However, though her eyes were on her book, she was proudly conscious
that everyone else's eyes were on her. Even the rector must have seen
her--as indeed from his elevated position on the bottom deck of the
pulpit he could scarcely help doing--and his distraction was marked by
occasional stutters and the intrusion of an evening Collect. He was a
nervous, deprecating little man, terribly scared of his flock, and
ruefully conscious of his own shortcomings and the shortcomings of his
church. Visiting priests had told him that Brodnyx church was a
disgrace, with its false stresses of pew and pulpit and the lion and the
unicorn dancing above the throne of the King of kings. They said he
ought to have it restored. They did not trouble about where the money
was to come from, but Mr. Pratt knew he could not get it out of his
congregation, who did not like to have things changed from the manner of
their fathers--indeed there had been complaints when he had dislodged
the owls that had nested under the gallery from an immemorial rector's
day.
The service came to an end with the singing of a hymn to an
accompaniment of grunts and wheezes from an ancient harmonium and the
dropping of pennies and threepenny bits into a wooden plate. Then the
congregation hurried out to the civilities of the churchyard.
From outside, Brodnyx Church looked still more Georgian and abandoned.
Its three aisles were without ornament or architecture; there was no
tower, but beside it stood a peculiar and unexplained erection, shaped
like a pagoda, in three tiers of black and battered tar-boarding. It
had a slight cant towards the church, and suggested nothing so much as a
disreputable Victorian widow, in tippet, mantle and crinoline, seeking
the support of a stone wall after a carouse.
In the churchyard, among the graves, the congregation assembled and
talked of or to Joanna. It was noticeable that the women judged her more
kindly than the men.
"She can't help her taste," said Mrs. Vine, "and she's a kind-hearted
thing."
"If you ask me," said Mrs. Prickett, "her taste ain't so bad, if only
she'd have things a bit quieter. But she's like a child with her yallers
and greens."
"She's more like an organist's monkey," said her husband. "What ud I do
if I ever saw you tricked out like that, Mrs. Prickett?"
"Oh, I'd never wear such clothes, master, as you know well. But then I'm
a different looking sort of woman. I wouldn't go so far as to say them
bright colours don't suit Joanna Godden."
"I never thought much of her looks."
"Nor of her looker--he! he!" joined in Furnese with a glance in Joanna's
direction.
She was talking to Dick Socknersh, who had been to church with the other
hands that could be spared from the farm. She asked him if he had liked
the sermon, and then told him to get off home quickly and give the tegs
their swill.
"Reckon he don't know a teg from a tup," said Furnese.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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