He for God only.—MILTON.
PURITAN hostility to the proceedings in St. Paul’s survived the demise of Flynn and his newspaper and spluttered into activity upon occasion, as when Francis instituted the Litany as a separate Sunday afternoon service or allowed his school-room to be used for musical entertainments organised by the local nigger minstrels—(the annual visit of Moore and Burgess gave birth to numerous amateur troupes)—or when in the jumble sales which were held at intervals he countenanced and even patronised raffles. One pretext was as good as another, but the fundamental grievance was his friendship with Father Soledano, a priest attached to the Roman Catholic Cathedral. The offence was greater in that he had no friend, hardly a kindly acquaintance among the Anglican clergy. They fought shy of him because he had incurred the disapproval of the dean, though their wives occasionally called on Mrs. Folyat because she was still visited by the bishop’s wife.
Father Soledano was an Irishman of Spanish extraction, a little ugly man, with a lame leg, stiff bristling hair receding from a knobby, wrinkled forehead, little eyes glowing under bushy brows, a long upper lip and a sensitive mouth, and a chin that looked as though he had to shave it every half hour.
The Roman Catholic Cathedral was about a mile away from St. Paul’s, and Father Soledano lived in the priest’s house in an asphalt court that lay under its shadow. The surrounding district was inhabited mostly by poor Irish—ignorant, drunken, superstitious, and Jews, whose morality was a reproach to the rest of the dwellers in the slums; and there were French people, and Bavarians, Lithuanians, not a few Poles, and refugees from Russia. All these [Pg 96]were swept into the various trades and manufactories—sweated tailoring, sweated shirt-making, sweated jam-making, sweated engineering. And Father Soledano found his work of digging for their souls infinitely amusing. Several of his Catholics lived over in the parish of St. Paul’s, and he had sought Francis out on hearing a tale of his kindness to an old woman who, by practising midwifery, supported her daughter-in-law and four children. This old woman was a Catholic, and every penny she could spare was spent in buying images of saints. She had the Virgin, and St. Peter, and St. Anthony of Padua, and a little Saint Catherine of Siena. One day two of the men who had assaulted Frederic and overturned the gravestone of the boy James, made a round of all the Catholic houses they could discover and destroyed all the images. When Francis heard of it he went from house to house and was given a list of all that had been destroyed, and a week later he went round with his chief sidesman carrying a clothes-basket full of saints, and made good every loss. When the aforesaid old woman found herself with a new Virgin, a new Saint Peter, and a new Saint Anthony of Padua and a more beautiful new Saint Catherine of Siena than she had ever thought of in her wildest dreams, she knelt down and began to pray for the soul of the English Father. And Francis knelt down and prayed with her, and all the children gathered round and stared at their grandmother and the portly bearded man kneeling there by the kitchen table, and their mother began to cry, and the old woman began to cry, until Francis lifted her up and kissed her on the cheek. Then he sent the children out to buy bread and jam and cake and they had a lovely tea together.
Francis did not tell the tale to anybody, but it was soon out all over the parish, and there was much indignation. A few of the parishioners left the church and Mrs. Folyat was shocked and affronted. What offended her most was that Francis had carried the images publicly and openly through the streets. Being an inveterate gossip herself, she could not endure being the subject of it, except it were flattering to her vanity.
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Father Soledano wrote to Francis and thanked him, and Francis invited him to come and see him. The invitation was accepted, and the two men found that they had many things in common outside their profession, and they had many a long talk about old Dublin days. Soledano was amused by the Anglican’s easy-going optimism, and Francis was shocked, interested, and stimulated by the priest’s almost cynical pessimism. They never discussed religion. To a certain extent they secretly allied forces in their work of dealing with the moral and economic difficulties of their poor, a certain substratum of whom were ultimately Catholic and Anglican according as they could win the attention and sympathy of the district visitors or the Little Sisters, though they hardly ever attended service either in the Cathedral or in St. Paul’s.
Every now and then Soledano would come to supper at Fern Square on Sundays, and it so happened that he was there when Bennett Lawrie appeared for the first time dressed sprucely for the occasion with a new suit and a very high collar and a blue birds-eye tie. The whole family was present, having been to church in full force—Serge read the Lessons—and they had sat down to their meal, having forgotten all about young Lawrie, when there came a resounding peal at the bell. The servant was out and Gertrude opened the door to him. His face was utterly tragic, and he could hardly find his voice to ask if Mrs. Folyat were in. Gertrude admitted him, showed him into the dining-room, where several people were talking all at once, and disappeared into the kitchen to fetch him plate, knife, and fork. It was some moments before Frederic recognised him—two gas-jets in glass globes do not give very much light—and Bennett suffered agonies of shyness and began to wish he had never come. He saw Francis open his mouth and insert a large piece of cold beef and his beard wag as he chewed it slowly, and he rather resented it. He had romanticised Francis, and had always pictured him in his vestments very saintly and impressive. The other man, Soledano, sitting between Mrs. Folyat and Minna, looked much more like a saint. . . . [Pg 98]Minna gazed at Bennett with mischievous approval, and he thought her very beautiful and cast down his eyes. Frederic said “Hullo” and told his mother who Bennett was, and Mrs. Folyat bade Serge and Mary make room for the young man between them. Gertrude returned with plate, knife and fork. Bennett sat down at the place made for him, and conversation was resumed and flowed on over him. It was chiefly concerned with food, and Mrs. Folyat was very anxious to know what Father Soledano had to eat at the priests’ house. He told her they ate very little meat and a great deal of macaroni. Mary tried to talk to Bennett but could get nothing out of him but “Yes” and “No.” He liked music but knew nothing about it, and had never been to a concert.
