THE ORGANIST

1

Christmas, that arch old time-server, hiding his pagan principles beneath a Christian livery, lending self-indulgence an air of specious goodwill, and proclaiming peace out of the satiety that succeeds good appetite; Christmas, that benevolent impostor, came and went, bringing to humanity by way of gifts such things as it already had; merry-making to the merry-makers; riches to the rich; sorrow to the sorrowful; bronchitis to the bronchial; hunger to the hungry; death to the dying. The little school broke up with games and laughter. The wooden benches, scoured and scalded, were stacked upon the deal table. The sallow atlas, sponged tenderly with lukewarm water as if it had been a face, resigned itself to the tedium of Christmas with the air of a dyspeptic to whom all indiscretions of rejoicing are forbidden. From the schoolroom landing to the bottom stair the faded Brussels carpet was relaid in case Miss Burford or some other chanced to call.

The cares of life, multiplied like flocks of hungry winter birds, thronged in the season’s wake. Coal grew profligate, burning away to nothing in no time like the best of resolutions. Gas so wasted his substance in riotous living that two of him were needed to make a light at all, whilst down in the cellar the insatiable meter ticked like an eight-day clock. Water froze and refused to be placated without a plumber. Pies and sausages were at a discount. Father Christmas, surfeited with geese and turkeys, positively sickened at the thought of pork. Scholastic bills would not be issued until the end of the holidays. It was uncertain when they would be paid. Frosts, snows, rains and fogs, compliments of the season, Christian Awake, Waits, Herald Angels and Brass bands filled life with foreboding and tarnished the brightest hopes. Twice Mrs. Holmroyd had recourse to the Bank, whose swing doors admitted her with a satiric politeness and mocked her as she went, with undissimulated scorn. Economy, in its blackest semblance, dogged her. Oswald and Beryl must look for no Christmas gifts this year beyond their mother’s love. She prepared their hearts for resignation with tender care, but as the season of universal fellowship drew near her inflammable heart took fire like a yule log and filled her with such a warmth as gleamed far beyond the limits of herself. Christmas came but once a year; her children should not be denied its blessings. The Christmas fire, blazing in her bosom, consumed all petty prudence mean and base; it blazed to a zealous profligacy that burned up every argument thrown on to quench it. All that she had not, she yearned to give. For Oswald she bought a volume of “Robinson Crusoe” and a paint-box; for Beryl a big new doll with flaxen hair, and a pair of cloth gaiters. Surely God would bless the gifts. Roast duck sanctified their Christmas dinner, followed by a plum pudding spiked with blanched almonds. Elizabeth helped to roast the duck and eat it; being further blessed to inarticulateness with silver and a pair of Mrs. Holmroyd’s boots. No errand boy, qualified with the remotest claim upon remembrance, rapped upon the knocker to wish the house a merry Christmas in vain. And Oswald, proud of the mission but dry-lipped with the responsibility laid upon him, bore a silver emblem in his hand for transmission to the snuffy Prestwich “with mother’s compliments” on Christmas morning. He had grave doubts whether the dignity of this official might not be affronted with such a gift, but the snuffy Prestwich palmed it like a conjuror before Oswald could credit the coin had left his fingers, saying: “My respects to Mrs. Holmroyd and the compliments of the season in return” through the one nostril this trying time had left open to him.

But all this--though it filled Mrs. Holmroyd’s heart with seasonable and festive fumes, seeming to constitute her a mystical partaker of the world’s bounty; a sipper of wassail from humanity’s cup--all this, whatever strength it lent to spiritual parts, made the purse falter. And when Christmas day was gone by, and the choice of dishes of this joyous banquet of kindred souls removed, her heart turned heavy after its emotional excess, like a head on the morning that succeeds the circulation of the flowing bowl. Pious exuberance, sad and disillusioned, settled down to its daily diet of hard fact. She heard the muffled bells of St. Gyles’s ring out the mournful passing of the old year. She heard the clocks at midnight proclaim its life extinct. She heard the bells thereafter crash out into a paean of welcome to the year new born with a boisterous gaiety that sought to crush all sadness under sound. But through the clangorous riot of tones and supertones the solemn muffle of the dead peal rang. For her, a mother, this birth so lustily commemorated was a portentous thing. Long after the bells were stilled, and their ropes swung drear and languid in the draughts that blew upon them through the whistling louvres; and the clattering footsteps of the ringers had echoed down the narrow spiral stairway, and the ringers (stooping their heads) had issued one by one through the oaken door at the foot of the tower, putting their collars up and staring at the stars their concussive chimes had shaken, and that trembled still like raindrops on blown gossamer--long after this she lay and listened to the ringing of a phantom peal; interminable Bob Majors and Bob Minors of the memory, whose melancholy reiteration of the past pervaded all the present with tumultuous sadness. Nor were her tears the only tears that fell upon a pillow in that house, bruised out of aching eyelids by the cruel beauty of the bells. On his narrow bed in the little narrow bedroom above the scullery, divided from her own by the door that nightly custom left unlatched, and sunk two steps below the level of her floor, a wakeful Oswald lay, soul-stricken before these solemn judges of the past that called him to account before the bar of conscience.

His mother’s blood flowed in his veins; her hopes and fears were his. This music of the bells, that never failed to stir her to an ecstasy of sadness so sweet as to be nothing short of pain, filled his heart, too, with sublime wretchedness to overflowing. The pathos of the past, the tragedy of the present, permeated every portion of his small being. His very limbs grew sentient, and his soul--become substantial--suffered horribly from stomach ache. O, to be something! To Be something. Another year (the bells averred) was dead and gone, and still he was Oswald Holmroyd the sausage boy, dependent on his mother--who should have been her succour and support. No nearer being an Alderman; no nearer being an Organist; no nearer being a Canon, Verger, Town Crier, Fireman, or Anything. Filled with remorse that dripped in tears from his contorted eyelids like the great drops wrested by Elizabeth from the writhing garments her wrinkled hands wrung above the wash-tub, he consecrated resolve anew. Imagination, wrought by despairing conscience to an intensity impatient of reality and daylight, seized its imaginary basket. No trials should dismay, no sufferings deter him. This visioned basket was his answer to the bells. Like a new year a new Oswald had been born. The old Oswald was already dead. Henceforth.... Hark! What was that? What had so shaken the four corners of his bed? Assuredly it was a sob. It was the sob accompanying re-birth; the sob with which (it seemed) the old Oswald had been delivered of the new; a startling, undissimulated sob that brought imagination to its senses and stopped the source of tears in no time. Motionless he held his breath, cowering from discovery into the smallest compass of his being.

“Oswald!”

Did lips of inward apprehension breathe the name, or lips of outward reality? So softly did it touch his hearing that he felt unsure, but his heart fluttered like a bird beneath the closing fingers of the fowler.

“Oswald....”

His mother’s voice it was, soft as silence itself, persuasive as sleep, fearful of ruffling the lightest slumber. At first his guilty wakefulness vouchsafed no sign. But his own silence accused him, and filled with awful fear lest on this first solemn morning of the New Year she might leave him utterly to the tortures of self-reproach, he made believe to hear her at last, answering in a still, small voice: “Yes, mother.” There was undeniable wetness about the voice.

“Are you awake, Oswald?”

“Yes, mother.”

“I thought I heard.... You are not, not crying, Oswald?”

“No, mother.”

Two steps were taken. The presence that filled his doorway suffused his narrow room. Its outstretched hands, putting the interceptive warmth aside, brought their warmth to his pillow.

“Where are you, Oswald?”

“Here, mother.”

Here on his back, with his nose in the sheet that his fingers plucked above him; his eyes wide open, prostrate as a corpse. That posture, alone, confirmed her hearing and her heart. She stooped to kiss his face. Her lips slipped upon the wetness of its marbled cheeks, and their taste was salt. She knew too well, by now, the taste of tears to harbor doubt.

“What is it, Oswald?”

“Nothing, mother.”

She needed to ask no more. Nothing (in the language of the soul) means Everything. Everything the soul can suffer, of darkness that dismays and the brightness it cannot bear. Her own misery became protective in a moment. Her arms encompassed him. His weakness was as a welcome well of clear comfort, whose draught refreshed and strengthened her; for nought in the world so sweetens sorrow as its kind. Without a word their mutual troubles made exchange of comfort, and tears staunched tears.

2

Of Miss Burford during these wintry days no more was seen. Yet the expectation of her visit, sinking like the last embers in a grate, was replenished on the brink of expiry by some reference on her father’s part, either in the form of a question: “My daughter hasn’t been to see you yet, ma’am?” or affirmatively: “She means coming to see you one of these days, I know. But there’s so many callers at this time of the year, and being without a regular servant too, ma’am....”

On the other hand, the Councillor himself, as though led by a sort of second nature to the Holmroyd door, became a visitor quite customarily to be reckoned with. No discoverable purpose brought him, yet his visits seemed so adequately to explain themselves that speculation after his departure was left in no painful uncertainty as to whether the call signified a pie or a pupil. Nor did he induce the tension of uncertainty attaching to a double knock, for after his third visit he made no use of the street knocker at all. Somewhere in the neighborhood of tea-time after the lapse of a few days his tread might be expected. The muffled thumping of his broad shoulders against the passage walls sufficiently announced his coming. At the parlour door his knuckles rapped a firm but courteous intimation as though, before all, the owner’s politeness sought not to take advantage of the assembled company or come upon it unaware. After which, attention being thus summoned to his presence he would open the door two inches to admit the enquiry:

“Are you at home, ma’am?” in a voice loud enough to clear all misunderstanding. But it was not until his hostess answered, begging him to enter, that he put all further formality aside and disclosed himself to sight, wearing his hat. “Don’t let me disturb you, ma’am,” was his unalterable formula. “I’m just on my way....” With which, his overcoat spread open, his hands plunged into the deep pockets of it, he moved at once to the hearthrug (that prescriptive place of man’s authority in the domestic circle) where, towering above the sitters at the table, on whom and which he looked down with a bland and interested gaze, he took off his hat. From his post of observation on the hearthrug he begged they would continue their meal, and supervised their eating of it with a regard as watchful and participant as if the food were destined rather for his own mouth than theirs. The first embarrassment occasioned by his large presence being overcome, table politeness--put on its mettle by the honour of performing before so important an onlooker--exerted every effort, and Oswald and Beryl ate their best. The Councillor was not a waster of words like his daughter--who, apparently for the reason that words cost nothing, inclined to extravagance in this direction. If he had nothing to say, nothing was what he said; quite content, it seemed, to participate in a silence that bespoke itself friendly and companionable. He alluded to the gas, and asked Mrs. Holmroyd with municipal interest how she found the quality, ma’am. Was she satisfied with the town water? Who, if he might venture to inquire, ma’am, was her landlord? Indeed! What rent (if she felt inclined to answer the question), did he ask her for this house? Indeed! That was a nice bright fire she had. And a nice clean burning coal, by the look of it. Was it Silkstone or Manvers? “That’s not my butter you’re using there, ma’am, surely!” “I thought I wasn’t mistaken. Judging by the look of it I should pronounce it a bit rank, ma’am.”

That he did not partake of a cup of tea along with them reproached no fault of invitation on Mrs. Holmroyd’s part, for she never failed to pass the compliment, albeit in the end with the uninsistent voice that takes refusal for granted; since the mere suggestion of hospitality was enough to make the Councillor brandish his hat as if reminded of the flight of time, and even put it on in preparation for departure, protesting he had not come for that, and his own tea would be waiting of him (thank her all the same, ma’am). On one occasion, however, about the middle of the Christmas holidays, when Mrs. Holmroyd had said, “I am afraid it’s no use my offering you a cup of tea, Mr. Burford ...” he answered, “Not at all, ma’am. I was just on the point of going.” And put his hat on, beneath which he had already proceeded as far as the door when suddenly to everybody’s surprise, he took it off again and returned bareheaded to the hearthrug. “After all, ma’am,” he said. “I’ve declined your kindness a deal of times. I don’t want to seem to throw it in your face. It’s very good of you to ask me. Thank you. Just one cup, if you please.” He added the prodigious compliment in a plain voice that scorned collusion with flattery: “Your tea-table always looks so clean and tempting, ma’am.” Mrs. Holmroyd, though flushing to an unexpected compliment paid with such obvious honesty, sought to decline acceptance of the Councillor’s tribute as if it had been monetary, saying she feared there was not very much about her little table to tempt anybody. “It is very simple,” she remarked.

