The Nebuly Coat Part 15

"I'm very sorry, sir," the boy said, whimpering. "I'm sure I never meant--I never thought--"

"You never _do_ think," Mr Sharnall said. "Well, well, don't go on whining. Old heads don't grow on young shoulders; don't do it again, and there's a sixpence for you. And now let's hear what you have to say."

Sixpences were rare things among Cullerne boys, and the gift consoled more speedily than any balm in Gilead.

"Canon Parkyn's compliments to you, sir, and he would be glad to have a word with you in the clergy-vestry."

"All in good time. Tell him I'll be down as soon as I've put my books away."

Mr Sharnall did not hurry. There were the Psalter and the chant-book to be put open on the desk for the afternoon; there were the morning-service and anthem-book to be put away, and the evening-service and anthem-book to be got out.

The establishment had once been able to afford good music-books, and in the attenuated list of subscribers to the first-edition Boyce you may see to this day, "The Rector and Foundation of Cullerne Minster (6 copies)." Mr Sharnall loved the great Boyce, with its parchment paper and largest of large margins. He loved the crisp sound of the leaves as he turned them, and he loved the old-world clefs that he could read nine staves at a time as easily as a short score. He looked at the weekly list to check his memory--"Awake up my Glory" (_Wise_). No, it was in

Volume Three instead of Two; he had taken down the wrong volume--a stupid mistake for one who knew the copy so well. How the rough calf backs were crumbling away! The rusty red-leather dust had come off on his coat-sleeves; he really was not fit to be seen, and he took some minutes more to brush it all off. So it was that Canon Parkyn chafed at being kept waiting in the clergy-vestry, and greeted Mr Sharnall on his appearance with a certain tartness:

"I wish you could be a little quicker when you are sent for. I am particularly busy just now, and you have kept me waiting a quarter of an hour at least."

As this was precisely what Mr Sharnall had intended to do, he took no umbrage at the Rector's remarks, but merely said:

"Pardon me; scarcely so long as a quarter of an hour, I think."

"Well, do not let us waste words. What I wanted to tell you was that it has been arranged for the Lord Bishop of Carisbury to hold a confirmation in the minster on the eighteenth of next month, at three o'clock in the afternoon. We must have a full musical service, and I shall be glad if you will submit a sketch of what you propose for my approval. There is one point to which I must call your attention particularly. As his lords.h.i.+p walks up the nave, we must have a becoming march on the organ--not any of this old-fas.h.i.+oned stuff of which I have had so often to complain, but something really dignified and with tune in it."

"Oh yes, we can easily arrange that," Mr Sharnall said obsequiously--"'See the Conquering Hero comes,' by Handel, would be very appropriate; or there is an air out of one of Offenbach's Operas that I think I could adapt to the purpose. It is a very sweet thing if rendered with proper feeling; or I could play a 'Danse Maccabre' slowly on the full organ."

"Ah, that is from the 'Judas Maccabaeus,' I conclude," said the Rector, a little mollified at this unexpected acquiescence in his views. "Well, I see that you understand my wishes, so I hope I may leave that matter in your hands. By the way," he said, turning back as he left the vestry, "what _was_ the piece which you played after the service just now?"

"Oh, only a fugal movement--just a fugue of Kirnberger's."

"I _wish_ you would not give us so much of this fugal style. No doubt it is all very fine from a scholastic point of view, but to most it seems merely confused. So far from a.s.sisting me and the choir to go out with dignity, it really fetters our movements. We want something with pathos and dignity, such as befits the end of a solemn service, yet with a marked rhythm, so that it may time our footsteps as we leave the choir. Forgive these suggestions; the _practical_ utility of the organ is so much overlooked in these days. When Mr Noot is taking the service it does not so much matter, but when I am here myself I beg that there may be no more fugue."

The visit of the Bishop of Carisbury to Cullerne was an important matter, and necessitated some forethought and arrangement.

"The Bishop must, of course, lunch with us," Mrs Parkyn said to her husband; "you will ask him, of course, to lunch, my dear."

"Oh yes, certainly," replied the Canon; "I wrote yesterday to ask him to lunch."

He a.s.sumed an unconcerned air, but with only indifferent success, for his heart misgave him that he had been guilty of an unpardonable breach of etiquette in writing on so important a subject without reference to his wife.

"Really, my dear!" she rejoined--"really! I hope at least that your note was couched in proper terms."

"Psha!" he said, a little nettled in his turn, "do you suppose I have never written to a Bishop before?"

"That is not the point; _any_ invitation of this kind should always be given by me. The Bishop, if he has any _breeding_, will be very much astonished to receive an invitation to lunch that is not given by the lady of the house. This, at least, is the usage that prevails among persons of _breeding_." There was just enough emphasis in the repet.i.tion of the last formidable word to have afforded a _casus belli_, if the Rector had been minded for the fray; but he was a man of peace.

"You are quite right, my dear," was the soft answer; "it was a slip of mine, which we must hope the Bishop will overlook. I wrote in a hurry yesterday afternoon, as soon as I received the official information of his coming. You were out calling, if you recollect, and I had to catch the post. One never knows what tuft-hunting may not lead people to do; and if I had not caught the post, some pus.h.i.+ng person or other might quite possibly have asked him sooner. I meant, of course, to have reported the matter to you, but it slipped my memory."

"Really," she said, with fine deprecation, being only half pacified, "I do not see who there _could_ be to ask the Bishop except ourselves.

