B 
 
 i 
 
 1
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN 
 
 VOL. I.
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 /// /in vol. crown Bvo, 5s., with Frontispiece hj J. E. Milluis, ll. A. 
 
 ST. OLAVE'S. 
 
 1 This novel is the work of one who possesses a great talent for writing, 
 as well as experience and knowledge of the world. The whole book is 
 worth reading.'— AtJu . 
 
 ' " st Olave's " belongs to a lofty order of fiction. It is a good novel, 
 but it is something more. It is written with unflagging ability, and it is 
 •is even as it is clever. The author has determined to do nothing short of 
 the best, and has succeeded.'— Morning Post. 
 
 London : HURST & BLACKETT, 13. Great Marlborough St.
 
 <£. V 
 
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN 
 
 BY 
 
 THE AUTHOR OF 
 
 ST. OLAVE'S," "JANITA'S CROSS," : ' ANNETTE,' 
 
 "A MAN'S MISTAKE," 
 
 <fec, &c. 
 
 4 Our times are in His hand 
 Who saith, " A whole I planned, 
 Youth shows but half ; trust God; see all, nor be afraid."' ' 
 
 IN THREE VOLUMES. 
 VOL. 1. 
 
 LONDON: 
 HURST AND BLACKETT, PUBLISHERS, 
 
 13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET. 
 
 1883. 
 
 All ri'jhls reserved.
 
 Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2010 with funding from 
 
 University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/seniorsongman01song
 
 £ v, I 
 
 i 
 
 bo 
 
 THE SENIOR SONG-MAN. 
 
 r 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 AMONG all the choristers of Crawl- 
 borough Minster in the time of old 
 Dean Barbegan there was none who so 
 put his heart into his voice, and sent that 
 voice deep down into the hearts of those 
 who had ears to hear, as Jacob Weird, the 
 senior songman. 
 
 He had his place at the organ end of the 
 choir, well away out of sight behind the 
 broad-shouldered, well-draperied figures of 
 Mr. Premonay, the minor canon, and Mr. 
 Garfleet, the vicar choral ; so that, unless 
 
 VOL. I, B
 
 Z THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 he was singing, scarcely a glimpse of him 
 could be caught by anyone, and that was 
 why Jacob sat there. 
 
 He was a pale-faced little man, with 
 plentiful black hair, and eyes that had a 
 curiously meditative expression, except when 
 there was anything definite to look at, and 
 then they went down to the very core of 
 the thing, resting not until they had got its 
 meaning out of it. In his manners he was 
 very quiet, always rather keeping out of 
 people's way than putting himself into it, 
 his position behind the Premonay and Gar- 
 fleet surplices being typical of his attitude 
 towards society in general. And, without 
 knowing why, one had the feeling about 
 him that he was a man who had known 
 trouble, a man who had a story to tell, 
 though he never told it. 
 
 He lived at the north end of the Cathe- 
 dral Close, in a little house, which, like its
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 6 
 
 master, had got well away into the back- 
 ground — at least, so far as regarded one 
 side of it, being comfortably hidden behind 
 the chapter house and the high grey stone 
 walls of the deanery garden, out of which 
 a massive door, iron clamped and studded, 
 opened just opposite that which gave Jacob 
 entrance to his little bit of back lawn. 
 As to the other side of the house, which 
 was probably the front, that looked out 
 from a wide old-fashioned bay window into 
 Crawlborough High Street, but not on that 
 account into anything approaching publicity, 
 the High Street itself being, except at Fes- 
 tival and Assize times, as sleepy a little 
 thoroughfare as the very genius of dulness 
 could wish. 
 
 This bow window was curtained for about 
 half its height all round with a brown gauze 
 blind, securely drawn until it reached the 
 middle pane, where it was put back suffi- 
 
 b2
 
 4 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 ciently to admit a neat square gilt frame, 
 surrounding a black plate, upon which was 
 printed the following announcement : 
 
 JACOB WEIRD, 
 
 Successor to the late Jonathan Weird, 
 Law Stationer and Engrosser. 
 
 Apparently Crawlborough did not require 
 what Jacob could do for it in that line, for, 
 with the exception of a little copying which 
 the Dean and Chapter gave him now and 
 then, the business, which in his uncle's time 
 was lucrative enough, had long ago dwindled 
 down to vanishing point, leaving the senior 
 songman time enough, when his duties at 
 the Minster were over, to follow his own 
 tastes. And so he lived his life chiefly in 
 a little room behind the office, sometimes 
 looking over church music, sometimes play- 
 ins the violin, sometimes working out sheets 
 of calculations for the dials which he loved 
 to construct ; oftener, in summer-time, saun-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 5 
 
 tering about in his bit of back-garden, 
 closed round by high stone walls, upon 
 whose copings three centuries of rain and 
 wind and sunshine had planted the many- 
 coloured lichens and mosses so thickly that 
 seeing them glowing there, orange, golden, 
 red, and russet, one scarcely wanted flowers. 
 And, indeed, flowers did not grow well there. 
 The place, like Jacob Weird's own life, was 
 too enclosed. The rain and wind and sun- 
 shine only reached its walls. Within there 
 was always silence and quietness and shadow. 
 
 But he could live without the flowers. 
 He had not had over many of them, within 
 or without, for this ten years past. He had 
 to look up to the sunshine, instead of seeing 
 it round about him like most other people. 
 
 From his favourite seat under a lime-tree 
 in the corner of that garden he could see, 
 away between the pinnacles of the west 
 front of the cathedral, the spire and cross
 
 6 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 of St. Anne's Roman Catholic church, with 
 its convent hard by and its lonely little 
 graveyard. From the room where lie 
 slept he could see the yew-trees in that 
 graveyard, and the white stones gleaming, 
 and the glow of setting sun on the convent 
 windows, and the shadowy figures of the 
 nuns as they paced up and down their long 
 green alleys among the elm-trees. But 
 Jacob spent too much time now over his 
 dials and his mathematics to sit often at 
 that upper window. 
 
 Dean Barbegan was fond of dialling too, 
 and having no wife to amuse him at home, 
 and not being violent upon the subject of 
 ecclesiastical duties or improvements, he 
 often found his way into Jacob Weird's den, 
 and there the two ' talked and talked and 
 better talked,' as old Marisha Pennvdrop, 
 Jacob's housekeeper, expressed it, the out- 
 come of the talking being generally a new
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 7 
 
 sun-dial either on the sunny south front of the 
 deanery, or in that warm little bit of gar- 
 den at the back of the senior songman's 
 house. And when in winter time the de- 
 canal gaiters were within easy distance of 
 the parlour fireside, or when in summer- 
 time the decanal shovel hat could be seen 
 bobbing earnestly to and fro with its 
 wearer's converse under the lime-tree which 
 overshadowed the garden seat, Marisha 
 knew as well as could be that, call Mr. 
 Weird as you would, get him in to his 
 victuals you never could, no, not though 
 you as good as went down on your bend- 
 ed knees to ask it of him. There never 
 were two such men for talking, she said, 
 as the master and Dr. Barbegan, though, if 
 it was so much as a word that you wanted 
 from Mr. Weird at any other time, you 
 might think yourself lucky to get it. And 
 everybody said the same.
 
 8 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 Jacob Weird was not an old man. 
 Forty years could scarcely have told 
 their story upon him. People who belong- 
 ed to Crawlborough could tell that by put- 
 ting two and two together. For Jacob and 
 his elder brother Hiram, of the Crawl 
 Farm, were boys together, not much 
 over a couple of years between them, and 
 Hiram was youthful and bright and vigor- 
 ous as ever, ready for his joke with the 
 well-to-do farmers on the Corn Exchange, 
 and, if report said true, ready for his glass 
 with them too, at the market table : but 
 always able to carry it like a gentleman, 
 as the Weirds, father and son for the last 
 two hundred years, had always done. And 
 old Jonathan Weird's tombstone in Crawl- 
 thorpe churchyard witnessed to the fact that 
 he had only been dead twelve years, and his 
 nephew Jacob was a young man of three 
 or four and twenty when he succeeded him
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 9 
 
 in the business, and had that plate framed 
 and put inside the brown gauze curtain. 
 Though what work it had done in the 
 world for the last dozen years, except to 
 give Mrs. Pennydrop half an hour's occu- 
 pation twice a week in polishing it up, was 
 more than they could say. 
 
 Seven and thirty years then, at the very 
 outside, and yet everyone looked upon 
 Jacob Weird as a man whose best days, if 
 he had ever had any best days, were long 
 ago over and done with. Not that he had 
 squandered them in riotous living; nothing 
 of the sort. Dean Barbegan, who was as 
 particular as anybody about the sort of 
 people he employed in the cathedral, would 
 never have let Mr. Weird be songman there 
 for twenty years if his character had not 
 been such as would bear the strictest inves- 
 tigation. Most probably it was something 
 in the family. One got it and another
 
 10 THE SENIOB SONGMAN. 
 
 missed it. Jonathan Weird had been very 
 much the same sort of man, shy, awkward, 
 never ready to speak a word or shake hands 
 with you if he could help it, stopping in the 
 house all day and prowling out after dark 
 like an owl or a bat, when you could not see 
 what sort of a coat he had on. And as for 
 asking a friend in to smoke a cigar or drink 
 a glass of wine with him, well, it was a 
 thing he never did, not even in the way of 
 business. Honest and honourable, yes, no 
 one more so, and a man who always attend- 
 ed to his religious duties ; but, when you 
 had said that, you had said all. And it was 
 just the same with Jacob Weird. 
 
 Then there were other things which kept 
 the senior songman of Crawlborough Min- 
 ster from being very popular with people of 
 his own standing. Daring his early man- 
 hood he had lived abroad, in Italy, for a 
 couple of years. And in those days living
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 11 
 
 abroad meant more than it does now, when 
 every man who pretends to any position at 
 all must have an hotel acquaintance with 
 all the considerable cities on the continent, 
 to say nothing of pyramids, trips up the 
 Nile, and explorations of African interiors. 
 Crawlborough liked the people who be- 
 longed to it to stay there, or, if they went 
 away, to keep their friends regularly in- 
 formed of all they were doing, and, when 
 they returned, to settle down contentedly to 
 the old habits and the old doings. Instead 
 of which, Mr. Weird came back quite a dif- 
 ferent man. If he was quiet before, he was 
 simply as bad as dumb afterwards ; and in 
 hot weather would have his bed taken into 
 the little back-garden and sleep out of 
 doors, a thing which had never been heard 
 of in Crawlborough, whatever people may 
 do in Milan. And he made use of garlic in 
 his food, and ate olives and salad oil, and
 
 12 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 played secular music on Sundays, and went 
 sometimes to St. Anne's Roman Catholic 
 chapel, and had been heard to say what a 
 quiet and peaceful life the nuns must live 
 amongst those elm-tree alleys, just as much 
 as to imply that if the convent had been a 
 monastery he would have gone into it. 
 A quiet life ? Yes, probably, but then who 
 could tell how much there might be besides 
 quietness ? And if there was nothing but 
 peace inside, why should the walls be built 
 so high that nobody could ever escape from 
 that peace? Of course these habits and 
 opinions set Jacob Weird apart from the 
 generality of people. 
 
 And then why did he not marry ? There 
 were not so many men folk in Crawl- 
 borough that one of them could be spared 
 to live a celibate life. Of course the dean 
 was out of the reach of remark, much as 
 people would have liked to make it of him ;
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 13 
 
 bat a middle-class man, who had a respect- 
 able calling and a comfortable home and a 
 little independent property — for Mr. Weird 
 got the most of his uncle Jonathan's money 
 — had no right to keep all these advan- 
 tages to himself. Counting one thing with 
 another, and taking into consideration the 
 exceeding quiet manner, at least outwardly 
 quiet, in which he had lived for the last 
 fifteen or twenty years, Mr. Weird could not 
 be worth less than four hundred a year, 
 independent of the law stationery, which 
 did not go for much. And with a wife who 
 could add a hundred or two to that, he 
 might very soon make his way amongst the 
 better class people of the place, more espe- 
 cially as his brother Hiram, of the Crawl 
 Farm, was beginning to launch out somewhat, 
 had got admitted into the Crawlborough 
 Gentlemen's Club, and was doing a little in 
 hunting and that sort of thins, which of
 
 14 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 course all helped a man up to a position if 
 he had the good sense to make use of it. 
 
 And then there was Mrs. Hiram's 
 brother, Mr. Bellfield, a very rising solicitor 
 in Crawlborough, doing a good deal of 
 the cathedral law business, a stirring man 
 in the city council too, and of the sort to 
 become mayor before long. And his wife 
 was not a woman to let the grass grow un- 
 der her feet where position was concerned. 
 She knew what it was worth, looked at 
 from a pecuniary point of view, where a 
 man had a profession to maintain ; and, now 
 that the dean was taking notice of Mr. 
 Jacob Weird, she would have been very 
 glad to have had him over to dinner occa- 
 sionally, and put him in the way of see- 
 ing a little society, if only he could have 
 been brought to look at things reasonably. 
 He might even marry among the cathedral 
 people some clay, if he looked well to his 
 ways.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 15 
 
 But looking well to his ways, socially 
 speaking, was not what Jacob Weird did. 
 And, whilst one and another said what 
 might be, he lived there among his dials 
 and his mosses, and he remembered and 
 was silent. Also he remembered and was 
 at peace, though none knew how the peace 
 had come. It was the peace of renunciation, 
 the peace of forgiveness, the peace of the 
 heart which, suffering loss, has yet been 
 saved so as by fire. And at last he had 
 won to better than patience with his life, 
 even to content with it.
 
 16 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 CRAWLBOROUGH was not a fast place ; 
 on the contrary, it was rather slow. 
 But its name did not partake of the nature 
 of a joke. It was called Crawlborough 
 simply because it ivas a borough, sending 
 two members to Parliament, and because it 
 was built on the river Crawl, which of 
 course might just as well have been called 
 by any other name, and then the place would 
 have escaped many a fling from would-be 
 witty people. 
 
 Indeed, the Crawl was not a sleepy river. 
 It went along at a very fair pace, and was 
 equal to a great deal more work than
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 17 
 
 had been put upon it for many years. 
 There was a time when it had cheerfully 
 borne the produce of half a dozen good- 
 sized towns farther up the county, and car- 
 ried it to Slumberley, the point at which it 
 debouched into the German Ocean. But 
 those towns sent their produce by railway 
 now, and so, though the Crawl moved on as 
 rapidly as ever, it often floated nothing 
 more important than an amateur rowing 
 party, or the sticks and straws which idle 
 children flung upon it. That, however, was 
 not its own fault, but the fault of circum- 
 stances. 
 
 Crawlborough was leisurely. But then 
 it was steady and respectable. What it did 
 it did thoroughly, and what it let alone was 
 let alone with a completeness which defied 
 criticism. 
 
 One of the things which it let alone, at 
 least in those days, was its old cathedral. 
 
 vol. i. c
 
 18 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 If you wanted dust pure and simple, the 
 accumulation of ages and generations past 
 — dust softening the outlines of exquisite 
 tabernacle work in the choir, casting new 
 and undesigned shadows on the capitals of 
 early English columns, accentuating the 
 mouldings of recessed arches ; dust mellow- 
 ing and toning down the colouring of thir- 
 
 DO O 
 
 teenth century windows, and casting a soft 
 subdued tint over the entire fabric — you 
 could see it to perfection in Crawlborough 
 Minster. If you wanted daily services dron- 
 ed through with the most complete pre- 
 ritualistic laziness, there you had them. If 
 you wanted the old order of things, it 
 flourished nowhere with such fine, full-fed, 
 wholesome unconsciousness of itself as in 
 the ecclesiastical and municipal economy of 
 Crawlborough. If in the bleak winter-time 
 you wanted frozen-fingered, red-nosed little 
 chorister boys, there you had them, a quar-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 19 
 
 ter of an hour before each service, jumping 
 and capering in the side aisles to keep 
 breath enough in their bodies for the an- 
 them of praise which they would shortly be 
 called upon to sing to the God of all com- 
 fort. And if you wanted to hear a lively 
 conversation touching the respective merits 
 of tops and marbles, hop-scotch or dad-in- 
 the-ring, you could hear it, any morning or 
 afternoon, carried on by those same little 
 white-robed chorister boys, whilst they were 
 supposed to be chanting the Psalms as set 
 forth in the order for morning and evening 
 prayer throughout the year. 
 
 It was the dean's fault, no doubt, and in 
 the present day people would have written 
 to the papers about it. But nobody blamed 
 Dr. Barbegan. He was so kind and good. 
 He lived such a simple life — would have 
 lived a simpler one still, if his elder bache- 
 lor brother, Sir Montague Barbegan, who 
 
 c2
 
 20 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 lived with him at the deanery, had not 
 insisted upon a gentleman's dinner-party 
 now and then ; and he helped the poor so 
 freely, and was so open-handed with coals 
 and half-crowns and blankets at Christmas- 
 time, and looked so every inch a gentleman 
 in his well stiffened canonicals and crimson 
 silk hood when he stood up to read the 
 Lessons, that one might as well have been 
 a Whig or a Dissenter as have insinuated 
 that he did not do all he ought to have 
 done for his cathedral. 
 
 And then on the great Church festivals 
 he did do all he ought to do — at any rate, 
 in giving a fine spectacular effect to the ser- 
 vices. One felt proud of being a member 
 of the Establishment when the procession of 
 clergy and choristers came into the choir 
 on Christmas Day, heralded by the two 
 vergers with their silver pokers, which they 
 shouldered with such martial spiritual pomp
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 21 
 
 as they conducted the stream of newly- 
 starched surplices into the places appor- 
 tioned to them, and then mounted guard, 
 mute but defiant, behind the crimson velvet 
 curtains of the dean's throne, until such 
 time as the milky way had to fare forth 
 again. A goodly sight it was, for the little 
 boys looked so well washed and shiny, with 
 a fore-gleam in their eyes of the plum cake 
 and elderberry syrup to be consumed that 
 night in the deanery porch, and the song- 
 men one and all seemed to feel that for 
 once their efforts were appreciated, and the 
 vicars-choral, and the great canons and the 
 minor canons, and the prebends and all the 
 rest of them, looked as if prayers had never 
 been said too often ; and after them all, a 
 king among them, for his stature was kingly 
 when he walked at his full height, came 
 Dr. Barbegan, beaming with the content of 
 a man who had done his best to please
 
 22 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 everybody, and little Dr. Sparkes, from 
 behind his red curtain, made the organ roll 
 out its hundred-voiced peal of sound, and 
 the clear sweet trebles and the piercing 
 tenors and the ponderous basses added 
 their majestic tumult, and one forgot the 
 dust, and the unholy colloquies about tops 
 and marbles, and the sleepy confessions and 
 the sleepier calls for pardon which charac- 
 terized the ordinary run of the prayers, and 
 only felt that, after all, it was a fine thing 
 to belong to a place where there was a 
 cathedral like that of Crawlborough. 
 