“Simple,” acquiesced the Councillor, who laid his hat upon the coal box and declined to be relieved of his overcoat on the ground that he did not propose to stay, ma’am, “What’s better than simple so long as simple’s good? It’s honest. There’s no fuss and nonsense about it. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t.” With which he sank spaciously into the easy chair that Oswald, obeying a secret sign from his mother, pushed up timidly for the guest’s reception between the table and the fireplace, and sat back for some moments at ease, his broad toes to the fire, his hands interlocked across his watch-chain, his eyes directed to the ceiling, as though he subjected the new experience to the test of critical enquiry. Nor did he fail to bring a full judgment to bear on the fare provided, and such a final opinion as he pronounced upon its excellence was neither lightly nor easily come by. True, Mrs. Holmroyd’s teacups were only small, but he accepted three of them with no more persuasion than accompanied the first, saying “Thank you, ma’am. Is that my three and tenpenny?” Being assured it was, he settled down to a more complacent enjoyment of it. “I felt I couldn’t be mistaken in my own tea. Nobody couldn’t wish for a better. I don’t care where they bought, or what price they paid for it.” The bread, too, won his commendation. “Do you bake it yourself, ma’am?” Receiving her assurance that she did, and that it owed its excellence to his special best roller-milled superfine flour, he consumed it with redoubled satisfaction; and even undertook at this point to remove his overcoat out of tribute to Mrs. Holmroyd’s table and the comfortable brightness of her fire. “I see your room’s meant to be sat in, ma’am,” he conceded, and looked around it with obvious intent to assimilate all the comfort visible. Mrs. Holmroyd explained that it was the only room she had.

“And the only room you want,” the Councillor decided, “if two’s going to be a trouble to you. Comfort is comfort, ma’am, just as quality’s quality. Where there isn’t quality, quantity won’t help improve it.”

From the consummation of the meal he turned his interest more directly to the fire, which truth to tell blazed with a most sociable and contentful warmth, and appeared to repose his thoughts in the attractive brightness of its flames. Something in his posture, or some half-conscious movement of a hand towards his breast pocket prompted Mrs. Holmroyd’s hospitality to suggest that if Mr. Burford smoked at all ... “I do, ma’am,” the Councillor replied immediately. “But rarely in the house.... It’s not,” he added, with a voice darkened by experience, “every lady that cares for the smell of smoking indoors. Particularly cigars. They say it clings to the curtains, and tarnishes the picture frames and furniture.” Mrs. Holmroyd begged at once that he let no such objections on her behalf deter him. For her own part she found the smell of tobbaco-smoke not disagreeable. In fact, she liked it. Her husband used to smoke occasionally.

“Why,” said the Councillor, reapplying his hand to the breast pocket and drawing forth a bulky leather cigar-case, “you show your common-sense in that, ma’am. I think so too. But all ladies doesn’t share your opinion. My daughter doesn’t. She says it’s no use trying to keep a house respectable if men insists on smoking in it. She says houses was never meant for it. You might as well cook in the drawing-room....

“ ... I won’t deny,” he said, “that she keeps my house clean. She studies it a deal more than her own health. There’s no house in Daneborough gets better looked after. It gets looked after too well. But as I sometimes tell her, Cleanliness isn’t everything. If a place has got to be made uncomfortable because it’s clean, let’s have a little less cleanliness and more comfort. A house didn’t ought to be a museum, ma’am, to my way of thinking, for folks to peep at and go about in on tip-toe. It ought to be lived in and enjoyed. Like this.”

The eulogy, coming from such a source, and bearing the indisputable stamp of sincerity, did not fail to gratify the recipient; and even to cause Oswald and his sister to turn eyes of reawakened interest around the little room. Each tried hard to see it through their visitor’s eyes, and Oswald (suddenly succeeding) realized the conviction that it was in truth a very wondrous, lovely home he lived in. He was less assured, and conviction stumbled over disappointment, to hear his mother in her gentle voice reply:

“I’m afraid, Mr. Burford, your daughter would scarcely regard my little home as a house at all.” She could not refuse the petition of her pride to add: “I did not myself when first we came. I found it very small.”

And in truth, as Oswald discovered on looking once more around the parlour, (this time through his mother’s eyes) the room seemed very small. Probably his mother was right. Miss Burford would consider it no house at all.

“There’s only one way to judge a home, ma’am,” said the Councillor oracularly, “and that’s to know if you’re comfortable in it. If you are, then it’s a home. If you’re not, it doesn’t signify a brass farthing how big it happens to be.” He appeared to be speaking now with his eye upon a page of experience invisible to Mrs. Holmroyd. “I take it you’re very comfortable here, ma’am,” he said. Oswald awaited his mother’s answer to this direct enquiry with solemn interest, and was inexpressibly relieved to hear with what fervour she assured their guest of the happiness derived from these familiar walls.

“I thought so, ma’am,” the Councillor commented. “If you wasn’t happy here, you’ll excuse me for saying I should think you hard to please. But you’d make any home comfortable. It’s your nature, ma’am.”

After the successful experiment of this first repast, Councillor Burford showed a diminishing diffidence in partaking of Mrs. Holmroyd’s hospitality. He rarely said No to the proffer of a cup of tea “to set him home,” as he expressed it; and was usually prepared to enjoy some minutes in the easy chair with his hat laid on the coal-box, and his feet to the fire, and his overcoat thrown open, sucking contentedly at his cigar in the intervals of asking after the coal and gas and waterpipes and the general health. His presence lent a certain comfort to the little home, a bulwark-confidence encouraging to dependent hearts, but there was one topic he touched on that filled his listeners with a secret consternation,--and that was Oswald’s future.

He did not invariably allude to it, but there was (particularly in every silence) the fear that he might; and the uncomfortable fear of it became a spectre. Whether he reverted to the subject through sheer conversational poverty, or through any deeper solicitude for Oswald’s welfare, not even Mrs. Holmroyd could decide, but the consequence for her remained the same. Questions as to Oswald’s health were easy to dispose of, since once the Councillor had uttered them he seemed to take small interest in the answer given. But when he asked of Mrs. Holmroyd if she had lent any further thought to her son’s future--which his lips affirmed was not that distant, comfortable form of it with which irresolution veiled the question, but a future so immediate and concise as to partake of the perplexities of the present--her self-possession lost countenance, and her smile grew strained. However casually introduced and tranquillized beneath the rhythmic puffing of the Councillor’s cigar, the subject took conscience by the collar; it walked with a flat constabulary tread familiar to Oswald’s fears. Mrs. Holmroyd, struggling to keep the shrinking edges of her smile over composure, twisted her wedding ring with gentle uncertainty.

“Oswald’s father,” she said on one occasion, “was, of course, an architect.”

“Indeed,” said the Councillor. “And do you think of making him an architect too, ma’am?”

He had taken the cigar out of his mouth, and held it now extended between his cleft fingers in an attitude that seemed to put too much responsibility upon her answer. She faltered, with an uneasy look at Oswald. On this point, she confessed, they had scarcely come (as yet) to a decision. She trusted, of course, to make Something of her son. He had undoubted talents.

“Talents, has he?” asked the Councillor, abruptly confronting this pretentious word. “What are they, ma’am?”

Demanded at the pistol’s point like this she knew not what they were. Nothing, she feared, that any language of the flesh could adequately utter. But the Councillor’s cigar, attached to space by a silken damoclean thread, still challenged her from the fork of his extended fingers.

“He is very fond of poetry,” she said, feeling the utter feebleness of words to express the wonders of her son’s attainments or to justify her pride in them. “He reads a great deal. And he writes too. Just before Christmas he wrote a little hymn.... He has a decided talent for drawing. And for music....” She struggled through the tottering list of accomplishments that not all her bosom’s ardour could kindle to convincing warmth. The Councillor’s eye remained at the end of her tribute coldly unmoved. “Indeed, ma’am,” was all he said, and put the suspended cigar back to his lips once more with the air of one whose interest has been lent in vain. With an effort to retrieve a situation that her defective advocacy had so prejudiced, she made haste to inform the visitor that later on ... though probably not this term, it was (as she had told him) her hope to send Oswald to the Grammar School. At present she was not sure ... she rather doubted; she was afraid she could not quite afford to do so.

“Then why try, ma’am?” the Councillor taxed her uncompromisingly. She attempted hurriedly to repair the error of a misgiving overstated.

“Of course,” she qualified, “ ... perhaps by making sacrifices.”

“Sacrifices!” the Councillor repeated, taking the word from her and seeming by the tone of his voice to expose the unworthiness of it. “Make nothing of the sort, ma’am, believe me. Why should you? It’s a big mistake for folks to sacrifice themselves for their children’s edjication. If it can’t be done without sacrifices, don’t do it at all. You’d be a deal better advised to keep your money, ma’am. It’ll be more use to you. What’s edjication, when all’s said and done? It’s nothing. As often as not it gets too proud to work, and thinks it ought to be paid for knowing something that’s no use to anybody. Give your lad good meat and serviceable clothes, ma’am, and send him to a sensible school where they’ll teach him to read and write and figure, and knock the nonsense out of him. That’s my advice. Let him start to earn his own living before he get ideas. My father never made any sacrifices for me, and I’ve lived to be thankful he didn’t. Why should you make sacrifices for your son, ma’am? Learn him to make sacrifices for you. It’s his duty. The only sacrifices that does a man a ha’porth of good is them he makes himself. I went behind the counter when I was twelve. It’s done me more good than a hundred sacrifices, or a score of schoolmasters. Teach a lad that he’s got to be his own schoolmaster. If there’s anything about him he’ll learn a deal quicker from his own mistakes that he’s got to pay for than from a teacher.”

Not, he was careful to explain, that he advocated the total abolition of schooling. Let Oswald be sent to St. Gyles’s School, or the English School, or St. Saviour’s School for the matter of that--albeit he was prompt to emphasize the fact that St. Saviour’s would not be _his_ choice.

From such educational sentiments, as may be supposed, Mrs. Holmroyd recoiled, doubly at a disadvantage by the knowledge that any argument in favour of a loftier view of learning must, to reach its object, pass first through the Councillor’s own imperfections. Nor was Oswald less disquieted by these views in reference to his future, and his anxiety hung like lead upon his mother’s question whether the schools just mentioned were “_quite_ the schools, Mr. Burford!”

“I went to St. Gyles’s School myself,” the Councillor affirmed, “when I was a lad--but that’s getting on for fifty years ago. The edjication’s gone down there, in my opinion, since then. I sent my son to the English School ma’am, and if I’d a dozen of ’em I’d send ’em all to the same place. You can’t improve upon the English School. If you want a good cheap school where your son will be taught to write and figure and be a sharp, smart, obedient lad ... send him there. That’s my opinion, ma’am.”

It was his opinion. She thanked him for it with such gentle graciousness that Oswald’s heart misgave him, believing from her tone of voice the visitor’s advice had been accepted, and that assuredly before long he would begin his dreadful education at the English School.

After the Councillor had taken leave, with his two hands plunged in the two side pockets of his outspread overcoat, Mrs. Holmroyd for a long while sat gazing at the fire, slowly twisting her wedding ring upon her slender finger. No reference was made to the dire topic of discussion, and Oswald dared no more broach this than he would have dared to penetrate the darkness of the cellar for confirmation of the terrors contained in it. Instead, he opened his mother’s Christmas gift of “Robinson Crusoe,” and immersed himself in its magic pages to demonstrate how good a reader he was. And he besought his mother to sharpen a pencil for him that he might portray the Mansion House on a sheet of cream-laid note paper, and prove what an artist he was. On the other side of this notable production he drew the wonderful memorial he meant to raise above his father’s grave, and the house he should acquire for the three of them to live in, out of the rich rewards of being a gentleman. But bedtime made his doubts insufferable. And at last, when he came to kiss his mother’s cheek and say good night, the tenderness of her embrace lent a panic courage to his lips.

“ ... Am I going to the English School, mother?” he asked. He asked the question in a rapid undertone, with downcast eyes that feared to take any part in so momentous a demand. Receiving no answer after awhile he glanced at his mother’s face, and was dismayed to find it bore no resemblance to the gentle countenance last looked on. A dreadful change, indeed, had in the interval come over it, disruptive of serenity. Turning hurriedly from his wondering gaze, as if it hurt her, his mother passed to the mantelpiece, in tears.

3

The little school had already reassembled, and pride was growing anxious to be insulted with the first payment of its last term’s labour, when Miss Burford called. True, the Councillor had intimated the likelihood of his daughter’s visit more than a week ago, saying: “I think my daughter will be giving you a call on Monday, ma’am.” But such notification had been tendered before without result, and though Mrs. Holmroyd made due preparation to receive the visitor she was not surprised when the afternoon passed with no louder summons at the door than imagination administered. Miss Burford did not call on Monday because, being still without a maid, she had decided that the Drawing-Room could not go for a single day longer “without being something done at” in her expressive and forceful idiom; nothing having been done at it since the room was turned out, with Elizabeth’s aid, the week before.

Nor did she call on Tuesday, because Tuesday was Elizabeth’s day, and Elizabeth’s sight grew more and more defective, needing Miss Burford’s sharper sight to supervise it, and Miss Burford’s raptorial forefinger to pounce upon the glaring instances of the enthusiast’s omission.

On Wednesday Miss Burford did not call because, pfff! the dust in her father’s bedroom was indescribable. Where men picked up all the dust they brought into a house she did not know. No sooner did she take a brush to the carpet, just to see, than it rose up in clouds. She had to go out upon the landing to cough. Never had she seen such a sight in her life. What would a doctor think if her father happened to be ill, and they showed him into such a room!

But on the Thursday, by dint of rising an hour earlier than her wont and working--as she phrased it--“like a Trojan,” she succeeded in paying her long deferred visit to Spring Bank Gardens at last.

Being somewhat antagonistically aware that Mrs. Holmroyd was a lady with a very composed and trying manner of speech, and a countenance so politely soft as to yield no visible imprint of any impression stamped upon it; and being much exercised in her mind as to how much of the Burford history (if any) had been delivered into her keeping by Elizabeth, whose rejoinders to oblique enquiry on this point were vague and unconvincing, she prepared herself for the visit to Mrs. Holmroyd with punctilious exactitude of toilet. She brushed her company skirt inside and out with the same thoroughness that she would have devoted to a carpet. She exhumed her hat from its place in the camphorated wardrobe where it lay swathed in a couple of silk kerchiefs, re-titivating its torpid millinery with endless deft and still dissatisfied touches. She sewed new lace frills inside her bodice sleeves and neck; breathed out the creases in her kid gloves; polished her company boots, and providing herself with two handkerchiefs (the one for usage, if required, in the street; the other to draw out for the first time in Mrs. Holmroyd’s sitting-room), she set off at last with a morocco leather card case in her hand, accompanied by an elderly lady and a precocious female child with straight legs.

Chiefly because her sitting-room was rather less orderly than she would have wished any unsympathetic eye to see it, Mrs. Holmroyd had the presentiment that visitors would take her at a disadvantage this afternoon. The moment that the knock resounded through the empty passage below, her uneasy conscience leaped instantly to its feet with the cry: “Miss Burford!” She would have wished to pay her personal appearance some trifling attention before descending to receive her visitors, but being acquainted with the nature of Miss Burford’s eye she hastened downstairs at once to protect her parlour from its depredations. It was even as she had feared. Miss Burford, of all the chairs within the room, had chosen with unerring instinct that one which afforded the finest view of its defects. The elderly lady, in the reposeful posture of age that seems ever grateful for an opportunity to seat itself, occupied the easy chair familiar to Councillor Burford’s bulk; her head on one side; her eyes partly closed; of a disposition to snatch slumber if undisturbed. Upright on a chair by the window sat the young lady with the straight legs, silenced by these new surroundings which she imbibed intently through eye and ear, and awaiting developments with an expression of interest more alert than anxious. The first chill greetings were exchanged. Miss Burford bowed. The old lady rocked her head, which--set in motion--continued amicably for some time after like a china mandarin or a rocking horse. The young lady’s body grew rigid, whilst her glance darted birdlike onto each limb that moved or mouth that spoke.

It was indeed with reference to the prospective new pupil (who resolved herself shortly into the young lady with the upright back and active eyes) that Mrs. Holmroyd’s visitors had called. The young lady, it appeared, was the granddaughter of the old lady in the easy chair, and there had been a question of sending her to school. Certainly it was high time. _Something_ should be done with her.

“She’s more than I can manage, at times, Mrs. Holmroyd,” the old lady confided in a placid voice. “So we thought somebody else should see what they can make of her.”

“Of course, nothing is settled at present,” Miss Burford threw in guardedly for Mrs. Holmroyd’s benefit. “But something _will_ have to be settled,” she added in a tone whose warning purpose was now directed to the young lady with the upright back. “She can’t go on like this. She’s being utterly ruined. People are beginning to cry shame of her.” From the chair occupied by the young lady issued a sound faintly resembling “they aren’t, then!” which, Miss Burford’s keen ear detecting, she silenced with a tart: “Don’t contradict me. I say they are.”

“You’re putting her up to it,” said the young lady with the straight legs. “I heard you talking it all over as we was coming.”

“She’s a thoroughly spoilt girl,” Miss Burford pronounced with a patch of temper in her hard cheek, ignoring the young lady and addressing herself exclusively to Mrs. Holmroyd, to whom the prospective pupil’s faults were exhaustively disclosed with a candour that made not the least concession to the object of it. The young lady, it transpired, was possessed of a curious and difficult temper. Her father had the same temper. Her grandfather had it too, “but not so bad.”

“She doesn’t get it from me,” the old lady explained. “Mine’s not that sort at all. It never was--even when I was younger, and reckoned to have one. It used to be sharp, I won’t deny. But when it was over it was over and done with, and I didn’t bear the least grudge against them I’d spoke to.” But her granddaughter’s temper, Miss Burford explained, was of that protracted and indefinite variety most baffling to diagnose or deal with. It appeared that the culprit was capable of sulking a whole morning without letting anybody as much as suspect she was sulking at all.

“I sulked for two days, once,” the young lady interposed, who, far from showing any resentment at this exposure of her failings, took the most interested part in their display.

“Two days!” the old lady enquired incredulously. “Are you sure, now, or are you telling a story? When was that?”

“Last year, when you wouldn’t let me go to the circus. You haven’t gone and forgotten _that_!”

The old lady’s enquiry melted in a gaze of almost rapturous remembrance as she confirmed this shocking boast to Mrs. Holmroyd.

“And so she did. To be sure. I forget things, without she’s there to remind me. She was a very naughty girl that time.”

Miss Burford with visible acerbity called on Mrs. Holmroyd to bear witness to this display of ridiculous indulgence, crying: “Did ever you hear!--You spoil her!” she said, turning on the old lady with indignation. “I’ve no patience with you. You’re to blame as much as her. You positively encourage her.”

The old lady, subsiding comfortably upon admission as if it were a sofa for the mind to rest on, confessed to Mrs. Holmroyd (seemingly not displeased with Miss Burford’s rebuke): “Why! What can you do when there’s only one? It’s not the same as if she was a whole family. You’re forced to spoil ’em a bit when they’re by theirselves.”

“She wants a good slap bottom,” Miss Burford averred with a vigour that imparted momentarily to her hard face the uplifted menace of a hand.

“I don’t, then!” the young lady declared, not less emphatically, as though in no doubt respecting the nature of the remedy suggested. “I wouldn’t have one. I never have had one. I wouldn’t let nobody give me one.”

“You’d have what you were given if I’d to do with you,” Miss Burford affirmed concisely.

The old lady, rocking a head of indulgence towards both parties in the dispute, as if appreciating the merits of their respective contentions, admitted that perhaps she was “a bit to blame.” But did Miss Burford seriously suggest she should take active measures at _her_ time of life? She was past that now. She hadn’t the strength.

“I get so short of breath,” she confided to Mrs. Holmroyd, “without That.” And explained a momentary convulsion of her features with the one word “Rheumatism!” Adding: “In my knees. Just _there_.”

After further conversation (with the young lady’s pert assistance) a varied assortment of other defects was brought to view; including indolence, untidiness, and more than suspicion of a general disregard for truth.

“She tells downright falsehoods, Mrs. Holmroyd,” Miss Burford declared indignantly. “You can’t believe a word she says.”

“Falsehoods we won’t call them,” the old lady remarked with lenience. “Although there’s no denying she makes up some naughty stories to deceive her grandma. But it’s no good. People that tells stories always gets found out sooner or later.”

The young lady interposed: “They don’t. There’s two you haven’t found out yet. Two you never will find out.”

“Two?” said the old lady with revived interest. “Which two’s them?”

The young lady, becoming oracular, replied: “_I_ know.”

“My word!” exclaimed Miss Burford with an explosion of her dark face,” ... if only I’d the handling of her.” Falsehood she pronounced with indignation to be abominable. “When you can’t believe what people says to you, there’s only one thing they’re fit for. Let them be domestic servants straight away and be done with it.”

This pronouncement modulating into a key dear to Miss Burford’s heart introduced a long thematic digression in which the ostensible object of the visit was lost sight of. But on its reintroduction Mrs. Holmroyd was relieved to hear a tone of greater confidence and certainty. In fact, the young lady of the straight legs appeared to take the issue of the interview so much for granted that she asked Miss Burford: “When have I got to come?” To which Miss Burford’s answer was, “When you’re told. And not before.” For the Councillor’s daughter had still much curiosity to gratify, and did not believe in arriving too hastily at decisions, even where these had been already taken. Did Mrs. Holmroyd’s terms include slates and school books? Would there be any reduction in the event of unavoidable absence? Respecting the schoolroom; did Miss Burford understand it was upstairs? Being assured that it was, she asked if they might be permitted to view the room, inspired (as Mrs. Holmroyd was aware) by the laudable desire to probe as deep into the mysteries of Mrs. Holmroyd’s house as possible. The aged lady, on learning that a visit to the schoolroom involved not only the forfeiture of her chair but the laboured ascent of a flight of stairs, begged Mrs. Holmroyd to excuse her, tapping her bosom with a plaintive hand and shaking her head over it, saying she would rather sit where she was. Mrs. Holmroyd excused her cheerfully, and would have been not less willing to excuse Miss Burford, but the latter had already risen to her feet with an air of energy that put any such lingering hope to flight.

4

Partly owing to the confidence engendered by the acquisition of this new pupil; partly owing to the depression disseminated by the New Year’s bells; partly owing to the Councillor’s enquiries respecting Oswald; partly to the fact that Mr. Rencil, being brought face to face with Mrs. Holmroyd and her children one recent Saturday, raised his hat and wished her a bright New Year; but largely to those emotional true reasons that woman hides from the sight of mankind with the instinctive delicacy for underwear, Mrs. Holmroyd called upon the Organist of St. Saviour’s that same evening.

In view of the doubtfulness of its issue the visit was kept secret from her children, who consequently did not accompany her. Beryl she committed to the care of Oswald, both in turn being confided to the overlordship of the next-door neighbour, who undertook to look in upon them from time to time, and held herself ready to answer their first summons in the event of need.

Despite the fact that Mrs. Holmroyd’s errand was totally unconnected with pies or pupils, and that she came to enquire terms and not to state them, she stopped before the Organist’s name-plate at last with some of that trepidation which, in these days, was become a reckonable part of her. She had been actuated by an impulse whose fierce fires, subsiding now, left her a little enervated, a little questioning, perhaps. The figure of the Councillor, that had not been without its influence in driving her to this door, rose up before her as she reached it, with a look of outraged reason; its silent lips shaped to the expostulation: “What? After all our talks ma’am? Music lessons? Sacrifices? It’s madness.” She plucked the bell with hesitating fingers. After all.... This was but an enquiry. Nothing (as Miss Burford would have said) had been Settled. All she sought to know was Mr. Rencil’s terms. At the worst, if these turned out to be too high, she could express her gratitude for the information and, of course, her little boy was rather young at present. Later on ... if Mr. Rencil were at liberty to take him....

In the midst of these improvisations the brass plate on which her gaze was fixed, reading and re-reading Mr. Rencil’s name, receded suddenly from sight, and was transformed into a white apron. That no Miss Burford controlled the internal economy of this house seemed adequately proved by the almost friendly smile with which the maid acknowledged Mrs. Holmroyd’s enquiry, as if it were a pleasure to answer it. Mr. Rencil was at home. Would the visitor please walk in. It was evident that the maid had been trained not to damp the ardour of any caller showing the least disposition to indulge in music lessons. In fact, the welcome with which she made the Organist’s house free to Mrs. Holmroyd caused the latter to entertain a sudden qualm lest she were being admitted on false pretences, and she asked somewhat anxiously if Mr. Rencil were engaged, but the maid seemed too intent on the joyful task of conducting her visitor to pay any heed to such a minor question. Begging Mrs. Holmroyd to follow, she tripped up the staircase in advance with a nimbleness that allowed no recall, and was already lost to sight in a ruffle of skirts when Mrs. Holmroyd set polite foot on the first stair. The carpet on which she trod was Axminister, and for all it made no pretence of being new its quality of noiselessness and soft pile that comforted the foot were already noticeable to one whose occupation denied her the consolation of a stair-carpet in term time. It sent her memory back to the days when she, too, had trod on carpets as thick and soft as this, and infinitely richer; when the fact of their softness and their soundlessness had evoked in her no dreamy sense of unreality as now. The house itself was smaller, far, than the house her happiness had once been mistress of, but by comparison with the present home in Spring Bank Gardens, it appeared spacious. The staircase mounted (not precipitously, like her own) from an ample entrance hall, and the rail of the balustrade on which Mrs. Holmroyd laid her hand was of polished broad mahogany. Had such a balustrade been hers how Oswald might have slid down it. In place of the two deal benches at right angles, that occupied the small landing in Spring Bank Gardens, was a carved-oak Jacobean chest between two carved oak chairs. An impressive eight-day clock with a copper face ticked away in a corner with the bass voice of a magnificent escapement. By the door of the room on the first floor overlooking the street, whose transverse bars of light so fascinated Oswald on Friday evenings, the maid awaited Mrs. Holmroyd with the smile for an old friend recognized after a long absence.

“Mrs. Holmroyd....”

From an upholstered wicker chair by the fireplace a lady arose who had been stooping, until the moment of Mrs. Holmroyd’s entrance, over a piece of fancy work in coloured silks. Mrs. Holmroyd recognized her immediately as the Organist’s wife, whom she had often noticed at St. Saviour’s, sometimes sitting in the nave, sometimes in the chancel pew beneath the decorative stars and lilies of the organ pipes. She was still youthful, showing coiled hair of an attractive brown, and soft blue eyes dilated, probably, and made more lustrous by the close nature of the needlework on which, so recently, they had been engaged. Her dress was of deep magenta with velvet at the wrists and neck. Between the slender white thumb and finger of her right hand she still held, with a precise and delicate touch, her needle attached to a strand of pale green silk, but she threaded this deftly into the stuff she worked on as Mrs. Holmroyd came forward, and held out the hand released from it with a very spontaneous and friendly welcome. “Do come in, Mrs. Holmroyd. I think my husband is in his study. He will not be long.” The hand thus extended to Mrs. Holmroyd was hot, and there showed more colour in the cheekbones of the organist’s wife, emphasizing their salience, than Mrs. Holmroyd cared to see. She commented to herself: “The poor thing is delicate. I do not like that colour. She should not stoop too closely over needlework. It is bad for the chest.”

The two women seated themselves in a sociable silence, disturbed only by the rustle of adjusted skirts. Each, as she sat, sought some friendly phrase with which conversation might be set upon its feet. Mrs. Rencil, dropping impulsively on one knee before the fire, picked up the occasional poker and split one of the coals into a blaze. Mrs. Holmroyd expressed the polite hope that her arrival had not put an untimely end to Mrs. Rencil’s work. The organist’s wife reassured her. She had been on the point of putting her work away when Mrs. Holmroyd was announced. “I only took up the needle for a moment. My husband and I are going out to dine this evening.... With Canon Quexley,” she explained. The remark, innocent though it was, seemed to send a chill and alienating breath over Mrs. Holmroyd’s expanding sympathies. Pride of poverty, ever too sensitive, believed it detected a note of conscious satisfaction in the words that made the blazing fire and the face of the organist’s wife in a moment less friendly. She tried to think the fault was hers, and to extinguish the unworthy flame of jealousy lit by this casual statement in her breast. The mere word “dining” oppressed her with its superiority, seeming to elevate itself unpleasantly above her present state in life. Since her husband’s death she had never dined.

Without laying further stress upon this theme so lightly introduced, Mrs. Rencil picked up the piece of work on which she had been engaged and held it out for the visitor’s criticism and advice. The act, so simple and impulsive, reproached Mrs. Holmroyd’s unworthy feeling, and gave back instantly to the fire and Mrs. Rencil’s face their former friendship. The mother of Oswald had been mistaken; her foolish pride had played her false. With desire to make atonement for her base suspicion she contributed her interest whole-heartedly to the piece of work, that declared itself to be a table-centre in egg-shell silk, embroidered with pansies at each corner, and edged with old gold. Mrs. Rencil, using the needle as a pointer, explained the scheme of decoration, and descanted on her choice of silks. Did Mrs. Holmroyd care for this green? Did she think the violet too vivid? What would Mrs. Holmroyd recommend for the centre? Roses or chrysanthemums? “I am sure you can help me, Mrs. Holmroyd. I always feel that you have such excellent taste. I do so admire the way you dress your children.”

This unexpected tribute to her taste and children from the Organist’s wife, touched Mrs. Holmroyd profoundly. She could only bow her head, clinging with gloved thumb and finger to an edge of the table-centre under pretence of its protracted scrutiny until the lump of bitter sweetness in her throat dissolved. The fire, about whose gleaming coals celestial amoretti, and not mere flames, frolicked and played, seemed to irradiate a divine warmth to the very heart of her solitude. The face of the Organist’s wife, transformed by the ecstatic eyesight of a soul for true fellowship with its kind, assumed a rare and sudden beauty. All at once she had the reinstated vision of a home. It filled her like a sweet and suffocating fragrance, permeating all the passageways of memory. For the first time since her husband’s death, she sat in sensitive communion with a sister-spirit; turned soft silks with fingers of equality; drank in the sound of sweet and friendly accents; raised to her lips the chalice of companionable life.

The room in which they sat, and that these tremulous emotions so strangely stirred and tranquillized, was spacious. By day, Mrs. Holmroyd imagined, when the sun poured its gold through the big bowed window that swelled out upon a balcony, it would be luxurious with light. That this upper apartment of the Organist’s house aspired to the dignity of a drawing-room was shown by the prevalence of cushions and insubstantial furniture. The conventional white marble of the mantelpiece was hid beneath terra cotta hangings, in which Mrs. Holmroyd discerned traces of the same hand that worked upon the table-centre. An upright pianoforte, posed in what a photographic artist would describe as a three-quarter attitude, with its keyboard diagonal to the window, displayed its broad back draped in voluminous folds, like some spacious dowager in an opera cloak. This garment also served the ingenious function of a show-case, photographs of all sizes being exhibited at all angles, protruding from plaits and pockets of silk. Such opulence of drapery, which a later age has come to hold in holy horror, was the last symbol of refinement at the time of Mrs. Holmroyd’s visit. It represented the social revolt against the gloom and austerity of an earlier Victorian age; the transition between one state of error and the next, when every innovation seems like an inspired prophet, treading the thralls of custom underfoot, and summoning society to follow to the kingdom of everlasting perfection whose gleaming gateway lies at hand.

At the first trumpet-challenge of true taste the whole drawing-room in which Mrs. Holmroyd and the Organist’s wife were seated would have fallen prostrate like the walls of Jericho before Joshua’s obbligato; but in the days of which our history treats it contributed its part to a living movement, and these decorative trumperies that filled it were emblems of something infinitely greater than themselves. The wife of the Organist of St. Saviour’s was a domestic pioneer, seeking beauty in unfamiliar and audacious channels; a futurist, as the present age would call her, offering her ideals to the contempt of the age that follows, and even to the protests of the age that was her own. The daughter of Councillor Burford would have been outraged at much that she found in Mrs. Rencil’s drawing-room. She would have contended that all these pleats and folds of drapery were fertile harbourers of fluff; that with these bright, audacious, perishable colours the sunlight must be resisted like a foe. Even Mrs. Holmroyd was sensible of a courage that quailed before this unequivocal expression of modernity, and, whilst admiring, confessed her own cowardice. She had never been herself, a devotee of the work-box and crewel-bag; never an innovator, but rather a faithful worshipper of the things made sacred by association and dear by love. Mrs. Rencil, on the contrary, whilst lavishing every love and care upon her home, was animated by the spirit of unresting progress. Her ardour transcended all sentiment in the prosecution of its ideal. No attachment blinded her vision to the superannuation of a piece of furniture. The moment it lagged behind the march of progress, pensioned off in some oblivious asylum it must be, or rejuvenated under flounces. Finding in Mrs. Holmroyd a sensitive and sympathetic spirit, the Organist’s wife submitted her drawing-room to the visitor’s judgment with the same ingenuous charm that characterized her showing of the centrepiece. She had the rare gift of appealing for opinion in terms that seemed to lay great store on the value of the taste invoked. “_Do_ tell me how you like this material, Mrs. Holmroyd!” “I _must_ show you our new Cosy Corner. We only fitted it up before Christmas. I would so love to have your suggestions.”

5

Mrs. Holmroyd had already noticed the pretentious piece of furniture that filled the space between the chimney breast and the opposite wall; a conglomeration of cushions and blue-enameled wood-work, terminating in a frieze of beaten copper and a cornice expanded into a book cupboard with glass doors, topped by a railed gallery for the display of indiscriminate vertu such as vases with silk ribbons round their necks; French sabots enriched with bronze paint, and Dresden figures which Mrs. Rencil’s needle had equipped with Gainsborough Hats, silken petticoats and knee breeches.

“It is all our own work,” the Organist’s wife explained, with the confiding pride that seems purged of its grosser particles and retains only a pardonable and childlike pleasure in a task of love joyously accomplished. “My husband’s and mine. Of course, we saw the design in a catalogue. Arthur--” The friendly confidence implied by her use of the Christian name stirred Mrs. Holmroyd’s gratitude as if it had been an unexpected gift offered to the soul. It vibrated through all the quivering strings of her emotion, “Arthur,” “Arthur,” “Arthur,” like the familiar echoes of a bell that chimed from a beloved place long quitted. O, how beautiful a thing was the music of a husband’s name uttered by lips that loved it. She was sure that the Organist’s wife loved it. All the things visible in this house were blossoms from the tree of love that had its roots deep down in the fertile soil of human hearts. This happiness of others, though it revived her sorrows and accentuated solitude, was as precious food to her. She listened almost with eagerness to hear the Organist’s name again.

