Anne's House of Dreams - L. M. Montgomery [22]
‘We were in the Methodist church last Sunday evening,’ said Anne wickedly.
‘Oh, I s’pose Dr Blythe has to go to the Methodist church once in a while or he wouldn’t get the Methodist practice.’
‘We liked the sermon very much,’ declared Anne boldly. ‘And I thought the Methodist minister’s prayer was one of the most beautiful I ever heard.’
‘Oh, I’ve no doubt he can pray. I never heard anyone make more beautiful prayers than old Simon Bentley, who was always drunk, or hoping to be, and the drunker he was the better he prayed.’
‘The Methodist minister is very fine-looking,’ said Anne, for the benefit of the office door.
‘Yes, he’s quite ornamental,’ agreed Miss Cornelia. ‘Oh, and very ladylike. And he thinks that every girl who looks at him falls in love with him – as if a Methodist minister, wandering about like any Jew, was such a prize! If you and the young doctor take my advice you won’t have much to do with the Methodists. My motto is – if you are a Presbyterian, be a Presbyterian.’
‘Don’t you think that Methodists go to heaven as well as Presbyterians?’ asked Anne smilelessly.
‘That isn’t for us to decide. It’s in higher hands than ours,’ said Miss Cornelia solemnly. ‘But I ain’t going to associate with them on earth whatever I may have to do in heaven. This Methodist minister isn’t married. The last one they had was, and his wife was the silliest, flightiest little thing I ever saw. I told her husband once that he should have waited till she was grown up before he married her. He said he wanted to have the training of her. Wasn’t that like a man?’
‘It’s rather hard to decide just when people are grown up,’ laughed Anne.
‘That’s a true word, dearie. Some are grown up when they’re born, and others ain’t grown up when they’re eighty, believe me. That same Mrs Roderick I was speaking of never grew up. She was as foolish when she was a hundred as when she was ten.’
‘Perhaps that was why she lived so long,’ suggested Anne.
‘Maybe ’twas. I’d rather live fifty sensible years than a hundred foolish ones.’
‘But just think what a dull world it would be if everyone was sensible,’ pleaded Anne.
Miss Cornelia disdained any skirmish of flippant epigram.
‘Mrs Roderick was a Milgrave, and the Milgraves never had much sense. Her nephew, Ebenezer Milgrave, used to be insane for years. He believed he was dead and used to rage at his wife because she wouldn’t bury him. I’d a-done it.’
Miss Cornelia looked so grimly determined that Anne could almost see her with a spade in her hand.
‘Don’t you know any good husbands, Miss Bryant?’
‘Oh, yes, lots of them – over yonder,’ said Miss Cornelia, waving her hand through the open window towards the little graveyard of the church across the harbour.
‘But living – going about in the flesh?’ persisted Anne.
‘Oh, there’s a few, just to show that with God all things are possible,’ acknowledged Miss Cornelia reluctantly. ‘I don’t deny that an odd man here and there, if he’s caught young and trained up proper, and if his mother has spanked him well beforehand, may turn out a decent being. Your husband, now, isn’t so bad, as men go, from all I hear. I s’pose’ – Miss Cornelia looked sharply at Anne over her glasses – ‘you think there’s nobody like him in the world.’
‘There isn’t,’ said Anne promptly.
‘Ah, well, I heard another bride say that once,’ sighed Miss Cornelia. ‘Jennie Dean thought when she married that there wasn’t anybody like her husband in the world. And she was right – there wasn’t! And a good thing, too, believe me! He led her an awful life – and he was courting his second wife while Jennie was dying. Wasn’t that like