 Many things were let alone in Crawl- 
 borough besides the cathedral dust. It was 
 a place that scorned to let itself be spoken 
 of as restless, either in religion, politics, or 
 social government. The people lived their 
 life and did their duties quietly, as that life 
 had been lived and those duties done by
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 23 
 
 their fore elders for many and many a gen- 
 eration past. Crawlborough never origin- 
 ated changes. It acted as it had been 
 taught to act. It occupied a position some- 
 thing like that of the middle men in the 
 long chain of helpers who pass the bucket 
 at a village fire. Theirs was not the patient 
 strength of the labourer who draws up the 
 water from the river, and still less was 
 theirs the pluck of him who stands closest 
 to the flames and fights them in the face of 
 danger and suffocation. But they did what 
 they could, they passed the bucket, and 
 were content so long as they knew that none 
 of it had got spilled in the passing. 
 
 And Crawlborough was exclusive. That 
 was a matter concerning which the bucket 
 of opinion had been most carefully handed 
 on for many a generation, with the wasting 
 of never a drop of its contents. And so
 
 24 THE SENIOR SONGMAX. 
 
 deeply was this feeling of class distinction 
 established in the minds of the better sort 
 of people that they had never been able 
 quite to get over the dean's partiality for a 
 chat with Jacob Weird of the Chantry 
 house. 
 
 Because, though Mr. Weird was as re- 
 spectable as anyone could desire, his own 
 immediate ancestors having been owners of 
 the Crawl Farm property for two or three 
 generations, and his uncle's family settled 
 for as long a time as law stationers in the 
 Chantry ; still the Weirds had never sought 
 to raise themselves above quite a middle- 
 class position. Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Weird, 
 well-to-do as they were in money matters 
 and living on their own land, would never 
 have dreamed of such a thing, for instance, 
 as calling upon the mayoress and so getting 
 invited to entertainments at which they 
 might chance to meet any of the Close peo-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 25 
 
 pie. And Mr. Jacob Weird must be given 
 clearly to understand that a little friendly 
 attention on the part of Dr. Barbegan would 
 never justify him in forgetting or seeking to 
 overleap the sunk fence which propriety 
 had put down between himself and those 
 whose birth entitled them to browse on the 
 uncontaminated park lands of the minor 
 aristocracy. 
 
 So Mrs. Grayson, who was the arch- 
 deacon's wife, and Mrs. Garfleet and Mrs. 
 Premonay, the wives respectively of the 
 minor canon and the vicar choral, and Mrs. 
 Dalmeny, whose husband was the cathedral 
 proctor, always made a point of passing 
 Jacob Weird by when they chanced to meet 
 him anywhere in the Crawlborough streets, 
 without even the glance of acknowledgment 
 which they would have accorded to the up- 
 lifted cap of an errand-boy. Because the 
 errand-boy's instinct in such matters, true
 
 26 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 as that which teaches the robin to build its 
 first nest as correctly as any later ones, 
 would know exactly how much the glance 
 of acknowledgment meant ; whilst Jacob 
 Weird, always on the watch no doubt, like 
 others of his class, for a nibble of the tooth- 
 some herbage whose fragrance he was near 
 enough to sniff, would translate it into an 
 invitation to come up higher, in fact to 
 cross the sunk fence and come into the 
 browsing ground of his betters. 
 
 Therefore, if Jacob Weird had been a 
 man who cared for society, the dean's kind- 
 liness would have been against him rather 
 than otherwise, for it made the people a 
 little above him careful to let him see that 
 he must not take it for more than it 
 was worth, whilst those on his own level, 
 or a little below it, drew aside from him 
 with a natural jealousy, feeling that lie was 
 allowed to stand where they could not come.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 27 
 
 And the result was just what he would have 
 wished — that he was let alone by almost 
 everybody.
 
 28 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 TTIRAM WEIRD, the present repre- 
 -*"*- sentative of the Weird family, lived 
 at the Crawl Farm, a substantial homestead 
 which took its name from the river to 
 whose brink its gardens and pasture-lands 
 sloped. 
 
 The property had belonged to the family 
 for some generations back, and had once 
 been extensive enough to make its owners 
 people of consideration in the neighbour- 
 hood, though never lifting them into the 
 rank of the county families. But old David 
 Weird's father, grandfather to Jacob and 
 Hiram, to whom a couple of hundred acres
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 29 
 
 of the land had come unencumbered by lien 
 or mortgage, had been a man given to more 
 exciting pursuits than the tilling of fields, 
 and so he and the land had parted company 
 acre after acre, until, when David took to 
 it, not more than a third was left, and that 
 third heavily encumbered with debt, which 
 kept him for most of his life, spite of care 
 and frugality, a poor man. 
 
 Still, however, he managed to buy back 
 as much of the land as had been sold, be- 
 sides freeing some house property in the 
 High Street, which had been mortgaged to 
 his uncle, Shallum Weird, the then law 
 stationer at the Chantry. So that, when 
 the time came for him to give up business 
 and retire to a comfortable little home at 
 Crawlthorpe, a mile or two further up the 
 river, he was able to settle his eldest son 
 Hiram in a much more eligible position 
 than that which he had himself inherited ;
 
 30 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 whilst Jacob, who had never shown any 
 taste for agricultural pursuits, was put as 
 pupil to his bachelor uncle Jonathan, with 
 the understanding that he was to succeed 
 to the law stationing interest ; and this, to- 
 gether with the High Street property and a 
 few shares in the Crawlborough Bank, was 
 his patrimony. 
 
 Hiram was just thirty when he married 
 Grace Bellfield, from Crawlthorpe, and 
 settled on the farm. He did well there, 
 especially as his father was at hand for 
 counsel whenever it was needed. Ten years 
 of good honest work under the old man's 
 vigilant eye redeemed every inch of the 
 land that had been mortgaged by the grand- 
 father who played so high and raced so 
 hard in King George's time. And David, 
 lying on his death-bed there in that cottage 
 by the river-side, was able, and it was al- 
 most the last thing he did, to read the deed
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 31 
 
 which restored to his family the free pos- 
 session of all that had ever been their own. 
 Then he died content. 
 
 So at forty Hiram Weird was a man to 
 whom fathers pointed when they wished 
 their sons to see what courage, perseverance, 
 and cheerfulness can do in achieving success. 
 The sunshine of life seemed to gather round 
 him, as its shadow did round the younger 
 brother. Hiram was a large, hale, well- 
 built man, ruddy of face, genial of manner, 
 with a frank straightforwardness in his blue 
 eyes, and a heartiness in his tone, which 
 seemed to make others welcome to all he 
 had to give them. A man not backward 
 in coming forward, a man who had his 
 honourable ambitions, who would be glad 
 to rise when it could be fairly done, who 
 had the nature to enjoy all that life had to 
 give, both for soul and body. 
 
 Yet somehow one felt that in the fence
 
 32 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 which guarded this fine bright manhood 
 there were weak places — who has them 
 not? — through which the wild beast from 
 without might enter, or the treasure within 
 be carried forth. As the people said, he 
 could take his glass and more, though he 
 always carried it like a gentleman. And 
 he knew a good horse when he saw it, 
 especially if it was a race-horse, and he 
 enjoyed excitement just enough to lay a few 
 pounds now and then upon his favourite at 
 the Derby or the St. Leger ; and being in a 
 better position than his father before him, 
 and having only one child, a little girl who 
 would one day come into a handsome pro- 
 perty, it would have pleased him better, 
 though he was far too loving a husband to 
 make any complaint about it, if his wife 
 could have seen her way to a little more 
 of the modern style in their manner of 
 living. Love of good living, love of popu-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 33 
 
 larity, love of excitement, love of display; 
 at any of these three places the fence might 
 break down. But then again at any of 
 them the faultiness was as yet so little that 
 the putting in of a bit of thorn now and 
 then seemed all that was necessary. And 
 this bit of thorn, this occasional mending 
 up where temptation had come in or foot- 
 steps gone out to meet it, was supplied by 
 Hiram Weird's wife, than whom a simpler, 
 quieter, more prudent and home-loving 
 woman never lived. So that all things had 
 a fair chance of being prosperous, though 
 old David lay in his grave in Crawlthorpe 
 churchyard, no longer able to give a look 
 round over the crops, or to hint that the 
 owner of them was becoming too much of 
 a gentleman. 
 
 Then the farmhouse itself. The sunshine 
 gathered round that as it did round Hiram 
 Weird. It stood substantial and foursquare 
 
 VOL. 1. D
 
 34 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 in the midst of its pleasant old garden, the 
 warm colouring of a hundred summers and 
 winters on its red brick walls, the mellow- 
 ness of aspect about it only acquired by 
 houses that have been the homes, genera- 
 tion after generation, of one family, whose 
 traditions and memories are unbroken, 
 whose graves lie together under the same 
 church shadow, whose joys and sorrows, 
 hopes and fears, have been lived through at 
 the same fireside, brightened by the same 
 faith. Big, warm, cheery, and genial, it 
 seemed to be brooding its dwellers, warm- 
 ing and comforting them from all outside 
 alarms. And its four-fronted aspect, square 
 and brave alike towards north, south, east, 
 and west, was like a promise of good, and 
 a defiance of ill for those who had gathered 
 their treasures within. 
 
 Everyone knew the Crawl Farm by the 
 clump of elm-trees which stood on the
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 35 
 
 sunny side of it, down towards the river ; 
 and everyone who had any experience in 
 agriculture could have told that the land 
 must be rich indeed which could rear such 
 giants as those trees, and clothe them year 
 after year with such wealth of foliage, the 
 first to bud and the last to fade in all the 
 country round. And, let the blight fall 
 where it would, it never fell on the Crawl 
 Farm elm-trees, and, let the storm blast 
 what else it might, it never blasted them, 
 such store of life was laid up in them, such 
 elastic power to bend, not break, under 
 whatever force wrestled with them. And 
 the tall grass grew and the wild flowers 
 bloomed, and the sheep grazed peacefully 
 beneath them, and their great roots stretched 
 down to the river, and in their branches the 
 rooks built, and the blackbirds sang, and 
 their shelter lay stronger year by year, 
 either for warmth or coolness, on the old 
 
 d2
 
 36 TIIE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 home, which they brooded as that home 
 brooded its children within it. 
 
 Entering the house one felt there was 
 peace and plenty everywhere, for those who 
 could be content with it. Of luxury there 
 was none, nor, at present, of style. The 
 big kitchen was close to the front door, its 
 bacon rack thickly set with flitches and 
 hams, its goodly array of tins, brasses, and 
 well-scoured copper utensils full in view of 
 afternoon or other callers. And coming 
 out of the best parlour, a panelled room 
 with seats all round its two bow windows, 
 you stepped straight across the hall into 
 the dairy, that arrangement having been 
 indeed planned with wisdom aforethought, 
 that the mistress might step back and forth 
 at milking time, making sure that her 
 pans were properly filled, and then return- 
 ing to her spinning wheel without loss of 
 time. As indeed Mrs. Weird did now. the
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 37 
 
 spinning wheel being only exchanged for 
 some substantial piece of knitting work in 
 the shape of stocking or toilet cover or 
 counterpane. And next to the best parlour, 
 still well in view of 'the front door — for in 
 those days the farmer's wife gloried in her 
 work — was the china pantry, and then the 
 store closet, and then the larder, all with 
 good wholesome ventilation and light right 
 through them, displaying both themselves 
 and their contents with a cheery innocence 
 which had no need to be ashamed. Why 
 should they indeed, when everything in 
 them was of the best, when from the 
 quaint old set of blue and white china, and 
 the finely-cut, slender-stemmed glass used 
 only at weddings and christenings and 
 funerals, down to the commonest bit of 
 crockery in which the berry pies for the 
 farming men were baked, everything was 
 as clean, and pure, and sweet, and spotless
 
 38 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 as labour and good management could 
 make it? 
 
 As indoors, so out of doors. There too 
 parlour and kitchen met on the friendliest 
 of terms, the red-currant bushes stretching 
 boldly up to the rose beds in front of the best 
 room window, the clumps of rhubarb, with 
 fine masses of light and shadow amongst 
 their broad leaves, reaching, without con- 
 sciousness of anything indecorous in the 
 proceeding, to give coolness and shelter to 
 pinks, wallflowers, and violets, whose sweet- 
 ness one knew almost a mile away. And 
 down to the river walk, past the elm. trees, 
 beds of knotted majoram and marigold 
 contended for the mastery with purple 
 columbines, and huge crimson peonies, and 
 snowy green-tipped bells of Solomon's seal, 
 and woodruff that scented all the air. And 
 lavender and southern-wood grew rankly 
 round the kitchen casements, and j examine
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 39 
 
 climbed up above them until it touched the 
 gnomon of the sun-dial under the western 
 gable, the sun-dial which had first wakened 
 Jacob Weird's interest in mathematics, as 
 he used to sit amongst the long grass in the 
 orchard on that side of the house watching 
 the shadow creep round and about upon its 
 curiously lined and figured face. 
 
 The grass was long in the orchard now, 
 and the woodruff in its Maytime whiteness 
 and sweetness, and amongst it, burying her 
 rosy face in its bloom, played little Hertha 
 Weird, the seven years old child for whose 
 sake, remembering what she would some 
 day inherit, her father was minded to have 
 the Crawl Farm establishment conducted 
 upon somewhat more modern principles. 
 Near her, on a bit of mossy stump, sat 
 Uncle Jacob, the senior songman. He was 
 busy with a sheet of calculations relative to 
 a new dial which he was going to project
 
 40 THE SENIOR BONGMAW. 
 
 for the deanery garden, a dial like this 
 one in the topmost gable of the old house, 
 and he had come to copy some of its 
 markings. 
 
 But he was not too busy over them to 
 spare time for a kindly glance now and 
 then"^ to the fair-haired little lassie amongst 
 the woodrufF. For Jacob Weird loved 
 children. He was never so happy as when 
 Hertha's footsteps were pattering in and out 
 of his back parlour, and Hertha's little 
 hands wandering over his, and her big blue 
 eyes, full of innocent wonder, bent on him 
 as he told her some quaint fairy tale. 
 Tenderly, as though she were his very own, 
 had he carried the child when she was a 
 baby, and now with a sort of knightly 
 reverence, seeing the dawning girl-heart in 
 her face, would he hold her hands and kiss 
 them, and pray that she might grow up a 
 leal, true woman, not as some that he had
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 41 
 
 known. But, for all that he loved children 
 so, Jacob never married. 
 
 1 Though why you don't, I can't tell,' said 
 Mrs. Weird, coming across to the orchard 
 just then to look for Hertha. 
 
 'And I can't tell you,' replied Jacob, 
 quietly. 
 
 He always put her off in this way, but she 
 was never afraid of returning to the subject 
 with him, because he did not, as she used to 
 say, shut her up. She could rather fancy 
 that he liked to talk about it, though it 
 never came to anything. 
 
 ' There is a time for that sort of thing, 
 Jacob,' she continued, after she had been 
 sitting for a while watching the little 
 Hertha at play, c and, if you let the time go 
 by, you may find it not so easy to fit 
 yourself into other people's ways and habits. 
 You get too settled into your own.' 
 
 'That's likely enough,' returned Jacob,
 
 42 TIIE SENIOR SOXGMAN. 
 
 folding up the sheet of calculations and put- 
 ting it into his pocket. One could not do 
 much at dialling diagrams with one's sister- 
 in-law expressing her opinions upon matri- 
 mony. 
 
 ' You're the last man, Jacob, my hus- 
 band has said it many a time, to think of 
 yourself before others, and to want the 
 best of everything. But a man may drop 
 into it without knowing, and then it comes 
 harder for a wife.' 
 
 ' I should think so, Grace, but a man isn't 
 worth calling a man at all who wants the 
 best of everything, even if he hasn't a wife 
 to want it too.' 
 
 1 You don't see what I mean, Jacob. It's 
 here. You live there at the Chantry house 
 by yourself, and you naturally take to the 
 most comfortable chair and the snuggest 
 corner, and the shadiest bit of garden if you 
 are out in the sunshine. And very right
 
 THE SENIOR SOXGMAN. 43 
 
 too, things being as they are. Only when 
 you've gone on in that way until you're 
 forty or more, it comes hard to give it up, 
 and give it up you must when a wife 
 comes. It isn't easy for a man to put a 
 woman first when he has been first himself 
 in his own house for nearly twenty years. 
 I've seen it, Jacob, in other people's houses, 
 though Hiram isn't the one ever to have 
 made me feel it in my own.' 
 ' Well, Grace, and what then ?' 
 'You know very well, Jacob, what then. 
 I mean that, if you ever mean to marry at 
 all, you ought to be quick about it, because 
 every day you are naturally getting more 
 and more set in your own ways. And 
 if a wife isn't first, I mean in those sorts 
 of little things, she isn't where she ought 
 to be.' 
 
 ' And she isn't where I should put her, 
 Grace, if ever my thoughts were set that
 
 44 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 way. But they never will be set that way, 
 and so it's no use. I'm not the sort of man 
 that a woman would care to have knocking 
 about her.' 
 
 This was a door of hope, because it 
 implied that, if he had been the sort of man, 
 the woman might have been found some- 
 where, and Mrs. Weird followed up her 
 advantage accordingly. 
 
 ' If it was a woman that had a heart 
 worth loving, she wouldn't look at you twice, 
 Jacob, without finding out that you were a 
 man that any wife ought to be proud of. 
 There are women and women, but I think 
 well enough of them in a general way to be 
 pretty certain that you wouldn't have far to 
 look, even here in Crawlborough, for a wife 
 who could see your worth, even through all 
 that you put on to hide it.' 
 
 Jacob Weird turned just then and faced 
 his sister-in-law. Had she somebody in
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 45 
 
 her mind? And a man, be lie ever so 
 humble, ever so conscious of plainness and 
 awkwardness, has yet a pardonable curiosity 
 to hear the name of the woman who has 
 been picked out by his people as a suitable 
 wife for him. 
 
