‘Oh, indeed. Very likely in the sense that a man may call his butler an old friend of the family. I should be quite pleased to speak of Parkinson like that. I am all for equality. We are all equal in the sight of Heaven, as Mr Silverdale says. Dear me, I wish I was his equal in energy: next month he holds a mission down at Easton Haven among all those ruffians at the docks, in addition to all his parish work.’
‘He is doing far too much,’ said Alice excitedly, ‘but he won’t listen. He is so naughty: he promises me he will be good, and not wear himself out, but he goes on just the same as ever, except that he gets worse and worse.’
Keeling listened to this with a mixture of pity and grim amusement. He felt sure that his poor Alice was in love with the man, and was sorry for Alice in that regard, but what grimly amused him was the utter impotence of Alice to keep her condition to herself. He was puzzled also, for all this spring Alice seemed to have remained as much in love with him as ever, but not to have got either worse or better. Silverdale filled her with some frantic and wholly maidenly excitement. It was like the love of some antique spinster for her lap-dog, intense and deplorable and sexless. He could even joke in a discreet manner with poor Alice about it, and gratify her by so doing.
‘Well, all you ladies who are so much in love with him ought to be able to manage him,’ he said.
Alice bent over her work (she had eventually induced Mr Silverdale to sanction the creation of a pair of slippers) with a pleased, lop-sided smile.
‘Father, you don’t know him,’ she said. ‘He’s quite, quite unmanageable. You never saw any one so naughty.’
‘Punish him by not giving him his slippers. Give them me instead, and I’ll wear them when he comes to dinner.’
Alice looked almost shocked at the notion of such unhallowed feet being thrust into these hardly less than sacred embroideries: it was as if her mother had suggested making a skirt out of the parrots and pomegranates that adorned the ‘smart’ altar-cloth. But she divined that, in spite of her father’s inexplicable want of reverence for the Master (they had become Master and Helper, and sometimes she called him ‘sir,’ much as Norah had called her father, but for antipodal reasons), there lurked behind his rather unseemly jokes a kindly intention towards herself. He might laugh at her, but somehow below that she felt (and she knew not how) that a part of him understood, and did not laugh. It was as if he knew what it meant to be in love, to thirst and to be unslaked, to be hungry and not to be fed.
She gave him a quick glance out of her short-sighted eyes, a glance that deprecated and yet eagerly sought for the sympathy which she knew was somewhere about. And then Lady Keeling put in more of her wrecking and shattering remarks, which so unerringly spoiled all the hints and lurking colours in human intercourse.
‘Well, that would be a funny notion for Sir Thomas Keeling to wear slippers at dinner,’ she said. ‘What a going-back to old days! I might as well wear some high-necked merino gown. But what your father says is quite true, Alice. We might really take Mr Silverdale in hand, and tell him that’s the last he’ll see of us all, unless he takes more care of himself. I saw him coming out of the County Club to-day, looking so tired that I almost stopped my carriage and told him to go home to bed. And talking of the County Club, Thomas, doesn’t your election come on soon? You must be sure to take me to have lunch in the ladies’ room one of these days. Lady Inverbroom told me she was lunching there to-day, and had quite a clean good sort of meal. Nothing very choice, I expect, but I dare say she doesn’t care much what she eats. I shall never forget what a tough pheasant we had when we dined there. If I’d been told I was eating a bit of leather, I should have believed it. Perhaps some day when Lord and Lady Inverbroom are in Bracebridge again, we might all have lunch together there.’