"The bicycle too," he said, wagging humorous temporal greeting towards it with his left. "Capital! capital! I thought we should n't be walking to-night. There 's no evening post, you see, in Ullbrig." He flung the gate backward on its hinges as far as it would go. "Come in; come in. Bring your bicycle along with you. Not that anybody would dare to violate its sanctuary by the Vicarage palings, but the saddle would absorb the dew and—let me help you."
All the time, from the gate to the doorway, his hands were hovering busily about the bicycle without once touching it; yet with such a consummate suggestion of assistance that the Spawer with very little prompting could have sworn before Justices that his Reverence had carried the machine into the hall unaided.
It was a big, bare hall—square, flagged in stone, and ringing to their footsteps with the sonority of a crypt. From the ceiling depended a swing-lamp of brass at the end of a triple chain. On the left-hand side stood a hard ecclesiastical bench of black oak, primarily provided, no doubt, for the accommodation of those visitors to whom the privilege of a front room audience would be denied. On the right side filed a long line of austere wooden pegs in monastic procession. A canonical beaver obliterated the first of them; two more held up the dread square mortar-board against the wall between them, diamond-wise, each supporting a corner. For the rest, some sticks and umbrellas—with the ebony divining rod of far-reaching reputation conspicuous among them—completed the movables of the hall. The bicycle followed the mesmeric indication of Father Mostyn's hands into place along the wall under the hat rack, and the priest saw that it was good.
By a magnificent act of courtesy he relieved the Spawer of his cap, and swept his own black mortar-board down the rack to make place of honor for it—though there were half a dozen unoccupied places to either side. Then, taking up a matchbox from the oak bench, which he shook cautiously against his ear for assurance of its store, he invited the Spawer to follow him, and threw open the inner door.
"The Vicar, you see," he explained, as his shoulders dipped into the dusk over the threshold, "is his own servant in addition to being everybody else's. He acts as a chastening object-lesson to our Ullbrig pride. We don't go out to service in Ullbrig. We scrub floors, we scour front-door steps, we wash clothes, we clean sinks, we empty slops, we peel potatoes—but, thank God, we are not servants. Only his reverence is a servant. When anything goes wrong with our nonconformist inwards—run, Mary, and pull his reverence's bell. That 's what his reverence is for. Don't trouble the doctor first of all. Let 's see what his reverence says. The doctor will go back and enter the visit in a book, and charge you for it. If anything goes worse—run, Mary, again. Never mind your apron—he won't notice. Pull the bell harder this time, and let 's have a prayer out of his reverence to make sure—with a little Latin in it. The pain 's spreading. For we 're all of us reverences in chapel, each more reverend than his neighbor; but in sick-beds we 're very humble sinners indeed, who only want to get better so that we may be ready and willing to go when the Lord sees fit to take us. Or if it 's a little legal advice you 're in need of—why pay six and eightpence to an articled solicitor? Go and knock up his reverence. He 's the man for you—and send him a turnip for his next harvest festival."
Genially discoursing on the Ullbrig habit as they proceeded, with an occasionally guiding line thrown over his shoulder in bolder type for the Spawer's assistance: "... A little crockery to your left here. Ha! ... mind the table-corner. You see the chair?" he led the way into the right-hand room—a room larger than you would have dared to imagine from the roadway—lighted dimly by one tall, smouldering amber window of many panes; heavy with the smell of tobacco, and heaped up in shapeless shadow-masses of disorder. Two great bales of carpet stood together in one corner like the stern roots of trees that had been cut down. On the grained side-cupboard to the left hand of the fireplace were glasses—regiments of glasses—of all sorts and shapes and sizes and qualities. A cumbersome early-century round table, rising like a giant toad-stool from a massive octagonal stalk, apparently constituted the larder, to the very verge of whose circumference were cocoa-tins, marmalade jars, tea-cups, tea-pots, saucers; sugar-bags red and blue; some cross-marked eggs in a pie-dish; a brown bread loaf, about three parts through, and some cold ham.
And yet, despite the room's disorder, entering in the wake of those benignant shoulders; treading in the constricted pathways delineated by those sacerdotal shoes (virtually and spiritually sandals); wrapped about with the atmosphere of genial indulgence thrown forth this side and that from those priestly fingers, as though they swung an invisible censer—one lacked all power to question. A swing to the left, the fault of the chair was forgiven; a swing to the right, what fear of treading on crockery; a swing to the front, were he swinging a lanthorn now the way could hardly be better lighted.
Such was the power of Father Mostyn.
So, swinging and censing, and asperging and exhorting, and absolving and exorcising till all the ninety-nine devils of disorder were cast out, the priest passed through to the window.
"Ha!" said he, with the keen voice for a conviction realised, when he came there. "I knew we should catch sight of Mrs. Gatheredge somewhere about. By Fussitter's steps for choice. She suffers dreadfully, poor woman, from a chronic enlargement"—he paused to slip his fingers into the rings of the shutters—"of the curiosity. I believe the disease is incurable. It will kill her in the end, I 'm afraid, as it did Lot's wife. Nothing can be done for her, except to protect her as much as possible from harmful excitement. If you don't mind the dark for a moment"—the first shutter creaked upward—"we 'll fasten ourselves in before making use of the matches. The strain of looking into his reverence's room when he lights the lamp and has a guest inside might prove too much for her—bring about a fatal congestion of the glans curiosus. His reverence, you see, has got to think for others as well as himself. Ha! that's better." The second shutter closed upon the first like the great jaw of a megalosaurus, swallowing up the dwindling remains of daylight at a gulp. "Now we can light up in all good Christian faith and charity."