JANET'S REPENTANCE
Chapter 1
'No!' said lawyer Dempster, in a loud, rasping, oratorical tone, struggling against chronic huskiness, 'as long as my Maker grants me power of voice and power of intellect, I will take every legal means to resist the introduction of demoralizing, methodistical doctrine into this parish; I will not supinely suffer an insult to be inflicted on our venerable pastor, who has given us sound instruction for half a century.'
It was very warm everywhere that evening, but especially in the bar of
the Red Lion at Milby, where Mr. Dempster was seated mixing his third
glass of brandy-and-water. He was a tall and rather massive man, and the
front half of his large surface was so well dredged' with snuff, that the
cat, having inadvertently come near him, had been seized with a severe
fit of sneezing—an accident which, being cruelly misunderstood, had
caused her to be driven contumeliously from the bar. Mr. Dempster
habitually held his chin tucked in, and his head hanging forward, weighed
down, perhaps, by a preponderant occiput and a bulging forehead, between
which his closely-clipped coronal surface lay like a flat and new-mown
table-land. The only other observable features were puffy cheeks and a
protruding yet lipless mouth. Of his nose I can only say that it was
snuffy; and as Mr. Dempster was never caught in the act of looking at
anything in particular, it would have been difficult to swear to the
colour of his eyes.
'Well! I'll not stick at giving myself trouble to put down such
hypocritical cant,' said Mr. Tomlinson, the rich miller. 'I know well
enough what your Sunday evening lectures are good for—for wenches to
meet their sweethearts, and brew mischief. There's work enough with the
servant-maids as it is—such as I never heard the like of in my mother's
time, and it's all along o' your schooling and newfangled plans. Give me
a servant as can nayther read nor write, I say, and doesn't know the year
o' the Lord as she was born in. I should like to know what good those
Sunday schools have done, now. Why, the boys used to go a birds-nesting
of a Sunday morning; and a capital thing too—ask any farmer; and very
pretty it was to see the strings o' heggs hanging up in poor people's
houses. You'll not see 'em nowhere now.'
'Pooh!' said Mr. Luke Byles, who piqued himself on his reading, and was
in the habit of asking casual acquaintances if they knew anything of
Hobbes; 'it is right enough that the lower orders should be instructed. But this sectarianism within the Church ought to be put down. In point of fact, these Evangelicals are not Churchmen at all; they're no better than Presbyterians.'
'Presbyterians? what are they?' inquired Mr. Tomlinson, who often said
his father had given him 'no eddication, and he didn't care who knowed
it; he could buy up most o' th' eddicated men he'd ever come across.'
'The Presbyterians,' said Mr. Dempster, in rather a louder tone than
before, holding that every appeal for information must naturally be
addressed to him, 'are a sect founded in the reign of Charles I., by a
man named John Presbyter, who hatched all the brood of Dissenting vermin
that crawl about in dirty alleys, and circumvent the lord of the manor in
order to get a few yards of ground for their pigeon-house conventicles.'
'No, no, Dempster,' said Mr. Luke Byles, 'you're out there. Presbyterianism is derived from the word presbyter, meaning an elder.'
'Don't contradict me, sir!' stormed Dempster. 'I say the word
presbyterian is derived from John Presbyter, a miserable fanatic who wore
a suit of leather, and went about from town to village, and from village
to hamlet, inoculating the vulgar with the asinine virus of dissent.'
'Come, Byles, that seems a deal more likely,' said Mr. Tomlinson, in a
conciliatory tone, apparently of opinion that history was a process of
ingenious guessing.