“Arthur did all the woodwork and the brass.”

“Your husband?” Mrs. Holmroyd enquired, astonished at this revelation of so unexpected a side to the Organist’s activities. “Do you really mean ...?”

Mrs. Rencil smiled with transparent satisfaction for the surprise her visitor displayed.

“Didn’t you know, Mrs. Holmroyd? Of course, it wasn’t to be expected you should. My husband is never idle for a minute. At times I rather fear he overtaxes his strength. He has a workshop downstairs (you must see it some day) where he does his metal work and wood carving in his spare time. It was he made the oak chest and the chairs on the landing outside. Perhaps you noticed them. He does all the repairs of the house.”

“How fortunate you are....” Mrs. Holmroyd said with emotion. “You ought to be very thankful.”

The face of the Organist’s wife was lit up with an amused, admissive smile.

“That is what Arthur is always telling me, Mrs. Holmroyd. He says that a wife who cannot be contented with six husbands has no right to be married at all.”

“Six husbands?” repeated Mrs. Holmroyd, with face and voice of consternation.

“That is only his fun. One of them, he says, is a musician. Another is a carpenter. The third is a metal worker. The fourth is a painter and paper-hanger. I forget just at the moment what the other two are. There must be more than six, for there is nothing, Mrs. Holmroyd, he cannot and does not turn his hand to.”

“How beautiful,” Mrs. Holmroyd said. She breathed the words with the reverence for some priceless work of art, paying tribute far less to the skill submitted for her admiration than to the picture of domestic happiness revealed. “You must be wonderfully happy in your married life.”

“I would not change it ... for all the money in the world,” Mrs. Rencil admitted with unaffected faith. “My husband promised, before we were married, to take care of me. He has kept his promise. In fact, I know he spoils me.--But it is so sweet to be spoiled,” she confessed with an attractive smile, “ ... that I dare not resist too much, for fear he might take me at my word. Not,” she added, “that he ever would. He insists on pretending that I am delicate, and treats me sometimes as if I were an invalid. It is lovely to be treated so, Mrs. Holmroyd--when really, all the while, one is well and strong, and able to enjoy it.” She looked at Mrs. Holmroyd with an arch face inviting her visitor’s appreciation, and saw for the first time then that the eyes appealed to were shining wet with tears. Instantly she curbed her smile, subduing it to the chastened service of sympathy.

“I am afraid you will think me very selfish,” she said with a note of trouble in her voice. “My happiness forgot that your sorrow could hardly share it. I fear I have awakened painful memories.... Do please forgive me.”

“Not painful memories,” the mother of Oswald corrected her. “Very precious memories, Mrs. Rencil. You have reminded me of some of the dearest days of my life.” She staunched her tears and smiled reassuringly at the Organist’s wife through brave and glistening lashes. “I think my dear husband must have been very like your own. The happiness I shared with him does not die. Your happiness seems only to be a reflection of it.” She added: “You do not know how much joy and comfort I have derived from my visit. If I have wept a little it has not been out of the emptiness of sorrow, but the fullness of joy. And I could only envy you if I had never known the happiness you have.”

No further reference was made on either side to Mrs. Holmroyd’s sorrow. But tears are the universal language of their sex, and these two women came nearer to an implicit understanding of one another through this portal of emotion than had prosaic lips recounted the life history of each to each.

“But my husband does not come,” Mrs. Rencil exclaimed giving utterance to a thought that had already begun to trouble her visitor. “What can be keeping him?” She raised her head, as if her ear detected some sound upon the staircase, and vocalized a persuasive “Arthur?” on the interval of an octave. In such wise Mrs. Holmroyd had been wont to call her husband by name in the happier days. The little touch of nature awakened all her kinship. She said to herself: “No woman who sings her husband’s Christian name like that, but cares for him. It is a happy home. There is love in it.” All the same, no voice responded to the invocation, and the Organist’s wife had already risen with outstretched fingers towards the bell when a door slammed below.

It was instantly succeeded by a shrill scream and a prodigious scuffle of feet, in which a large pair appeared to be in noisy pursuit of a small. The scream came nearer, repeating itself at brief intervals with every manifestation of alarm, and burst at last into the drawing-room, where it materialized into the figure of a frenetic little girl with fugitive feet and streaming hair, bearing a brass box in her hands, who, apparently without any assistance from sight but guided by instinct alone, plunged into Mrs. Rencil’s arms crying: “Quick, mother! Look what Daddy’s made!” Outside, the larger feet appeared to be negotiating endless flights of steps with an effect of crescendo as though drawing loudly nearer, whilst a voice beyond the door declared: “She has defied her father. She shall have nothing to eat but broken chords and diminished sevenths for a fortnight.” With which, protesting that his daughter’s disobedience had turned him into a wolf, and that he would eat her up along with the furniture, the Organist of St. Saviour’s came into the room at a rapid rate of progression on his hands and knees, emitting noises calculated to dismay all evil-doers. He had advanced after this manner to the middle of the room when his wife’s laughing protestation, “_Ar_-thur!” caused the wolf in him to hesitate and lift its head. “Don’t you know that Mrs. Holmroyd is here? What ever will she think!”

The Organist’s little daughter, safely ensconced behind her mother’s skirt, laughed with shrill delight at her father’s public discomfiture. Mrs. Rencil and her guest laughed too--though the laughter of the latter welled up from a deeper source; from that same source, or nearly, whence tears of thankfulness and joy derive. As the warm sunlight is to those who have known but the lifeless seclusion of the sick-room, so was this intimate warm sunlight of family love to Mrs. Holmroyd. Repudiating the floor the Organist sprang lightly to his feet. His laughter participated frankly in the amusement of the situation as he held out to Mrs. Holmroyd the hand that so lately had been a lupine and predatory paw. He begged his visitor’s forgiveness for any alarm he might have caused her. He had been quite unaware of her presence in the room. But it was very necessary for him to exert his authority in that house. “My wife openly disobeys me,” he confided. “If I tell her to rest quietly on the sofa, she insists on stooping over her needle in the most uncomfortable chair. Naturally with such an example it is not surprising that I am defied by my daughter, aged four.”

“I am not four,” the culprit protested. “I am seven.”

“You see how she contradicts me, Mrs. Holmroyd,” her father declared. “As a matter of fact, she _was_ seven a few weeks ago. But in view of her rebellious conduct I have instituted a system of fines. Since she has no money in her own right, and all mulctings come out of my own pocket, I am compelled to deduct the amount from her age. Within the last few days her balance has been as low as three years. To-morrow I dread to think what her age will be reduced to. As you may believe, it is a subject of grave concern to her parents. At this rate we see no prospect of her ever growing up. It seems probable that she will spend the whole of her life in short frocks, and end her days in the cradle.”

6

Already, as we have seen, Mrs. Holmroyd stood on complimentary speaking terms with the Organist of St. Saviour’s, but the personality he represented for her was largely inductive. Such human disposition as she endowed him with reposed on no surer foundations than his voice and smile, and she ventured to wonder, in thinking of him now and then, whether his identity (if ever it should be disclosed) would disappoint the faith invested in it. But his voice, his hand, his smile--beatifically enlarged through the gold-rimmed lenses--and the sympathetic humour diffused through it, that seemed as if it could never be acrid or unkind, but always veiled in its own softness like sunlight in May mist--all these reassured her she had not erred.

Nor was she by any means the first to appreciate the Organist’s personal charm. This smile, so uninsistent and yet so diffusive, and a conversational readiness whose whimsicality seemed never at a loss to strip occasion of formalism and put the moments at their ease, had contributed perhaps as greatly to his reputation as his musical attainments--which few among those who lauded them were in the least competent to judge. The members of his choir, without exception, swore by Arthur Rencil, and would have returned him perilously near the head of any poll of the world’s musicians, living or dead, in which their suffrages were allowed free play. As the Tax Collector remarked sententiously:--

“A man that’s written Anthems and published Music of his own, that’s to be bought publicly to-day in shops, is no ordinary musician. We ought to make the most of him while we’ve got him. Westminster or St. Paul’s will be claiming his services, in my opinion, before long.”

For in addition to being a wood-carver, a carpenter, a metal-worker, a painter, a paper-hanger, an organist, a teacher of the theory and harmony of music, a professor of Singing and Voice Production, Arthur Rencil was also a composer, wielding a prolific pen. Songs, elementary teaching pieces, books of simple voluntaries for amateurs and village organists composed in soporific minims very comforting to performers endowed with more devotion than technique; and anthems, choral services, chants and special ceremonial hymns for village choirs and organists of the same calibre flowed without ceasing from his pen into the religious world. Such compositions, it is true, himself assessed at no great value. They were written, if truth be told, much less with an eye to fame than to the comfort of his wife and home. And yet, though he never failed to speak of his own productions with smiling disrespect, he possessed a natural aptitude--bordering on genius--for bringing his pretentions before the notice of admirers without revealing any of the ugly mechanism of vanity. His trumpet was incontestably of silver, and not of blatant brass, which, when he blew upon it, emitted very pleasant notes much more akin to the breathings of modesty than the noisy fanfares of pride. If, for instance, they chanced to be rehearsing one of his anthems for any special service at St. Saviour’s he would beseech the choir in his soft voice (rendered still softer by the kind, persuasive smile): “Now I want us to do this anthem our very best on Sunday. Not because I wrote it. Beethoven or Mendelssohn might have done it nearly as well. But I’m told it is to be given in no fewer than eight parish churches and one Minster. We mustn’t let the Minster beat us.”

Whereupon the Tax Collector, fired with zeal and confidence in his own voice would affirm:

“If there were twenty-four churches, sir, and all the cathedrals in England put together, it wouldn’t be more than the work deserves. If I may venture to express my own opinion, Mr. Rencil, (and I make bold to say I voice the sentiments of the whole choir) it’s a sublime composition. That A flat is worth waiting through an evening service for. Don’t be frightened of it, sir. Give it out boldly on the organ and it won’t be our fault if we don’t sing it. We hadn’t need to fear no competition from no Minster so long as we’ve got the Composer himself seated at the organ.”

Such was the power of Mr. Rencil’s attractiveness, indeed, that all who in the least came under it extended this quality of persuasive personal charm into the music he played and wrote. There was something irresistibly winning about his face, whose expression might have been rather one of sadness and melancholy but for the smile that perpetually crept through it and warmed all its features to a pervading gentleness. Upon Mrs. Holmroyd this expression, alike so tender and so bravely smileful, had the emotional effect of sunlight when it rests on some familiar scene and makes it poignant. Albeit there was little likeness between the two men, the Organist of St. Saviour’s recalled her husband. When he looked, or moved, or spoke, she caught innumerable glimpses of her husband. The acts themselves might differ, but their source of animation was the same; the stream of love and kindness that like a lance of sunlight pierces the dark mass of humanity and makes luminous the elect that intercept its warmth and render visible its brightness.

