Part 3

It was settled; the dusty little man in Plymouth accepted Frederic as an articled clerk, and, when he had received his premium, went into the affairs of the family, and presented the horrible truth that such inroads had been made upon capital that the income was reduced by one-third from its original dimensions.

Francis was so relieved at having disposed of Frederic that at first he made light of it and said nothing to his wife. He supposed his difficulties would solve themselves, and this to all appearances they did.

Willie Folyat, the possible heir afore-mentioned, an undergraduate at Oxford, a very worthy and high-souled son of a pious and very poor father, spent two long vacations at the St. Withans Vicarage. Gertrude fell in love with him first, as by prescriptive right, and then, as she seemed to make no progress, Mary considered herself free to lose her heart. To their amazement and dismay, Willie sought an interview with their father and proposed for the hand of the chit, Minna, not yet out of short frocks. He was besottedly in love and prepared for all sacrifices; however, he was refused on the score of Minna's youth, but given to understand that in two years or three he might return with every hope of success. Meanwhile there could be no objection to his writing to Minna if he were discreet.

He vowed eternal constancy with all youth's fervent and curious belief in its possibility, and, by way of proving the breach of his heart, accepted an appointment in a school in Bombay. Then by every mail he addressed the most excellently turned love-letters to Minna, who skimmed through them--being already engaged upon another conquest--and handed them over to her mother, who wept over them, read them to father, and saw herself as the beloved mother-in-law of the Earl of Leedham--the title to which Willie had the remotest possible claim.

All this was very exciting and disturbing, and it set the thoughts of Gertrude and Mary in that direction from which there is no turning back. Gertrude, then Mary, made a long stay in Plymouth, and they returned with new costumes, new accents, new thoughts, and all their talk was of the superiority of town-life over the country. They spent a great deal of money, and the problem of income and expenditure occupied their father's mind to the exclusion of everything else. In Plymouth Gertrude and Mary had met the most delightful young man, a friend of Frederic's, named Herbert Fry. On their entreaty he was invited to stay for a holiday. He came and saw and was conquered--by Minna. He was caught kissing her in the shrubbery, his stay came to an end, and the name given him by the nurse--"a reg'lar Apollyon, my dear"--was found to be appropriate. Minna was furious, and in a gust of spite wrote a most offensive letter to Willie Folyat in Bombay. She told her mother what she had done and robbed her of her most cherished dream. She was found to be conducting a clandestine correspondence with "Apollyon," and Martha let loose the thought which for some time had been lurking at the back of her head, namely, that they must make a change and, if possible, seek life in some city. She skirmished about with it, never suspecting that much the same thought might be in her husband's mind also, and she led him to it by easy stages. Really the girls were getting beyond her; they had said things to her which she would never have dared to say to her aunt when _she_ was a girl; and the country certainly was dull for young people, and they had the children to think of, and, of course, parents must make some sacrifices.

Francis looked at her with anxious eyes and muttered something about his duty to his parishioners. He was popular with them, and he liked the peace of the country and the simplicity (also the low cunning) of country people. He liked the figure he cut, with his knee-breeches and black shoes with silver buckles, and silk stockings and tall hat. He had grown used to himself in a back-water and shrank from the prospect of city life. Even Plymouth he found bewildering on his rare visits. On the other hand, there was the perpetual leakage in his finances--Frederic in no way to earn his living for at least four years, and his daughters, like the horse-leech's, crying "Give! give!" and no man apparently desirous of marrying them; and beyond them the long tail of his family, all of whom might grow up and develop minds which thought along lines different from his own. He was not in the least resentful about it, that was not in his nature; but he hated his own helplessness, the impossibility of doing anything to relieve the growing strain. He loathed quarrelling, and his daughters were always quarrelling with each other and their mother, and that, in a house which should have been a model to the country-side, made him profoundly ashamed. He had begun once more to think in an extra-professional way, to see things in a humorous light which by all tradition were sacred. A curious desire to tease had taken possession of him, and he fought it with all his might. Further, if he was to continue the war with circumstances in this place he must admit his wife to his inmost thoughts. He tried, but his new failure was the most bitter of all to bear; but yet he would not admit that she was stupid. Still he clung to old memories, and he told himself that he loved her. He did love her--he loved everything and everybody; but he was not and had not been for many years in love with her. She had never understood love, and she had bullied him. When he argued with her she wept; when he agreed with her she wept also, and protested that he was an angel and far, far too good for her.

He came as directly to the point as she would let him, and one night, after a protracted curtain lecture, he proposed that he should consult his bishop and negotiate an exchange of livings with some clergyman desirous of a country life. His only stipulation was that the new parish should be among the poor, and this, unhappily, broke in upon Martha's dreams of a brilliant social life among rich and more or less "gentle" parishioners. She had mapped out marriages for all her daughters and careers for all her sons, and was drowsing off into a golden slumber when the word "poor" punched into her pillow.

