To end her story, she told Richard that, since their coming to this country, her mother's favourite had died. She nearly went mad, she said, and had never been like herself again. For not only had her opposition to her husband deepened into hate, but—here, to Richard's amusement when he found on what the reverential change was attendant, Barbara lowered her voice—she really and actually hated God also. “Isn't it awful?” Barbara said; but meeting no response in the honest eyes of Richard, she dropped hers, and went on.
“I have heard her say the wildest and wickedest things, careless whether any one was near. I think she must at times be out of her mind! One day not long ago I saw her shake her fist as high as she could reach above her head, looking up with an expression of rage and reproach and defiance that was terrible. Had we been in New Zealand, I should not have wondered so much: there are devils going about there. Nobody knows of any here, but it was here they got into my mother, and made her defy God. She does it straight out in church. That is why I always sit in the poor seats, and not in the little gallery that belongs to my father.—Have you ever been to our church, Mr. Tuke?”
Richard told her he never went to church except when his mother wanted him to go with her.
“My mother goes twice every Sunday; but what do you think she is doing all the time? The gallery has curtains about it, but she never allows those in front to be drawn, and anybody in the opposite gallery can see into it quite well, and the clergyman when he is in the pulpit: she lies there on a couch, in a nest of pillows, reading a novel, a yellow French one generally, just as if she were in her own room! She knows the clergyman sees her, and that is why she does it.”
“She disapproves of the whole thing!” said Richard.
“She used to like church well enough.”
“She must mean to protest, else why should she go? Has she any quarrel with the clergyman?”
“None that I know of.”
“What then do you think she means by going and not joining in? Why is she present and not taking part?”
“I believe she does it just to let God know she is not pleased with him. She thinks he has treated her cruelly and tyrannically, and she will not pretend to worship him. She wants to show him how bitterly she feels the way he has turned against her. She used to say prayers to him; she will do so no more! and she goes to church that he may see she won't.”