And spreading out a benedictory semicircle of arm, whose left extremity was about Pam and whose right fell paternally on the Spawer's shoulder, he gathered them both before him like a hen coaxing her chickens, and so urged them invitingly to the feast.
Ah! but that was a feed to remember. The glorious, never-to-be-forgotten first of many of its kind. The same old room it was in which the Spawer had sat with Father Mostyn two nights ago, but you could never have known it without being told. There was no longer any need to walk like a prisoner in shackles, sliding one foot past the other for fear of treading on crockery, or balancing outstretched arms as you went against the dizzy inclination to sit down. All the things by the side of the wall and the skirting-board (including the cobwebs) were either gone or unrecognisably reduced; cunningly compressed into semblances of Chesterfields and ottomans and settees. And all about the room were traces of Pam's taste and explorative industry; everything that had a good side to show showed it, and even those that had n't had been coaxed by Pam's alluring fingers into looking as though they had.
You may guess if the Spawer tried politely to make believe he did n't notice any change in the room.
But the crowning glory of the place and of all Pam's achievements—it was the table. Four candles lighted it and a brass lamp, and they were every one lighted to start with. There was a chicken-pie in a Mother Hubbard frill, with its crust as brown as a hazel-nut, and just nicely large enough to feed half a dozen, which is a capital size for three; and a noble sirloin of beef, fringed with a hoary lock of horse-radish, and arching its back in lonely majesty on an oval arena of Spode; and there was a salad, heaped up high under the white and yellow chequer of sliced eggs, and a rosy tomato comb, in a glorious old oaken bowl as big as a kettle-drum, china-lined, bound with three broad hoops of silver and standing on three massive silver claws; and there were some savory eggs, deliciously embowered in their greenery of mustard and cress, and a tinned tongue, tissue-papered in white and red, and garnished with stars and discs and crescents as though it had never known what it was to sleep in darkness in an air-tight tin under Fussitter's counter; and some beetroot, brimming in a blood-red lake of vinegar; and whipped creams, and a trifle pudding, all set out on snowy white damask amid an arctic glitter of glass and silver and cutlery. Except the cheese, which was a Camembert, and went by itself on the grained side-cupboard, where all the tumblers and wine-glasses had been congregated before.
And they sat down to table.
Father Mostyn took his place at the head, in the ecclesiastical high-backed arm-chair of oak, facing the beef and the window, with the big buck-horn hafted carving-knife to his right hand and the carving fork to his left for insignia of office, each of them rearing its nose over a monstrous cut-glass rest, shaped like a four-pound dumbbell. Pam sat on his left. And the Spawer sat exactly in front of Pam on the other side of the table; whenever they raised their eyes they were looking at each other. While they were drawing their serviettes across their knees, Father Mostyn keeled abstractedly over the arm of his chair towards Pamela with his eyelids curiously lowered, as though he were trying to catch sight of a fly on his nose, and named her in a spirit of gentle musing:
"... Pam ... dear child?"
Then Pam threw up her chin fairly and squarely and fearlessly, after the manner of one who had nothing to be ashamed of, looking into the Spawer's eyes without flinching, first of all, and thence to the very gates of Heaven over his shoulder and crossed herself, and lifted her clear, bell-like voice in pronouncement, and said:
"In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."
Whereupon Father Mostyn crossed himself too—with easy familiarity, as though he were sprinkling surplus snuff off his fingers; being a priest, and in the profession, so to speak—his neck stretched out the while like that of a Christmas Eve turkey, and his nose thrown up raptly over the beef; after which he let his serviette slip through his knees, and took hold of both arms of his chair, and flung himself recklessly out over them at right angles, first to one side of the table and then to the other, in bland survey, like Punch delivering his immortal gallows oration, and said: