Scenes of Clerical Life | Page 5

so long abstained from it with an
eye to the weekly butter-money, that abstinence, wedded to habit, has
begotten aversion. She is a thin woman with a chronic liver-complaint,
which would have secured her Mr. Pilgrim's entire regard and
unreserved good word, even if he had not been in awe of her tongue,
which was as sharp as his own lancet. She has brought her knitting--no
frivolous fancy knitting, but a substantial woollen stocking; the
click-click of her knitting-needles is the running accompaniment to all
her conversation, and in her utmost enjoyment of spoiling a friend's
self-satisfaction, she was never known to spoil a stocking. Mrs. Patten

does not admire this excessive click-clicking activity. Quiescence in an
easy-chair, under the sense of compound interest perpetually
accumulating, has long seemed an ample function to her, and she does
her malevolence gently. She is a pretty little old woman of eighty, with
a close cap and tiny flat white curls round her face, as natty and
unsoiled and invariable as the waxen image of a little old lady under a
glass-case; once a lady's-maid, and married for her beauty. She used to
adore her husband, and now she adores her money, cherishing a quiet
blood-relation's hatred for her niece, Janet Gibbs, who, she knows,
expects a large legacy, and whom she is determined to disappoint. Her
money shall all go in a lump to a distant relation of her husband's, and
Janet shall be saved the trouble of pretending to cry, by finding that she
is left with a miserable pittance.
Mrs. Patten has more respect for her neighbour Mr. Hackit than for
most people. Mr. Hackit is a shrewd substantial man, whose advice
about crops is always worth listening to, and who is too well off to
want to borrow money.
And now that we are snug and warm with this little tea-party, while it is
freezing with February bitterness outside, we will listen to what they
are talking about.
'So,' said Mr. Pilgrim, with his mouth only half empty of muffin, 'you
had a row in Shepperton Church last Sunday. I was at Jim Hood's, the
bassoon-man's, this morning, attending his wife, and he swears he'll be
revenged on the parson--a confounded, methodistical, meddlesome
chap, who must be putting his finger in every pie. What was it all
about?'
'O, a passill o' nonsense,' said Mr. Hackit, sticking one thumb between
the buttons of his capacious waistcoat, and retaining a pinch of snuff
with the other--for he was but moderately given to 'the cups that cheer
but not inebriate', and had already finished his tea; 'they began to sing
the wedding psalm for a new-married couple, as pretty a psalm an' as
pretty a tune as any in the prayer-book. It's been sung for every
new-married couple since I was a boy. And what can be better?' Here
Mr. Hackit stretched out his left arm, threw back his head, and broke

into melody--
'O what a happy thing it is, And joyful for to see, Brethren to dwell
together in Friendship and unity.
But Mr. Barton is all for th' hymns, and a sort o' music as I can't join in
at all.'
'And so,' said Mr. Pilgrim, recalling Mr. Hackit from lyrical
reminiscences to narrative, 'he called out Silence! did he? when he got
into the pulpit; and gave a hymn out himself to some meeting-house
tune?'
'Yes,' said Mrs. Hackit, stooping towards the candle to pick up a stitch,
'and turned as red as a turkey-cock. I often say, when he preaches about
meekness, he gives himself a slap in the face. He's like me--he's got a
temper of his own.'
'Rather a low-bred fellow, I think, Barton,' said Mr. Pilgrim, who hated
the Reverend Amos for two reasons--because he had called in a new
doctor, recently settled in Shepperton; and because, being himself a
dabbler in drugs, he had the credit of having cured a patient of Mr.
Pilgrim's. 'They say his father was a Dissenting shoemaker; and he's
half a Dissenter himself. Why, doesn't he preach extempore in that
cottage up here, of a Sunday evening?'
'Tchuh!'--this was Mr. Hackit's favourite interjection--'that preaching
without book's no good, only when a man has a gift, and has the Bible
at his fingers' ends. It was all very well for Parry--he'd a gift; and in my
youth I've heard the Ranters out o' doors in Yorkshire go on for an hour
or two on end, without ever sticking fast a minute. There was one
clever chap, I remember, as used to say, "You're like the woodpigeon;
it says do, do, do all day, and never sets about any work itself." That's
bringing it home to people. But our parson's no gift at all that way; he
can preach as good