 Grace knew what the look meant. She 
 only smiled her pleasant, gracious, motherly 
 smile. 
 
 1 No, Jacob, it isn't that. I've nobody 
 particularly in my mind's eye, and, if I had, 
 I wouldn't be such a simpleton as to tell 
 you. I only mean that I want to see you 
 married. You would be a happier man 
 and worth more to yourself and everybody 
 else. And it isn't selfishness, Jacob/ 
 
 Unconsciously their eyes met, and then 
 travelled to little Hertha, there under the 
 Ribston pippins, picking the woodruff and 
 purple clover. If Jacob Weird kept as he 
 was, there would be nobody for his money
 
 46 THK SENIOR SCXGMAN. 
 
 but the child. And many a sister-in-law, 
 knowing that, would have tried to keep 
 him as he was. 
 
 1 No, it isn't,' he answered. ' But you 
 needn't talk, Grace. It's waste of words. 
 There will never be a wife of my own seek- 
 ing come to me now.' 
 
 1 If she isn't of your own seeking, then, 
 Jacob, I hope she will never come to you 
 at all. A man may do a good many foolish 
 things, but he never does one more foolish 
 than when he sets another to look for a 
 wife for him. Only sometimes he may not 
 exactly have the idea of a wife in his mind, 
 and he does not know what he wants, until 
 somebody sets it before him. And then, 
 when he begins to look, he sees.' 
 
 'All right, Grace. Then I should say, if 
 a man does not know what he wants, he 
 may as well not have it set before him at 
 all. A want that's only felt because you're
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 47 
 
 told about it isn't much of a want. A man 
 had best keep as he is.' 
 
 1 No, he had not — at least, not always. 
 I would like to see you as happy and pros- 
 perous as your brother Hiram, Jacob, look- 
 ing all the world in the face, and with a 
 smile for everyone, and a heart for any 
 trouble, because he knows that when he 
 crosses his own threshold there is peace 
 waiting for him, come what may outside.' 
 
 Jacob Weird sighed, but it was not a 
 sigh of pain. 
 
 ' There's one thing better, Grace. It is 
 when a man is at home within himself, 
 when he can cross the threshold of his own 
 heart, and be alone there, and be at peace 
 still. Yet I don't deny that Hiram is a 
 happier man than I am. There's always a 
 sort of sunshine about a man that has a 
 good wife and knows her worth, and, if 
 trouble comes, it doesn't hit him half so
 
 48 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 hard. All the same, Grace, you needn't 
 talk. I'm where I've put myself, and I'm 
 content.' 
 
 With that Jacob crossed over to the Rib- 
 ston pippins and kissed little Hertha, then 
 bade Mrs. Weird good-bye, and took his 
 way home by the river path, just in time to 
 miss his brother Hiram, who was coming 
 across the meadows from Cravvlthorpe.
 
 49 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 'AMI where I put myself?' said Jacob 
 -*■-*• Weird under his breath, as slowly 
 he took his way back to that little house at 
 the north end of Crawlborough Minster. 
 ' Nay, I am where a woman put me, and 
 that's the way with the most of us. It's 
 just that which does it, whether it's for good 
 or whether it's for evil. But let them talk. 
 It's all one to me. And Grace has a good 
 heart, bless her !' 
 
 Then he went down a bit of shelving 
 bank, where the river formed a sort of little 
 creek, running in amongst tall willow herb 
 
 VOL. I. E
 
 50 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 and rank sedge grasses, and sat him there 
 to think. 
 
 It would be yet a good hour before the 
 bells began to chime for afternoon service 
 at the cathedral, and no duty was nearer 
 to him for the present than to do his duty 
 there. And for Jacob Weird to sit still 
 and remember was always easy. 
 
 He chose that bit of bank down amongst 
 the willow herb, just as he chose his place 
 in the choir behind Dr. Premonay's surplice, 
 for the sake of beinsj well out of sight. 
 There was a right of footpath across his 
 brother's farm to Crawlborough, but no one 
 ever came down to that bit of creek, and 
 no one would ever find him there, unless 
 pursuing him of set purpose. And so some- 
 times in the summer afternoons he would 
 bring his pages of calculations and make for 
 himself a quiet retreat at the water's edge, 
 and hear far off the hum of farm-work, and
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 5L 
 
 little Hertha's laugh as she played in the 
 orchard, and the chimes of St. Anne's Con- 
 vent ringing down through the elm-tree 
 avenue, where the nuns, black-robed and 
 quiet-faced, were saying their daily prayers. 
 And oftener than not the page of calcula- 
 tions w r ould fall away into the grass, and 
 the pictures that passed across his memory 
 were such as no English sun had ever shone 
 upon or English landscape given. 
 
 For much had fallen out in Jacob Weird's 
 life that his brother Hiram, tilling his fields 
 and counting up his acres, and taking little 
 dips now and then into more questionable 
 sorts of amusement, had never so much as 
 dreamed of. And when Grace, in her 
 cheerful, motherly way, would fain have 
 persuaded him to the search for a wife who 
 could light up that lonely little home of 
 his with the brightness which only a woman 
 could bring, she little knew what thoughts 
 
 e 2 
 
 liMiwcDoiTV nr iillNntC
 
 «52 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 followed in the track of her words, what 
 presence, unforgotten, intangible, but filling 
 the whole circle of his life, stood between 
 him and the pleasant, monotonous domes- 
 ticity which she longed after for him. And 
 this was how it had fallen out. 
 
 Jacob Weird's had not been by any means 
 an eventful career. People knew all about 
 it, except for that two years abroad which 
 made the home-loving, respectable folk of 
 Crawlborough look upon him ever after as 
 in some sort a foreigner. The two brothers 
 had been brought up together in their 
 father's house, David Weird intending 
 Hiram to succeed him on the farm, whilst 
 Jacob, following the family custom, which 
 for many years had given one son to the 
 land, and another to the law, was in due 
 time to be articled to his uncle at Crawl- 
 borough. Besides, the younger lad had 
 always been Jonathan Weird's favourite,
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 53 
 
 and Jonathan was a bachelor — the legal 
 side of the family for the most part eschew- 
 ing matrimony — and well to do, and he 
 and David of the Crawl Farm had settled it 
 between them that the land was to be 
 Hiram's portion, but that, instead of so much 
 of its value going to Jacob, he should have 
 the law stationery interest and the High 
 Street property, consisting of a couple of 
 substantial well-built houses, which brought 
 in a comfortable rental. 
 
 Jonathan, who was a kindly old man, 
 liked to have the boy with him, and so it 
 came to pass that Jacob, from the age of 
 ten, spent most of his time at the Chantry 
 house, going to school to old Mr. Penfold 
 of the Cathedral Close. And at nights he 
 used to amuse himself in his uncle's garden, 
 whose back wall was within a pace or two 
 of that which bounded the pleasant old 
 lawns and flower-beds of the deanery.
 
 54 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 Strolling from time to time amongst 
 those flower-beds, Dr. Barbegan, — a man of 
 five and thirty, newly appointed to the office 
 which had been procured for him through the 
 influence of the Duke of Broadmarsh, whose 
 estate lay next Crawlchester, the ancient 
 seat of the Barbegans, — heard the little lad 
 singing as he weeded the walks for Uncle 
 Jonathan. And the dean was so struck 
 with the beauty of his voice that he never 
 rested until he had obtained old David 
 Weird's permission to try the boy for the 
 cathedral choir. 
 
 He got him in too, and there was no 
 voice like little Jacob's amongst them all. 
 People came from afar to hear it. There 
 was always a good congregation at Crawl- 
 borough Minster, let the preacher be as 
 tedious as he might, if only it was known 
 that Jonathan Weird's nephew was going to 
 sing the solo in the anthem. A queer little
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 55 
 
 figure he looked in his white surplice and 
 crimped frill, and his big black eyes and 
 his straggling black hair, and his sharp 
 pinched features, for one might think, to 
 look at him, that he never got enough to 
 eat. And even in those days he would get 
 well away out of sight if he could, behind 
 any shoulders that were broad enough to 
 hide him, though not a sound of tremor was 
 there in his young voice, as it echoed fresh 
 and clear away through the long aisles and 
 up to the ancient dust of the topmost choir 
 arches. For, singing, Jacob forgot himself. 
 He only remembered when the music had 
 died out; and then, shrivelling himself up 
 inside his surplice, and getting his sharp 
 little chin as far down as it would go into 
 his frill, he trembled there behind the big 
 music books, and was never happy again 
 until he found himself safely back in the 
 Chantry garden.
 
 56 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 Now Dean Barbegan was a bachelor. 
 Almost necessarily so, for bis preferment, 
 with all the pickings belonging to it, was 
 not worth more than a paltry nine hundred 
 a year, and upon that sum any lady whom 
 a Barbegan would have married could not 
 live. And his elder brother, Sir Montague 
 Barbegan, was a bachelor too, though not 
 necessarily so by any means. The bachelor- 
 ship was almost the only point of similarity 
 between them, Dean Barbegan being as 
 guileless a man as ever stepped, simple, 
 unworldly, shy, and retiring, devoted to 
 classics and mathematics, and amateur 
 scientific pursuits ; whilst his brother, Sir 
 Montague, was a popular man of society, 
 who might at forty have married any young 
 girl in the county, so people said, only that 
 he got more enjoyment out of his life by 
 not having a lady to share it with him — at 
 least, permanently.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 57 
 
 For people said, moreover, that when Sir 
 Montague went to town, as he did for two 
 or three months every se"ason, and when he 
 went abroad, as he did regularly when the 
 season was over, his conduct was by no 
 means what that of a dean's brother ought 
 to be, especially a dean's brother who was 
 living at the deanery. But no one liked to 
 say much, for Dr. Barbegan was the kindest 
 of men, the very soul of honour and charity, 
 and so straitened in his income that he 
 could not have given away anything like 
 what he did amongst the poor, if the baro- 
 net, by paying handsomely for his board, 
 had not made things comfortable. For Sir 
 Montague had two thousand a year at the 
 very least, and no one to spend it upon, 
 unless 
 
 And then people looked wise, but said 
 no more. 
 
 So little Jacob sang on like a young
 
 58 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 archangel, his voice rolling silver sweet into 
 the dusty old corners of the cathedral ; and 
 when he could be spared from school and 
 choir practice, he used to go home to the 
 Crawl Farm. But there was not much to 
 make home pleasant to him now. His 
 mother was dead. Hiram was away at a 
 boarding-school. His father was busy over 
 the ploughing and sowing and reaping. 
 Marisha Pennydrop, who had risen to the 
 estate of housekeeper since Mrs. Weird's 
 death, was somewhat of a scold, preferring 
 brightly scoured pans and a clear course for 
 her scrubbing-brush to the clatter and patter 
 of a restless boy ; whilst as for singing, she 
 ' couldn't abide it.' So that Jacob was never 
 loth to go back again to the Chantry house, 
 where he could be as tuneful as he liked, 
 either with voice, or piano, or fiddle. 
 
 Thus the years passed until he was fif- 
 teen, and his voice broke. But with the
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 59 
 
 advice both of Sir Montague and the dean, 
 who took much interest in the lad, his 
 musical education was still carried on under 
 Dr. Sparkes, whilst his uncle Jonathan 
 took him in hand for the law stationery ; 
 singing, as the old man shrewdly said, being 
 a thing you might do with or without, 
 whilst law, so long as there were men and 
 women to quarrel with-^aph other, was 
 always there to make a living out of. 
 
 Jacob worked well at both until his voice 
 came back to him, a tenor so sweet and 
 pure and powerful that Sir Montague said 
 it was a shame no one should listen to it 
 but the church folk of Crawlborough. He 
 must go and study in Italy for three years, 
 if the money could be found for his expenses 
 during that time. 
 
 David Weird, bent on one thing, to get 
 and keep money enough to buy back the 
 title-deeds of his own land, was in no wise
 
 60 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 minded to spare anything for what might, 
 after all, only get the lad into shiftless, ex- 
 travagant ways. And Jonathan, scratching 
 away from dawn to sunset behind the brown 
 gauze blind, his soul grown well-nigh as 
 dead and mechanical as the sentences which 
 he spent his life in copying, said, if Jacob 
 was for that sort of thing, he must do it on 
 his own responsibility. All he could pro- 
 mise was that he would keep the business on 
 for him during the three years he was away, 
 so that, if he came back, as he most likely 
 w 7 ould, a poorer man than he went, there 
 would still be a way left to earn his bread 
 and cheese. But, as Tor paying out hard 
 cash for teaching a grown man to sing fal- 
 la-la's, he would none of it. 
 
 Then the baronet, who was never nig- 
 gardly with his money, came to the rescue. 
 He would be responsible for the sum re- 
 quired by Jacob Weird for three years'
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 61 
 
 study of music. He could repay it by in- 
 stalments when his position as a professional 
 singer was established ; and if that happy 
 time never came to pass, well, Sir Montague 
 promised not to be troublesome about it. 
 And the end of the matter was that at 
 twenty Jacob Weird, shy, quiet, self-dis- 
 trustful, but with all the determination of a 
 born musician in him, entered himself as a 
 student in the school of music in Milan, 
 there to do what he could on his own ac- 
 count in the great world of art, to which, 
 and not any longer to the law stationery 
 profession, he felt that the voice was calling 
 him.
 
 62 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 TN Milan Jacob worked hard and lived 
 -*- sparingly, neither of these conditions 
 being by any means a new experience to 
 him. For Jonathan Weird was not a man 
 to spend a shilling where sixpence would 
 serve its purpose, and in that little Chantry 
 house as scant a table was kept as would 
 have satisfied even the nuns of St. Anne's 
 Convent. 
 
 There was no need for him to keep up 
 any position in the place. So he took lodg- 
 ings witli the widow Valeria, a hard-fea- 
 tured, managing dame, with no children of
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 63 
 
 her own, who kept a fruit and flower shop 
 in one of the little streets at the back of 
 the cathedral. He did not pay the widow 
 much for his board, for, as soon as he had 
 picked up enough of the language, he began 
 to help her in keeping her accounts, and he 
 did not disdain either to take her place in 
 selling grapes and melons when she was 
 away in the country gardens round about, 
 laying in her stores for the week. Then, 
 before many weeks had passed, he was able 
 himself, having worked hard under Dr. 
 Sparkes, to give lessons in music and sing- 
 ing, and by the end of the year he was sup- 
 porting himself entirely, though not yet able 
 to pay back any part of what Sir Montague 
 had advanced. 
 
 That merry baronet and his good, un- 
 worldly brother, who had been persuaded 
 to come to Italy with him for once, stayed 
 in Milan on their way down to Rome, and
 
 64 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 the former showed no lack of friendliness 
 towards the young man whose fortunes he 
 was supposed to be making. For Sir Mon- 
 tague, though people might say what they 
 liked about him, could give very good ad- 
 vice to those who were willing to listen to 
 it; and, what was more, he could give it 
 with the air of a man who had followed it 
 all out to the letter for himself. To hear 
 him one would think that, like a very Sir 
 Galahad, he had passed through the shoals 
 and quicksands of youthful temptations, 
 bearing the white flower of a stainless life 
 right on into the prime of his manhood. 
 And he could discourse so well upon econ- 
 omy too, upon the necessity for self-denial 
 in a youth who had his own way to make ; 
 how one must strive after plain living and 
 high thinking ; how success was only won 
 by those who sought it through much loss 
 of mere personal enjoyment ; how for laurels
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. Q5 
 
 that were worth the wearing one must be 
 content to wait patiently, resting short of 
 nothing but the very highest that could be 
 obtained. 
 
 Jacob listened in simple trust, as those 
 listen who have found nothing but faith 
 amongst their fellow-men. The dean stood 
 by and heard it all, with a look half sad, 
 half humorous, upon his face. It was 
 nothing new to him. Montague had a fine 
 gift of volubility, could take up other 
 people's thoughts and express them as his 
 own with an ease and earnestness far sur- 
 passing those of men who had wrought out 
 their own convictions and lived them too. 
 Besides, it would have been a thankless 
 task to expose one's own brother, to hint 
 that his actions were not as beautiful as his 
 words. If Jacob could take the advice 
 and act upon it, good. One might, as the 
 pious George Herbert says, pick out treasure 
 
 VOL. I. r
 
 66 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 from an earthen pot. So the dean was 
 silent. And after a week at Milan, during 
 which time young Weird had come up 
 almost every evening to the hotel where 
 the two were staying, Dr. Barbegan and his 
 brother went home. 
 
 When Jacob had been a year at his quiet 
 little lodgings over the fruit and flower 
 shop, the widow Valeria's niece, Nanni, came 
 home from the convent where she had been 
 a sort of charity scholar. Came home to 
 help her aunt in the housework, by way of 
 doing something to earn a living for herself. 
 For at sixteen, the widow Valeria said, with 
 a shake of her black-kerchiefed head, a girl 
 must put as much into the world at least as 
 she took out of it in the shape of food and 
 clothing. There was work enough to do, 
 now that the shop was getting upon its feet, 
 and Nanni could employ her time to better 
 purpose than saying praj'ers fifty times a
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 67 
 
 day in front of that picture of St. Ursula in 
 the convent chapel of Priadora. So Nanni 
 was bidden home to a secular life. 
 
 She was a bright girl, with a voice like a 
 nightingale, and a face as beautiful as her 
 voice. It was as good as a picture to see 
 her flitting about amongst the grapes and 
 melons and tall white Florentine lilies in 
 the widow Valeria's front shop, picking off 
 the dead leaves, re-arranging the flowers, 
 holding them to her soft red lips as though 
 they were things that could be loved and 
 caressed, the only drawback being that they 
 could give nothing in return. 
 
 And poor Nanni needed something, for 
 her aunt was by no means an angel of pa- 
 tience. Jacob Weird's heart used to thrill 
 within him sometimes with infinite pity as 
 he heard the widow's voice scolding and 
 worrying from morning to night. There 
 was no servant maid kept now, and Nanni 
 
 F 2
 
 68 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 was far better than a servant, because she 
 could not give warning, and, if ever she 
 ventured into the least little bit of temper 
 on her own account, the widow would bring 
 tears to the front, bewailing the ingratitude 
 which was repaying her care with insolence 
 and her protection with defiance. And a 
 hard box on the ear, or a vicious snatch at 
 the long black curls, whose untidiness was 
 always inviting attack, would emphasize the 
 words, and Nanni, crushed and trembling, 
 would take refuge in the little garden be- 
 hind the house. And there Jacob Weird, 
 strolling up and down, studying his compo- 
 sitions for the director, would find her pull- 
 ing the jasmine blossoms to pieces, or tread- 
 ing underfoot the juicy stems of the melons, 
 for the sake of having something to crush, 
 and what could he do but comfort her ? 
 
