“Get up, you impudent swab!” bellowed Lord Cannebrake. “What! Disobey orders, would you, you dog! You whimpering, sneering, dirty ship’s steward.”
Mr. Springle, perceiving he had made too free with his master’s affableness, rose at once and slunk from the hall.
My Lord Cannebrake growled to himself awhile, and then sat moodily silent, staring into the fire.
I seized the occasion of the butler’s absence to ask him point blank why the first sounds of my flute had alarmed him so violently. “For,” said I, “there is nothing surprising at this jolly season of the year, when waits and mummers are abroad, in hearing the sound of music by night.”
“Did I look frightened, eh?” asked his lordship. “Hah, and I was frightened, woundily frightened. I come, sir, of a plaguy old family, and I live in a plaguy old house, and I’ve inherited very little else but a plaguy crew of ghosts.”
“And you mistook me for one of ’em?” I laughed.
“We Starlings,” he went on, “like most old families, have our omens and death cries and what not, and it has always been accounted very ill work for a Starling to hear a starling’s whistle.”
I was somewhat put about to learn that my playing had been mistaken for a vulgar bird’s whistle, but, concealing my annoyance very genteely, laughed the matter off.
“‘Springle,’ his lordship gasped. ‘Springle, I’ve killed him, ha’n’t I?’” (page 113).