Round the Corner: Being the Life and Death of Francis Christopher Folyat, Bachelor of Divinity, and Father of a Large FamilyCannan, Gilbert
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Round the Corner: Being the Life and Death of Francis Christopher Folyat, Bachelor of Divinity, and Father of a Large Family
Cannan, Gilbert
Clergy -- Fiction; England -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; English fiction -- 20th century; Families -- Fiction
Father Soledano was an Irishman of Spanish extraction, a little ugly
man, with a lame leg, stiff bristling hair receding from a knobby,
wrinkled forehead, little eyes glowing under bushy brows, a long upper
lip and a sensitive mouth, and a chin that looked as though he had to
shave it every half hour.
The Roman Catholic Cathedral was about a mile away from St. Paul's,
and Father Soledano lived in the priest's house in an asphalt court
that lay under its shadow. The surrounding district was inhabited
mostly by poor Irish--ignorant, drunken, superstitious, and Jews,
whose morality was a reproach to the rest of the dwellers in the
slums; and there were French people, and Bavarians, Lithuanians, not a
few Poles, and refugees from Russia. All these were swept into the
various trades and manufactories--sweated tailoring, sweated
shirt-making, sweated jam-making, sweated engineering. And Father
Soledano found his work of digging for their souls infinitely amusing.
Several of his Catholics lived over in the parish of St. Paul's, and
he had sought Francis out on hearing a tale of his kindness to an old
woman who, by practising midwifery, supported her daughter-in-law and
four children. This old woman was a Catholic, and every penny she
could spare was spent in buying images of saints. She had the Virgin,
and St. Peter, and St. Anthony of Padua, and a little Saint Catherine
of Siena. One day two of the men who had assaulted Frederic and
overturned the gravestone of the boy James, made a round of all the
Catholic houses they could discover and destroyed all the images. When
Francis heard of it he went from house to house and was given a list
of all that had been destroyed, and a week later he went round with
his chief sidesman carrying a clothes-basket full of saints, and made
good every loss. When the aforesaid old woman found herself with a new
Virgin, a new Saint Peter, and a new Saint Anthony of Padua and a more
beautiful new Saint Catherine of Siena than she had ever thought of in
her wildest dreams, she knelt down and began to pray for the soul of
the English Father. And Francis knelt down and prayed with her, and
all the children gathered round and stared at their grandmother and
the portly bearded man kneeling there by the kitchen table, and their
mother began to cry, and the old woman began to cry, until Francis
lifted her up and kissed her on the cheek. Then he sent the children
out to buy bread and jam and cake and they had a lovely tea together.
Francis did not tell the tale to anybody, but it was soon out all over
the parish, and there was much indignation. A few of the parishioners
left the church and Mrs. Folyat was shocked and affronted. What
offended her most was that Francis had carried the images publicly and
openly through the streets. Being an inveterate gossip herself, she
could not endure being the subject of it, except it were flattering to
her vanity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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