 And afterwards, what else could he do 
 but fall in love with her, when she lifted
 
 THE SENIOK SONGMAN. 69 
 
 her great black eyes and smiled on him 
 through their tears ? For he had never 
 known the sunshine of a girl's smile before, 
 nor the touch of a girl's hand upon his 
 own, nor the lightning flash of passion that 
 quivers down, keen and sharp and beauti- 
 ful, once and for ever into a true man's 
 heart. Nor had he known how, coming 
 there, it means life-long happiness or life- 
 long pain, if the man be true. And, if he 
 be not true, how worse than all other light- 
 ning blast it is ! 
 
 So, after thus finding her a few times, 
 Jacob Weird knew how it must fare with 
 him — knew in a strange new happiness, 
 which brightened all his work and all his 
 days. Perhaps the widow Valeria knew 
 too, for by-and-by she did not scold Nanni 
 so often, and she spoke no word of rebuke 
 if the young girl, neglecting a little more 
 the grapes and lilies in the front shop, found
 
 70 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 her way in warm moonlighted summer 
 evenings down to the bottom of the garden, 
 where the white jasmine bloomed and the 
 melons lay golden green beneath their broad 
 shading leaves, and Jacob Weird sat under 
 a trellised vine, conning over fugue and 
 counterpoint for the director. And was 
 Jacob glad when he heard the rustle of 
 Nanni's coming through the silent gloom ? 
 Ask a traveller if he is glad when, after 
 losing his way over morass and moor, he 
 sees the warm light in some far-off window 
 to tell of rest and home. Ask the sailor if, 
 when becalmed in tropic seas, panting under 
 brazen sky and scorching wave, he is glad 
 to feel the soft cool breeze which stirs the 
 idle sails onward to where he may see land, 
 his own native land, dim the horizon. And 
 then ask if Jacob Weird was glad when the 
 girl he had learned to love came to him
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 71 
 
 there through the twilight amongst the blos- 
 soming jasmine. 
 
 Still the widow Valeria said nothing, 
 only improved in her temper, which made 
 everything much happier in that little house 
 behind the cathedral of Milan. And some- 
 times of an evening they used all to go out 
 to the arcade, or Galleria, facing the piazza, 
 and have a little feast of coffee and fruit 
 and cakes at a table to themselves, listening 
 to the music meanwhile, and watching the 
 crowds of well-dressed people moving to 
 and fro like a many-coloured picture. And 
 it was one night, as they came home from 
 the Galleria, and the widow Valeria, having 
 unlocked the garden gate, hurried up to 
 the house, perhaps of set purpose, to see 
 whether all had gone well with the shop, 
 that Jacob Weird, drawing Nanni back into 
 the vine shade, told her in one long sweet
 
 72 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 kiss what had been growing in his heart all 
 these months. And Nanni, nestling her 
 soft fingers into his, told him, in the pretty 
 broken English he had taught her, that she 
 had never been so happy before. 
 
 The widow Valeria did not so much as 
 shake her black-kerchiefed head when that 
 night, walking up and down the garden 
 with her, the young man told her every- 
 thing. She had seen it coming, she said, 
 and she thought Nanni would be safe with 
 the good-hearted young Englishman. The 
 girl was young and very lovely, and a little 
 bit vain, perhaps, and it would be very 
 wise that she should find shelter in a steady 
 faithful love, before she had learned to 
 know anything of the wickedness of the 
 world. Because there icas a great deal of 
 wickedness. 
 
 And the widow Valeria folded her ker- 
 chief round her and drew down the corners
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 73 
 
 of her mouth. Yes, it was a wicked world, 
 and who so well as she had taken her spot- 
 less way through it, and would see, so far 
 as in her lay, that Nanni did the same ? 
 For she had been young herself once — ay, 
 and pretty too, though that was long ago — 
 and she had known what it was to be poor 
 and have fair promises made to her. But 
 she thanked all the saints she was a woman 
 still that the honestest in Milan might be 
 proud to know. She had listened to no 
 fair promises that did not mean the priest's 
 blessing and the church's sanction, and here 
 she was, poor, but for all that one that had 
 no need to be ashamed of herself. 
 
 Only it must not be an open engagement 
 just yet. People would say she had been 
 laying snares for the young man, and 
 wanted to get Nanni off her hands. Be- 
 sides, he had his way to make yet, and the 
 girl knew nothing— coming from the Pria-
 
 74 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 dora convent, where she had only said her 
 prayers — about how to manage a house and 
 stretch a lira as far as it would go. She 
 would have to stretch it, too, with a musical 
 student, for goodness knew how poor they 
 were for the most part to begin with, and 
 for the most part, too, they ended as they 
 began. But she did not want money for 
 Nanni, only that the girl should be safe. 
 So, when he had a fair prospect of success 
 in his profession, they should be betrothed 
 publicly, and Nanni might receive the good 
 wishes of her friends, but not till then. 
 And the widow Valeria would rather his 
 people at home should not be told of it, 
 for they too might say she had had a hand 
 in it, which St, Borromeo himself could wit- 
 ness she had not, and she bore too good a 
 character in Milan to let people fling such a 
 taunt at her. 
 
 It was all right. Jacob Weird kept his
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 75 
 
 happiness in his own heart. He had neither 
 mother, sister, nor friend to tell of it. How 
 it overflowed and enriched all his life could 
 only be known by the beauty into which 
 that life blossomed. How hard he worked 
 to win for himself such success as should 
 give him the right to claim Nanni for his 
 own before all the world ! How little all 
 else seemed to him but the art he laboured 
 in and the girl he laboured for ! How 
 sweet to him was his simple fare and his 
 lowly lodging ! — how bright the picture of 
 the life they would live together when he 
 could bring her to England as his wife, 
 giving her ease, comfort, plenty, where 
 now all seemed to be lacking to her but his 
 love ! Oh, the joy and the brightness and 
 the purpose which lifted Jacob Weird to 
 his true manhood, as he felt that now he 
 had another to work for — that life could 
 never be sweet for himself save as he made
 
 76 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 it sweet for her whom he had chosen, and 
 who loved him ! 
 
 He had been two years in Milan, when 
 the Dean of Crawlborough and Sir Montague 
 Barbegan, returning from a little tour in 
 Naples and South Italy, took Milan on their 
 way home. Sir Montague liked the place, 
 and he had plenty of time to spare, and he 
 had a natural wish to see how the young 
 musician, whom he was befriending, had 
 made his way since last they met. As for 
 the dean, it did not signify to him where 
 he went, but he was glad to see Jacob 
 Weird again, though he had always had a 
 little feeling about his deserting his place in 
 Crawlborough Minster, and desert it he 
 knew he would if he once gained a footing 
 in the higher ranks of his profession. Dean 
 Barbegan's idea was for a man to do the 
 best he could in the niche where Providence 
 had placed him, not to seek another higher
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 77 
 
 up. And in support of this theory he would 
 quote St. Paul's words, ' I have learned in 
 whatsoever state I am therewith to be con- 
 tent.' In arguing the matter with Jacob 
 Weird, before the Milan scheme had been 
 decided upon, Jacob had got rather the 
 better of him by noting that i therewith' was 
 not in the original, a fact which consider- 
 ably modified the force of the Apostle's 
 statement, simply making it incumbent upon 
 a good man to be content in his state, not 
 content with it ; at peace so long as he 
 remained there, but quite ready, neverthe- 
 less, to take wing when the time for flight 
 arrived. The dean was constrained to say 
 there was sense in that view of it, but he 
 had a feeling all the same about the young 
 man's going. However, one must let people 
 choose for themselves. 
 
 Sir Montague was charmed. This time 
 he was not satisfied with sending for Jacob
 
 78 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 Weird to his own room at the grand hotel 
 in the cathedral piazza, but he came himself 
 to visit him in his little room over the 
 flower and fruit shop. And he was intro- 
 duced to the widow Valeria, and to little 
 Nanni, who looked up with shy, bright, 
 wondering eyes to .the English milord, who 
 looked so grand with his already grey hair 
 and curled black moustache, and upright, 
 dignified, soldierly mien, so different from 
 Jacobo, as she called him, who was more 
 like one of her own countrymen. 
 
 Sir Montague heard her sing, too. No 
 one made many visits to the fruit shop 
 without having that pleasure, for Nanni, as 
 she fingered the cherries and strawberries, 
 and arranged the grape clusters, and filled 
 her big brown earthenware pots of roses 
 and lilies, would trill to herself little bits of 
 the airs she had heard her lover sing, and 
 they were never so sweet to him as then.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 79 
 
 But she must sing something better than 
 that to the English milord, the gentleman 
 who had been so kind to Jacobo, and so 
 she came and stood before them as they 
 talked together under the trellis at the 
 bottom of the garden, and she sang some 
 of the sweet church music which the nuns 
 had taught her, and sang it so fairly, and 
 looked so fair as she sang, that Sir Montague 
 said, as he had once said of the little Crawl- 
 borough chorister, it was a shame no one 
 else should hear.
 
 80 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 QIR MONTAGUE said more than that. 
 ^ He said he should not be content until 
 Nanni's voice was put under proper train- 
 ing, with a view to her one day entering 
 the musical profession. And, after a few 
 visits to the fruit and flower shop, he brought 
 the widow Valeria to agree that it should 
 be so, he undertaking to furnish the class 
 fees for a couple of years. 
 
 Nanni was nothing loth. It would be 
 far pleasantcr to spend her time singing in 
 the great practising-room of the Conserva- 
 toire, where doubtless many would praise
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 81 
 
 both her face and voice, than to pick dead 
 leaves off flowers, and arrange cherries and 
 strawberries, and do household work under 
 the fire of the widow Valeria's tongue. And 
 she would be able to walk home with her 
 lover, too, and sometimes they might turn 
 into the cathedral and have a chat together 
 in the shadowy crypt, where one solitary 
 light only burned over St. Borromeo's 
 shrine. The widow Valeria need know 
 nothing, and there could be no harm in it. 
 Yes, Nanni would gratefully accept the 
 English milord's good offer, and do her 
 best to let him see that his money was not 
 spent in vain. And the end of it was, that 
 just a week after Sir Montague's first visit 
 to the widow Valeria, Jacob Weird and 
 Nanni were singing together in the school 
 of music, much happier than their noble 
 patron knew, their happiness being as yet 
 for themselves alone. 
 
 VOL. I. G
 
 82 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 But the baronet's kindness did not end 
 here. He and his brother, the dean, had 
 intended to spend about a fortnight in 
 Milan, and then return to Crawlborough in 
 time for the Whit-tide services, which Dr. 
 Barbegan never liked to miss. When the 
 time arrived, however, for their departure, 
 Sir Montague said that he should prefer 
 remaining a little longer in North Italy. 
 The climate suited him well, no one needed 
 him at home, and his own purposes would 
 be quite sufficiently served if he reached 
 London in time to hear a few good operas 
 before the season closed. So he proposed 
 that Jacob Weird, who had now been two 
 years away from his home and friends, 
 should, instead of himself, be the dean's 
 travelling companion ; and, that expenses 
 should not stand in the way of such a com- 
 fortable arrangement, he generously offered 
 to defray them all out of his own purse.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAX. 83 
 
 Jacob could not refuse, though the pros- 
 pect of six weeks at Crawlborough was not 
 so pleasant now as it would have been a 
 year before. He would rather have stayed 
 in Milan, with Nanni to sing by his side in 
 the big class-room, and at night have loitered 
 with her in the jasmine shade at the bottom 
 of the garden, the widow Valeria never 
 objecting to anything of that sort, so long 
 as no public manifestation was made of the 
 state of affairs between them. But when 
 he even suggested that it might be advisable 
 for him to keep to his work until the end 
 of the three years, Sir Montague was evi- 
 dently grieved at the slighting of his kindly 
 offer — would, indeed, almost look upon it 
 as an offence if his proposal were not 
 accepted — and, moreover, represented so 
 strongly what the disappointment of the 
 dean would be if he had to take his journey 
 alone, that Jacob had no alternative but to 
 
 g2
 
 84 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 fall in with the arrangement, and make his 
 preparations for departure, the widow Va- 
 leria, who also had urged the visit, impress- 
 ing upon him, with almost more emphasis 
 than usual, the expediency of maintaining 
 silence amongst his English relatives on the 
 subject of his engagement with Nanni. 
 When he had a reasonable prospect of suc- 
 cess in his profession, she repeated, going 
 over the old arguments, he should publicly 
 notify the state of matters, but not till 
 then. 
 
 And with that Jacob Weird was fain to 
 be content. Might he not give Nanni, 
 before he went away, a ring to wear in 
 token, for themselves only, of the tie that 
 bound them ? No, not a ring, the widow 
 Valeria said. Such jewels were not for 
 maidens who had shops to mind and mat- 
 ting to sweep, and their own respectability 
 to take care of in a place where men were
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN, 85 
 
 many and morals not much to speak of. 
 Might he write to her, then ? No, not that 
 even. For the widow Valeria, though poor 
 enough, was, as she said, a woman of pride, 
 a woman who had known better days, and 
 it should not be said amongst strangers that 
 she had hasted to push her niece into a 
 family above her own. The girl was not 
 so old yet — no, nor so ill-favoured either — 
 that people should fling that at her. 
 
 And Valeria, giving her black kerchief a 
 twist, looked down into the garden, where 
 Nanni, fair as a rose, and with the long 
 black curls tossed back from a brow which 
 any painter might have taken for his model, 
 was beating the dust out of Jacob Weird's 
 bit of bed-room matting — mean work for 
 hands so soft, the young man thought, as 
 he watched her there. 
 
 But he did get one of those tossing black 
 curls for his own. And, as he acd the
 
 86 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 young girl stood together the night before 
 he went away in the gloom by St. Borro- 
 tneo's shrine, he unclasped from her neck 
 the little cross which she wore there, and 
 gave her instead a locket with his own pic- 
 ture in, bidding her wear it always for his 
 sake, which she promised to do. 
 
 1 Two months, Nanni, and I shall be 
 back. You will remember me.' 
 
 For answer the girl looked up at him 
 with sweet laughing love in her eyes. 
 
 * I shall be here,' she said, ' all of me.' 
 
 'And here for me, Nanni?' 
 
 1 Here for you, my own. For whom else 
 should I be here at all ?' 
 
 There were footsteps near, and the two 
 came out again into the dim cathedral 
 nave. 
 
 The footsteps were those of Sir Montague 
 and Dr. Barbegan, going the round of the 
 cardinals' tombs, Sir Montague a little
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 87 
 
 bored, for church matters were not in his 
 line. He had enough of them at home, 
 where he was obliged to keep up appear- 
 ances amongst the canons and the prebends, 
 and the vicars-choral and the archdeacons, 
 and all the rest of them. Still one must 
 be polite, an English gentleman most of all, 
 even at a little personal sacrifice, and this 
 was his last evening with dear, strait-laced 
 old Anselm, the dean. To-morrow he 
 should be able to amuse himself in ways 
 more congenial. 
 
 Nanni slipped quickly away from her 
 lover's side, mindful of the widow Valeria's 
 injunction about their behaviour in public, 
 and Dr. Barbegan, coming forward to make 
 some little arrangement with Jacob about 
 the journey next day, Sir Montague natu- 
 rally fell behind, and began chatting pleas- 
 antly with the young girl. 
 
 Not a thing he could have done at home,
 
 88 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 in the Crawlborough streets, especially with 
 a girl so much below hira in social position, 
 even though she had been as fair as Nanni 
 of the tossing curls and laughing black eyes, 
 without having been told about it after- 
 wards. That was the worst of Crawl- 
 borough, one had to be so painfully on 
 one's good behaviour. And it was the best 
 of foreign cities that you could follow your 
 own taste in matters of that sort, wichout 
 bringing down upon yourself anything that 
 was unpleasant, 
 
 And Nanni was surely the prettiest little 
 maiden that he had ever alighted upon in 
 those conveniently obscure walks of life 
 where the proprieties had not to be so 
 rigorously observed. If she had looked 
 irresistible amongst the melons and straw- 
 berries, with the broad sunlight shining 
 down upon her peasant dress of common 
 blue homespun, she was sweeter than ever
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 89 
 
 now, in her somewhat holiday attire of 
 white calico, with its black laced bodice, 
 and. a veil tossed coquettishly over her hair, 
 just raised at one side with a great crimson 
 rose, which she must have stolen, the mis- 
 chievous little jade, from her aunt's very 
 choicest brown earthenware pot. He must 
 have that rose, and he would pay her well 
 for it, too. 
 
 Yes, the prettiest little thing ia girls of 
 the humbler class that he had seen since 
 he came to Milan. i\nd not a simpleton 
 either, for she knew what belonged to her- 
 self; he had found that out the very first 
 night she sang to him, able to stand upon 
 her own dignity almost as firmly as a lady. 
 And, even if she had not, the widow Valeria 
 would have taken care of it for her. 
 
 A sensible woman, that widow Valeria, 
 and not of the sort to let herself be im- 
 posed upon. Nanni was fortunate in hav-
 
 90 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 ing such a one to look after her. A woman 
 who knew exactly where it was prudent to 
 go, and where it was prudent to stay. 
 Else, with the girl's good looks, and the 
 frank, easy, laughing manner which seemed 
 natural to her, there was no telling how 
 things might fall out. And to have been 
 loitering in St. Borromeo's chapel too, with 
 Jacob Weird. What did that mean ? 
 
 ' I would warn you to have a care,' he 
 said that night, to the widow Valeria, as 
 they all walked home to make the final 
 arrangements for the journey. ' The young 
 man is good and steady, he is all we could 
 wish him to be. Nevertheless, he has yet to 
 show what there is in him. He may do 
 well or he may not.' 
 
 The widow curtseyed. Milord had done 
 well for them already, might do better, by- 
 and-by. At any rate he had not his way to 
 make.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 91 
 
 ' There is no entanglement, sir,' she said. 
 ' My Nanni is a prudent girl, only with her 
 mother's ways that I had myself, for we 
 were all alike when we were young. She 
 will do well, I have no fear. But it is right, 
 milord, that you speak. When the candle 
 is lighted within on a dark night, those who 
 walk outside have the best chance of 
 seeing.' 
 
