In the interval before the last hymn he derived a temporary solace from finding his own name inscribed in dull red characters in the leaf of his hymn-book, with, underneath in the same colour, the fateful inscription, “Written in blood by Garrett Dysart.” The thought of his younger brother utilising pleasantly a cut finger and the long minutes of the archdeacon’s sermon, had for the moment inspired Christopher with a sympathetic amusement, but he had relapsed into his pristine gloom. He knew the hymn perfectly well by this time, and his inoffensive tenor joined mechanically with the other voices, while his eyes roamed idly over the two rows of people in front of him. There was nothing suggestive of ethereal devotion about Pamela’s neighbours. Miss Mullen’s heaving shoulders and extended jaw spoke of nothing but her determination to out-scream everyone else; Miss Hope-Drummond and the curate, on the bench in front of him, were singing primly out of the same hymn-book, the curate obviously frightened, Miss Hope-Drummond as obviously disgusted. The Misses Beattie were furtively eyeing Miss Hope-Drummond’s costume; Miss Kathleen Baker was openly eyeing the curate, whose hymn-book she had been wont to share at happier choir practices, and Miss Fitzpatrick, seated at the end of the row, was watching from the gallery window with unaffected interest the progress of the usual weekly hostilities between Pamela’s dachshund and the sexton’s cat, and was not even pretending to occupy herself with the business in hand. Christopher’s eyes rested on her appraisingly, with the minute observation of short sight, fortified by an eyeglass, and was aware of a small head with a fluffy halo of conventionally golden hair, a straight and slender neck, and an appleblossom curve of cheek; he found himself wishing that she would turn a little further round.
The hymn had seven verses, and Pamela and Mrs. Gascogne were going inexorably through them all; the school-master and schoolmistress, an estimable couple, sole prop of the choir on wet Sundays, were braying brazenly beside him, and this was only the second hymn. Christopher’s D sharp melted into a yawn, and before he could screen it with his hymn-book, Miss Fitzpatrick looked round and caught him in the act. A suppressed giggle and a quick lift of the eyebrows instantly conveyed to him that his sentiments were comprehended and sympathised with, and he as instantly was conscious that Miss Mullen was following the direction of her niece’s eye. Lady Dysart’s children did not share her taste for Miss Mullen; Christopher vaguely felt some offensive flavour in the sharp smiling glance in which she included him and Francie, and an unexplainable sequence of thought made him suddenly decide that her niece was as second-rate as might have been expected.
Never had the choir dragged so hopelessly; never had Mrs. Gascogne and Pamela compelled their victims to deal with so many and difficult tunes, and never at any previous choir practice had Christopher registered so serious a vow that under no pretext whatever should Pamela entice him there again. They were all sitting down now, while the leaders consulted together about the Kyrie, and the gallery cushions slowly turned to stone in their well-remembered manner. Christopher’s ideas of church-going were inseparably bound up with those old gallery cushions. He had sat upon them ever since, as a small boy, he had chirped a treble beside his governess, and he knew every knob in their anatomy. There is something blighting to the devotional tendencies in the atmosphere of a gallery. He had often formulated this theory for his own exculpation, lying flat on his back in a punt in some shady backwater, with the Oxford church bells reminding him reproachfully of Lismoyle Sundays, and of Pamela,—the faithful, conscientious Pamela,—whipping up the pony to get to church before the bell stopped. Now, after a couple of months’ renewed acquaintance with the choir, the theory had hardened into a tedious truism, and when at last Christopher’s long legs were free to carry him down the steep stairs, the malign influence of the gallery had brought their owner to the verge of free thought.
He did not know how it had happened or by whose disposition of the forces it had been brought about, but when Miss Mullen’s tea-party detached itself from the other members of the choir at the churchyard gate, Pamela and Miss Hope-Drummond were walking on either side of their hostess, and he was behind with Miss Fitzpatrick.
“You don’t appear very fond of hymns, Mr. Dysart,” began Francie at once, in the pert Dublin accent that, rightly or wrongly, gives the idea of familiarity.
“People aren’t supposed to look about them in church,” replied Christopher with the peculiar suavity which, combined with his disconcerting infirmity of pausing before he spoke, had often baffled the young ladies of Barbadoes, and had acquired for him the reputation, perhaps not wholly undeserved, of being a prig.
“Oh, I daresay!” said Francie, “I suppose that’s why you sit in the back seat, that no one’ll see you doing it!”
There was a directness about this that Lismoyle would not have ventured on, and Christopher looked down at his companion with an increase of interest.
“No; I sit there because I can go to sleep.”
“Well, and do you? and who do you get to wake you?”—her quick voice treading sharply on the heels of his quiet one. “I used always to have to sit beside Uncle Robert in church to pinch him at the end of the sermon.”