“Anyhow, I’d been devout enough, as far as sinning goes, for forty years. I wasn’t even blessed with the chance to be anything else. Then a new parson came, an underdone young man with new fal-da-dal ideas. I wonder how soon he’d become a gargoyle? I defy him to stand out long against the cast-iron nonentity of that village. But he didn’t take kindly either to me or my music. Hadn’t any sense of humour at all. I don’t know what I ever knew a clergyman who had. Perhaps a man couldn’t very well go on being a clergyman if he possessed such a trait.
“Anyhow, this particular one did not think I put enough expression into the tunes. He said they hardly sounded like sacred tunes at all; which wasn’t surprising, when you come to think that sometimes a low note and sometimes a high note on that little tin-pot organ would take it into its head to stick, and would either boom or squeak all through the thing I was playing.” Hal burst out laughing, quite unable to contain herself any longer, but the spinster went on calmly: “The tune might just as well have been ‘Down by the Old Bull and Bush’ then, but it wasn’t my fault, because when your hands and arms and feet and eyes and ears are all struggling to keep time with a village choir that varies its pace every few bars, you’ve got nothing left to release a stuck note with.”
“I hope you didn’t tell the under-done young parson about ‘The Old Bull and Bush’?” said Hal, still rocking with enjoyment and bent chiefly upon leading her on.
“I’d never heard of it then, or I might have. Even that won’t reach the village I’m thinking of for a hundred years; and then they’ll play it until the very birds lose heart, and think they are uncannily up to date. So they are if you count it when things come round the second time. I told him if the organ seemed to be playing ‘Yankee Doodle,’ I supposed it was because it felt like it; as, for twenty-five years, it had more or less pleased itself at my expense.
“But he’ll be a gargoyle soon, and then he won’t notice, and it will boom and squaek to its heart’s content. Of course I ought to have stayed on because I matched it all, and I didn’t mind the booming and squeaking as long as the choir didn’t get convulsed, and stop altogether—because that was liable to catch father’s attention. A gargoyle is out of place in London. It’s as mad for me to be here as that I’m here to teach music. After I became fossilised I ought to have stayed on till I died, and then that self-willed organ could have fairly squeaked itself out over my corpse. Come along and have some tea now. Poor Mr. Hayward will be getting faint.”
“But you’re too perfectly delicious for anything!” Hal cried, springing off the table. “Why haven’t I known you for years? Why haven’t I known you all my life? You must meet my cousin Dick Bruce. You absolutely must, with the least possible delay. He’ll simply dote on you. Come along to Basil, and tell me heaps and heaps more”; and she caught her by the arm in the friendliest fashion, and half-pulled her along to the little sitting-room.
CHAPTER XXXIII
“What a gossip you two have been having!” Basil said, and, seeing the laughter in Hal’s eyes, he added, “has G been telling you some of her amazing theories, or tearing the existing order of the universe to shreds?”
“Oh, I don’t know, but she’s simply immense. Have you heard about the tin-pot organ that will play its own way, and the choir that gets convulsed, and the underdone young parson? She’s simply got to know Dick. He wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“Yes; I’ve heard most of it. She plays an organ of laughter for me nowadays, that makes me bless the day she was born.”