The hotel struck even Hyacinth as of inferior quality, though it boasted great things in the timetable advertisements, and called itself ‘Imperial’ in large gold letters above its door. A smell of whisky and tobacco greeted him as he entered, and a waiter with a greasy coat, in answer to inquiries about a bed, sent him down a dark passage to seek a lady called Miss Sweeney at the bar. Large leather cases with broad straps and waterproof-covered baskets blocked the passage, and Hyacinth stumbled among them for some time before he discovered Miss Sweeney reading a periodical called Spicy Bits among her whisky-bottles. She was a young woman of would-be fashionable appearance, and acted apparently in the double capacity of barmaid and clerk. On hearing that Hyacinth required, not whisky, but a bedroom, she requested him to go forward to the office, indicating a glass case at the far end of the bar counter. Here he repeated his request to her through a small opening in the glass, and received her assurance, given with great condescension, that No. 42 was vacant, and, further, that there was a fire in the commercial room. A boy whom she summoned carried Hyacinth’s bag to an extremely dirty and ill-furnished bedroom, and afterwards conducted him to the promised fire. Two other guests were seated at it when he entered, who, after a long stare, made room for him. Apparently there was no one else stopping in the hotel, and the whole mass of cumbrous baggage which blocked the passage to the bar must belong to them. Hyacinth realized, with a feeling of disgust which he could not account for, that these were two members of his new profession—fellow-travellers in the voyages of commerce. He gathered—for they talked loudly, without regarding his presence—that they represented two Manchester firms which were rivals in the wholesale drapery business. Very much of what they said was unintelligible to him, though the words were familiar. He knew that ‘lines’ could be ‘quoted,’ but not apparently in the same sense in which they discussed these operations, and it puzzled him to hear of muslins being ‘done at one and seven-eighths.’ He sat for a time wondering at the waste of money and energy involved in sending these men to remote corners of Ireland to search for customers. Then he left them, and made his way down the muddy street to Mr. Quinn’s house.
The room into which he was shown was different from any he had ever seen. It was lit by a single lamp with a dull glass globe and a turf fire which burnt brightly. Two straight-backed, leather-covered chairs stood one on either side of the tiled hearth. Near one stood a little table covered with neatly-arranged books, and, rising from among them, a reading-lamp, as yet unlit. Beyond the other was a work-table strewed with reels and scissors, on which lay a child’s frock and some stockings. The table was laid for tea. On it were plates piled up with floury scones, delicate beleek saucers full of butter patted thin into the shapes of shells, and jam in coloured glass dishes cased in silver filigree. A large home-baked loaf of soda bread on a wooden platter stood at one end of the table, and near it a sponge-cake. At the other end was an array of cups and saucers with silver spoons that glittered, a jug of cream, and one of milk. Two of the cups were larger than the others, and had those curious bars across them which are designed to save men from wetting their moustaches when they drink. No room and no preparation for a meal could have offered a more striking contrast to Augusta Goold’s dining-room, her groups of wineglasses, multiplicity of heavy-handled knives and forks, and her candles shrouded in silk. Nor was the dainty neatness less remote from the cracked delf and huddled sordidness of his old home.
Long before Hyacinth had realized an impression of the scene before him Mrs. Quinn greeted him, and led him to the fire. Her two little girls, who lay on the hearthrug with a picture-book between them, were bidden to make room for him. When her husband appeared she bustled off, and in a minute or two she and the maid came in bringing toast and tea and hot water hissing in a silver urn.
As the evening passed Hyacinth began to realize that he had entered into a home of peace. He felt that these people were neither greatly anxious to be rich nor much afraid of being poor. They seemed in no way fretted that there were others higher in the social scale, cleverer or more brilliant than they were. He understood that they were both of them religious in a way quite different from any he had known. They neither spoke of mysteries, like his father, nor were eager about disputings, like the men who had been his fellow-students. They were living a very simple life, of which faith and a wide charity formed a part as natural as eating or sleeping. When the children’s bedtime came it seemed to him a very wonderful thing that they should kneel in turns beside their father’s knee and say their prayers aloud, when he, a stranger, was in the room. It seemed to him less strange, because then he had been two hours longer in the company of the Quinns, that before leaving he, too, should kneel beside his hostess and listen while his new employer repeated the familiar words of some of the old collects he had heard his father read in church.
