When the Rev. Mr. Sopley, of the Alton Road Chapel, had decided to retire on account of failing health, Lady Knob-Kerrick determined to bring up from Barton Bridge, her country residence, the Rev. Andrew MacFie. She had forgiven him his participation in the Temperance Fête fiasco, accepting his explanation that he had been drugged by the disciples of the devil, a view that would have been entirely endorsed by Mrs. Bindle, had she known that Bindle was responsible for the mixing of alcohol with the lemonade.
The Barton Bridge Temperance Fête fiasco had proved the greatest sensation that the county had ever known. The mixing of crude alcohol and distilled mead with the lemonade, whereby the participants in the rustic fête had been intoxicated, thus causing it to develop into a wild orgy of violence, resulting in assaults upon Lady Knob-Kerrick and the police, had been a nine days' wonder. A number of arrests had been made; but when the true facts came to the knowledge of the police, the prisoners had been quietly released, and officially nothing more was heard of the affair.
It was a long time before Lady Knob-Kerrick could be persuaded to see in the Rev. Andrew MacFie, the minister of her chapel, an innocent victim of a deep-laid plot. It was he who had seized the hose that washed her out of her carriage, it was he who had led the assault on the police, it was he who had said things that had been the common talk of all the public-house bars for miles round.
After Mr. MacFie's eloquent sermon upon the Gadarene swine, Lady Knob-Kerrick had eventually come round, and a peace had been patched up between them. From that day it required more courage to whisper the words "Temperance Fête" in Barton Bridge, than to charge across "No Man's Land" in France.
And so it was that the Rev. Andrew MacFie transferred his activities from Barton Bridge to Fulham. He was grateful to Providence for this sign of beneficent approval of his labours, and relieved to know that Barton Bridge would in the future be but a memory. There he had made history, for in the bars of The Two-Faced Earl and The Blue Fox the unbeliever drinks with gusto and a wink of superior knowledge a beverage known as a "lemon-and-a-mac," a compound of lemonade and gin, which owes its origin to the part played in the historic temperance fête by the Rev. Andrew MacFie.
One evening, shortly after the departure of Charlie Dixon, Mrs. Bindle was busily engaged in laying the table for supper. Mrs. Bindle's kitchen was a model of what a kitchen should be. Everything was clean, orderly, neat. The utensils over the mantelpiece shone like miniature moons, the oil-cloth was spotless, the dresser scrubbed to a whiteness almost incredible in London, the saucepans almost as clean outside as in, the rug before the stove neatly pinned down at the corners. It was obviously the kitchen of a woman to whom cleanliness and order were fetiches. As Bindle had once remarked, "There's only one spot in my missis' kitchen, and that's when I'm there."
As she proceeded with her work she hummed her favourite hymn; it rose and fell, sometimes dying away altogether. She banged the various articles on the table as if to emphasise her thoughts. Her task completed, she went to the sink. As she was washing her hands there was a knock at the kitchen door. Taking no notice she proceeded to dry her hands. The knock was repeated.
"Oh, don't stand there playing the fool, Bindle!" she snapped. "I haven't time to——"
The door opened slowly and admitted the tall, lanky form of the Rev. Andrew MacFie.
"It's me, Mrs. Beendle," he said, as he entered the room. "The outer door was open, so I joost cam in."