Whilst Mrs. Holmroyd admired the latest object of the Organist’s skill, that the Organist’s little daughter at his instigation brought to the visitor’s knees, she saw him turn his glance for a moment to Mrs. Rencil and ask in a quickened undertone: “How are you feeling now, Ethel?” His wife answered lightly: “Quite well, Arthur,” and seeking Mrs. Holmroyd’s eyes which this brief aside had caused to leave the object of their examination (a glove box in brass repoussé) laughed with gratified admission. “You see, Mrs. Holmroyd! My husband insists on being too anxious about me.” For the first time since her husband’s death was Mrs. Holmroyd permitted this evening to look upon the sacred picture of a home. A flash of divination showed her these two, husband and wife, in all their daily intercourse; at their meals, in those bright moments snatched between lessons, when each called upon the other’s name for sheer companionship and love. She heard the sound of their commingled voices in gladness and anxiety; she partnered all their precious joys and sorrows lost to her. Of truth this visit had borne most blessed fruit. Emotion laid hold of her. At all costs she must contrive to give Oswald the advantage of a musical education in such a home. Its influence might be incalculable. And when politeness had sufficiently admired the product of the Organist’s handiwork, she ventured to disclose the object of her visit. It was sympathetically received. The Organist’s wife paid an impulsive compliment to Oswald. “What a sweet intelligent face your little boy has, Mrs. Holmroyd. I often find myself looking at him across the chancel. He ought to be musical.... Don’t you think so, Arthur?”

The Organist laughed.

“If he comes to me for lessons,” he said, with a glance at Oswald’s mother, “there can, I think, be no doubt about it. All my pupils,” he confided to Mrs. Holmroyd, “have talent. Some of them have great talent. In fact, I positively refuse to take any pupils who have not talent.” But he paid a warm tribute to Oswald in his capacity as chorister. “His conduct in the choir is so exemplary, Mrs. Holmroyd, that I sometimes find myself wondering what sort of a rascal he is in private life.”

In the atmosphere of congenial sympathy Mrs. Holmroyd’s bosom could not resist the impulse to confide:

“At first ... it was something of a trouble to me to see him in the choir. He seemed so young. If his father had lived ...” she paused for just the fraction of a second to steady her emotion, “ ... things would have been very different for Oswald. Different for us all.”

Mr. Rencil acknowledged in a lowered voice, “So I am sorry to understand, Mrs. Holmroyd.”

The Organist’s wife, applying the soft poultice of mutual sorrow to the wounded bosom (that old established woman’s remedy for hearts bereaved) said with sad understanding:

“My husband lost his father only last year.” And encouraged by Mrs. Holmroyd’s expression of reciprocal sympathy, added: “Arthur wrote an anthem in memoriam.--What key was it in, Arthur?”

In a grave voice the Organist told her, “E flat.”

“E flat. Of course. How stupid of me to forget. I always forget keys. It was sung the Sunday after Alderman Bankett died. But you would hear it, Mrs. Holmroyd.”

Mrs. Holmroyd had heard it, to her solemn satisfaction, and was not surprised to learn that so moving a work had been given at the Mirfield Parish Church only the Sunday before, and that it was to form one of the test anthems for the inter-church choral competitions in May. By way of the memorial anthem in E flat they returned, more self-possessed, to the subject of Oswald. Mrs. Holmroyd failed to realize that she occupied towards the Organist and his wife the hopeful place that the aged lady and Miss Burford and the straight-legged granddaughter had occupied towards her this afternoon, and that the Organist’s wife was saying mentally to herself: “Another pupil for Arthur! He will be so glad. I hope it comes to something.” Aloud, she paid a warm tribute to Mrs. Holmroyd’s wisdom in seeking to give Oswald the advantages of a musical education. At the question of terms an air of marked obscurity descended over all. Mrs. Holmroyd’s finger sought her lip. The Organist’s wife stole a glance at her husband as if to say: “What do you think, Arthur?” The outcome of the thinking appeared, in a gentle voice, to be that “it depended.” The Organist’s wife, discreetly interposing before her husband’s incautious sympathies should have a chance to prejudice the issue, took occasion to acquaint Mrs. Holmroyd:

“Of course, my husband’s regular terms” (she laid a lingering stress on the word “regular”) “are three guineas.” She turned a brightened glance towards her husband for confirmation. “Aren’t they, Arthur?” The Organist concurred. Those were the terms he usually asked from regular pupils. True, he did not go so far as to assert that he always got them. Mrs. Holmroyd’s face, politely dubious, fell at the sound of three guineas. They were the terms she had feared all along. It was the Grammar School over again. Music seemed no cheaper than learning.

“Those, of course ...” explained the Organist’s wife, on whom the descent in tonality of Mrs. Holmroyd’s countenance had not been lost,” ... are my husband’s regular terms.” She seemed to turn now towards a consideration of his irregular terms as though, perhaps, some more promising solution of the difficulty might be found in this new direction. “Perhaps.... I daresay.... My husband might.... What do you think, Arthur?”

Arthur thought Mrs. Holmroyd needed not to let the question of terms trouble her. “You see Oswald is in the choir, Ethel.” “To be sure! how stupid of me,” the Organist’s wife exclaimed. “I was quite overlooking the choir.--My husband generally makes some slight reduction to the members of his choir,” she informed Mrs. Holmroyd, whose hopes began to rise again. If Mrs. Holmroyd could arrange for her little boy to meet the Organist’s convenience in the matter of times--

“My husband is so busy,” the Organist’s faithful spokeswoman threw in. “He has scarcely a minute to himself. I don’t know how he manages to fit all his lessons in.”

--If Mrs. Holmroyd’s little boy could do this, and take such times as Mr. Rencil had at liberty, he would suggest....

“Two guineas and a half, Arthur?” his helpmeet prompted. The Organist said he had even thought of two guineas in Mrs. Holmroyd’s case. He was sure Oswald would give him very little trouble.

“How does the suggestion strike you, Mrs. Holmroyd?” he enquired, and suddenly yielding to the sympathetic current passing through them all, he threw aside business dissimulation. “Do tell me if I am asking you more than you came prepared to give,” he said. Perhaps it might have been but Mrs. Holmroyd’s over-sharpened fancy that believed his wife turned a quick look in his direction as though to recall a too impulsive generosity to reason. But if the look were aimed with this intent it softened instantly on the Organist’s face, and turned back to Mrs. Holmroyd with seeming eagerness to cull the first fruits of gratitude from her eyes for this beloved husband’s goodness. Nor did Mrs. Holmroyd’s countenance disappoint her. It displayed her grateful sensibility of the Organist’s consideration. “I never expected.... I scarcely know how to thank you....” she said.

Two guineas. It was more than she had any right to pay. Whatever terms might have floated vaguely in her mind, they certainly were not these. She knew they were not these by the impossibility of declining terms that came garbed in such generosity and goodness. Had they been hard and business-like she might have hesitated. But hesitation could not be suffered to insult an offer such as this; nor self respect to trade upon so great a kindness. The offer was gratefully accepted. Oswald’s musical fate was settled. And with respect to times she ventured to propose Saturday, if that would be convenient to Mr. Rencil. She gave her little school a whole day’s holiday then (she told him) and Oswald would be quite free for any hour in the course of the day that Mr. Rencil might suggest. This reference to the school, that only supreme unconsciousness could have dared to make after such signal evidences of the Organist’s goodness, appeared to take Mrs. Rencil’s understanding by surprise.

“A school, Mrs. Holmroyd?” she enquired. “Do you really mean....”

“Did you not know?” Oswald’s mother asked in mild surprise. To her sensitive feeling it seemed as if her means of less than livelihood were patent to the world.

“But I thought ... I was led to understand,” Mrs. Rencil said, obviously wrestling with a refractory intelligence, “that you ... that you made pies, Mrs. Holmroyd. Somebody told me so. Who was it, Arthur?--Of course, it is ridiculous. I might have known.”

In another house, whose atmosphere of sympathy was less assured, Mrs. Holmroyd might have been consumed with the fires of her own shame. But here her pride walked curiously independent of all deception or pretence.

“I do make pies, Mrs. Rencil,” she admitted very simply, and with curious self-possession. “It _is_ ridiculous. There seems not the least connection between pies and teaching. But after my husband’s death, I scarcely knew what to do. I had my children to think of. They were dearer to me than pride.”

“Oh, forgive me, please!” the Organist’s wife exhorted her with a face and gesture of remorse. “How rude and thoughtless of me. I did not intend to hurt you, Mrs. Holmroyd. I really asked with a view to Alice, Arthur,” she said, looking at her husband. “What sort of a school is yours, Mrs. Holmroyd? A mixed school?”

Mrs. Holmroyd confessed to its mixture with misgiving.

“I do not know,” she said, “whether you would care ... to let your little daughter come to me.” But her heart plucked at the suggestion. “It is perhaps more mixed than you would care for. Not all my scholars are quite what I could wish. I dare not pick and choose, Mrs. Rencil.”

Mrs. Rencil said, “I quite understand,” with an emphasis that seemed to say the sad exigency was not confined to schools alone. But learning by enquiry that Mrs. Holmroyd’s own two children drew their manners and education from the maternal source, she appeared rather to disparage the visitor’s scruple, asking her husband: “What do you think, Arthur?”

The Organist thought that if Mrs. Holmroyd had no hesitation in sending her children to her own school, it was an example they might safely follow.

“I do not know if my wife has confessed it to you,” he said, “but she is, I can assure you, a very warm admirer of yours. She admires you in more respects than I can tell you. She admires the way you come into church, and the way you leave it, the way you dress your children and teach them to behave. In fact, they are the models by which all behaviour is regulated in this house. What Mrs. Holmroyd’s children would, or would not do, constitutes the standard by which Alice is (I will not say ‘ruled’ but) judged. Of course, my wife and I have frequent quarrels as to who is responsible for Alice’s awful disobedience. My wife accuses me of giving her pennies and buying obedience by pennyworths at a time. I’ll admit there’s some truth in the accusation. Do you ever give _your_ children pennies, Mrs. Holmroyd? I hope not. It’s really rather fatal. Once upon a time my little daughter used to give me quite a lot of excellent behaviour for a penny. Now a penny seems to go no way, and the quality is dreadful. I think school seems to be the only solution of the difficulty.”

“What _are_ your terms?” his wife enquired.

Controlling a heart now riotous with hope, Mrs. Holmroyd mentioned her modest thirty shillings for the term of thirteen weeks. The idea took root and grew. Mrs. Rencil was indeed a warm admirer of the sweet face and gentle bearing of her visitor, and this school, under such unexceptional mistress-ship, seemed almost the providential answer to sundry questions touching her little daughter’s education that had been table talk for some time past. Not only was it decided that the little girl with her father’s soft dark eyes, who had intently followed the discussion concerning her, (nursing the brass glove box all the while) should take her place in Mrs. Holmroyd’s class next week; but the Organist said that under the circumstances he could not dream of accepting more for Oswald’s music than Mrs. Holmroyd asked for Alice’s schooling. The two services must be reciprocal. With a heart full of thankfulness and hope renewed, Mrs. Holmroyd took leave. The Organist himself accompanied her to the door and let her out into the street whose gaslights seemed to have taken on the bright similitude of stars, flashing forth messages of radiant gladness.

“Do come and see my wife again, some time, Mrs. Holmroyd,” the Organist urged her. “I know she will be so charmed.--And I will expect Oswald at half past ten on Saturday.”

She thanked him very, very much for all his kindness. “Yes. At half past ten. It will be a great event for Oswald. He shall be punctual.” As she left the house, the Deputy--momentarily retarding his footsteps in the shadow until the Organist’s door should be clear--made a dart forward to intercept it before it closed.

“Good evening, sir.”

Mr. Rencil re-opened the door.

“What.... Is that you, Wembling?”

“Here is the emery paper, sir,” said Wembling, putting a tubular package into the Organist’s hand. “It is the finest they had. And there are the screws.” He added a small twisted packet to the first. “Meakins have three copies of your Song in the window now, sir. Just under the gaslight. They look very well, sir. I saw some people standing outside the shop.... Shall I go straight up into the music-room?”

“If you like,” said the Organist. “Why?”

“Why.... You said Thursday evening, sir, I understood,” Wembling reminded him. “At half past six.”

