Both parties poured out their grievances to the same auditor, for Mr.
Touchett regarded Ermine Williams as partly clerical, and Rachel could
never be easy without her sympathy. To hear was not, however, to make
peace, while each side was so sore, so conscious of the merits of its
own case, so blind to those of the other. One deemed praise in its
highest form the prime object of his ministry; the other found the
performance indevotional, and raved that education should be sacrificed
to wretched music. But that the dissension was sad and mischievous,
it would have been very diverting; they were both so young in their
incapacity of making allowances, their certainty that theirs was the
theory to bring in the golden age, and even in their magnanimity of
forgiveness, and all the time they thought themselves so very old. "I
am resigned to disappointments; I have seen something of life."--"You
forget, Miss Williams, that my ministerial experience is not very
recent."
There was one who would have smoothed matters far better than any, who,
like Ermine, took her weapons from the armoury of good sense; but that
person was entirely unconscious how the incumbent regarded her soft
eyes, meek pensiveness, motherly sweetness, and, above all, the refined
graceful dignity that remained to her from the leading station she had
occupied. Her gracious respect towards her clergyman was a contrast as
much to the deferential coquetry of his admirers as to the abruptness of
his foe, and her indifference to parish details had even its charm in a
world of fussiness; he did not know himself how far a wish of hers would
have led him, and she was the last person to guess. She viewed him, like
all else outside her nursery, as something out of the focus of her eye;
her instinct regarded her clergyman as necessarily good and worthy, and
her ear heard Rachel railing at him; it sounded hard, but it was a pity
Rachel should be vexed and interfered with. In fact, she never thought
of the matter at all; it was only part of that outer kind of dreamy
stage-play at Avonmouth, in which she let herself he moved about at her
cousin's bidding. One part of her life had passed away from her,
and what remained to her was among her children; her interests
and intelligence seemed contracted to Conrade's horizon, and as to
everything else, she was subdued, gentle, obedient, but slow and obtuse.
Yet, little as he knew it, Mr. Touchett might have even asserted his
authority in a still more trying manner. If the gentle little widow had
not cast a halo round her relatives, he could have preached that sermon
upon the home-keeping duties of women, or have been too much offended
to accept any service from the Curtis family; and he could have done
without them, for he had a wide middle-class popularity; his manners
with the second-rate society, in which he had been bred, were just
sufficiently superior and flattering to recommend all his best
points, and he obtained plenty of subscriptions from visitors, and of
co-operation from inhabitants. Many a young lady was in a flutter at the
approach of the spruce little figure in black, and so many volunteers
were there for parish work, that districts and classes were divided and
subdivided, till it sometimes seemed as if the only difficulty was to
find poor people enough who would submit to serve as the corpus vile for
their charitable treatment.