curiosity is not to be commended either. Nip it in the bud, my dear, while there is time.’

So he had seen her patting her pelisse and stroking her muff . . . So he had noticed her trying to see over the door of the pew . . . She did not hang her head, for that was not her way, but the eyes that she kept unwaveringly upon the Old Parson’s face filled with tears, and she blushed rose-pink from forehead to neck . . . Because she discovered suddenly that the approval of the Old Parson was something that she wanted terribly badly, and she appeared to have lost it already.