He stopped, and observed her impressively, as if he expected to see the guilty blushes of arraigned heresy covering her amused, attentive face.
“I hope you will pardon me, ma’am, for repeating it, but Clotildy said that you told her she should have a pianna in heaven. A pianna, ma’am!”
“I certainly did,” she said quietly.
“You did? Well, now, I didn’t believe it, nor I wouldn’t believe it, till I’d asked you! I thought it warn’t more than fair that I should ask you, before repeating it, you know. It’s none of my business, Mrs. Forceythe, any more than that I take a general interest in the spiritooal welfare of the youth of our Sabbath school; but I am very much surprised! I am very much surprised!”
“I am surprised that you should be, Deacon Quirk. Do you believe that God would take a poor little disappointed girl like Clo, who has been all her life here forbidden the enjoyment of a perfectly innocent taste, and keep her in His happy heaven eternal years, without finding means to gratify it? I don’t.”
“I tell Clotildy I don’t see what she wants of a pianna-forte,” observed “Clotildy’s” uncle, sententiously. “She can go to singin’ school, and she’s been in the choir ever since I have, which is six years come Christmas. Besides, I don’t think it’s our place to speckylate on the mysteries of the heavenly spere. My wife told her that she mustn’t believe any such things as that, which were very irreverent, and contrary to the Scriptures, and Clo went home crying. She said: ‘It was so pretty to think about.’ It is very easy to impress these delusions of fancy on the young.”
“Pray, Deacon Quirk,” said Aunt Winifred, leaning earnestly forward in the carriage, “will you tell me what there is ‘irreverent’ or ‘unscriptural’ in the idea that there will be instrumental music in heaven?”
“Well,” replied the Deacon after some consideration, “come to think of it, there will be harps, I suppose. Harpers harping with their harps on the sea of glass. But I don’t believe there will be any piannas. It’s a dreadfully material way to talk about that glorious world, to my thinking.”
“If you could show me wherein a harp is less ‘material’ than a piano, perhaps I should agree with you.”
Deacon Quirk looked rather nonplussed for a minute.