What then of the organ? Ned turned, crept up the stair without waking an old man--the bell-ringer no doubt--who was asleep in his long-accustomed seat beside the blow-handle, and found himself before the usual red-curtain screen. Seating himself on the organ stool he looked out, unseen, on the church below.
It was quaint. There was the Reverend Gawain in the pulpit giving out his text, "There came a mighty rushing wind," and looking out over his church as if it had been full instead of empty.
There were some, said the preacher, who expected signs and wonders direct from the Almighty, but the great rushing mighty wind was the teaching of the Church which had begun on Whit Sunday and would go on throughout the year. It was a mighty voice, indeed, sounding in the ears of all his parishioners, even those who were absent. And it spoke through him, their priest, responsible to the Church for the soul of every man, woman, and child, in the parish of Dinas. Seven minutes, by Ned's watch, of unbounded authority, of absolute priesthood, of the Middle Ages. Ned, watching the dignity of the Reverend Gawain Meredith's denial of the passage of Time became admiring. And he was such a fine figure of a man. The old type, chief, medicine man, Druid, Archbishop--Archangel if you will--always the same, in all ages.
Ned wandered off into thoughts such as men of his type have had since the beginning of time, and was roused from them by seeing the priest, holding a huge sacrificial brass platter, awaiting the sheepish sidesman at the chancel steps.
By all that was holy!--one penny--only one, the sidesman's own; but its poverty was covered the next instant by the Rector's sovereign. Well done to the Rector!
What an imagination, what a magnificent make-believe. Something in Ned's innermost soul leapt up to meet this escape from deadly reality. It deserved a recognition. Yes! as the man couldn't play himself out of church, he would--the organ was there!
In sudden impulse he laid an awakening hand on the drowsy sexton. "Blow!" he whispered strenuously, "Blow, I tell you, for all you're worth."
The man, half--asleep, obeyed; Ned opened the keyboard, and not knowing his instrument put on full diapason. Thus, when the last Amen had echoed out from the Rector, for the choir appeared to be dummies, and the cope and the brass platter began to follow the little white surplices, the whole procession paused in amazement, as, with many a note dumb, many a dissonance overborne by the full burst of sound, Handel's "Lift up your heads, oh! ye gates," crashed into every corner of the old church. Crashed for the first two bars, then, the pressure on leaky bellows yielding, wavered and sank.
Ned, realising his failure, was down the loft stairs, through the graves, and over the back of the churchyard wall, where he lay convulsed with inextinguishable laughter at his own mad prank, before curiosity followed the amazement in the church as the last breath of air escaped in a long-drawn pipe from a stuck note in the treble.
It was some time ere, seeing the chapel folk coming out, he made his way round at the back of the Rectory wood and joined Ted, whom he found enthusiastic about the singing, and glad to have heard the Reverend Morris Pugh's "hwl," the bardic note. It was really rather impressive, that constant iteration of the A-flat, and even to one ignorant of Welsh gave a feeling of something being desperately wrong, of something needing desperately to be set right.