Jared Pellet sat in the front parlour--_pro tem_, his workshop--while,
to keep the sun from troubling him, Patty had been pinning up the broad
sheet of a newspaper over the window, and now descended by means of a
chair. For jared was busy working a curious-looking pair of bellows
with his foot, and making a little tongue of metal to vibrate with a
most ear-piercing but doleful note in the process of being tuned, before
being returned to the German concertina, where its duty was to occupy
the part of leading note in the major scale of C.
"Hum-um," sang Jared, checking the current of air, and striking a
tuning-fork upon his little bench. "Hum-um; a bit flat, eh, Patty?"
"Just a little," said Patty, looking up from her work.
"But there, only think!" cried Jared, dropping his tuning-fork, leaving
his task, and crossing over to an old harmonium, over whose keys he ran
his bony fingers; "only think if I could--only think if I could get it!
Fifty pounds a year for two practices a week, and duty three times on
Sundays. Black, of course, for your mother; but what coloured silk
shall it be for you, eh, Patty?"
"Silk?" said Patty wonderingly, and her eyes grew more round.
"Yes, silk--dress, you know," said Jared, jumping up again from the
harmonium, and walking excitedly about the room. "Only think if I could
get it--Jared Pellet--no, Mr Jared Pellet; or ought it to be esquire,
eh, Patty? Organist of St Runwald's. But there," he continued, with a
grim smile, "this is counting the chickens before they are hatched, and
when there has not been one solitary peck at the shell. Heigho, Patty,
if the wind has not been and blown down my card house."
"Is any one at home?" said a high-pitched, harsh voice, as the door was
quietly opened, and a little yellow-looking Frenchman entered, a
tasselled cane in one hand, a cigarette being held between the fingers
of the other, but only to be changed to the hand which held the cane,
that its owner might raise the pinched hat worn on one side of his head,
and salute gravely the two occupants of the room.
"Aha! the good-day to you bose. The good Monsieur Pellet is well? and
you, my dear child, you do bloom again like the flowers."
Patty smiled as she held out her hand; the little Frenchman gravely
raising it to his lips, and then crossing to where Jared had stood,
looking ten years older, till, reseating himself at his bench, he began
to make the metal tongue vibrate furiously, sending a very storm of wind
through it, so rapidly he worked his foot; now making the note too
sharp, now too flat, and taking twice as long as usual to complete his
task.
"No, no, mon ami; he is too sharps--now too flats again. Aha, it is
bad!" exclaimed the visitor, dropping cane and cigarette to thrust both
fingers into his ears as Jared brought forth a most atrocious shriek
from the tortured tongue.
"My ear's gone completely, I believe," exclaimed Jared, looking in a
bewildered way at his visitor.
"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 mechant! 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.
But it was no easy task to write a letter at Jared Pellet's. True,
there had been a pennyworth of the best "cream laid," and envelopes to
match, obtained for the occasion; but the ink in the penny bottle was
thick, and when thinned with vinegar to prevent it from coming off the
nibs upon the paper in beads, it looked brown and bitty. Then the pen
spluttered, partly from rust, partly from having been turned into a tool
for raising the tongues of silent harmonium notes.
So fresh pens and ink had to be procured, when Jared wrote one
application, and smeared his name, and then said, "Tut-tut-tut!" He
wrote a second, but that did not look well, for there was a hair in the
pen, and he put two n's in candidate. He then wrote a third, but only
to find that he had done so with the paper upside down, when he
exclaimed--
"There never was a letter yet that didn't get more and more out of
tune--I mean didn't get worse--the more you tried."
Patty did not speak, only looked sympathetic, and as if she would gladly
have written the letter herself. But Jared tried once more, and this
time a proper missive was written, passed round, and approved by both
Mrs Pellet and her daughter. Then the postage stamp was affixed to the
envelope with paste, for Jared had managed to lick off all the gum; and
at last, when the important document had been safely posted, its writer
recollected half a score things he ought to have said, and after
fidgeting all the evening, went off despairingly to bed, feeling certain
that the post of organist could never be his.
Volume 1, Chapter III.