Where should the Bishop of Carisbury lunch in Cullerne except at the Rectory?" In this unanswerable conundrum she quenched the smouldering embers of her wrath. "I have no doubt, dear, that you did it all for the best, and I hate these vulgar pus.h.i.+ng n.o.bodies, who try to get hold of everyone of the least position quite as much as you do. So let us consider whom we _ought_ to ask to meet him. A small party, I think it should be; he would take it as a greater compliment if the party were small."

She had that shallow and ungenerous mind which shrinks instinctively from admitting any beauty or intellect in others, and which grudges any partic.i.p.ation in benefits, however amply sufficient they may be for all.

Thus, few must be asked to meet the Bishop, that it might the better appear that few indeed, beside the Rector and Mrs Parkyn, were fit to a.s.sociate with so distinguished a man.

"I quite agree with you," said the Rector, considerably relieved to find that his own temerity in asking the Bishop might now be considered as condoned. "Our party must above all things be select; indeed, I do not know how we could make it anything but very small; there are so few people whom we _could_ ask to meet the Bishop."

"Let me see," his wife said, making a show of reckoning Cullerne respectability with the fingers of one hand on the fingers of the other.

"There is--" She broke off as a sudden idea seized her. "Why, of course, we must ask Lord Blandamer. He has shown such marked interest in ecclesiastical matters that he is sure to wish to meet the Bishop."

"A most fortunate suggestion--admirable in every way. It may strengthen his interest in the church; and it must certainly be beneficial to him to a.s.sociate with correct society after his wandering and Bohemian life.

I hear all kinds of strange tales of his hobn.o.bbing with this Mr Westray, the clerk of the works, and with other persons entirely out of his own rank. Mrs Flint, who happened to be visiting a poor woman in a back lane, a.s.sures me that she has every reason to believe that he spent an hour or more in the clerk's house, and even ate there. They say he positively ate tripe."

"Well, it will certainly do him good to meet the Bishop," the lady said.

"That would make four with ourselves; and we can ask Mrs Bulteel. We need not ask her husband; he is painfully rough, and the Bishop might not like to meet a brewer. It will not be at all strange to ask her alone; there is always the excuse of not liking to take a businessman away from his work in the middle of the day."

"That would be five; we ought to make it up to six. I suppose it would not do to ask this architect-fellow or Mr Sharnall."

"My dear! what can you be thinking of? On no account whatever. Such guests would be _most_ inappropriate."

The Rector looked so properly humble and cast down at this reproof that his wife relented a little.

"Not that there is any _harm_ in asking them, but they would be so very ill at ease themselves, I fear, in such surroundings. If you think the number should be even, we might perhaps ask old Noot. He _is_ a gentleman, and would pa.s.s as your chaplain, and say grace."

Thus the party was made up, and Lord Blandamer accepted, and Mrs Bulteel accepted; and there was no need to trouble about the curate's acceptance--he was merely ordered to come to lunch. But, after all had gone so well up to this point, the unexpected happened--the Bishop could not come. He regretted that he could not accept the hospitality so kindly offered him by Canon Parkyn; he had an engagement which would occupy him for any spare time that he would have in Cullerne; he had made other arrangements for lunch; he would call at the Rectory half an hour before the service.

The Rector and his wife sat in the "study," a dark room on the north side of the rectory-house, made sinister from without by dank laurestinus, and from within by gla.s.s cases of badly-stuffed birds. A Bradshaw lay on the table before them.

"He cannot be _driving_ from Carisbury," Mrs Parkyn said. "Dr Willis does not keep at all the same sort of stables that his predecessor kept.

Mrs Flint, when she was attending the annual Christian Endeavour meeting at Carisbury, was told that Dr Willis thinks it wrong that a Bishop should do more in the way of keeping carriages than is absolutely necessary for church purposes. She said she had pa.s.sed the Bishop's carriage herself, and that the coachman was a most unkempt creature, and the horses two wretched screws."

"I heard much the same thing," a.s.sented the Rector. "They say he would not have his own coat of arms painted on the carriage, for what was there already was quite good enough for him. He cannot possibly be driving here from Carisbury; it is a good twenty miles."

"Well, if he does not drive, he must come by the 12:15 train; that would give him two hours and a quarter before the service. What business can he have in Cullerne? Where can he be lunching? What can he be doing with himself for two mortal hours and a quarter?"

Here was another conundrum to which probably only one person in Cullerne town could have supplied an answer, and that was Mr Sharnall. A letter had come for the organist that very day:

"The Palace,

"Carisbury.

"My dear Sharnall,

"(I had almost written 'My dear Nick'; forty years have made my pen a little stiff, but you must give me your official permission to write 'My dear Nick' the very next time.) You may have forgotten my hand, but you will not have forgotten me. Do you know, it is I, Willis, who am your new Bishop? It is only a fortnight since I learnt that you were so near me--

"'Quam dulce amicitias, Redintegrare nitidas' -

"and the very first point of it is that I am going to sponge on you, and ask myself to lunch. I am coming to Cullerne at 12:45 to-day fortnight for the Confirmation, and have to be at the Rectory at 2:30, but till then an old friend, Nicholas Sharnall, will give me food and shelter, will he not? Make no excuses, for I shall not accept them; but send me word to say that in this you will not fail of your duty, and believe me always to be

"Yours,