“What do you mean by taking me at my word?” Mr. Rencil asked. “Your own sense ought to have told you that I should be dining with Canon Quexley to-night. If not, it would seem that all my musical instruction is being wasted.”

“If it’s in the least inconvenient to you, sir,” the Deputy proffered with great obligingness, “I can come again another night. Shall I go back and get some practice, sir?”

He had his Sunday hat on, and his Sunday tie, for this was to have been his singing lesson, and he had some popular nautical songs of the period and a fat copy of the Messiah under his arm.

“No, don’t go back,” said the Organist, drawing him forward with a friendly hand. “A night’s rest won’t do your voice any harm. In fact, it will give it an added timbre. Come in and patch up those voluntaries like a good fellow. You know where they are, and the paste is in the cupboard. Light the gas and stir up the fire. Now I must go and dress.”

7

Thus was a new doorway in life thrown wide for Oswald. It seemed to open direct upon heaven and yield glimpses of the brilliant celestial furniture beyond--chiefly upright pianos and gilded organs, radiating splendour and such harmonies as fill the firmament when the heavenly choristers (that are stars) open their lips and sing ecstatically together. The ideal of the dead alderman faded somewhat and lost lustre. Gold-rimmed spectacles and brown moustaches acquired a palpitating significance instead. Some day Oswald was to have both, and talk apart with Canons, and be addressed as “Sir” by Deputies, and pass mahogany-nosed vergers without a tremour. His first memorial to the best of fathers should be not a tombstone, but an anthem. It should be sung at the Mirfield Parish Church, and form one of the test pieces at the inter-church choral competitions. By the Tax Collector it should be proclaimed “Sublime Music.” If the music were to bear any relation to the exalted fervour that conceived it already written and published, exalted it must surely be. Its prospective creator well nigh snivelled beneath the bed-clothes at the sheer beauty of it. He would have drunk even deeper of the draught of his own emotion but for fear of the sensitivity of the maternal hearing in the room beyond.

Nor did Oswald stand alone in the intensity of his new feelings. The consciousness of his approaching initiation to the sacred mysteries of an art extolled so rapturously by the Tax Collector, and made illustrious by such names as Handel, Rencil, and Sidney Smith, intoxicated the home in Spring Bank Gardens. They were as drunk, all of them, on the vintage of pure emotion as the verger of St. Saviour’s could have made himself for eighteenpence at the Nag’s Head; steadier on their feet, it is true, but not a whit more reliable in their interpretation of the phenomena of life. Because Oswald was going to take his first music lesson on Saturday at half-past ten o’clock in the forenoon, what reason was there to suppose that the economic laws of life were being suspended? What reason was there to regard the shrinkage of Aunt Caroline’s financial remains with equanimity restored, and life to come with courage? What reason was there to exercise the spirit of gigantic gratitude from the Best of Fathers’ memory and say: “O, children! Think of him. Never forget your dear father.” What reason was there for making a sudden hero of Oswald for a feat not even yet attempted, and paying him the exaggerated deference for an old master? What reason? Why, no reason at all; which is the only reason for half the enthusiasms in the world, or at least a reason no better than that for which (or for the lack of which) the verger shook hands six times with the last customer of the Nag’s Head--as though half that number should not suffice for any reasonable being--whilst the barman slid the bolts with a brutal disregard of feeling behind the closed door; and the verger’s vocabulary was suffused with an uplifting love of humanity that a few pennyworths’ of kindred spirits had expanded in him. Not without good cause was Mrs. Holmroyd’s dream disturbed by the apparition of Councillor Burford, bringing his polished counter, white shirt-sleeves and knotted apron-strings into her very bedroom, his lips so hard compressed as to leave visible no mouthway in his beard, with the unspoken charge:

“Sacrificing good money for music! You are making a great mistake, ma’am. A very great mistake. When did music ever teach a man business? When did music ever take a man into the Council? Point me out the name of a single musician in all the list of Mayors. Music is unpractical. It’s unreliable. It’s dangerous. It can’t add up nor subtract. It can’t judge the weight of a ham. It leads nowhere. Once your son gets music into his system you’ll have no more control over him. He’ll be good for nothing. But you please yourself, ma’am, of course. He’s your son, not mine. I don’t want to influence you.”

8

It was the cleanest of Oswalds that presented himself before the Organist’s house on Saturday morning at half-past ten. The weather being warm and springlike--one of those mild January mornings, in fact, that mimics May and makes the heart of mankind impatient for Spring--he wore neither overcoat nor muffler, but his Saturday cuffs were carefully drawn down above his knitted gloves. It lacked still some minutes to the appointed time, and Oswald--furnished with a brand new empty polished leather music case that his mother’s love could not deny itself the joy of buying for her son--paced up and down before the brass name-plate as impatiently he awaited the half hour chiming from St. Gyles’s. The instant the quarter jack rang out, taking him by surprise when he was still some paces from the door, he ran hurriedly to the step and pulled the bell. His last moments at home had been spent before the keyboard by his mother’s side, picking up eleventh-hour scraps of music-knowledge for the saving of his credit, and he attended the opening of the door with a nervous recapitulation of the lines and spaces in case he might be questioned on them. First space F; second space A; third space.... The third space was an oval space of considerable astonishment to find himself confronted all at once by the familiar face of a fellow chorister, who greeted Oswald’s thunderstruck third space with an apathetic “Hello!”

This was one of the senior choristers whose voice poised on the verge of breaking, but who, nevertheless, still continued to attend rehearsals with a regard to quarter day, under warning from the Organist against any vocal over-strain. In lieu of a collar he had his throat wrapped up in some red material that might have been part of a flannel petticoat. His appearance so little suggested music or sustained the dignity of this noble Art, that Oswald was conscious of a sudden chill of disillusionment, as though over his fire of enthusiasm wet ashes had been thrown. Could it be?... Why! the chorister had not even a music case. And yet, the community of their interests was painfully established by the neck-tied figure’s asking: “What have _you_ come for?”--and being told with suitable gravity that Oswald had come for his music lesson, responded laconically: “So’ve I.”

The answer indeed, was so incontrovertible, and dealt pride such a flat-hand blow, that Oswald could only stare incredulously. And a second disillusionment followed closely on the heels of the first as the chorister stepped out into the street with the announcement that Oswald would get no lesson that morning.

“There’s another pupil sat waiting of him upstairs, now. Mr. Rencil’s out.”

“Out!” said Oswald. “I was to come at half-past ten.”

“Was you,” said the chorister.

“What am I to do?” asked Oswald, whose diffidence was ever ready to appeal to any authority rather than his own.

“Do?” said the chorister. “Go back. That’s what I’m doing.”

Oswald’s heart stopped beating at the mere suggestion of such drastic procedure.

“But Mr. Rencil said half-past ten!” he urged. “I was to be punctual.”

“Then go in,” said the chorister. “If you want. _I_ should.”

This second advice, for all its obvious conformity to Oswald’s apprehension, reassured him no better than the first.

“Go in?” he said blankly. “Where?”

“Inside,” answered the chorister, jerking his wrist in the direction of an appalling flight of stairs, all carpeted, that Oswald saw with growing concern, beyond his shoulder. “You’ve been before, haven’t you?”

Oswald shook his head.

“Is this the first time?”

Oswald said “Yes.”

“Come along o’ me,” said the chorister with a decision that allowed no argument. “I’ll soon show you. You don’t need to ring if it’s a lesson. Only if it’s an errand. Open the door and go straight in. Like this.”

He doffed his cap again, stepped into the hall, gave his boots two kicks upon the mat and made his way up the staircase, Oswald following--without courage to decline the aid of such a leader, and yet troubled with the thought of what judgment might be pronounced on his temerity. They passed up the stairs swiftly and noiselessly; so swiftly that Oswald had scarcely time to exercise his troubled sight. In a vague and disconcerting way he was aware of doors on all sides of him; of stairs leading upward in unending spirals to infinity, but he knew no more where he was or how many steps it had taken him to come there until he heard the voice of the chorister exclaim: “In here.”

The long naked wrist shot out in front of him and turned a knob. A door opened. A voice said, “Go on with you.” A hand pushed him peremptorily from behind, and next moment he stood, deserted and unannounced, the prey of his own emotions within the sanctum sanctorum, or music-room.

9

His entrance coincided exactly with a chord played very unevenly upon the pianoforte, which had been preceded by two other chords widely spaced from each other by intervals of stagnation as Oswald and his cicerone had mounted the stairs. All these chords, and some others unheard, had been produced by a young lady in a black frock who sat upon a music-stool before an upright piano, with her legs dangling above the pedals, and several inches short of them; her eyes and nose tilted up to the extreme summit of what appeared to be a terrible, steep and precipitous page crowded with black and busy notes which she gazed at with great fixity of attention. Judging by the number of notes and the time required to play them, the composition on which she was at present engaged would last about eighteen months, allowing a six weeks’ holiday at midsummer. Oswald’s abrupt entrance seemed no less of a surprise to her than her presence was to him, for she dropped both wrists (still clutching, however, with all her out-stretched fingers to the chord last played, as though to pin it to the keyboard) and turned a startled face in the direction of the door where Oswald stood, holding his cap in one hand and his polished music case in the other, speechless and perturbed.

For the executant, he realized, was the daughter of Mrs. Bankett whom everybody knew, and granddaughter of the defunct Alderman for whom a gigantic urn and kerb were now in active preparation at the monumental mason’s. And though Oswald still exchanged occasional shy glances with this young lady across the perspective of her parent’s hall, albeit it was only on the night of the Mayor’s party that stress of vanity had broken through the reserve between them and caused her to address the Sausage Boy, the precise degree of their acquaintanceship constituted a perpetual puzzle to them both. For Oswald, this granddaughter of the august Alderman assumed an almost symbolic significance in the wide realm of his aspirations. Ever since the night of the Mayor’s party, in fact, when she did his pride the honour of speaking to it, she had come to occupy a sentimental place in his inner and most cherished life. When it is recorded that in his sacred moments of imagination he had even led her to the altar, and that she had wept tumultuous widow’s tears over her deceased husband’s grave in the cemetery, it may be conceived with what embarrassment Oswald now found himself face to face with this object of his dreams, conscience-troubled lest any part of these guilty imaginings might by some mental alchemy escape control and become visible. Besides, seen out of her customary environment, Miss Bankett seemed curiously changed, and her eye was certainly more alert and penetrative than Oswald cared to encounter single handed. But, as though she found nothing in the new arrival’s appearance to repay further notice, Miss Bankett transferred her gaze to the crowded summit of the sheer and almost toppling page. By the convulsive movement of her lips, wrists and shoulders, Oswald believed another chord was imminent, and regaining some of his self-confidence now that the young lady’s back was turned to him, awaited its execution with interest. At the crucial moment she dropped her wrists again and flashed her face round at Oswald, who blushed at being discovered with so flagrant a look of expectation and interest in his eyes.

“Can you play?” the granddaughter of Alderman Bankett asked him with a pert enquiring mouth.

Fearful lest any reply short of negation might plunge him into a command to prove ability, Oswald answered: “Not yet.”

“Have you learned three flats?”

Oswald tendered the same answer.

“This piece is in three flats. Common Time. Counting four crotchets in a bar. It is my new piece. It is by Mr. Rencil. I wish he would come. What time is it?”

All the while she imparted information or sought it, her eyes--hard, grey-green Bankettian eyes--put Oswald through a searching examination from his boots to his cap, and his cap to the music case, and the music case to his clean white collar, chin, mouth, eyes, and forehead, and without waiting for any answer to her last question, addressed herself once more to the topmost stave of the page, and went through all the elaborate and conclusive processes as before. This time, however, with a tremendous hardening of her mouth and contracting of her brows and stiffening of her forearms and hunching of her shoulders, the chord was struck.

It was wrong. Palpably, inextricably wrong.

