§6

Her pity made her kind. She no longer squabbled, complained or resented. She took Joanna's occasionally insulting behaviour in good part. She even wished that she would marry—not one of the subalterns, for they were not her sort, but some decent small squire or parson. When the new rector first came to Brodnyx she had great hopes of fixing a match between him and Jo—for Ellen was now so respectable that she had become a match-maker. But she was disappointed—indeed, they both were, for Joanna had liked the looks of Mr. Pratt's successor, and though she did not go so far as to dream of matrimony—which was still below her horizons—she would have much appreciated his wooing.

But it soon became known that the new rector had strange views on the subject of clerical marriage—in fact, he shocked his patron in many ways. He was a large, heavy, pale-faced young man, with strange, sleek qualities that appealed to her through their unaccustomedness. But he was scarcely a sleek man in office, and under his drawling, lethargic manner there was an energy that struck her as shocking and out of place. He was like Lawrence, speaking forbidden words and of hidden things. In church he preached embarrassing perfections—she could no longer feel that she had attained the limits of churchmanship with her weekly half-crown and her quarterly communion. He turned her young people's heads with strange glimpses of beauty and obligation.

In fact, poor Joanna was deprived of the spectacle she had looked forward to with such zest—that of a parish made to amend itself while she looked on from the detachment of her own high standard. She was made to feel just as uncomfortable as any wicked old man or giggling hussy.... She was all the more aggrieved because, though Mr. Palmer had displeased her, she could not get rid of him as she would have got rid of her looker in the same circumstances. "If I take a looker and he don't please me I can sack him—the gal I engage I can get shut of at a month's warning, but a parson seemingly is the only kind you can put in and not put out."

Then to crown all, he took away the Lion and the Unicorn from their eternal dance above the Altar of God, and in their place he put tall candles, casting queer red gleams into daylight.... Joanna could bear no more; she swallowed the pride which for the first few months of innovation had made her treat the new rector merely with distant rudeness, and descended upon him in the three rooms of Brodnyx Rectory which he inhabited with cheerful contempt for the rest of its howling vastness.

She emerged from the encounter strangely subdued. Mr. Palmer had been polite, even sympathetic, but he had plainly shown her the indifference (to use no cruder term) that he felt for her as an ecclesiastical authority. He was not going to put the Lion and the Unicorn back in their old place, they belonged to a bygone age which was now forgotten, to a bad old language which had lost its meaning. The utmost he would do was to consent to hang them up over the door, so that they could bless Joanna's going out and coming in. With this she had to be content.

Poor Joanna! The episode was more than a passing outrage and humiliation—it was ominous, it gave her a queer sense of downfall. With her beloved symbol something which was part of herself seemed also to have been dispossessed. She became conscious that she was losing authority. She realized that for long she had been weakening in regard to Ellen, and now she was unable to stand up to this heavy, sleek young man whom her patronage had appointed.... The Lion and the Unicorn had from childhood been her sign of power—they were her theology in oleograph, they stood for the Church of England as by law established, large rectory houses, respectable and respectful clergymen, "dearly beloved brethren" on Sunday mornings, and a nice nap after dinner. And now they were gone, and in their place was a queer Jesuitry of kyries and candles, and a gospel which kicked and goaded and would not allow one to sleep....