 And next morning Dean Barbegan and 
 Jacob Weird started for Crawlborough.
 
 92 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 HOWEVER thankful brother Anselm 
 might be to get back once more to 
 his musty old cathedral, the very dust of 
 whose aisles, and there was plenty of it too, 
 was precious to him, Jacob Weird was not 
 particularly rejoiceful over the coming 
 home. 
 
 Things were much altered at the Crawl 
 Farm. Old David lay beside his wife under 
 the churchyard sod. Hiram had brought a 
 bride to the home where he was now sole 
 master, a gracious, pleasant, comely girl, 
 whose parents, of the old-fashioned sort,
 
 THE SENIOll SONGMAN, 93 
 
 had taught her to look well to the ways of 
 her house ; a looking which had already 
 brought just a shade of anxiety to her face, 
 for Hiram was a man who, now that mat- 
 ters were prospering with him, did not care 
 for small economies, and was for establish- 
 ing himself, if his wife would only have 
 helped him, as a country gentleman in a 
 small way. It was what his grandfather 
 had been before him, and one might resume 
 the position without the other things, not so 
 reputable, which in the old man's time had 
 gone along with it. 
 
 Grace Weird received her brother-in-law 
 affectionately, and would fain have made 
 him at home under her husband's roof. 
 But Jacob was not one to fall easily into a 
 new order of things. Somehow it pained 
 him to see another woman where his 
 mother once had been, even though she was 
 a woman whom he could love as a sister.
 
 94 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 And then he wanted to be alone, to think 
 his own thoughts ; and Grace, woman like, 
 wanted him to think hers, wanted him to 
 enter into all her interests, to go round 
 amongst the brooding hens, and count the 
 chickens, and gather in the eggs, and enter 
 into all the little details of farm life, and he 
 must listen to all she had to say about her 
 own life, with its quiet current of duties 
 and cares and joys, and her hopes for Hiram 
 too, and all that she would like him to be 
 and to do. And Jacob found it a weariness, 
 the more so that he could tell to no one the 
 thing that lay nearest his own heart, could 
 not even have quiet to think about it. 
 
 Old Mrs. Pennydrop, who had lived with 
 him in his mother's time, and who, since 
 the mother's death, had been housekeeper 
 at the Crawl Farm, had gone, after Hiram's 
 marriage, to live with Jonathan Weird at 
 the Chantry, and there Jacob, after a week
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 95 
 
 of domestic life with his brother and sister, 
 went to spend the remainder of his holida}\ 
 Here at last he could wander about to his 
 heart's content, Uncle Jonathan spending all 
 his days still at the desk behind the brown 
 gauze blind, and having no interests to 
 speak of but those connected with the law 
 stationery. And at night the old man 
 liked to be alone with his pipe, and he did 
 not care, not he, for stories of outlandish 
 goings on. If the lad was steady, and if 
 he was in a fair way for getting an 
 honest living, and if he was doing his duty 
 according to the Church Catechism, the 
 rest might go. That suited Jacob better. 
 
 The widow Valeria's last word was that 
 he and Nanni were not to write to each 
 other. So there was only a lock of hair 
 and a tiny golden cross to link him to the 
 past and to the future. But strong was the 
 link, and stronger Jacob's trust, and strong,
 
 96 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 too, the joy, though he must needs shut it 
 far down in his own heart, which made him 
 count the days of what was truty his exile 
 there in the old Chantrv house under the 
 north front of the minster. 
 
 Of course people thought he had come 
 home to look for a wife. What else should 
 he be looking for, seeing that there were 
 good reports of his success in the profession 
 he had chosen ? And one or other of the 
 neighbours, dropping in occasionally to note 
 if his foreign life had altered him, had a 
 pleasant word to say about some girl they 
 knew who would make a capital help for 
 him, with perhaps a little money too, which 
 was never out of the way. And old Jona- 
 than would say, mouthing at his pipe as he 
 said it, 
 
 4 Marry to suit yourself, lad, and not to 
 suit your neighbours. But this I say, and 
 stand by it I mean to, if your wife suits me,
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 97 
 
 all that I have shall go to you both, and 
 that will be as much as will even you with 
 Hiram, not to say more. I'd like the girl 
 you marry to be able to hold her owd, for 
 dress and everything else, with your 
 brother's wife of the Crawl Farm. I've 
 never had a wife of my own, but if I had 
 she should have gone as well clad as any 
 woman in Crawlborough, and all paid for 
 as she got it, too, which makes it sit with 
 a grace. And a dark girl, Jacob, is 
 more what I like, only she's careful with 
 it.' 
 
 Jacob smiled. It was good to let the old 
 man go on. 
 
 'I've noted this, Jacob. See a girl with 
 her hair and her eyes well dark, and if she's 
 careful at all she'll be careful to the double 
 of what one of your fair-haired women is, 
 and mostly has it in cleverness too, though 
 I wouldn't say as much for temper. 
 
 VOL. I. h
 
 98 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 But then temper isn't everything, even if 
 it's a deal. Only she must suit me, Jacob, 
 and then, though you're the youngest, you 
 shall hold your head up with your brother 
 every bit.' 
 
 Jacob felt as if he could hold up his 
 head on his own account, come what might. 
 And how could the bright laughing maiden 
 whom he loved, Nanni with the dark eyes, 
 and the ivory brow, and the blue-black 
 curls, do anything but suit even crusty old 
 Uncle Jonathan. And, but for the widow 
 Valeria's words, he could have reached out 
 and grasped the law stationer's hand, and 
 told him how fair a palace of hope was 
 built up for him already, there under the 
 shadow of Milan cathedral towers. 
 
 The dean looked in now and then, as 
 he had always been accustomed to do when 
 Jacob Weird lived with his uncle before, 
 and from him the young man learned that
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 99 
 
 Sir Montague was still living in the big 
 hotel fronting the Galleria. The place was 
 lively, the society pleasant, and the climate 
 suited him, so he had as yet made no 
 arrangements for leaving it. 
 
 But nothing about Nanni, and the lover 
 did not dare to ask. 
 
 Sir Montague did not fail to send kindly 
 messages, was delighted to hear such good 
 reports of him from the various masters, 
 felt sure that patience, courage, and self- 
 denial were all that he needed for success, 
 should be delighted to mention him amongst 
 his musical friends when he returned to 
 town. And he thought perhaps it might be 
 advisable for him, now that his position was 
 becoming a little more established, to re- 
 move to lodgings more in accordance with 
 it. Nothing was more praiseworthy than 
 economy in the outset of a young man's 
 career, but at the same time it was expe- 
 
 h2
 
 100 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 dient to rise with circumstances, and he 
 could scarcely expect to secure good pupils 
 unless he had a residence suitable for their 
 reception^, The widow Valeria, though all 
 one could desire for prudence and respect- 
 ability, was not quite of the sort at whose 
 house gentle-folks would choose their 
 carriages to wait. He had made inquiries, 
 and had heard of an English family occupy- 
 ing a house somewhat larger than they re- 
 quired in a quiet street not far from the 
 Brera, and they would be very glad to 
 accommodate a well-recommended young 
 man, who would board with them and have 
 a room for the reception of his pupils. 
 
 Just the very thing, Sir Montague wrote, 
 and he hoped to be able to make arrange- 
 ments about it before Jacob returned. In 
 fact the widow Valeria herself had said, 
 last time he happened to see her, that her 
 strength was failing somewhat, and that she
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 101 
 
 would rather not have anyone to look after, 
 her own health more requiring the care 
 which now she was obliged to spend on 
 others. She was beginning to long for a 
 little home where she could rest and be 
 quiet. 
 
 And she shall have it too, thought Jacob 
 Weird to himself, picturing how, when Nanni 
 was his wife, the dapper, notionable, and 
 energetic, though somewhat sharp-tongued 
 widow should live with them, so that Nanni 
 need not feel she was quite amongst 
 strangers, though she had left her country 
 for his sake. 
 
 And with this kindly thought in his heart, 
 Jacob Weird, just one month after he ar- 
 rived in Crawlborough, left it on his return 
 journey to Milan, no holiday ever more 
 thankfully ended, nor prospect of work so 
 cheerfully welcomed. 
 
 At the Milan station Sir Montague was
 
 102 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 waiting, bright, genial, complacent as ever. 
 Young Weird must go with him to his own 
 hotel, where he had engaged a room for 
 him for the night, in order that he might 
 hear all the home news, and talk over with 
 him a plan which he had been maturing in 
 his own mind for some days, and which 
 might perhaps be more advantageous than a 
 residence with the well-bred English family 
 near the Brera. 
 
 This was that Jacob should journey on 
 to Naples, to study for twelve months in the 
 great Conservatoire there. People who 
 were able to judge, said the Naples system 
 of teaching was so much superior to that 
 adopted in the Milan school of music. The 
 expense of course would be considerably 
 greater, but — and the baronet smiled benig- 
 nantly upon his young friend — a few pounds 
 need not stand in the way. He would make 
 all that right himself. There were times
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 103 
 
 when sparing was the worst economy, and 
 to do things thoroughly in the beginning was 
 often half the battle. 
 
 Jacob listened patiently, with such grati- 
 tude as was fitting, waiting only for a pause 
 to come, in which he might express his wish 
 to go and report himself to the widow Va- 
 leria. The opportunity came at last in the 
 shape of a visit from a couple of Sir Mont- 
 ague's English friends, and, under cover of 
 the brisk salutations which were inter- 
 changed, he managed to make his escape to 
 the one place out of all the world which 
 was home to him now. 
 
 The widow was sitting in her little par- 
 lour over the shop, alone. She was a 
 trifle stiff, also rather better dressed than 
 had been her manner a couple of months 
 before. The black kerchief was exchanged 
 for one of lace, she had even a silk dress 
 on, which rustled with a certain dignity, as
 
 104 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 she rose to welcome her former lodger to 
 the scene of his labours. 
 
 She anticipated his inquiries about Nanni 
 by telling him that the girl had gone to 
 spend the evening with Maddalena, a re- 
 spectable old woman who used to take her 
 out for a walk sometimes, as she did not 
 like her to be abroad alone in a city where 
 the manners of the men were so free, even 
 though they might mean nothing wrong. 
 
 Which was just like the widow Valeria, 
 ever one of the prudentest of her sex. 
 
 And then she went on to say that, know- 
 ing of his arrival that night, she had sent 
 Nanni out, on purpose that she might be at 
 home alone to tell the signor of certain 
 changes which had come to pass during his 
 absence. 
 
 She had had her own fears all along, the 
 widow said, arranging her lace mantilla as 
 she said it, that the girl was scarcely old
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 105 
 
 enough to make a choice for herself in a 
 matter which was to affect all her future 
 life. And events which had happened 
 within the last three weeks were such as to 
 justify those fears. For Nanni had learned, 
 what certainly it was well she should learn 
 in time, namely, that she had made a mis- 
 take in thinking she loved the signor Weird 
 sufficiently to be his wife. She respected 
 him very much, no one more. He had 
 been very kind to her, and she should al- 
 ways remember him as one of her best 
 friends, but he must not think of her any 
 longer as in any way bound to him, for it 
 could not be. In fact she was not old 
 enough to know her own mind in such 
 matters, and the tacit en^a^ement between 
 
 ' CO 
 
 them had become a weariness to her. 
 
 Jacob Weird listened in silence, scarcely 
 taking in the drift of what was said. Nanni 
 tired of his love, her own worn out ! Arid
 
 106 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 only a few weeks ago she had told him how 
 all her life was bound up in his. It could 
 not be. Was this indeed her own doing, 
 or was she acting under pressure ? For 
 some time past he fancied there had been 
 some hanging off from him on the part of 
 the widow, and her lately expressed wish to 
 have him no longer as an inmate of her 
 house might be part of the plan against him. 
 
 But was Nanni giving her will to it ? 
 Was she thus bending with the remover to 
 remove ? Jacob could not believe it of her, 
 unless from her own lips he heard it. 
 Might he not come again when she was at 
 home, and hear her reasons for such a 
 change ? 
 
 The widow replied, with a readiness 
 which Jacob Weird might have known was 
 fatal to his hopes, that he might come and 
 see Nanni at any time. She had only 
 arranged to tell him the circumstances her-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 107 
 
 self first, to save her niece embarrassment. 
 He would probably find Nanni with her 
 old friend Maddalena at the Galleria now, 
 as it was about the time the band began to 
 play in front of the cathedral, and perhaps 
 the sooner they had it all settled between 
 them, the better. 
 
 And then the widow smoothed down her 
 silk dress, and began to make sundry little 
 arrangements in the room, as much as to 
 intimate that Jacob Weird might consider 
 the interview at an end. 
 
 He went out into the warm summer twi- 
 light. Nothing seemed real to him. The 
 change had smitten upon him too suddenly 
 to produce any definite effect. He was 
 only conscious of a longing to be alone with 
 Nanni, and then he felt sure all must be 
 well. She could but love him, looking into 
 his eyes again, and knowing how faithfully 
 she was held in his heart. And the widow
 
 108 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 must have been willing for it to be so, else 
 she would never have given him leave to 
 seek her and plead his own cause. 
 
 He took his way towards the Galleria. 
 Dark and mighty the shadow of the 
 cathedral lay eastward, but the great piazza 
 was full of light, and people thronged the 
 marble steps, and everywhere dark eyes 
 gleamed under the lace mantillas, and 
 there were sounds of music, and laughter, 
 and gladness, a general holiday and blos- 
 soming out of life after the long, sultry 
 summer day. Jacob went into the arcade. 
 Standing on the steps of one of the shops 
 he looked away over the hundreds of 
 groups of people gathered round the 
 marble tables, sipping coffee, toying with 
 ices and sweatmeats and creams, lovers with 
 their ladies, parents with their children, 
 idlers and loungers on the watch for mis- 
 chief, gaily dressed girls with their duennas,
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 109 
 
 and still more gaily-dressed ones without 
 them. 
 
 At last, close to one of the flower stands 
 he espied Nanni with Maddalena, half 
 hidden behind a great basket of white 
 lilies which touched her cheek if she did 
 but turn to listen to the old woman's 
 gossip. 
 
 Truly how fair she looked, and how 
 innocently she seemed to be enjoying the 
 bright, many-coloured scene around her. 
 Sometimes she leaned her pretty round 
 arms, gleaming through her black lace 
 mantilla, on the marble table, and beat 
 time to the music that was going on in the 
 piazza beyond. And then she would follow 
 with eager admiring gaze the finely-dressed 
 ladies who moved slowly along, compla- 
 cently conscious of their embroideries and 
 their jewels. And then the over-bold 
 glance of some gallant or other would
 
 110 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 make her draw back with a proud look of 
 scorn, and behind the shadow of the white 
 lilies Jacob Weird could see her eyes flash 
 angrily and her lithe little figure set itself 
 into rigid dignity. Let the men keep their 
 boldness for those who liked it, Nanni was 
 not the one to give back glance for glance 
 when the glance told of aught that would 
 peril her pride. But no one amongst them 
 spoke to her. She and Maddalena just kept 
 to themselves. Surely if she had given 
 him up for some one else, that one would 
 have been there to guard the treasure he 
 had won. 
 
 Jacob watched her for awhile, then 
 made his way up to the marble table 
 amongst the lilies. Before he reached it 
 Maddalena had risen and Nanni had drawn 
 her mantilla over her shoulders, and the 
 two were crossing over to the piazza. 
 Jacob followed them till they got into the
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. ] 1 1 
 
 shadow at the other end of the cathedral, 
 and then overtook them. 
 
 ' Good evening, Nanni.' 
 
 The girl turned carelessly round, and 
 there was scarcely a shade of embarrass- 
 ment in her voice as she said — 
 
 'Ah, Jacobo, it is you then! My aunt 
 said you would be coming, and so she 
 bade me go away with Maddalena to the 
 Galleria. And now you are here.' 
 
 ' Yes, now I am here. Maddalena, you 
 can go. I will walk home with Nanni.' 
 
 Maddalena curtsied and trotted away. 
 It was all right. She knew Jacob Weird 
 very well. Did he not walk home with the 
 widow Valeria's niece nearly every evening 
 from the singing-class, and was he not a 
 steady and estimable young man of whom 
 the widow never made any complaint? But 
 she knew her place better than to leave 
 the pretty little flower-girl before she
 
 112 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 had seen her safely to her own door. 
 
 'Nanni, is it so?' Jacob Weird said, when 
 they were alone together in the dense 
 gloom of the cathedral's shadow. 
 
 Nanni looked straight on before her. He 
 had taken her hand in his, but it did not 
 move nor tremble. 
 
 ' Nanni, is it so ?' 
 
 1 It is so.' 
 
 4 And why?' 
 
 Nanni gave an impatient little twitch, but 
 let her hand stay in his. 
 
 ' And now you want it to be over ?' 
 
 4 Yes, now I want it to be over. I 
 thought I could live always like that, but 1 
 cannot.' 
 
 'Nanni, tell me once for all. Do you 
 love some one else ?' 
 
 Still Nanni [did not take her hand away. 
 And if Jacob Weird could have seen her 
 face, he would have found there only a
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 113 
 
 smile of girlish triumph curling the soft red 
 lips. She did not know much about any- 
 thing else than that it was pleasant to be 
 petted and praised, and to have presents of 
 pretty things to wear. 
 
 1 The auntie has told you. It is over 
 now, and it is not right that you ask me 
 questions.' 
 
 'Nanni, have you done it of your own 
 free will ?' 
 
 They were at the door of the widow 
 Valeria's house. Nanni drew her fingers 
 quietly away. 
 
 ' 1 have done it myself. Good night, 
 Jacobo. I will leave you.' 
 
 And with pretty, childlike grace, as she 
 used to part from him when, bringing her 
 home from the singing-class in happier days 
 he had to go to give his lessons in a distant 
 part of the city, she just bent her head, and 
 dropping her hand after she had, as in the 
 
 VOL. i. I
 
 .114 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 old times, half raised it for a parting wave, 
 she disappeared into the little narrow 
 doorway.
 
