HENCEFORTH we see Francis Folyat in trousers, and his broad-brimmed silk hat, like a bishop’s without cords, has been exchanged for the soft round black felt which takes so many inches from a man’s stature. Black trousers, elastic-sided boots, a black silk waistcoat on which hung an amethyst cross, a clerical frock-coat, and a round white-linen collar were the daily attire of the new Rector of St. Paul’s, Bide Street. On great occasions the black-silk waistcoat was renounced in favour of one of violet silk. All day on Sundays he wore his cassock with a black silk sash round his full stomach, and when he walked to church he wore a biretta, to the solemn awe of the street urchins, who confounded him with the Greek papa, a strange figure that haunted the children of the northern district of our town and was reputed to be a wizard.
Francis was in fine middle age. His head was beginning to be bald and his golden beard was rapidly turning white. There were red veins on his round cheeks, but his eyes were those of a boy, bright and blue and merry, and when he laughed they used to close up into little slits and all his bulk would shake until tears were squeezed out of them. He had a great capacity for laughter, but always it seemed that he could not shake it out. It possessed him and set him quivering like a jelly, and there was nothing to be heard but a hoarse chuckle deep down in his chest.
There had been times of great difficulty in the beginning. Martha had come to our town with glowing dreams, and when she saw Fern Square and the house she was to live in they came tumbling down on her romantic head, and she wept many tears and declared that she could not bear the house or the people or the town, and she demanded to be taken away—to Potsham, to Plymouth, anywhere out of the smoke and the rain and the filth and the noise and away from the common, common people. She vowed that she would never attend service in the hideous, squalid little church, and could never have anything to do with the nasty, dirty school. It was impossible. She could not let her children mix with the children of these barbarians. They must find another living or give up the Church altogether. Francis could retire, and devote himself to theological literature.
Francis bore it all with excellent good-humour, and pointed out that he could not even write his own sermons (he had amassed a collection of one hundred and fifty, which he delivered in rotation). By sheer amiability he won his wife over to a more sweet and reasonable temper, and helped her to set her house in order.
When he came to tackle his work he found that his predecessor had been a lazy and unpopular man and that his congregation was never more than a hundred and twenty persons, while the Sunday-school was very meagrely attended. He began by having the church and school cleaned and decorated, and it was quickly noised abroad that the new rector had private means. Further, it soon became clear that a new church was to be added to the little ring of churches which upheld the High Church cause in our town. After much cogitation Francis decided to abolish the pew-rents and to open his church free to all and sundry. He bought new surplices and cassocks for his choir, and new vestments for the clergy and the acolytes whom he intended to appoint. Very soon he found adherents and was given presents of new altar-cloths and sacramental vessels. Altogether his prospects were admirably fair.
Fern Square was a wedge-shaped piece of ground enclosed on one side by six old red-brick houses four stories high, built in an imitation of the Georgian style, with three rooms on each floor except the top, which had four and an attic. The dining-room and the study were on the ground floor, the drawing-room on the first. They were fine rooms, and the Folyats’ old furniture made a brave show in it. The house was lit by gas, and the drawing-room window looked across the square upon the deliberate ugliness of a Wesleyan chapel. The parrot had his cage in the dining-room among the family portraits, and the dog lived where he liked. He grew very fat and lost what little intelligence he had ever had, so that it ceased to matter even to himself which was his head and which was his tail.
The Clibran-Bells from next door but one were the first to call. Mr. Clibran-Bell was the borough treasurer, a man with a huge red beak of a nose, a little white moustache, and a tremendous manner. He had an unfailing source of pride in his wife, who was really beautiful and had frequently been likened to the Marquise in Caste, a play which his daughters were always performing in the cause of charity. Mrs. Folyat flourished the Folyats and the Bampfields at Mrs. Clibran-Bell, who countered with the Staffordshire Bentleys, her cousins. The Clibran-Bells all talked mincingly, as though they had eaten olives and could find no polite method of getting rid of the stones. Young George Clibran-Bell was in the head office of the Thomson-Beaton Bank, but, let it be added, the Clibran-Bells knew the manager. There were four girls and young George, and they soon became on terms of great intimacy with Gertrude and Mary Folyat, and they fell into the habit of running in and out of each others’ houses.
The bishop’s wife called.
Very soon St. Paul’s by its ritual attracted a number of extra-parishioners who had previously had to go two or three miles to the other end of our town for their religious satisfaction on a Sunday morning. Francis was encouraged and worked very hard, found some excellent people among his poor, and really tried to make his church a centre for them and a source of help in their all-too-frequent times of trouble. Mrs. Folyat, by dint of custom, overcame her dislike of the common people with their coarse accent and rather uncouth manners, and went so far in her compromise with native custom as to renounce dinner in the evening and take to a heavy mid-day meal, a solid tea, and a betwixt-and-between sort of supper about nine in the evening. On Sunday she kept open house. Acquaintances and personages were fed at half-past one, and the familiars of the house at nine, after evening service.