“My dear,” replied in remonstrance her interlocutor, who had just married her last daughter to the leading manufacturer in Fulminster, “You must not talk as if the Canon had run off with a ballet-girl.”
But generally his indiscretion was condoned. It had been a stroke of genius to let Yvonne charm her critics from a public platform at the very outset.
For Yvonne herself, the remainder of her visit passed in a whirl. Families called upon her; mothers congratulated her; the “Fulminster Gazette” interviewed her; the Santyres changed the small dinner-party, to which she had been already asked, into a solemn banquet in her honour; and the Canon was ever at her side, attentive, courteous, dignified, authoritative, playing his part to perfection. The flattery pleased her. The universal deference paid to the Canon, of which she had grown more keenly conscious, awakened a shy pride. But it all seemed an incongruous dream, out of which she would awake when she found herself in her tiny flat in the Marylebone Road. She was afraid to go back. If it was a dream, she would regret this sudden lifting from her shoulders of all sordid cares, the dread of losing her voice, of poverty, and the grasshopper’s wintry old age. If it continued true, she feared lest the familiar surroundings might pain her with regret for the life she was abandoning--the sweet artist’s life, with all its inconsequences and its purposes, its hopes and fears, its freedom and its claims. Even now, she cried a little at the prospect of giving it up. And then she wouldn’t know herself. Hitherto, her conception of herself had been Yvonne Latour, the singer. That was her Alpha and Omega. It would be like looking in the glass and seeing a total stranger. It was pathetic.
On Sunday she received a series of sensations. She believed such elemental doctrines as she had received at her mother’s knee: in a beautiful heaven and a fearful hell, in Christ and the angels--she was not quite certain about the Virgin Mary--in the Lord’s Prayer, which she said every night at her bedside, and in the goodness of going to church. Her religion might have been that of a bird of the air for all the shackles it laid upon her soul. But the outer forms of worship impressed her strongly--church music, solemn silences, vestments, stained windows, even words. She felt very solemn when she called her innocent self a “miserable sinner” in the Litany, and the word “Sabbaoth,” in the “Te Deum,” always seemed fraught with mystic meaning. The symbolic hushed her into awe. Even the surplices of the choir-boys set them apart for the moment, in her mind, from the baser sort of urchins. And, _a fortiori_, the clergyman, in surplice and stole, had always appealed to her childish imagination as a being that moved in an especial odour of sanctity. It is fair to add that Yvonne’s church-going had never been as regular as might have been desired, so these reverential feelings had not been staled by custom. However, when the Canon appeared at the reading-desk, and his fine voice rang through the Abbey, Yvonne felt a sudden pang of alarm. The night before he had been so tender and playful that he had almost seemed to be upon her level. And now, he was far, far away. The distance between her, poor, insignificant little Yvonne, and him performing his sacred office, appeared immeasurably vast. And when he mounted the pulpit, her awe grew greater. She could not realise that he was her affianced husband.