After gazing curiously at her outspread fingers and at the page in turn, whilst the chord still vibrated discordantly in the bowels of the instrument, and as though despairing of a reconciliation between factors so conflictingly at variance, the young lady directed her attention towards Oswald again.

“How long have you been learning music?”

Oswald answered diplomatically, “Not very long.”

“A year?”

“Not yet.”

“I’ve been learning nearly three years. I’ve never played this piece before. It’s a lot more difficult than the last. The last had only one sharp. I don’t think I like this one. Do you? I shall ask Mr. Rencil to play it for me as soon as he comes. It goes faster than this really. A lot faster.” There came a pause and she added: “You won’t be bringing us any more pies or sausages for a long while. I know. I heard mother tell Mary so last night. We’re getting tired of them. Aren’t you?”

All this time the dissonant chord made a protesting clamour in the depths of the pianoforte, as though supplicating to be resolved or otherwise put mercifully out of misery. The subject of sausages proving somewhat delicate for the son of the Manufacturer, Oswald could only respond to it by means of a flush, which Miss Bankett immediately noted and commented on, saying with the utmost self-composure: “You’ve gone all red. Did you know?” Oswald’s reply being unintelligible, the young lady exclaimed: “O, dear! I wish he’d come. Aren’t you tired of waiting? I am,” and displayed half a tendency to tackle the top of the page once more. But the cryptic look of the chord already attempted, and probably the still more forbidding aspect of the chord that was to follow, deterred her. Instead, submitting to an impulse of coquettish vanity, she suddenly asked him: “Do you know this piece?” and rattled audaciously through half a dozen bars of a busy rondeau, these half dozen bars constituting all that she was able to play without the book. Oswald, lacking as yet any intimacy with the works of the Organist of St. Saviour’s, was in no position to answer that this extract just performed for him came from the fourth of the second Series of Twelve Progressive Pieces for Tiny Players, called “In the Swing,” published (with a coloured title page) by Messrs. Ashpot and Claypole. Nor indeed, had he so much as the time to shake his head, for this mournful admission of ignorance was frustrated by no less a personage than the Composer himself, who opened the door at this juncture, and, rolling up his gloves, sportively flung the ball so made at the extended fingers on the keyboard, with the exclamation: “Tig!”

Then, finding the further opening of the door impeded by the person of Oswald, whose diffidence forbade him to seek escape from the handle that impended in the small of his back, he turned the mild surprise of his glasses upon the apologetic presence.

“Oswald, you scamp! What are you doing in my music-room at this time of day? Trying to steal my pupils from me, are you?”

Oswald’s lips emitted a penitential murmur, in which the words “Mother” and “half-past ten” were distinguishable. Miss Bankett, slipping adroitly off the music-stool to pick up the Organist’s gloves, cried:

“Oh! Mr. Rencil, will you play me my new piece?”

“Half-past ten!” said the Organist, drawing out his gold half-hunter and referring to the dial. “But this is not half-past ten. This is much more like a quarter to eleven.”

The humour, kindly though it was, rose somewhat above the level of Oswald’s immediate modesty. He hung his head, deficient of the courage requisite to tell this great musician that he had been on the doorstep when St. Gyles’s church clock chimed the half hour. He wondered, too, if Mr. Rencil were really displeased to find him in the music-room, and whether it was not incumbent on him to beg the Organist’s pardon. But his apprehensions were quickly allayed by the friendly pressure of the hand that fell upon his shoulder.

“One of us is evidently very late this morning,” Mr. Rencil said with an air of great indulgence. “But as I happen to be in a very good temper we won’t ask who it is.”

“It’s you,” said Miss Bankett emphatically. “I’ve been here since a quarter past ten. And the other boy was here too--that funny looking boy with the sore throat. He said it was no use waiting--you’d only tell him to come again. He said you’d told him to come again twice, this week.”

“Twice?” said the Organist of St. Saviour’s. “Are you sure? I’d no idea it was twice. I thought it was three times.” He laid his hat upon the writing table by the window, littered with music paper, part songs and anthems. “Did he take the letter?”

“What letter?”

“The letter I meant to give him if he had waited for me as he ought to have done.” He brushed the part-songs and anthems aside and found the envelope still resting where he had laid it. “No! Here it is, the rascal! He shall have some harmonic minor scales for this.--Well? What about this new piece? I will give you sixpence if you can play it from memory.”

The granddaughter of Alderman Bankett declined his challenge, but dismounted from the stool and gave the padded seat a vigorous twist with both hands. “_Please_, Mr. Rencil!”

Thus supplicated, Mr. Rencil seated himself at the instrument, and after reciting the characteristics of the composition to be performed, in most punctilious fashion: “Home for the Holidays” composed by Arthur Rencil, opus 103, No. 7. In the key of E flat, containing three flats B. E. and A (and occasionally F sharp). Common Time. Counting four crochets in a bar. Allegro ma non troppo--which means play slowly and mind your stops--ran glibly through the music that had cost Miss Bankett so much unprofitable labour. As the composition drew to a close he elaborated it by means of a protracted coda on a sustained pedal, finally modulating into the key of C major for the execution of some miraculous glissandi with both hands, to Miss Bankett’s huge delight, who exclaimed nevertheless: “That isn’t in the piece. I know it isn’t. You’re making it all up. Aren’t you?” Not only so, but warming to his genial task the Organist of St. Saviour’s let his enraptured auditors hear how the composition would sound on a musical box,--the preliminary winding-up of the mechanism being realistically suggested by rubbing the finger-nails lightly over the surface of the keys. That Miss Bankett was not altogether unacquainted with this high form of musical art was evinced by her begging the executant: “Now let it run down, so you have to wind it up again.” At which the placid tinkling of the music-box manifested signs of unsteadiness; the notes dragged, as though the cylinder had insufficient strength to overcome the pressure of the minute metallic tongues resisting it; hiccoughed and came to a standstill. A vigorous re-winding ensued, succeeding which the music leaped into life again, more tinklingly mechanical than before.

Nor did the versatility of the performer stop here, for he interpreted the composition after the virtuosic style of a French piano, and also in the manner of an itinerant German Band of three instruments--saxophone, cornet and clarinet. After awhile the clarinet (as Mr. Rencil explained over his shoulder) took off his cap and went collecting coppers, thus leaving the composition to the mercies of the cornet and saxophone. The cornet, after a further while, also doffed his cap and departed in quest of coppers, abandoning the morceau to the care of the saxophone alone, who held on resolutely with the basses until the clarinet’s return, when he ceased playing on the saxophone in order to blow through it. Mr. Rencil also, at Miss Bankett’s urgent request, played the National Anthem in two simultaneous keys, putting this familiar hymn perplexingly into the minor, at the same time dropping its tonality by semitones until at last, for lack of any further keyboard, it came into collision with the bass truss. During the course of this marvellous recital the delight which Miss Bankett experienced caused her to turn continually towards Oswald, impelled by the instinctive desire to share her own joy and partake of his, and Oswald’s assurance (since no speech was demanded of it) rose to an incredible degree. Stimulated by these wonders of the sublime art--wonders of which he had not even dreamed--his bosom expanded. He visioned himself retailing all these marvels in turn; to his mother; to his sister; to Miss Bankett’s own self; to imaginary legions of Canons, vergers, and admiring pupils. He felt endowed with a courage that would stick at nothing. He could even have answered questions put to him. This was an auspicious beginning, indeed. This was something like learning music. This was, in the highest sense of the word, Sublime.

As the bell of St. Gyles’s boomed the hour of eleven, the music room door opened once again, and the smiling maid insinuated her head to announce that Miss Bankett’s mamma had called for her, and was now seated with Mrs. Rencil in the drawing-room.

This interruption, closely followed by the appearance of a gaunt gentleman with high cheek bones and a moustache like a respirator (though shaggier at the edges) whose roll of music wrapped in brown paper and tied with string proclaimed him a student of the divine art--probably a bass vocalist, to judge by the protuberance of his Adam’s apple--put an effectual stop to further contrapuntal exercises. Miss Bankett, suddenly infected with market fever and the excitement to go a shopping, picked up her hat and mantle and ran to rejoin her waiting parent, sped by genial words of recommendation from the Organist, and the promise of a longer lesson next week. The gaunt gentleman was taken cordially by the hand and welcomed--although, as Mr. Rencil warned him, they would have to make the most of the least available time this morning, inasmuch as he had shortly to give an organ lesson at the church. Oswald, indulgently patted on the back, was commended for the lustre of his music case, which (said Mr. Rencil) showed how hard he meant to work. In addition, the Organist told him to practice his scales and to come back on Monday morning at the same time, which Oswald undertook to do, saying to himself all the while: “But I shall be at school on Monday. I can’t come then. Tell him!” Had it not been for the presence of the gaunt gentleman with the natural respirator, who, having unrolled his music and straightened it upon his knee, was now beginning to cough in a summary and professional manner and to work his Adam’s apple up and down in preparation for vocal exercises, and whose eye seemed to rest on Oswald in a somewhat menacing and unfriendly fashion as though resentful of his presence--Oswald felt sure he could have found sufficient courage to explain his inability to come at the time appointed. But the eye of the vocalist sealed his lips with the weight of a leaden “Begone!”

As he closed the door, still deeply pondering, he heard his name called after him in Mr. Rencil’s voice. “Perhaps,” thought Oswald, “he has remembered that I shall be at school on Monday morning.” But the Organist had remembered no such thing. He had found on his writing table the note, addressed to one of his pupils, that the red-throated boy should have waited for this morning. The duty of delivering it was now delegated to Oswald, who accepted the charge with pride. Oswald knew Mr. Finchley; Oswald was to take the note to him at Messrs. Garrod and Wheelright’s Office in Monastery Street. He would find Mr. Finchley in the public office on the left-hand side of the door, with an office coat on and a pen over his ear. If it wasn’t over his ear it would be stuck through his mouth. On no account must Oswald turn by mistake into the private office on the right-hand side, for if he so much as put his head in there would be six and eightpence to pay. That Oswald should keep out of the clutches of the law was Mr. Rencil’s earnest hope. The gentleman with the respirator laughed at this. That is to say, the respirator arched its back under his nose and became crescent shaped, but instantly the valves of his Adam’s apple began to work again, and he tried his voice subterraneously on a “Ha!” as though actuated by the sudden fear that, in laughing, he had lost it.

“And don’t forget Monday morning,” Mr. Rencil reminded Oswald as he took his leave once more. Oswald, still telling himself: “But I shall be at school on Monday morning. Doesn’t he know?” acquiesced again. Pondering this matter deeply, he walked with exemplary politeness down the padded stairs, keeping his eyes from wandering and praying that the doors he passed might not open to involve him in any further complications before he reached the street. A brilliant prelude on the pianoforte rang out from the music room and arrested his attention. He opened the front door with exceeding delicacy and care, to prolong the rapture of these glorious sounds that emanated from the Organist’s hallowed fingers, wondering too, whether he might not be rewarded with a taste of the quality of the gaunt-faced gentleman’s voice. But that hope bore no fruit, for the moment of the singing lesson was not yet. These far more glorious strains originated from the Organist alone, who played to his flattered and enraptured pupil the latest song whose proofs sheets had reached him from the London publishers that morning. Perhaps, thought Oswald, his mother might be willing to release him from the school on Monday for such an important matter as a music lesson. His conscience troubled him the less because his vanities were so vigorous. It is true he had had no opportunity to display his clean fingers, or to show Mr. Rencil how politely he could sit at the piano. But he had been played to by the Organist’s great and very self; he had been spoken to by Miss Bankett; Mr. Rencil had patted his shoulder. And lo! now he was engaged to undertake a most important mission on the Organist’s behalf.

Devotion grows with service. They love best who serve the most. Oswald’s loyalty towards the Organist was greater because something had been asked of it. He went on his errand irradiated with gratitude and aspirations.

O! after all this--what a musician he should some day be.