Serge tackled him. The directness of his questions embarrassed Bennett, and the kindliness of his interest moved him so that a lump rose in his throat and he could hardly get out his replies. He had, he said, been born in the town and had hardly ever been away from it; once to Scotland, where his father came from, and once to Westmoreland and once to Derbyshire. His family were so poor, you see, though they had once been quite rich and lived in a big house with a garden. He could just remember the garden. He was nineteen and had been in business since he was sixteen, first of all in a little office where there was only one clerk, and then, by the influence of his uncles, in a great firm of shippers where, if you did not earn very much, you were at any rate safe. His mother was Low Church and his father was a Presbyterian but never went to any place of worship. He had two brothers and two sisters, but they were all older than himself and didn’t care about the things he cared for, though one of his brothers sang in the choir at the Church of the Ascension, where they only wore surplices and no cassocks. . . . Timidly he asked Serge if it was true that he was an artist, and Serge laughed and said he was a sort of middle-aged embryo.
“That must be splendid,” said Bennett, wistfully. “I draw, but not real things, only dreams and horrible grotesques. We started a family paper once but the [Pg 99]others wouldn’t do anything, and I had to write it all myself and draw all the pictures, and they laughed at everything I did, and I drew a picture of my mother being carried off by the devil and they burnt it. I write verses about the people in the office, but they don’t like them unless they’re—you know—rather nasty. We can’t smoke in our office and everybody takes snuff. I think I’d like to have been a clergyman.”
He suddenly became conscious that Gertrude’s eyes were upon him and that she was devouring every word he said. He had recognised her as the young woman who came so often to St. Saviour’s, and he had thought about her a great deal. He had tortured himself with the notion that she might have come to see him, had even dreamed lofty romances in which she figured as a mysterious lady of high degree who swept him off in a great carriage with two tremendous horses, and then had been ashamed. It comforted him a little to know that she was the daughter of the Rev. Francis Folyat, and that her attendance at St. Saviour’s could therefore only have been prompted by the highest spiritual motives. . . . All the same she was looking at him exactly as she did when he came down to the steps of the nave and stood with the great brass offertory-plate. He was wretchedly nervous, but he imagined the Folyats to be a happy united family, and he basked in the warmth which seemed to pervade their house. He listened to their bantering conversation and was very much afraid of them all except Serge. Frederic seemed to drink a vast quantity of beer, and he remembered stories that he had heard of him in the office. Like everybody else who was interested in church matters, he was familiar with the flying gossip concerning the Folyats, and the ill-natured remarks that were current about the unmarried daughters. He thought Minna more and more beautiful, and Mary devoted, and Gertrude—he could not disentangle Gertrude from all the absurd things he had thought of her before he knew who she was.
Mrs. Folyat began, as she always did in the presence of a newcomer, to talk of the ancestors on the wall, and to tell the lurid stories of the Red Lady, who had known [Pg 100]more than was ever written of the Monmouth rebellion, and the Grey Lady who had such a violent temper, that, losing it one day out driving with her husband in a high chariot, she boxed his ears so that he lost his balance and fell out and broke his neck. She rambled on by way of Baron Folyat to Willie, now safely established as Earl of Leedham, and she declared, being thoroughly warmed to her subject, that failing heirs male, and in the event of the extirpation of two other branches of the family—and less likely things had happened—Serge would become heir, or his sons, if he ever had any.
Bennett was much impressed, as it was meant that he should be, and began to talk of his own ancestry. There were Lawries in Elgin as far back as Robert the Bruce, and for hundreds of years there had been Lawries who were lairds or in the ministry. Mrs. Folyat asked him who his mother was, and Bennett replied:
“She was a Miss Smith. She married my father when she was seventeen. People don’t seem able to marry so young nowadays.”
“It is difficult, isn’t it, Gertrude?” asked Minna.
The meal came to an end, and Francis asked Frederic to accompany him to the study to discuss a theatrical entertainment that was in process of organisation in aid of the restoration of the organ. Mary and Minna cleared away and Gertrude helped her mother upstairs, carrying her spectacles, book and knitting-bag. Serge, Bennett, and Father Soledano were left in the dining-room. Serge and Bennett smoked and Father Soledano began to talk. Bennett was unused to drinking beer. Serge had plied him with it rather too generousl............