At first she kept three servants, but when one of them gave notice she did not replace her and was content with two. Even that was found to be over-expensive, and she came down to one and a charwoman, and then, on Sunday evenings, Gertrude and Mary were forced to cook the supper and to wash up the dinner afterwards. They were very disagreeable about it until they found that most of the young women they knew, including the Clibran-Bells, did far more housework and did it as a matter of course. Then it became part of the routine of their existence and they raised no further objection, but Sunday supper became a cold feast, and they never cooked anything but potatoes and perhaps a Welsh rarebit for their father, whom they called “Pa.”
Soon everybody, including the parrot, called Francis “Pa,” and he sunned himself in his new popularity and had no further misgivings as to the wisdom of the step he had taken. Certainly he seemed to have disposed of the strained relations that had existed in his family in the country. The girls were busy and occupied all day long and every day. The boys seemed to have many friends, desirable and otherwise. Martha had taken to knitting and crochet-work, and she had Mrs. Clibran-Bell and Mrs. Starkey, the solicitor’s wife, and Mrs. Tuke, the widow of the man who built the Albert Bridge and was killed on the day it opened, all ready and pleased to listen to her tattle of her husband’s ancestry and her own property and her hopes for her children. She had taken to lace caps and had settled down to a style in dress and a general appearance which should last to the Judgment Day. She read The Family Herald every week, and every month purchased the threepenny novel published by the same firm. She had and was allowed a feeling of superiority, and enjoyed herself immensely. When Francis came to her with misgivings as to their capacity to live within their income she refused to listen to him, observed that they knew all the best people in the place—and what more could they want? Every Sunday they had a splendid congregation, and if the worse came to the worst they could restore the pew-rents. Francis had a vague, uneasy feeling that the worse had come to the worst, but nothing would induce him to do that. He let the subject drop.
Leedham had been sent to the grammar school, and James attended a dame’s school round the corner in the Bury Road. Annette at first accompanied him, but her godmother had stepped in and sent her to a school in Edinburgh. Minna, who all her life had done exactly what she wanted, refused to be educated any more, put up her hair and let down her frocks, and claimed equal rights with her two elder sisters. She enjoyed their privileges and avoided their duties.
After the family had been a year in Fern Square Frederic returned a full-blown solicitor, and after a few weeks’ idleness was taken into the office of Mr. Starkey at a nominal salary. He had grown a little moustache, which made the weakness of his chin even more pronounced, and, for some reason best known to himself, he wore a monocle. In Plymouth he had discovered a light tenor voice, and he became very useful to the Clibran-Bells in their amateur theatricals. He joined forces with young George, and together they indulged in all those follies with which young men fortify their uneasy sense of manhood. He had pale straw-coloured hair and a very pale complexion. He had a ready wit and a quick tongue, and soon won a reputation for cleverness. His brother Leedham hated him but always shrank away from Frederic’s irony. Leedham had a great respect and admiration for his father, while Frederic regarded him with a contempt which originated, perhaps, in the episode of his intoxication at St. Withans. Mrs. Folyat doted on Frederic, and he never had the slightest difficulty in obtaining money from her. He used to play the buffoon to her, set her laughing until the tears ran, and then, with a sudden turn of sentiment, he would make her cry until she laughed. When he could do neither of these things he would shock her with an audacious jest. Always he would contrive to keep her entertained.
Francis, then, had no anxiety about his family. There was always plenty of fun and merriment in his house, and a constant stream of young people enjoying themselves as though the world had only just come into being and was to go on for ever and ever. If the atmosphere was not altogether pious, they were none the worse for that. They attended church regularly, worked in the Sunday-school, and in many other directions for the parish, and their happiness won the confidence of the poor, who made surprising efforts to please the rector and his family. Best of all, from Francis’s point of view, numbers of young men were attracted to the house and from there were drawn off into various activities. Enthusiasm for the High Church cause ran high.