"My dear Frank!" she said.

"I must work," said Francis.

"But, my dear Frank, the poor!"

"It is easier for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to pass through . . ."

"I am not talking about that."

"If I go to a town, I must go to the poor," said Francis, his old ideals stirring in him.

"But think of the girls."

"I am thinking of the girls. I shall make them work among the poor. It will do them good. It will keep their minds healthy and clear of amorous thoughts."

"How can you be so coarse?"

This came with almost a scream, and Francis smothered what he was going to add and turned over and pretended to be asleep. His wife went on talking indignantly to herself. About five o'clock she woke him up and told him that she had been dreaming of water, which she thought meant riches, and also in her dream she had seen her son Leedham crossing the sea, and Mary had made a great match of it with a tall man who looked like a lord, but Minna had appeared very unhappy.

"I do believe," Martha went on, "that in her heart of hearts Minna really loves Willie Folyat."

"Nonsense," replied Francis, "she is much too young to love anything but herself."

Martha was enraged at this, and harped on the string of her husband's crazy notion of living among the poor. On that point he was immovable, and Martha's light skirmishing was fruitless. Francis turned and looked at her, told her that she wanted a clean night-cap, and went off to sleep.

They had many unhappy days, and it was some weeks before they found an incumbent willing to exchange his living for the two in distant Cornwall. This was the rector of St. Paul's Church, Bide Street, in the darker half of our town on the north bank of the poisoned river, about which we have no pride at all.

Neither Francis nor any member of his family had ever been north of Bristol, and the north of England was to them a place where millionaires grew and factories ground out wealth and a set of ideas associated with the name of Richard Cobden, a Liberal of whom no Churchman could entirely approve. There was a bishop in our town, and he was a person of some celebrity. Also there were two churches which had a certain fame or notoriety for their extreme ritual. Welsh Nonconformists teemed in the town, and the Roman Catholics had a cathedral thirty years old.

Francis visited the place and stayed there two days, during which it rained except for half an hour just before he left. He refused to be depressed by the slums in which his church was situated--a black, stunted Gothic building with a ridiculous little steeple, and a sordid school next door to it--and told himself that it was just what he wanted. There was a fried-fish shop directly opposite the church, a dirty greengrocer's shop next to that, and next again three public-houses. Another row of little shops followed on the other side of a bye-street, and for the rest, there were nothing but squat terraces of blackened red-brick cottages, two stories high, with blue slate roofs. In the street were an incredible number of children in curious nondescript garments, and some of them in rags. Many of the women wore clogs and all of them were sallow. The men were pale and ill-nourished and they walked slouchingly. The street was muddy and littered with refuse, and the air was thick and full of smells.

Francis stayed with the rector and met the caretaker of the school and church, the rector's and the people's wardens, and a few earnest men who examined him with hard, curious eyes. They asked after his family and how many children he had, and one of them whistled when he said he had eight. Francis wanted to like them, but he felt a stranger amongst them and could not be at his ease. They asked how he liked the church, and he told them very well, and the rector's warden, Mr. Parsons, said: "Ah! you should see it at 'Arvest Festival."

Their speech sounded uncouth and harsh after the soft drawl of his Cornish peasants, and it was this that Francis felt as the strongest barrier between them.

The living was worth three hundred and fifty pounds a year, and there were pew-rents, which would bring the stipend up to within a hundred pounds of the joint income of his two livings. Francis ignored that, and calculated that as he would have only one curate, the exchange would be equal, and no doubt his daughters would soon marry, and his sons would quickly earn their living in this money-making town. He was told that there were excellent schools for "them as could afford 'em," and that settled the matter. Everything was as far as possible arranged and he returned to St. Withans, tussling with himself during the long journey and telling himself that he was not sorry to renounce his old life, and that at last he was going to enter upon work, real work.

He had arranged to take on the former rector's old house in Fern Square (there was not so much as a blade of grass growing in it), and when Martha asked him about the town he concentrated on a description of the house in one of the largest and most imposing terraces in the district.

It was arranged that Frederic should finish his articles in Plymouth; and then, on a brilliant spring day, all the furniture, heirlooms, family portraits, and the valuable china inherited at intervals by Mrs. Folyat as her few aged relations one by one departed this life, having gone before, the Folyats set out at seven o'clock in the morning, and at half-past ten the same night reached our town where, at last, their history becomes interesting.

IV

FERN SQUARE

_Sir,--I pray you take heed how you put a beast, tired with the heat of the sun and with long travel, among others, which, as I hear say, have divers maladies and diseases._--A PETTY THEFT.

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.

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.