‘Oh, I hope so,’ said Alice, extending her long neck over her embroidery.
‘Not that it will do any good talking to your father,’ continued Mrs Keeling placidly, ‘for I’m sure in all these thirty years I never saw him so vexed as when you and I said we should keep on going to St Thomas’s after the incense and the dressing-up began. But I had made up my mind too.’
Alice flushed a little.
‘I wish you would not call it dressings-up, Mamma,’ she said. ‘You know perfectly well that they are vestments. They all signify something: they have a spiritual meaning.’
‘Very likely, my dear,’ said Mrs Keeling amiably, ‘and I’m sure that’s a beautiful bit of figured silk which he has his coat made of.’
Alice drew in her breath sharply.
‘Cope, Mamma,’ she said.
‘Yes, dear, I said coat,’ rejoined her mother, who was not aware that she was a little deaf.
Alice did not pursue the subject, and since there was now no chance of Mr Silverdale’s coming in again, she put on her spectacles, which enabled her to see the lines of the pomegranate foliage with far greater distinctness. Never before had she had so vivid an interest in life as during these last two months; indeed the greater part of the female section of the congregation at St Thomas’s had experienced a similar quickening of their emotions, and a ‘livelier iris’ burnished up the doves of the villas in Alfred Road. The iris in question, of course, was the effect of the personality of Cuthbert Silverdale, and if he was not, as he averred, being spoiled, the blame did not lie with his parishioners. They had discovered, as he no doubt meant them to do, that a soldier-saint had come among them, a missioner, a crusader, and they vied with each other in adoring and decorative obedience, making banners and embroideries for his church (for he allowed neither slippers nor neckties for himself) and in flocking to his discourses, and working under his guidance in the parish. There had been frantic discussions and quarrels over rites and doctrines; households had been divided among themselves, and, as at The Cedars, sections of families had left St Thomas’s altogether and attached themselves to places of simpler ceremonial. The Bishop had been appealed to on the subject of lights, with the effect that the halo of a martyr had encircled Mr Silverdale’s head, without any of the inconveniences that generally attach to martyrdom, since the Bishop had not felt himself called upon to take any steps in the matter. Even a protesting round-robin, rather sparsely attested, had been sent him, in counterblast to which Alice Keeling with other enthusiastic young ladies had forwarded within a couple of days a far more voluminously signed document, quoting the prayer-book of Edward VI. in support of their pastor, according to their pastor’s interpretation of it at his Wednesday lectures on the history of the English Church.
Cuthbert Silverdale was not unaware of the emotion which he had roused in so many female breasts, and it is impossible to acquit him of a sort of clerical complacency in the knowledge that so many young ladies gazed and gazed on him with a mixture of religious and personal devotion. Though a firm believer in the celibacy of the clergy, he did not feel himself debarred from sentimental relations with both married and unmarried members of his flock, indeed the very fact that nothing could conceivably come of these little mawkishnesses made them appear perfectly licit. He held their hands, and took their arms, and sat at their knees, and called them ‘dear girls’ two or three at a time, finding safety perhaps in numbers, and not wishing to encourage false hopes. He was an incorrigible if an innocent flirt; a licensed lap-dog practising familiarities which, if indulged in by the ordinary layman, would assuredly have led to kickings. In some curious manner he quite succeeded in deceiving himself as to the propriety of those affectionate demonstrations, and considered himself a sort of brother to all those young ladies, who worked for him with the industry (and more than the excitement) of devoted sisters. To do him justice he was just as familiar with the male members of his congregation, and patted his boys on the back, and linked his arm in theirs, but it would be idle to contend that he got as much satisfaction out of those male embraces.