"Which," said Mrs Bowldler to Palmerston later on, as they sat drinking in that ditty, one on either side of the kitchen table, "it can't sing, but the words is that I dreamt I dwelt in Marble Halls with Princes and Peers by my si-i-ide—just like that. Princes!" She leaned back in the cheap chair and closed her eyes. "It goes through me to this day. I used to sing it frequent in my 'teens, along with another popular favourite which was quite at the other end of the social scale, but artless—'My Mother said that I never should Play with the gypsies in the wood. If I did, She would say, Tum tiddle, tum tiddle, tum-ti-tay' —my memory is not what it was." Mrs Bowldler wiped her eyes.
"And did you?" asked Palmerston. "Tell me what happened."
Next morning, while the Church bells were ringing in Regatta Day,
Captain Cai tucked the musical box under his arm and called, on his way
to the Committee Ship, upon Mr John Peter Nanjulian (commonly "John
Peter" for short).
John Peter, an elderly man, dwelt with a yet more elderly sister, in an old roomy house set eminently on the cliff-side above the roofs of the Lower Town, approachable only by a pathway broken by flights of steps, and known by the singular name of On the Wall.
The house had been a family mansion, and still preserved traces of ancient dignity, albeit jostled by cottages which had climbed the slope and encroached nearer and nearer as the Nanjulians under stress of poverty had parted with parcel after parcel of their terraced garden. Of the last generation—five sons and three daughters, not one of whom had married—John Peter and his sister "Miss Susan" were now the only survivors, and lived, each on a small annuity, under the old roof, meeting only at dinner on Sundays, and for the rest of the week dwelling apart in their separate halves of the roomy building, up and down the wide staircase of which they had once raced as children at hide-and-seek with six playmates.
John Peter was eccentric, as all these later Nanjulians had been: a lean, stooping man, with a touch of breeding in his face, a weak mouth, and a chin dotted with tufts of gray hair which looked as if they had been affixed with gum and absent-mindedly. He was reputed to be a great reader, and could quote the poetical works of Pope by the yard. He had some skill with the pencil and the water-colour brush. He understood and could teach the theory of navigation; dabbled in chess problems; and had once constructed an astronomical timepiece. His not-too-clean hands were habitually stained with acids: for he practised etching, too, although his plates invariably went wrong. He had considerable skill in engraving upon brass and copper, and was not above eking out his income by inscribing coffin-plates. But the undertaker was shy of employing him because he could never be hurried.
John Peter received Captain Cai in his workshop—a room ample enough for a studio and lit by a large window that faced north, but darkened by cobwebs, dirty, and incredibly littered with odds and ends of futile apparatus. He put a watchmaker's glass to his eye and peered long into the bowels of the musical box.
"The works are clogged with dust," he announced. "Fairly caked with oil and dirt. No wonder it won't go."
"But it does go," objected Captain Cai.
"You don't tell me! . . . Well, you'd best let me take out the works, any way, and give them a bath of paraffin."