There & Back. George MacDonald
up with an expression of rage and reproach and defiance that was terrible. Had we been in New Zealand, I should not have wondered so much: there are devils going about there. Nobody knows of any here, but it was here they got into my mother, and made her defy God. She does it straight out in church. That is why I always sit in the poor seats, and not in the little gallery that belongs to my father.—Have you ever been to our church, Mr. Tuke?”
Richard told her he never went to church except when his mother wanted him to go with her.
“My mother goes twice every Sunday; but what do you think she is doing all the time? The gallery has curtains about it, but she never allows those in front to be drawn, and anybody in the opposite gallery can see into it quite well, and the clergyman when he is in the pulpit: she lies there on a couch, in a nest of pillows, reading a novel, a yellow French one generally, just as if she were in her own room! She knows the clergyman sees her, and that is why she does it.”
“She disapproves of the whole thing!” said Richard.
“She used to like church well enough.”
“She must mean to protest, else why should she go? Has she any quarrel with the clergyman?”
“None that I know of.”
“What then do you think she means by going and not joining in? Why is she present and not taking part?”
“I believe she does it just to let God know she is not pleased with him. She thinks he has treated her cruelly and tyrannically, and she will not pretend to worship him. She wants to show him how bitterly she feels the way he has turned against her. She used to say prayers to him; she will do so no more! and she goes to church that he may see she won’t.”
The absurdity of the thing struck Richard sharply, but he feared to hurt the girl and lose her confidence.
“Her behaviour is only a kind of insolent prayer!” he said. “—Has the clergyman ever spoken to her about it?”
“I don’t think he has. He spoke to me, but when I said he ought to speak to her, he did not seem to see it. I should speak to her fast enough if it were my church!”
“I dare say he thinks her mind is affected, and fears to make her worse,” said Richard. “But he might, I think, persuade her that, as she is not on good terms with the person who lives in the church, she ought to stay away.”
Barbara looked at him with doubtful inquiry, but Richard went on.
“What sort of a man is the clergyman?” he asked.
“I don’t know. He seems always thinking about things, and never finding out. I suppose he is stupid!”
“That does not necessarily follow,” said Richard with a smile, reflecting how hard it would be for the man to answer one of a thousand questions he might put to him in connection with his trade. “Your poor mother must be very unhappy!” he added.
“She may well be! I am no comfort to her. She never heeds me; or she tells me to go and amuse myself—she is busy. My father has his twin, and poor mamma has nobody!”
CHAPTER XVII. BARBARA AND OTHERS
At this point, Barbara’s friend came into the room, and they went away together.
Theodora, so named by her mother because she was born on a Sunday, was a very different girl from Barbara. Nominally friends, neither understood the other. Theodora was the best of the family, but that did not suffice to make her interesting. She was short, stout, rather clumsy, with an honest, thick-featured face, and entirely without guile. Even when she saw it, she could not believe it there. She had not much sympathy, but was very kind. She never hesitated to do what she was sure was right; but then, except for rules, many of them far from right themselves, she would have been almost always in doubt. Anything in the shape of a rule, she received as an angel from heaven. If all the rules she obeyed had been right, and she had seen the right in them, she would have been making rapid progress; as it was, her progress was very slow. How Barbara and she managed to entertain each other, I find it hard to think; but all forms of innocent humanity must have much in common. A contrast, nevertheless, the two must have presented to any power able to read them. Barbara was like a heath of thyme and wild roses and sudden winds; Theodora like a Dutch garden without its flowers. They never quarrelled. I suspect they did not come near enough to quarrel.
Barbara left Richard almost bewitched, and considerably perplexed. He had never seen anything like her. No more had most people that met her. She seemed of another nature from his, a sort of sylph or salamander, yet, in simplest human fashion, she had come quite close to him. She had indeed brought to bear upon him, without knowing it, that humbling and elevating power which ideal womankind has always had, and will eternally have upon genuine manhood. There was an airiness about her, yet a reality, a lightness, yet a force, a readiness, a life, such as he could never have imagined. She was a revelation unrevealed—a presence lovely but incredible, suggesting facts and relations which the commonplace in him said could not exist. The vision was, to use a favourite but pagan phrase, “too good to be true.” Richard’s knowledge of girls was small indeed, but he had now enough to make his first comparison: Alice was like China, Barbara like Venetian glass. He thought there was something in Alice if he could only get at it: he feared there was nothing in Barbara to get at. For one thing, how could she have such parents and take it so lightly!
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