Free The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge Page A

his lean brown hands clasped upon his chest, closed his eyes, lifted his head and began to pray, his tremendous voice slightly lowered now, but so clear and true that if any members of his congregation missed a word here and there no excuse could be made for them unless they were stone deaf.
    Maria had never heard anyone pray like this Old Parson, and the way that he did it made her tremble all over with awe and joy. For he talked to God as if he were not only up in heaven, but standing beside him in the pulpit. And not only standing beside him but beside every man, woman, and child in the church — God camealive for Maria as he prayed, and she was so excited and so happy that she could hardly draw her breath.
    And when the Old Parson read the Bible to his people, he did not read it in the sing-song sort of way that the parsons in London had read it, a way that had made one want to go to sleep. He read it as though it were tremendously exciting; dispatches dictated on a battlefield, or a letter written only yesterday and bringing great news. And when he preached, taking as his subject the glorious beauty of the world, and the necessity for praising God for it every moment of the day or else standing convicted of an ingratitude so deep that it was too dreadful even to be spoken of, it was as thrilling as a thunderstorm. In London Maria had always thought about her clothes in the sermon or taken an interest in other members of the congregation, but today she only patted the pleats in her pelisse and stroked her muff a very few times, and only once craned her neck in a futile attempt to see a little something over the top of the pew door.
    Maria listened spellbound. And when they sang the last hymn, in a way that almost lifted the roof off, she found that she was not tired at all, but feeling as fresh as when the service had started.
    After the last Amen had died away, the Old Parson climbed down from the pulpit, and went striding down the aisle, to stand at the west porch and greet his people as they filed out past him. Maria had never seen a parson do this before. But then she had never seen any parson in the least like this old man, or attended any service in the least like this one. Nothing in this enchanted valley seemed in the least like anything anywhere else.
    The Old Parson, it seemed, was one of those people who don’t in the least mind what they say, for as she went down the aisle Maria could hear his tremendous voice scolding a farmer for beating his dog, a mother for letting her child go to school with a dirty face, a boy for robbing a bird’s nest, and a little girl for drinking the milk that had been put out for the cat.
    He seemed to know what each of them had been doing during the past week, and his scoldings were so scorching that Maria thanked heaven that he could not possibly know anything of her own past peccadilloes . . . If he ever really scolded me, I think I should die, she said to herself . . .
    Yet none of his people seemed to resent either his scoldings, or the fact that they were so loudly spoken that the porch echoed with them. They went as red as beet-roots, they hung their heads, and they murmured their apologies with real sorrow. In Silverydew, it seemed, the Old Parson was as privileged as though he were a king.
    And he could praise too. Now and then the anger went out of his voice, and a deep note of delight stole into it, like wine poured into water. One little girl had helped her delicate mother with the washing, a young husband had minded the baby while his wife had an outing, and a boy had bound up a puppy’s injured paw, and to hear the warmth with which the Old Parson commended their deeds, you’d think that at the very least they’d saved Queen Victoria from drowning.
    Then the manor-house party reached the porch and the Old Parson was holding Miss Heliotrope’s hand and Miss Heliotrope was all of a twitter. Yet she needn’t have been, for at sight of her the Old Parson’s