CHAPTER XIV
On Sunday, the third day after his arrival in Ballymoy, Hyacinth went to church. He could hardly have avoided doing so, even if he had wanted to, for Mrs. Quinn invited him to share her pew. There was no real necessity for such hospitality, for the church was never, even under the most favourable circumstances, more than half full. The four front seats were reserved for a Mr. Stack, on whose property the town of Ballymoy stood. But this gentleman preferred to live in Surrey, and even when he came over to Ireland for the shooting rarely honoured the church with his presence. A stone tablet, bearing the name of this magnate’s father, a Cork pawnbroker, who had purchased the property for a small sum under the Encumbered Estates Court Act, adorned the wall beside the pulpit. The management of the property was in the hands of a Dublin firm, so the parish was deprived of the privilege of a resident land agent. The doctor, recently appointed to the district, was a Roman Catholic of plebeian antecedents, which reduced the resident gentry of Ballymoy to the Quinns, a bank manager, and the Rector, Canon Beecher. A few farmers, Mr. Stack’s gamekeeper, and the landlady of the Imperial Hotel, made up the rest of the congregation.
The service was not of a very attractive or inspiriting kind. Canon Beecher—his title was a purely honorary one, not even involving the duty of preaching in the unpretending building which, in virtue of some forgotten history, was dignified with the name of Killinacoff Cathedral—read slowly with somewhat ponderous emphasis. His thirty years in Holy Orders had slightly hardened an originally luscious Dublin brogue, but there remained a certain gentle aspiration of the d’s and t’s, and a tendency to omit the labial consonants altogether. He read an immense number of prayers, gathering, as it seemed to Hyacinth, the longest ones from the four corners of the Prayer-Book. At intervals he allowed himself to be interrupted with a hymn, but resumed afterwards the steady flow of supplication. The eldest Miss Beecher—the Canon had altogether two daughters and three sons—played a harmonium. The other girl and the three boys, with the assistance of an uncertain bass from Mr. Quinn, gave utterance to the congregation’s praise. Hyacinth tried to join in the first hymn, which happened to be familiar to him, but quavered into silence towards the end of the second verse, discovering that the eyes of Mrs. Beecher from her pew, of the Canon from the reading-desk, of the vocal Miss Beecher and her brothers, were fixed upon him. The sermon proved to be long and uninteresting. It was about Melchizedek, and was so far appropriate to the Priest and King that it had no recognisable beginning and need not apparently have ever had an end. Perhaps no one, unless he were specially trained for the purpose, could have followed right through the quiet meanderings of the Canon’s thought. This kind of sermon, however, has the one advantage that the listener can take it up and drop it again at any point without inconvenience, and Hyacinth was able to give his attention to some sections of it. There was no attempt at eloquence or any kind of learning displayed, but he understood, as he listened, where the Quinns got their religion, or at least how their religion was kept alive. Certain very simple things were reiterated with a quiet earnestness which left no doubt that the preacher believed exactly what he said, and lived by the light of his faith.
One evening shortly afterwards Canon Beecher called upon Hyacinth. The conversation during the visit resolved itself into a kind of catechism, which, curiously enough, was quite inoffensive. The Canon learnt by degrees something of Hyacinth’s past life, and his career in Trinity College. He shook his head gravely over the friendship with Augusta Goold, whom he evidently regarded as almost beyond the reach of the grace of God. Hyacinth was forced to admit, with an increasing sense of shame, that he had never signed a temperance pledge, did not read the organ of the Church Missionary Society, was not a member of a Young Men’s Christian Association, or even of a Gleaners’ Union. He felt, as he made each confession sorrowfully, that he was losing all hope of the Canon’s friendship, and was most agreeably surprised when the interview closed with a warm invitation to a mid-day dinner at the Rectory on the following Sunday. Mrs. Quinn, who took a sort of elder sister’s interest in his goings out and comings in, was delighted when she heard that he was going to the Rectory, and assured him that he would like both Mrs. Beecher and the girls. She confided afterwards to her husband that the influence of a Christian home was likely to be most beneficial to the ‘poor boy.’
The Rectory displayed none of the signs of easy comfort which had charmed Hyacinth in the Quinns’ house. The floor of the square hall was covered with a cheap, well-worn oilcloth. Its walls were damp-stained, and the only furniture consisted of a wooden chair and a somewhat rickety table. In the middle of the wall hung a large olive-green card with silver lettering. ‘Christ is the unseen Guest in this house,’ Hyacinth read, ‘the Sharer in every pleasure, the Listener to every conversation.’ A fortnight before, he would have turned with disgust from such an advertisement, but now, since he had known the Quinns and listened to the Canon’s wandering sermons, he looked at it with different eyes. He felt that the words might actually express a fact, and that a family might live together as if they believed them to be true.