Gaveston had been brought up (it was his mother’s pride) a strict Church of Englander. Lady Penhaligon, although no bigot, had seen to that, and Sunday after Sunday in his earlier childhood they had punctually repaired to St. George’s, Hanover Square (it held so many poignant associations for her, she always wept a little when the solemn banns were read). And during their foreign journeyings, too, they had always sought out the Anglican places of worship with which the nicer towns of the Continent are so liberally endowed. All four Anglican churches at Cannes knew them well; together they had enjoyed the Christmas sermons of the chaplains at Siena and Seville and Shepheard’s Hotel; and Gav indeed had been confirmed in the Hôtel Ritz-Carlton at Trouville by the Bishop of North-Western Europe. Small wonder, then, if he had almost instinctively come to regard religion as a Sunday habit of the English, like Yorkshire pudding or cold supper. But now the Establishment in its wider aspects had dawned upon his receptive soul. The assistant sacristan of SS. Protus and Hyacinth smiled companionably to him as he passed into the dim doorway.
“Tallis in G to-morrow, Mr. ffoulis,” he said.
“Splendid,” said Gav. “I shan’t fail you.”
And, murmuring a few decades to St. Gilbert of Sempringham and Blessed Thomas Plumtree, whose festas fell during that octave, he reached his accustomed prie-dieu.…
How delightful these early mornings were! After long vigils of sombre brooding over the invaluable histories of Messrs. H. Jackson and Muddiman, how champagne-like was the crisp dry air of an Oxford dawn as he hurried out the Woodstock Road! How infinitely gracious he found the liturgical rhythms of terce and none after debauching his soul all night with deep draughts of the fierce decadent prose of Huysmans or Hichens!
And then there would be the walk homewards from SS. Protus and Hyacinth in the flush of full dawn with his undergraduate fellow-worshippers, as far at any rate as the gates of Keble College. Soon he made close friends from among the “P. and H. push,” as they were irreverently nicknamed in the non-ecclesiastical circles of Wallace, and Gaveston became an active, but never pushing, member of several of the many societies which, in slightly varying combinations, they formed—the Athanasian Club, for instance, and the Syro-Chaldean Society, the O.U.C.U., and the O.S.C.U., and the O.E.C.U., and the In Saecula Saeculorum. On these walks he got to know dear John Minns, of Keble, the man who knew all there was to be known about the Eurasian use of the amice prior to the Tridentine decrees, and good old John Thoms, of Keble, who had once tracked down a little country church in Suffolk where, in accordance with an old Gallican rite, the vicar wore a maniple with its ends cut obliquely!
What fun it all was!
There was John Jones too, of Keble, with his huge giglamp spectacles and fast-thinning hair, famed among the P. and H.’ers as a raconteur, who, if carefully primed, could sometimes be induced to tell his glorious story of the thurifer that simply would not light.… And Jones it was who, during these amazing weeks, became Gaveston’s especial friend.
True, Gav’s Etonian blood never took altogether kindly to John’s somewhat provincial manners, but erudition, he reflected, is thicker than etiquette, and the close bonds of common pieties united them. Together they would wander off to unvernacular and illegal services in clandestine seminaries and remote rebellious rectories. Together they would count up the ceremonial points of every church in the overchurched city; but where John could find but seven, Gaveston was seldom content with less than nine. Together too they addressed their every activity to saints that no other Anglicans had ever heard of, and St. Domenico Theotocopuli and the Bienheureux Stanislas Beulemans were the familiar patrons of their collegiate activities; whilst buying flowers, they invoked St. Rose of Lima, and sitting down to a meal they called upon St. Francis of Borgia to protect them from poisoning; red letter days were given in their Kalendar to St. Veep and St. Deusdedit, and for help in composing their tutorial essays they would put up many a candle to St. John of Beverley; against the danger of madness they called in friendly unison upon Santa Maria Maddalena degli Pazzi, and mayhap it was their gladsome veneration of King Charles (the First and Martyr) that first turned Gaveston’s mind toward the political career which a twelvemonth later was to startle all Oxford.…