Our town is composed of a number of smaller towns and boroughs, all now under one city council, but at that time many of the boroughs and urban districts maintained their separate entities and had their own councils and their own newspapers. The district in which St. Paul’s was situate was still a separate borough, and it had a newspaper called The Pendle Times and Lower Brighton Gazette, which published local news and copious police reports. The editor of this sheet was a fanatical Low Churchman whose whole religious force had gone into worship of a certain Calvinistic divine, the Reverend Humphrey Clay, a rigid temperance reformer, Puritan and moralist, who, perceiving the growing laxness of the new industrial population, flung himself with fierce zeal into the task of castigating their immorality and whipping them up into a state of religious fervour. He had pictured their lives—ugly and stunted as they were in fact—as a gay rout of sin, and he strove to counteract this peculiar fiction of his own mind by a religion of appalling dulness. He had a commanding spirit and found many disciples. He substituted the intoxication of conversion for that of alcohol, and drew hundreds to the corrugated-iron church he had built on a piece of waste land opposite a public-house and a theatre. His sermons were printed week by week in The Pendle News—half a page of fierce exhortation, while the other half was filled with racing results and advertisements of rat-pits and coursing. When he died twenty thousand men and women followed him to the grim cemetery overlooking the canal, and the streets were lined for two miles. In his obituary, Flynn, the editor, called him “the Sainted Humphrey Clay,” and the name stuck. A movement was set on foot to replace his iron church with a stone building to be called the “Humphrey Clay Memorial Church”—none of your old Romish saints was to give his name to it—and a house-to-house canvas was instituted. The factory hands gave their pence, the better class their shillings and pounds, and after many years of unceasing work the fund was completed. The building was erected and consecrated by the bishop just six months after Francis Folyat came to St. Paul’s.
Flynn, the editor, scented the presence of the enemy, and began the attack by the publication of the “Literary Remains of Humphrey Clay,” containing stern denunciations of Popish mummery and mediæval witchcraft. The wildest stories flew, and very soon Francis was credited with worshipping the Virgin Mary and maintaining a secret shrine in his vestry. Flynn wrote two denunciatory articles, blindly prejudiced and pitifully ignorant. Francis read them and wrote to the editor to invite him to attend service in St. Paul’s and see for himself.
Flynn waited for some weeks until Easter Sunday, when he fully expected to see a statue of the Virgin carried round the church. There was, in fact, a procession, and there was incense which stank in the editor’s nostrils. His first impression as he entered had been one of disgust, for the whole place was filled with flowers, in the windows, on the pulpit, on the altar, twined about the lectern—daffodils and tulips and hyacinths and violets and lilies. He sat in his pew at the back of the church and saw men and women enter, cross themselves, and curtsey and bow to the East in the central aisle, and his gorge rose at it all. When the organ began to boom and send music whirring up to the roof and flooding the nave and the chancel, and a young man in a purple cassock and a lace surplice appeared bearing the Cross, and behind him two censer-bearers, and behind them again the choir, the curate, the special preacher, and Francis Folyat, in robe, cope and stole, carrying his biretta, he was fain to scream out upon the blasphemy of it all—blasphemy upon the memory of Humphrey Clay. He watched the procession wind round the church, singing the gladdest of Easter hymns, and move up into the chancel, where the choir, still singing in their harsh, untrained voices, filed into their places, and the three priests stood solemnly upon the altar steps and waited for the last notes of the organ to die away. Two acolytes appeared in purple cassocks and little lace surplices and stood below the priests, and the solemn service began.
Flynn rushed away and walked for miles until he was dog-weary. He took his class in Sunday-school in the afternoon in a sort of dream, and in the evening with wide-staring eyes he sat unheedingly through the sombre evening service in the Humphrey Clay Memorial. He saw the whole town, the whole world, imperilled. He saw in Francis an emissary of the great whore of Babylon that sitteth upon many waters, a man bent upon seducing souls from salvation, the very devil quoting Scripture to his ends.
Flynn’s sensations were those of a pious young man who for the first time in his life enters a music-hall, with this difference, that for Flynn the abhorred thing had no charm nor peril for himself, only for others—those others whom his hero’s life had been given to save.