 115 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 T T was easier, after that, to fall in with 
 ■** Sir Montague Barbegan's proposal that 
 he should immediately go to Naples to 
 obtain more advanced instruction. And 
 thither next morning he went, Sir Montague 
 going to the station with him, and giving 
 him all manner of good advice as to the 
 best way of establishing and maintaining a 
 position there. 
 
 'And if you should happen to be in 
 want of funds, Weird, just send to me and 
 I will make it all right. You know I never 
 do a thing of this kind by halves, and so if 
 
 i2
 
 1 16 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 you find you haven't enough to turn round 
 upon comfortably, now that the class fees 
 are a little more expensive, don't hesitate ; 
 only stick to your work and fight the fight 
 out.' 
 
 And there for a month Jacob Weird did 
 stick to his work, working at it as only 
 those men work who have the past to con- 
 quer as well as the future to win. And 
 then, the fight being done, he fell ill, and 
 the people with whom he lodged sent him 
 to the hospital, where he was tended by a 
 kind old nun who had heard him spoken 
 of as one of the best, most hard-working 
 students in the Conservatoire. 
 
 He would not need to go there again, 
 she thought, if singing was what he had 
 come to practise. Breath enough to keep 
 body and soul together for another dozen 
 years or so, was about all that he would 
 manage to gather up with the utmost care
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 117 
 
 and watchfulness. A pity ; for many a 
 worse voice than his had earned its owner 
 a good living. But the saints would have 
 a care of him if he prayed to them, and 
 kept himself unspotted from the world. 
 
 And the good old nun, who had seen 
 him safely through his illness, crossed her- 
 self and shook hands with him, and bade 
 him God speed. He was of the sort that 
 would come right in the end, she knew 
 that. 
 
 The doctor was of Sister Brigitta's 
 opinion as regarded Jacob Weird's vocal 
 powers. He had pulled through the bush 
 wonderfully, he said, but the tenor so 
 sweet and strong that used to ring through 
 the great hall of the Conservatoire was a 
 thing of the past, and as soon as he could 
 get home and take to some quiet way of 
 earning his bread he had better go. And 
 so, when he was well enough to be set
 
 118 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 upon his feet again, he took the journey by 
 easy stages and reached Crawlborough a 
 battered, worn-out-looking man, just the 
 day six months that he had left it, full of 
 hope and purpose, to take up his work 
 again at Milan. 
 
 It was not to his brother's sunshiny, love- 
 lighted home that he returned this time., 
 but to the little house at the north end of the 
 minster, where Uncle Jonathan plodded on 
 as aforetime, with Marisha Pennydrop to 
 take care of him. 
 
 'You're welcome, Jacob, lad,' was the 
 old law stationer's greeting, ' and better wel- 
 come that it's for good. I'm a plain man, 
 and it was never my will that you should go 
 among those outlandish folk and wear your- 
 self down to skin and bone with nothing to 
 come of it. You'll maybe settle now and 
 live your life with me. I've enough for us 
 both. There's mv desk where I've sat this
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 119 
 
 forty years, to earn myself an honest living, 
 and } 7 ou can sit to it now, and do the same, 
 just as if you'd never left it. It's getting 
 past the time of day with me to do as once 
 I did. Are you fain to stay, Jacob?' 
 
 ' Uncle Jonathan, I'm fain.' 
 
 * Then there's my hand upon it, lad, and 
 all that I have to go to you when I've done 
 with it, being as it is that Hiram is prosper- 
 ing well enough on the land. Only you'll 
 let the music go, Jacob.' 
 
 Jacob's lean, melancholy face broke into 
 a quaint smile at this promise. 
 
 ' It's the music that's let me go, Uncle 
 Jonathan, else I would have stuck to it, 
 whether I starved or not. It's the only 
 way a man like me can get his thoughts 
 spoken. And please God, if ever I get a 
 bit of voice back, I'll go into Crawlborough 
 Minster with it, and there I'll sing as long 
 as I've strength to stand on my two feet.
 
 120 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 I'll do it for the sake of Sister Brigitta, who 
 nursed me back to life, and I'd do it at St. 
 Anne's convent, only they don't want a man 
 there. If that doesn't suit you, Uncle Jon- 
 athan, we shall have to let things go.' 
 
 ' It'll suit me well enough, lad, only 
 you're content to stick to the minster. It's 
 that going up and down the country, and 
 your name scrambled over every empty bit 
 of boarding, that isn't what a quiet man like 
 me has been brought up to, and what 
 your father, if he could rise up out of his 
 grave, would say he hadn't been brought 
 up to, either. And it's safe glad I am you 
 have seen your way to quit it. So now, 
 Jacob, there's an end.' 
 
 This was what Jonathan Weird said to 
 his nephew, on the night that Jacob came 
 back to Crawlborough. And the young 
 man, sitting there in the dim firelight, 
 looked across the bit of garden to the min-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 121 
 
 ster, through whose great east window the 
 choir lights could be seen dimly flickering ; 
 and, when Uncle Jonathan's voice ceased, the 
 far-off murmur of the anthem reached him, 
 though only as a sigh. Crawlborough Min- 
 ster, the minster where he used to sing when 
 he was a little boy, and where he earned 
 the fame which had sent him to Milan, there 
 to earn quite other things than fame. And 
 Jacob felt that there was indeed an end. 
 
 His life was played out, shut up, put 
 away so far as anything that he had once 
 hoped for in it was concerned. With the 
 most of it yet before him, for counting by 
 years he was only a young man, all that re- 
 mained for him now was to do his work 
 and be silent. And perhaps the saddest of 
 all was that he wished nothing else. 
 
 Dr. Barbegan came over to see him next 
 day, not to hear tidings of Sir Montague, 
 for him the dean never so much as men-
 
 122 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 tioned, but to know if he could in any way 
 help the man whose life was so sorely broken. 
 And then it was arranged that, so soon 
 as Jacob's health was a little established, he 
 should go across to the cathedral choir 
 whenever he chose, and sing or be silent 
 there as it pleased him best. Also it was 
 arranged that he should undertake the 
 musical instruction of the boy choristers, 
 with one of the songmen to help him. So 
 that after all he was not quite shut out from 
 the work he loved. 
 
 Not a year after Jacob's return to Crawl- 
 borough, Uncle Jonathan died, leaving to his 
 younger nephew his law stationery business, 
 and his little property, consisting of a few 
 houses in the High Street. Also he left him a 
 reversionary interest in old Mrs. Pennydrop, 
 who said that, as long as there was a Weird 
 in the Chantry house to look after, she was
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 123 
 
 the woman to look after him, and look after 
 him she would. 
 
 Thus at five and twenty Jacob was estab- 
 lished in his uncle's place, with a comfortable 
 income, a respectable position, and a pros- 
 perous future, so far as external advantages 
 go to make up respectability and prosperity. 
 But of the things which make up more than 
 these, the things in which a man's life, so 
 far as that life has its joy, consists, of these 
 things Uncle Jonathan had spoken truly 
 enough when he said, 
 
 4 And so, Jacob, there's an end.' 
 In due time, which time was when the 
 November fogs had ceased to come up from 
 the Crawl river into the minster close, Sir 
 Montague Barbegan returned from Milan, 
 full, as usual, of kindliness and consideration 
 for all his inferiors, and, if possible, more 
 popular than ever in his own class of so-
 
 124 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 ciety. He was very good to Jacob Weird, 
 who, of course, ranked with the inferiors, 
 condoled much with him on the sad misfor- 
 tune which had shut him out from what 
 promised to be such a successful career; 
 said that, if he could be of use to him at 
 any future time, his purse should always be 
 ready, and his influence too, and hoped that 
 even yet his health might become sufficiently 
 established for a return to his profession. 
 And nothing need be said about the little 
 debt between them. It might be considered 
 as cancelled. 
 
 Sir Montague never settled much at 
 Crawlborough after that long visit to Milan. 
 He said he found the Italian climate so 
 much better suited to his constitution. At 
 least, that was how people generally ac- 
 counted for it, but there were those who 
 said that the baronet and his brother did 
 not get on so well together as formerly, that
 
 . THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 125 
 
 the habits he was forming and the society 
 he was cultivating were not such as to 
 make the quiet life of the deanery congenial, 
 and that his lengthy visits abroad or to 
 London were more for amusement than for 
 health. Still, however, he was considered 
 to make his home at the deanery, though 
 it was noticed that Dr. Barbegan's manner 
 of living was more and more characterised 
 by economy, arising probably from the fact 
 that Sir Montague's contribution to the joint 
 income was not so liberal as formerly. In- 
 deed, why should it be, when he was 
 scarcely ever in the place ? 
 
 After old Jonathan Weird's death, the 
 dean found his way oftener than ever to 
 the quiet little Chantry house, and all that 
 he could do he did to brighten the life of 
 the solitary, pale-faced man who bent over 
 his desk there, or strolled wearily round 
 the little bit of walled-in garden when
 
 126 THE SENIOR SONG MAN. 
 
 scant January sunshine had warmed the 
 air enough. And coming away he would 
 take the songman's thin hand in his own, 
 and say, 
 
 * Good-bye, Jacob. Come to me when 
 you like. I am alone now. We have neither 
 of us much left.' 
 
 For he knew, and the heart of the good 
 man shook with righteous anger in knowing 
 it, that what was Jacob Weird's portion of 
 joy in this life, Sir Montague Barbegan had 
 taken away from him for evermore.
 
 127 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 rilHESE things, gone now for more than 
 ■*■ a decade of years, were what came to 
 Jacob Weird's remembrance as he sat there 
 amongst the willow herbs and sedges by 
 the river, after his sister-in-law, Grace, had 
 been pressing upon him the duty of taking 
 a wife. 
 
 Taking a wife, indeed ! 
 
 Jacob watched the long tresses of river 
 weed, which waved slowly to and fro 
 with the current, but whose roots were 
 never shifted from their resting-place far 
 down below the surface. So it was with
 
 128 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 himself. He might move with the tide of 
 life, let himself be bent a little this way or 
 that, but all the time the heart of him was 
 firmly anchored down in the past — a past 
 which could never change. It was as true 
 now as when old Jonathan Weird said the 
 words a dozen years ago, not knowing all 
 he said. 
 
 ' And so, Jacob, there's an end.' 
 An end of all that most men look for. 
 Where their lives begin to unfold, his closed 
 up. 
 
 Jacob was not much altered in the years 
 which had brought him over the age of five 
 and thirty. When he came home from 
 Naples, he looked a worn out, prematurely 
 old man. He only looked that now. It 
 was illness which had done it, and a very 
 sad thing too, people said. And then the 
 disappointment of a man who has seen a 
 brilliant future open before him, only to be
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 129 
 
 swept away by no fault of his own, but by 
 suffering which seemed of itself an added 
 wrong, depriving him, as it did, almost of 
 the power of using his life at all, this might 
 well give him the aspect of subdued bitter- 
 ness, which kept him to a certain extent 
 apart from his fellow-men. 
 
 At the same time he ought not to give 
 way to it entirely. A man should show 
 himself master of circumstances, not let them 
 master him. Mr. Weird had a great many 
 mercies, even yet. He had a position which 
 many a man in Crawlborough, as well born 
 as himself, might envy. He had a snug 
 little property, enough to keep him far out 
 of the reach of want, even though his state 
 of health should prevent him from ever 
 doing another stroke of professional work. 
 And though the chance of making for him- 
 self a famous name had been taken from 
 him by that disposing providence which 
 
 VOL. I. K
 
 130 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 often orders the affairs of men in a manner 
 mysterious to themselves, still he was able 
 to use that voice in the service of his Maker, 
 with such skill that no songman in all the 
 cathedral choir could equal him. Not that 
 the thought of equalling or excelling ought, 
 under the circumstances, ever to enter his 
 mind ; but at the same time a man cannot 
 be ignorant of his gift, and Jacob Weird's 
 gift was a wonderful one, there was no 
 doubt about that, and he ought to be 
 thankful for it. 
 
 So Mr. Garfleet, the vicar choral said, 
 and so said the excellent old clergyman at 
 the chapel-of-ease to the minster, and so 
 also said Dr. Premonay, the minor canon, 
 who enjoyed nothing so much as a good 
 long spell of church music with Jacob Weird, 
 when he met him at the house of Dr. 
 Sparke, the organist. And he would gladly 
 have had him join a glee society which some
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 131 
 
 of the Close people had amongst themselves, 
 his unmarried condition making it more 
 easy to admit him into that select fellowship. 
 But the man was so hopelessly shut up 
 within himself, could not be drawn out, let 
 you do what you might, so he was obliged 
 to be left alone. A pity. For there was 
 always room for gratitude somewhere, how- 
 ever life might appear to be crowded with 
 privations, and it was a pity a man should 
 throw away the chances of happiness which 
 were left him, by mourning over those 
 which heaven, for some wise purpose doubt- 
 less, had removed. 
 
 Hiram Weird and his wife were very 
 much of the same opinion. They could not 
 understand why Jacob should have 'given 
 up ' so. For if ever there was a man whose 
 feeble health and gentle retiring disposition 
 marked him as peculiarly fitted for home 
 life, that man, Grace Weird said, was her 
 
 k2
 
 132 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 brother-in-law. And so loving, so tender- 
 hearted. To see him with the little Hertha 
 in his arms, or leading her along the orchard 
 path, was to see him with the smile of an 
 angel on his face. That such a man should 
 have neither chick nor child of his own, 
 was a clear case of flying in the face of 
 providence. 
 
 A man, too, who gave so little trouble in 
 a house, who was so easily contented, who 
 never seemed to be looking after his own 
 interests or comforts in any way. What a 
 treasure of a husband he might be to a right- 
 minded woman ! Surely there were right- 
 minded women in Crawlborough, not a few, 
 who could have found their happiness in 
 ministering to such a man, plain and feeble 
 and delicate though he might be, and 
 wanting in much that goes to make up 
 what is generally considered as an eligible 
 match.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 133 
 
 Only that was never the way Dr. Barbe- 
 gan talked about it. 
 
 Dr. Barbegan spent nearly half his time 
 at the Chantry house now. Being a lonely, 
 unmarried man himself, people said he 
 knew how to sympathise with anyone in the 
 same situation. And Mr. Weird's musical 
 talents were exceptional, and his tastes, 
 though slightly foreign, were always those 
 of a gentleman, and, since he came back 
 from Naples, he had developed a fondness 
 for mathematical pursuits which made him 
 a still more congenial companion for the 
 dean. 
 
 Another change helped on the intimacy. 
 Some eight or ten months after that very 
 lengthy visit to Milan, Sir Montague Barbe- 
 gan left the deanery altogether, and estab- 
 lished himself on his own account at the 
 Old Residence, a tall, narrow, dignified grey 
 stone building which had been standing
 
 134 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 unoccupied for nobody knew how long on 
 the north side of the minster close, not far 
 from the Chantry garden. 
 
 A very good change indeed, the Close 
 families said. They only wondered it had 
 not been made long before. For Sir 
 Montague, according to all accounts, was 
 not a man who grew better as he grew 
 older, and though Dr. Barbegan made a 
 firm stand, as indeed he was bound to do, 
 respecting the class of gentlemen who were 
 invited to the deanery, still it was impossible 
 for him to avoid being mixed up with very 
 uncongenial society, if the baronet was at 
 all to surround himself with his own set. 
 It was very much better that Sir Montague 
 should go where he could do as he liked. 
 At the same time they hoped he would not, 
 for the sake of his brother's position, carry 
 things too far. And now, of course, the 
 dean would have to live more quietly than
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 135 
 
 ever, his income being so very much 
 reduced, poor man ! They hoped, when he 
 got promotion, the deanery would be given 
 to some one who had a comfortable private 
 income. Or if he could marry a wife with 
 a fortune. But people had quite given over 
 now talking about his marrying at all. 
 
 Dr. Barbegan was not a man to make 
 explanations, and the matter ended there. 
 
 Jacob Weird lived quietly on at the 
 Chantry house. Of Nanni and the widow 
 Valeria he heard no more. Sir Montague 
 went to Italy every year for his health's 
 sake, and, in an indirect way, Jacob some- 
 times learned that he had stayed in Milan, 
 going or coming. But he and the baronet 
 seldom met now, Jacob never going to 
 the deanery when other guests were there, 
 and Sir Montague never going when he 
 thought his brother was likely to be 
 alone.
 
 136 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 Once only, in all those years, had the 
 senior songman been in any definite manner 
 brought face to face with the past, and that 
 was when he went to the house of Dr. 
 Sparke, the cathedral organist, to take part 
 in some musical practice which was going 
 on, just before the triennial festival of 
 choirs. An Italian newspaper was lying 
 about. He took it up, and his eye fell on 
 a flattering notice of the Signora Nanni 
 Valeria, who had been performing in opera 
 at Naples with great success. So then she 
 was still following her profession, and as it 
 appeared was still unmarried, though of 
 that he could not be sure, these great 
 singers not caring to drop, at least in 
 public, the name they had once made 
 famous. 
 
 That night, instead of sleeping quietly, 
 Jacob Weird paced his room until the 
 morning light began to steal into it. The
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 137 
 
 dead past rolled back upon him. It would 
 not bury its dead. For though, of all 
 brightness and spring in his life, there had 
 long ago been an end, in the heart that 
 loved, and the faith that remembered, and 
 the truth that had been so rudely thrown 
 back to him, there could never be any 
 change at all.
 
 138 
 
 CHAPTER X. • 
 
 TACOB rose and shook himself. The 
 ^ minster bells were chiming for after- 
 noon prayers. 
 
 Ten minutes brought him away from the 
 rosy blossoming willow herbs, from the 
 mists of memory and its useless regrets, to 
 his place behind Dr. Premonay's well-stiff- 
 ened surplice, and there he sang through 
 his part in the service, none knowing how 
 every tone of it came up from a soul which 
 had gone through — nay, was in them now 
 — the depths of sadness and longing. But
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 139 
 
 it was the best of Jacob Weird's life that, 
 save the dean, no one did know. For his 
 own family he was a gentle, affectionate, 
 tender-hearted man, pressed down by ill- 
 health and the disappointments of early life. 
 For outsiders he was a moody enthusiast, 
 with no capacity of good fellowship about 
 him — a sort of hermit crab, only inferior to 
 that creature in that he never outgrew his 
 shell, or had energy enough to change it 
 for another. And, though he knew that 
 they held him as such, he was content. 
 
