A Little World

by George Manville Fenn

“Ah, no, no; try him again—yais, try him again;” and the visitor leaned over the performer. “Ta-ta” he hummed, nodding his head, and beating time with a finger. “Better—yes, better—better still—one leetle touch, and—aha, it is done—so!” he exclaimed triumphantly, as the little note now sounded clear and pure.

“And now I must have two string for my violin. They do wear out so fast.” Which was a fact, and nothing could have more fully displayed Monsieur Canau’s friendship than his constant usage of Jared Pellet’s strings, best Roman by name, worst English by nature. “Why do you not come to-day?” he continued, as Patty opened a tin canister, and emptied a dozen of the transparent rings of catgut upon the table.

“I could not leave,” said Patty, hastily. “We are anxious about the organ.”

“Yes, oui, of course; and the good papa will get it?”

“He has not written yet,” said Patty, dolefully.

“But he is méchant! Why do you not write? Eh! what—you are going to? It is good; then I will not stay. But write—write—for you must have it. What! you shake your head. Fie; you must have it. And you, ma fille—I will take these two—and you will come to us soon, for the poor Janette is triste, and longs for you, and the birds pine; but he goes to write. Adieu.”

The little Frenchman kissed his hand to both in turn, and, with his yellow face in puckers, stole out of the door on tip-toe, turning back for an instant to make a commanding gesture at Jared, who rose from his bench and went slowly towards the table.

For, be it known, that the post of organist to St Runwald’s was vacant—the church that everybody knows, situated as it is in a corner, with houses all round, turning their backs as if ashamed, and hiding it, lest people should see what a patch Sir Christopher Wren made of the fine old Gothic building when he restored it, squaring the windows, putting up a vinegar-cruet steeple, padding, curtaining, brass-rodding, and cushioning the interior to make calm the slumbers of miserable sinners; and, one way and another, so changing it that, could the monks of old once more have gazed upon the place, they would have groaned in their cowls, and called Sir Christopher a barbarian.

But the only groans proceeding from cowls were those which were heard upon windy nights, when showers of blacks were whirled round and round and then deposited in the corners of the window sills, or against the lead framing, whence they could filter through in a dust of the blackest, which would gather upon the pew edges in despite of the pew-opener’s duster, ready to be transferred to faces by fingers, or to rise of itself and make church-goers sneeze and accuse the old place of being damp, the churchwarden of being stingy with the coals, the pew-opener of not lighting the fires at proper time to air the church, and the vicar of spinning out his sermons, finishing off by accounting for the smallness of the attendance by declaring that it was impossible for a parish to be religious where there was such a damp church. And all this through the sootiness of the neighbouring houses, for St Runwald’s was as dry as a bone—as the bones of the old fathers who lay below in the vaults, placed there hundreds of years ago, when Borgle’s yard was occupied by a monastery, and matins and vespers were rung out from the tower of the church.

Jared Pellet in after times could have told you it was not damp, in spite of the words of Sampson Purkis, the beadle, who said that there were “sympsons” of it, else why did the steel fastenings of the poor-boxes grow rusty? unless—but thereby hangs a tale. Jared could have told you the place was not damp by the organ, for would not the stops have stuck, and the notes refused to speak, had there been moisture? But at this period he was in ignorance, for, incited thereto by his wife, his daughter Patty, Mr Timson, the churchwarden, and Monsieur Canau, professor of the violin, Jared Pellet was about to offer himself as a candidate for the vacant post of organist, to perform which task he had now settled himself at a table—some four or five small faces that had come peeping in at the door having been warned off by divers very alarming looking frowns and shakes of the head.