True to his Colours | Page 2

he chose to do so; which was by no means his regular habit, as frequent
sprees and drinking-bouts with congenial companions made his
services little to be depended on. However, he was a first-rate hand, and
his employers, who could not do without him, were fain to put up with
his irregularities.
Foster was now in the prime of life, and had a young wife and one little
baby. He was professedly a sceptic, and gloried in his creed--if he can
be said to have any creed who believes in nothing but himself. Of
course the Bible to him was simply a whetstone on which to "sharpen
his tongue like a serpent, that he might shoot out his arrows, even bitter
words." As for conscience, he ridiculed the very idea of such an old-
fashioned guide and monitor. "No," he would say, "as a true musician
abhors discordant sounds, and as a skilled mechanic abhors bad work,
and therefore cannot turn it out without doing violence to his finer and
more cultivated sensibilities, so the best guide in morals to an
enlightened man is his own sense of moral fitness and propriety."
Nevertheless, he was by no means over-scrupulous as to the perfection
of his own handiwork when he could slur over a job without fear of
detection; while the standard of morality which he set up for himself,
certainly, to judge by his own daily life, did not speak much for the
acuteness of his moral perceptions.

But he was shrewd and ready, and had a memory well stored with such
parts of Scripture as were useful pegs on which to hang clever
objections and profane sneers. Not that he had read the Bible itself, for
all his knowledge of it was got second-hand from the works of sceptics,
and in detached fragments. However, he had learned and retained a
smattering of a good many scientific and other works, and so could
astonish and confound timid and ill-informed opponents.
No wonder, therefore, that he was the admired chairman of the
"Crossbourne Free-thought Club," which met two or three times a week
in one of the public-houses, and consumed, for the benefit of the house,
but certainly not of the members themselves or their homes, a large
quantity of beer and spirits, while it was setting the misguided world
right on science, politics, and religion. The marvel, indeed, to Foster
and his friends was how ignorance, bigotry, priestcraft, and tyranny
could venture to hold up their heads in Crossbourne after his club had
continued its meeting regularly for the last two years.
Perhaps they might have been a little less surprised could one of them
have taken down an old volume of Dr South's sermons from the vicar's
library shelves, and have read these words to his fellows: "Men are
infidels, not because they have sharper wits, but because they have
corrupter wills; not because they reason better, but because they live
worse." Assuredly this was true of the infidelity in Crossbourne.
And what sort of a home was William Foster's? The house itself looked
well enough as you approached it. Those houses of a humbler stamp on
either side of it had doors which opened at once from the street into the
parlour or living-room; but to Foster's dwelling there was a small
entrance-hall, terminating in an archway, beyond which were a large
parlour, a kitchen, and a staircase leading to the upper rooms.
There was an air of ambition about everything, as though the premises,
like their occupiers, were aiming to be something above their station,
while at the same time a manifest absence of cleanliness and neatness
only presented a sort of satirical contrast to the surrounding grandeur.
On either side of the entrance-hall, and just under the archway, was a

plaster-of-Paris figure, nearly as large as life--that on the right-hand
being a representation of Bacchus, and that on the left of a nymph
dancing. But the female image had long since lost its head, and also
one of its arms--the latter being still in existence, but being hung for
convenience' sake through the raised arm of Bacchus, making him look
like one of those Hindu idols which are preposterously figured with a
number of superfluous limbs. If the effect of this transference of the
nymph's arm to its companion statue was rather burlesque than
ornamental, the disconnected limb itself was certainly not without its
use, small fragments of it being broken off from time to time for the
purpose of whitening the door-steps and the hall-flags when the
hearthstone could not readily be found.
Within the archway, over the parlour door, was a plaster bust of
Socrates; but this had met with no better treatment than the statues,
having accidentally got its face turned to the wall as