 Coming from the cathedral service, he 
 found Mrs. Pennydrop preparing tea for 
 him in the parlour, always a pleasant little 
 room in summer afternoons, with the vine 
 leaves shadowing its casements, which 
 looked away across the cathedral close to 
 the two great west towers, dim now in a 
 warm purple haze. And Mrs. Pennydrop 
 was bustling about with an unusual air of
 
 140 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 importance. Something had happened. 
 One could tell that by the way the frills of 
 her cap bristled round her comely, wrinkled 
 old face. 
 
 It was not temper. Mrs. Pennydrop never 
 had any difficulty in letting people know 
 when that was the matter with her. One 
 could tell it in a moment by a sort of 
 unquiet feeling in the atmosphere, to say 
 nothing of the way in which doors were 
 banged and things taken up or set down. 
 Still Jacob felt nervous. He always did 
 when the cap borders bristled in that 
 manner. 
 
 ' I thought you was never going to get 
 home from the prayers this afternoon, Mr. 
 Weird, sir,' she said, arranging the bache- 
 lor cosy over the bachelor tea-pot in which 
 she had infused the regulation two spoon- 
 fuls of Congou. 'When there's anything 
 to say, the time hangs as heavy as a mill-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 141 
 
 stone, and there's a deal to say this time, if 
 there never was before.' 
 
 Jacob braced himself up. Something 
 must have happened to mar the even tenor 
 of life at the Chantry house ; and yet Mrs. 
 Pennydrop's manner did not seem to mean 
 mischief. He dropped quietly into his arm- 
 chair. 
 
 • Well, Mrs. Pennydrop, I am ready. Is 
 it anything serious ?' 
 
 ' Oh, dear, no, sir, nothing that you need 
 trouble yourself about, though no one can 
 tell but what it may turn out serious enough 
 for them that has to do with it. And you 
 might guess till Doomsday and never come 
 near the truth. Mr. Weird, sir, the dean 
 is going to be married this day month.' 
 
 Jacob Weird jumped out of his chair 
 much more quickly than he had dropped 
 into it. 
 
 ' Mrs. Pennydrop !'
 
 142 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 ' Marisha Pennydrop — yes, sir, that is my 
 name, and has been this forty year back, 
 and will be until my dying day, me know- 
 ing too well what the men are to have any 
 drawing to change it as;ain. Crawlborough 
 dean's to be married this day month, sir, 
 and into a good family, too, for it's Lady 
 Anne Camperdown, the Earl of Narrow- 
 march's daughter, that he's going to get. 
 With five thousand a year to her fortune, 
 sir, besides, so now he'll be comfortable, 
 and he won't need to think what he does.' 
 
 'That would be a poor outcome of riches, 
 Mrs. Pennydrop.' 
 
 ' It's what comes in general with 'em, sir, 
 and it all goes the way you take it. Sir 
 Montague wasn't the man he is now before 
 he got that property extra from his old 
 godfather. Not that Dr. Barbegan, bless 
 him ! would ever go such a way, but all the 
 same it won't be saving that he has a need
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 143 
 
 to. Of course, one likes a gentleman to be 
 comfortable, sir, if marrying makes him so, 
 but at the same time I can't say I heard it 
 with a deal of satisfaction, for it come to 
 me as clear as could be that now he 
 wouldn't step across to see you as he'd used 
 to formerly, and it's been a deal of company 
 to you, sir, has his stepping across so free 
 like.' 
 
 1 1 have nothing in the way of society, 
 Mrs. Pennydrop, that I could not live with- 
 out, but we need not trouble ourselves just 
 yet. This is not the first time, by many 
 a one, that the Crawlborough people have 
 married the dean. It is not twelve months 
 ago since you told me the lady was to be 
 Miss Standish, the daughter of the old 
 bishop.' 
 
 ' Yes, sir, and it was the bishop's lady's 
 own maid that I spoke after, so that, if I 
 wasn't justified, it's a pity, and vexed
 
 144 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 enough I felt when it all came to nothing, 
 with me not being a woman that's given 
 to gossip. But it's better than the bishop's 
 lady's maid this time, sir, it's the foreman 
 from Cricket and Jones, the upholsterers 
 up yonder in the High Street, and they've 
 got the doing up of the drawing-room, and 
 my lady's going to have a boudoir all to her- 
 self out of it, yon little room, sir, with a win- 
 dow sticking out into the garden. You 
 could look out and see it this very minute, 
 if it were not for the leaves being so thick 
 set on the lime-trees at the back.' 
 
 'Well, Mrs. Pennydrop,' and Jacob 
 looked towards the door, instead of in 
 the direction where my lady's boudoir 
 was going to be, 'all I can say is .that 
 I am very glad for anything that will 
 increase Dr. Barbegan's happiness. Not 
 knowing the lady he has chosen, I cannot 
 speak more decidedly. But marriage is
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 145 
 
 at all times an uncertain thing, and one 
 must rejoice with trembling. I daresay 
 you know that better than I do.' 
 
 ' Well, sir, I should rather think I ought 
 to do, having gone through with it, which 
 you haven't done, and that naturally makes 
 a difference. And as for the rejoicing, sir, 
 well, I can't say that I ever did a deal of it. 
 It isn't rejoicing that there's a call to when 
 you can't so much as hear the clink of a 
 glass without thinking that the man you're 
 bound to love and honour is getting a drop 
 over much, and has to lock up every penny 
 for fear it goes in drink, and to keep up 
 your pecker among the neighbours as if 
 there was nothing at all the matter. That 
 was what I had to go through, Mr. Weird, 
 sir, after I was married, and so, if I can't 
 speak, it's a pity. All the same, I hope the 
 dean'll have better luck.' 
 
 ' 1 hope so, Mrs. Pennydrop.' 
 
 VOL. I. L
 
 146 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 And then, by way of changing the sub- 
 ject, Jacob Weird asked if his muffin was 
 ready. Mrs. Pennydrop so often heard 
 that people were going to be married, or 
 had died, or had come to grief in some 
 way or other, and he had to listen to the 
 whole story, only to be told next day, with 
 an equal flow of volubility from his excel- 
 lent housekeeper, that she had been ' put 
 upon ' by some gossiping neighbour, and 
 that nothing of the sort had really hap- 
 pened. Most probably, when to-morrow's 
 muffins came to light, the dean's matri- 
 monial prospects would have been found 
 to be a myth. But Mrs. Pennydrop was 
 not croing to be thrown off her track this 
 time. 
 
 c Yes, sir, I left Peggy toasting of it, but, 
 the fire not being as bright as i fc is some- 
 times, it don't come to the brown in a 
 minute, and I thought while she was making
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 147 
 
 it ready I would just step in, and tell you 
 what I had heard. You see, sir, with 
 keeping to yourself as you do, and Mrs. 
 Weird from the farm not being a person 
 that goes about to pick up anything, it 
 wasn't likely to come to your knowledge 
 any other way. And such a thing as it 
 will be for Crawlborough, for they say 
 she's a person, is Lady Anne Camperdown, 
 as don't let anything go past her, whether 
 it's bazaars or soup kitchens, or anything 
 for the benefit of the poor, or whatever it 
 is. A sort of lady, sir, that we've a deal 
 of need of; for, though the dean's as good 
 a man as ever stepped, it stands to reason 
 he can't know about broth and petticoats, as 
 a lady could, if she was there.' 
 
 1 Well, Mrs. Penny drop, we will only 
 hope that too many cooks will not spoil the 
 broth. Peggy must surely have done her 
 toasting by this time, and whatever hap- 
 
 l2
 
 148 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 pens, you know, one must have one's muffins 
 as usual/ 
 
 ' By all means, sir,' said Mrs. Pennydrop, 
 with dignity, not liking that such a serious 
 subject as the marriage of the dean should 
 be met by anything approaching the nature 
 of a joke. ' You shall have what is necessary 
 this very minute. And should have had it 
 before, sir, only I naturally thought, having 
 the respect for the dean you've always 
 shown, it would be according to your wishes 
 for me to speak what I knew. But if I've 
 mistaken my place, sir, I'm not the woman 
 to require more than once telling.' 
 
 And Mrs. Pennydrop's cap borders began 
 to look as if temper ivas going to be the 
 matter with her. Mr. Weird was really 
 altogether too quiet, and when he must 
 have known what interest she felt in being 
 the first to tell him. 
 
 But Jacob threw oil upon the troubled
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 149 
 
 waters. He could generally manage to do 
 it when he knew what they were troubled 
 about. 
 
 1 All right, Mrs. Pennydrop. I would 
 rather receive the information from yourself 
 than from anyone else, and I am very much 
 obliged to you for telling me. Only towards 
 tea time I naturally feel hungry, whether 
 Lady Anne Camperdown chooses to marry 
 the dean or not. And especially when the 
 muffins are of your own making.' 
 
 Mrs. Pennydrop softened. She could 
 make muffins, whatever else she could not 
 do, and she knew it. 
 
 ' Yes, sir. I might have given it a 
 thought that you would be wanting your 
 victuals, though you are a man that in a 
 general way takes to them as unconcerned 
 as anyone I ever saw. I often say to Mrs. 
 Weird of the Crawl farm that it's little use 
 my being able to do for you as I can, in
 
 150 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 savouries and made dishes, for if it was a bit 
 of plain cake that was set down before you 
 almost any meal of the day, you'd be con- 
 tent. You would soon look a different 
 man, Mr. Weird, sir, and you must excuse 
 me for saying it, if you only fed yourself 
 better.' 
 
 ' Very likely, Mrs. Pennydrop, but I am 
 sure I shall soon look a different man if you 
 do not feed me at all. So the tea-cake 
 first and Lady Anne afterwards, if you 
 please.' 
 
 Old Marisha smiled and disappeared, 
 returning presently with her master's 
 evening portion, buttered hot and sending 
 out its pleasant fragrance as she took off 
 the china cover. 
 
 1 I'd a deal rather it had been a chop, 
 sir, or a dish of kidneys with sherry and 
 vinegar gravy. There's reason in every- 
 thing, and when a gentleman has anybody
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 151 
 
 that can cook for hiin, he should act 
 accordingly. It's your uncle you take 
 after, sir, not your own side of the family. 
 The times and times I've seen your poor 
 mother, Mr. Weird, set studying in the 
 front kitchen at the farm, for nothing in 
 life but to know what to set before your 
 father, so that he might eat it with a relish ; 
 and your brother, Mr. Hiram, isn't one that 
 care and pains are wasted on. I never get 
 a recipe out of the common from the 
 bishop's cook, but I step down to the farm 
 as soon as I've a chance, and Mrs. Weird's 
 as pleased with it as if she'd earned a 
 sovereign. But, maybe, 1 shall get them 
 nearer at hand, now that there's to be a 
 lady at the deanery. I lay she won't let 
 things go there as they've been doing of 
 late, often nothing but plain roast or boiled, 
 and if a tart and a bit of cheese after it, 
 that's as much as ever there was. I had it
 
 152 THE SENIOR SCNGMAN. 
 
 from Mrs. Morrison herself, sir, and she's 
 the housekeeper, as you know. And there's 
 more to be told, sir, only perhaps you'd 
 rather hear it another time.' 
 
 ' Oh, no, Mrs. Pennydrop, now that you 
 have brought me my tea-cake, you may 
 stay and tell me of as many marriages as 
 you like. I don't think they will any of 
 them make any difference to me.' 
 
 ' No, sir, I don't think they will. You 
 may say that with ease and safety, you 
 being the gentleman you are, with respect 
 to marrying, and I could wish you different 
 for your own sake, though it stands to reason 
 a wife in this house isn't what I should 
 prefer, except for your own comfort. A 
 woman like myself doesn't like a young- 
 person set over her, and, if it came to that, 
 I should feel it my dut} T to ask you to 
 suit yourself elsewhere. It's the baronet, 
 sir, that's going to make a change similar to
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 153 
 
 his brother, only the dean gets money, and 
 Sir Montague gets good looks, which, if 
 folks say right, he sets a deal of store 
 
 by.' 
 
 ' Most people do, Mrs. Pennydrop,' said 
 Jacob, rather wearily. To be kind to the 
 old lady, he must needs let her talk on, 
 though he would gladly have been alone 
 with his own thoughts. ' And pray, who 
 is the lady this time ?' 
 
 'Miss Wardilow, sir, Major Wardilow's 
 youngest daughter, of Crawlthorpe Hall, 
 scarcely past a girl, they say, and him well 
 over the wrong side of fifty, if he's a day, 
 and looks a deal more. But, as I said to 
 Mr. Potts, the foreman — for Cricket and 
 Jones is doing up the Old Residence likewise 
 — some can swallow a deal when there's a 
 title to gild it with. And they're both to 
 be married on the same day, sir.' 
 
 1 1 hope so, Mrs. Pennydrop. It would
 
 154 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 be rather uncomfortable for them if they 
 were married on different days.' 
 
 'I don't know what you mean, sir. I 
 don't see that Sir Montague need bind 
 himself to the same day as his brother.' 
 
 ' Oh ! all right. I thought you were 
 speaking of Sir Montague and the young 
 lady he is going to marry.' 
 
 4 If I did, sir, it was my mistake. It's 
 the baronet and the dean that are goiDg 
 to be married on this day month, according 
 to what Mr. Potts says, and, by the way 
 the alterations is being hurried on, he 
 thinks the wedding journey can't be going 
 to be long. So we shall get a chance to 
 see a bit ol gaiety now ; for, with two 
 brides in the Close, and the sort they are, 
 things can't go creeping on as they've done 
 of a late. Miss Wardilow isn't the one to 
 keep quiet when she's got the money to do 
 different. One of the maids at the hall
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 155 
 
 has told me a deal. Likes a stirring life, 
 and means to have it, too — plenty of gentle- 
 men about, and all that sort of thing — so 
 I say they're well matched, if it wasn't for 
 the age.' 
 
 ' Well, Mrs. Pennydrop, they have my 
 best wishes. I cannot say more than that.' 
 
 ' No, sir ; I didn't think you'd say a deal, 
 for that's never your way, let it be what 
 it may that you have to listen to. But I 
 thought it was only my duty to tell you 
 what I'd heard, for, with you keeping your- 
 self to yourself as you do, the Minster bells 
 might be ringing their welcome home before 
 you'd as much as found out there had been 
 a wedding. 
 
 And with that Mrs. Pennydrop departed.
 
 156 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 rjlHE old lady's information was quite 
 -*- correct. The Dean of Crawlborough 
 and his elder brother, Sir Montague Barbe- 
 gan, had both of them decided, somewhat 
 suddenly, upon a change in their condition, 
 and were to be married upon the same 
 clay ; one to Lady Anne Camperdown, 
 daughter of the old Earl of Narrowmarch, 
 and the other to Isabel Wardilow, the 
 youngest, and, if report said truly, most 
 frisky, child of Major Wardilow of Crawl- 
 thorpe Hall. 
 
 Society had often credited the baronet
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 157 
 
 with matrimonial intentions, lie being a 
 popular man amongst the ladies. Indeed, 
 the only wonder was that he had remained 
 so long unmarried, especially after his re- 
 moval to a separate establishment, which 
 people naturally thought was preparatory 
 to the installation of a wife. But it had 
 never entered into the minds of the Close 
 people that the dean was a marrying man, 
 and there were those who said that it would 
 never have entered into his own mind 
 either, unless Lady Anne had put it there 
 herself. Still they hoped it would be all 
 for the best. 
 
 Crawlborough had a prospect of unusual 
 gaiety placed before it during that summer, 
 for in addition to the Barbegan marriages, 
 the announcement of which it might say 
 had come upon it like a thunderbolt, there 
 was the British Association for the Advance- 
 ment of Science to be entertained for a
 
 158 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 week during the month of August, that 
 society having been invited by the Mayor 
 to hold its annual meeting in their ancient 
 city. And people who had an eye to profit 
 were already trimming up bed-rooms and 
 sitting-rooms to be let at a much more than 
 remunerative rental, to such members as 
 had not friends to entertain them. Indeed, 
 for monetary purposes, the British Associa- 
 tion was looked upon by practical people 
 as a more interesting event than the social 
 changes in the Close. Besides, the actual 
 weddings themselves would not make much 
 difference in the place, since they were to 
 be performed at St. George's, Hanover 
 Square. 
 
 Lady Anne Camperdown was consider- 
 ably past the heyday of youth, almost as 
 much so as the dean himself. And she was 
 an excellent woman, well accustomed to 
 carrying out plans of improvements upon
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 159 
 
 her father's estate, he being a widower; and 
 she was devoted to the Church, and adminis- 
 tered that too, so far as a woman could on 
 the earl's property, with a forty-vicar power, 
 so that she seemed peculiarly set apart for 
 the position she had selected. If the dean 
 was to marry at all, he could not do better 
 than marry such a lad} T , especially as he 
 was interesting himself so little now in 
 matters ecclesiastical, that a wife who could 
 interest herself in them for him, would be 
 very much to the purpose. 
 
 Doubtless she had felt this when she 
 decided on marrying the dean. And, hav- 
 ing decided upon that step, she carried out 
 her plans with quiet resolution. Mrs. 
 Dobrillon, the wife of the present Bishop 
 of Crawlborough, who had come across the 
 earl's travelling party in Italy during the 
 spring of that year, said that a shrewder 
 man than Dr. Barbegan would have found
 
 160 THE SENIOR SOKGMAX. 
 
 it a difficult matter to come home disengaged 
 when Lady Anne had taken him in hand. 
 But at the same time Mrs. Dobrillon added 
 that it could only have been out of the purest 
 goodwill that an earl's daughter gave herself 
 so much trouble. For the dear dean's income 
 and position were neither of them worth 
 thinking about for a woman of Lady Anne 
 Camperdown's character. She could have 
 made a far better match any day, if 
 mere marrying had been all she desired ; 
 and therefore one must give her the credit 
 of being actuated by no other motive than 
 that of usefulness to the man she had 
 chosen, and to the Church to which he 
 belonged. 
 
 But, as for Miss Wardilow, no one need 
 ask twice why she was marryiug. A hoy- 
 denish young thing, not out of her teens, 
 as full of fun and mischief as a schoolgirl, 
 never content unless on the back of a horse
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 161 
 
 or with a parcel of young men dangling 
 after her, and he a broken-down and more 
 than middle-aged bachelor, with the family 
 gout already affecting his once military bear- 
 ing, and the unmistakable marks of fast 
 living in every line of his face, — it was very 
 evident that the title and not the man 
 had been her attraction. But the Major 
 knew as well as anyone else what was said 
 about Sir Montague, and if he chose to 
 let a baronetcy weigh against his young 
 daughter's happiness, well, it was his own 
 affair. 
 
