"And the Vicar is strict with the boy?"
Timothy screwed up his lips.
"Well, sir, there be some gentlemen on the school board do say he's a bit too strict; 'the flogging parson', they call him, because he's all for more caning in the schools. But to my mind he's right, sir; the human heart is corrupt and desperately wicked, and how else be 'ee goin' to instil the fear of God into a boy?"
"It doesn't seem to have got instilled into this one."
"Ah, that's the bad blood in him. Many a tear he's cost poor Mrs. Raymond. You must know, she comes of a very respectable family, up St. Ives way; good church people, all of them, and not used to such goings on. She's a godly, pious woman, and good to the poor, as a clergyman's wife should be, and she's cared for those two children as if they'd been her own, though they're none of her kin. Little Molly's the apple of her eye. She's tried her hardest to coax the devil out of the boy, and the Vicar, he's tried to thrash it out, and you might as well plant potatoes on the Runnel Stone. He's his mother's own brat."
"Who was she?"
"A scarlet woman, sir; a play actress from London that Captain John brought home when he was young and wild, to carry shame into a decent house. Lord knows what she'd been before he married her. If you'll believe it, sir, she'd smoke tobacco like a man, and her foot was never inside a place of worship. And then her flaunting skirts and her lewd ways — it was enough to make the old folks turn in their graves! She'd trapes about under the cliffs in dirty weather singing to herself, with her hair streaming down her back, for all the world like a madwoman. Why, I've seen her myself sitting half-dressed with her bare feet in a rock-pool and a crazy artist fellow from London painting her portrait — great maazed antic! She was as ugly as sin, too; you can tell by the boy; but Captain John was fair mad about her. However, she went the way of damnation after the little maid was born; 'took an engagement,' she called it, and ran off to Paris to her play-acting; as 'tis written in the Scriptures: 'the dog returneth to his vomit, and the sow to her wallowing in the mire.'