 Such was the verdict of the upper ten 
 of Crawlborough, headed by Mrs. Do- 
 brillon, in the matter of the Barbegan 
 marriages. 
 
 But at the same time the upper ten were 
 quite ready to come forward with the usual 
 mild entertainments and festivities when, 
 about the end of June, the dean and Sir 
 
 VOL. I. M
 
 162 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 Montague brought home their respective 
 brides. 
 
 Both ladies commenced their wifely 
 careers with equal vigour, the only difference 
 being in the directions which that vigour 
 took. Miss Isabel Wardilow had no inten- 
 tion of limiting the range of her enjoyment 
 when she became the partner of a middle- 
 aged and somewhat gouty baronet. Every- 
 thing; that she had entered into as the belle 
 of Crawlborough, she entered into with even 
 more spirit as Lady Montague Barbegan, so 
 that her husband had a sufficiently lively 
 time of it. And as her young ladyship 
 looked handsomer than ever in her bridal 
 splendour, and as the unwonted freedom 
 which a husband and a liberal allowance 
 of pocket money gave her, brought out 
 more and more the pleasure-loving side of 
 her disposition, life at the Old Residence be-
 
 THE SENIOR SOXGMAN. 163 
 
 came a very gaily coloured affair, almost too 
 gaily coloured to last. 
 
 The dean's new wife took her enjoyment 
 after a more solid fashion. 
 
 Lady Anne was not a butterfly, far from 
 it. And she was not a woman who was 
 content to let her faculties rust. Further- 
 more, she was not a woman who would let 
 other people's faculties rust either; and, what 
 was a little inconvenient sometimes, they 
 must be kept bright in her own fashion. If 
 Sir Montague was trotted about from ball to 
 ball and from dinner to dinner by his spark- 
 ling young wife with hitherto unheard of 
 rapidity, Dr. Barbegan found himself com- 
 pelled in many respects to turn over a new 
 leaf when Lady Anne came to the Deanery. 
 No more peaceful reposing now of ancient 
 dust, material or spiritual, on the ecclesias- 
 tical edifice over which the Sovereign, acting 
 
 m2
 
 164 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 by the advice of her Prime Minister, had 
 placed him. Lord Narrowmarch's daughter 
 inaugurated her matrimonial career by a 
 Cyclopean spring-cleaning — only that it 
 took place in July — of the whole cathedral 
 establishment, choir, nave, side aisles, 
 songraen, canons, Dean and Chapter in- 
 cluded. 
 
 Of course Dr. Barbegan was supposed 
 to manage the cleaning himself. Lady 
 Anne was far too prudent and sensible a 
 woman to expose herself, or her husband 
 either, to ridicule, by assuming outwardly 
 the management of affairs. That flighty 
 young marriage connection of hers, Isabel 
 Barbegan of the Old Residence, used to en- 
 rapture the men of Crawlborough by singing 
 to them a sort of half comic song, setting 
 forth the power which women could assert 
 by looks and smiles and tears and other 
 artifices of that nature. And with inimitable
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 165 
 
 archness in her eyes and voice, an archness 
 which never failed to carry conviction to her 
 audience, Isabel used to wind up with these 
 words : — 
 
 ' We'll always let them hold the reins, 
 But we'll show them the way to go.' 
 
 Now Lady Anne disliked comic songs. 
 She would as soon have thought of dancing 
 on a tight-rope five and twenty feet above 
 the heads of the Crawlborough public, as of 
 singing before a male audience any com- 
 position which was calculated to produce 
 laughter. But at the same time she could 
 appreciate the sense of that particular song, 
 though she would rather it had been em- 
 bodied in an essay or a lecture. And it 
 exactly expressed her own feelings with re- 
 gard to the relations which should subsist 
 between husband and wife. 
 
 Now the poor dear dean carried with him
 
 166 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 the outward appearance of dignity, no one 
 more so, when he got into his hood and sur- 
 plice — especially if they were newly out of 
 the laundress's hands — and was standing up 
 at his full height in front of the crimson vel- 
 vet curtains which draped the decanal stall ; 
 or when in the Chapter House, with his 
 college cap disposed decently on the table 
 beside him, he sat in his own proper chair in 
 the centre of a conclave of canons and other 
 church dignitaries. But for all practical 
 purposes, that is for driving in the matri- 
 monial gig along the beaten and sometimes 
 crowded highways of ordinary life, it was 
 far better for him only to occupy the post 
 of command, the double-cushioned seat 
 to the right, with the outward symbols of 
 authority looped and arranged after the 
 orthodox fashion in his duly gloved hands, 
 whilst some one else, namely herself, read 
 the signposts and kept the whip and regu-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 167 
 
 lated the speed at which the gig was to go, 
 as well as the destination at which it was 
 ultimately to arrive. 
 
 Those were Lady Anne's sentiments, and 
 she acted upon them. A self-controlled, 
 well-bred, fair-haired woman, with the 
 quiet command of generations born to rule 
 in her voice and tread, she sat at home in 
 the beautiful old Gothic library of the 
 deanery, and thence moved the springs 
 which worked these changes ; moving them 
 with such resolution that the dean found 
 there was nothing for it but submission, and 
 submitted accordingly. 
 
 After the cleaning of the cathedral came 
 the lighting of it, which was done in antici- 
 pation of the visit of the Association, the 
 crypt, which had hitherto been shrouded in 
 almost heathen darkness, containing some 
 of the finest specimens of pure Norman 
 architecture in the kingdom. And, after
 
 168 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 the lighting had been accomplished, tenders 
 were invited for the heating of the whole 
 of the sacred edifice, and whoever accepted 
 the contract bound himself to have all 
 arrangements completed by the first of 
 November. 
 
 Whatever the choristers and vergers 
 might have to say about Lady Anne, and 
 to tell the truth she ivas severe with them, 
 though always through her husband, in 
 the matter of deportment, they did bless 
 her when they heard of the stoves. For 
 the palsied shiver of their usual winter de- 
 votions would be able to steady itself now 
 into at least outward composure, and what- 
 ever fervour characterised the daily services 
 would not any longer be that of hands 
 rubbed vainly to and fro to keep the blood 
 from freezing in them. 
 
 Not that in everything the choristers 
 blessed Lady Anne — quite the reverse.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 169 
 
 The dean had once looked benevolently 
 upon juvenile pockets that bulged with tops 
 and marbles, or even, at Christmas-time, 
 with currant buns, stowed away there for 
 consumption during sermon-time, with a 
 view to keeping up the normal temperature. 
 But now an imperial ukase was issued, 
 commanding the deposit of all such stores, 
 before service, upon a shelf appointed for 
 that purpose in the choristers' vestry. And 
 those stores were never found again after 
 service-time by the little boys who had put 
 them there. Conversation had formerly 
 been winked at under cover of the chanting 
 of the Psalms ; and whilst a solo was being 
 performed, those who had not to sing con- 
 sidered themselves at liberty to redeem the 
 time in other ways. Now those who sang 
 must sing what was set down for them, and 
 those who did not sing must observe a 
 silence unbroken as that of the Sphinx.
 
 170 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 And as Lady Anne never missed a service 
 herself, and as from her coign of vantage, 
 immediately under the dean's stall, she 
 could command a view of every single 
 separate individual in the choir, there was 
 nothing for it but to obey orders, though 
 those who had to obey sometimes wished 
 the dean had never married at all. 
 
 But she was a lady, and expected nothing 
 from other people which she was not ready 
 to practise herself; and, when the warming 
 and lighting were taken into account, there 
 
 DO ' 
 
 was much left to be thankful for. 
 
 Dr. Barbegan still came over pretty con- 
 stantly to the Chantry house, his wife not 
 being a woman who wanted him always at 
 her apron-strings. And he came oftener 
 as the time for the meeting of the Associa- 
 tion drew near, Jacob Weird having engaged 
 to furnish a paper in the mathematical sec- 
 tion, and the dean being much interested in
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. L71 
 
 the composition of it. Law stationery was 
 rather a thing of the past with Jacob now. 
 True, the neatly-framed notice still occupied 
 its place in the centre of the bow window 
 fronting the High Street, and was duly 
 cleaned by Mrs. Pennydrop twice a week ; 
 but it served no other purpose than to 
 occupy her time, for the dean and chapter 
 had given their work to a new firm at the 
 Minster gates, Jacob saying he would rather 
 those had it who were more in need than 
 himself. And since his quiet way of living 
 was far within his means, and since he had 
 ability enough in art and science to save 
 him from the need of employment just to 
 pass the time, he let the rest go, not being 
 a man who loved money for its own sake. 
 
 They were peaceful days, peaceful with 
 the best sort of peace, that Jacob Weird 
 lived now under the shadow of Crawl- 
 borough Cathedral. His grief had lost its
 
 172 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 bitterness. He had no quarrel with any. 
 He wanted nothing from the world but to 
 be let alone by it. He was amongst the 
 wise-hearted ones who have learned to find 
 their content in the simple pleasures free to 
 all ; for whom the bursting of a leaf, the 
 opening of a flower, the tint of morning 
 or evening upon a passing cloud, can give 
 a joy which others travel far to seek and 
 never find. People msiy pity such lives, 
 but the pity is unwisely spent ; for there is 
 no possession which makes a man so rich 
 as the power of seeing beauty in common 
 things. If it be true that happiness lies 
 in this, to be at rest in one's own home, 
 then Jacob Weird was a happy man, let 
 the w T orld turn on him what eye of scorn it 
 would. 
 
 And behind it all there lay the past in 
 which he had loved, love being no more for 
 him now. Behind him lay the strife, too,
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 173 
 
 which thai love had brought, and upon him 
 the scars it had made, the pain being gone. 
 And out of them all had come the peace. 
 For no life worth the living was ever lived 
 without sore strife ; and that which is the 
 sorest, and whose outcome is of the noblest, 
 is often that which no one ever sees — strife 
 of the spirit against foes of the spirit, the 
 true heart struggling to keep true, the pure 
 will to keep pure. And, when it is done, 
 there is no one to praise, and, when it is 
 left undone, no one blames. Nay, for those 
 who have refused such battle, the unsuffer- 
 ing face and the pleasant smile ask for 
 quite other than blame. So those who 
 fight the hardest, fight alone, and the re- 
 ward is to themselves, nothing to show here 
 for pride.
 
 174 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 TULY passed. Crawlborough Cathedral 
 ^ stood forth cleared of its dust. The 
 lighting of the nave and choir had proved 
 a splendid success. So had that of the 
 crypt, which was now for the first time 
 thrown open to the public. The musical, 
 as well as the devotional, part of the 
 services was reorganised. The songmen 
 were picked over; many of them replaced. 
 By the time Lady Anne had been at the 
 deanery a couple of months, things had 
 advanced further than during the whole of 
 Dr. Barbegan's previous tenure of office,
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 1 75 
 
 and to what perfection they would reach 
 before she was satisfied, no one could tell. 
 
 But now her energies were for awhile 
 diverted into a new channel, for the meet- 
 ing of the Association was drawing near. 
 Already the lodging-house people, who had 
 had no such chance of spoil for many a day, 
 nor were likely to have it again, had fur- 
 bished up their apartments, and hung out 
 their notices ; whilst respectable citizens of a 
 higher grade, who were anxious to make 
 a little profit, and at the same time shield 
 their names from vulgar curiosity, had given 
 them in to the secretary, whose office it was 
 to direct distinguished strangers to suitable 
 accommodation. 
 
 Lady Anne was in the thick of the battle, 
 entertaining some of the most prominent 
 members as her own guests at the deanery, 
 and having issued, besides numerous dinner 
 invitations, cards for an evening reception,
 
 176 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 and also for a couple of garden parties, at 
 which the scientific rank and fashion of the 
 united kingdom would be present. And 
 Lady Barbegan, too, though having scarcely 
 the merest bowing acquaintance with the 
 objects of the Association, was always glad 
 of an excuse for a little extra gaiety, especi- 
 ally if plenty of men could be gathered 
 up to take part in it, and so she was giving 
 a dance at the Old Residence, and she was 
 also giving a dinner-party, at which the 
 President, who was an old friend of her 
 father, had promised to be present. 
 
 The dean and Jacob Weird had had their 
 last consultation over the astronomical 
 paper. Jacob's plan was to slip quietly 
 somewhere into the back seats, and hear 
 it read ; then slip as quietly out, leaving the 
 discussion of it to those who cared for 
 discussions. He knew he had said what he 
 had found out to be truth, and therefore
 
 THE SENIOE SONGMAN. 177 
 
 what other people might say about it would 
 not make much difference. The reading 
 was to take place on the third evening of 
 the Congress, and, after hearing it, he should 
 have time to go down to the Crawlborough 
 station, on what was with him an almost un- 
 precedented errand, the meeting of a young 
 stranger who was to be his guest for a few 
 days at the Chantry house. 
 
 This guest was a lad of about twelve, 
 Albion Grey by name, a ward under the 
 care of Dr. Sparke, the organist. He was 
 coming to Crawlborough to attend the 
 grammar-school, and he was to live with 
 his guardian ; but, as the organist's house 
 was full of people who belonged to the 
 Association, he had asked Jacob Weird to 
 take the boy in for a few days, until he 
 could find room for him. And Mrs. Penny- 
 drop, without whose permission such an 
 innovation could never be permitted, had 
 
 VOL. I. n
 
 178 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 cheerfully acquiesced, saying that the house 
 would be the better of a little young life in 
 it, and, for that matter, the master too. 
 
 So Jacob Weird started, heard his paper 
 read in the Mathematical section room, and 
 then, as some of the leading scientific men 
 of the day were beginning to discuss it, he 
 stole quietly out, and made his way to the 
 station to meet Albion Grey. 
 
 As he went down the High Street, whose 
 shops were more brilliantly lighted than 
 usual to-night, and from whose upper stories 
 flags, banners, and streamers trailed half 
 across the street, a young woman passed 
 him who had just come in by the London 
 evening mail, and as she walked along she 
 looked hurriedly from side to side, and 
 paused at the turnings to scan the names 
 which were printed there, as though, in 
 spite of her fine, clear-cut face and elegant
 
 THE SENIOE SONGMAN. ] 79 
 
 bearing, she was not sufficiently a scholar 
 to decipher them. 
 
 She had already stopped one or two 
 policemen, but their directions only seemed 
 to confuse her, for she hurried about with a 
 more bewildered air than before. 
 
 1 II cathedral,' she said to a sturdy 
 blue-coated guardian of the public peace 
 who was standing by the door of the Assem 
 bly Hall for the purpose of directing visitors 
 to the Philological section, at present meet 
 ing there. 
 
 ' II cathedral ?' he replied — ' I don't know 
 any tiling about an ill cathedral. If you 
 want Crawlborough Minster, you'll find it 
 up at the top of Bridlegate.' 
 
 And he pointed to a narrow, irregular 
 old street turning down a few steps beyond 
 the bow window of Jacob Weird's house. 
 
 She thanked him and wandered on, but 
 
 n2
 
 180 THE SENIOR SONGAIAN. 
 
 was soon lost in the twistings and turnings 
 which spread about in all directions just in 
 that part of the city. After asking one and 
 another, and seemingly gaining no light 
 upon her path, she wandered about until 
 she came to the tall iron gate which led 
 into the cathedral close. In front of it an 
 old porter paced up and down, his duty 
 being to see that no disreputable people 
 entered the sacred precincts. 
 
 1 Cathedral ?' she asked, in her curious 
 foreign accent. 
 
 The old man looked at her. She was 
 outlandish, and he had lived too Ions in 
 Crawlborough to care for outlandish folk. 
 
 ' It's the minster, if that's what you mean,' 
 he said, snappishly. ' Can't you tell a min- 
 ster when you see it?' 
 
 ' I know,' she replied, not without a cer- 
 tain dignity, ' and I want milord Montague, 
 Signor Barbegano.'
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 181 
 
 ' Don't know no such person about here. 
 Never heard tell of any milords in Crawl- 
 borough Minster close.' 
 
 * Milord Montague Barbegano — very big 
 house.' 
 
 1 Blessings on us ! it's the old baronet she 
 wants. Did ever anybody hear such a way 
 of putting it ? And what may the like of 
 you be a-wanting with Sir Montague, I 
 wonder, miss ?' 
 
 Nanni drew herself up. She did not 
 quite understand what the old man meant, 
 but she knew enough English to gather 
 that he was not treating her with sufficient 
 respect. 
 
 ' Will you tell me where is Sir Montague 
 Barbegano ?' 
 
 ' Yes, yes, miss, him that was married 
 this two months back, and he lives yonder 
 at that big house over there, where the 
 lights is shining out. They're having a
 
 182 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 dinner-party to-night, is him and ray lady/ 
 
 Nanni's eyes flashed ; she looked scorn- 
 fully at the man. 
 
 ' Milord Montague is not married. There 
 is no lady at his big house.' 
 
 4 Isn't there ? Well, I thought there was. 
 But maybe you'd best go and look for your- 
 self. There's some won't believe while 
 their own eyes tells them.' 
 
 And with that the old porter resumed his 
 walk up and down in front of the Close 
 gates. 
 
 Nanni swept past him as though she had 
 been a queen. She had quite lost the 
 bright, frank, coquettish manner of her girl- 
 ish days, and had developed into a hand- 
 some, almost stately woman, with still the 
 same great dark eyes flashing tenderness or 
 scorn or impatience, still the same rosy lips 
 that could smile so sweetly or bend them- 
 selves into such bitter curves, still the same
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 183 
 
 long dark rippling hair, one single curl of 
 which lay close to Jacob Weird's heart. 
 Only the soft outline of the face was begin- 
 ning to sharpen; a look in the black eyes 
 told of anxiety, even of fear. And in her 
 aspect there was a touch of that defiance 
 which a woman needs who has in all things 
 to begin to care for herself. 
 
 She went up to the door of the Old 
 Residence. The light shining from within 
 through the crimson blinds made a ruby 
 stain upon the pavement. Down in the 
 area servants were hurrying to and fro. 
 From the open windows of the dining-room 
 one could hear voices as of men chatting 
 pleasantly together ; now and then a laugh 
 as some good story reached its climax. 
 Nanni rang the bell. After waiting some 
 time, a footman came. 
 
 ' The baronet and Lady Barbegan are 
 engaged with dinner company.'
 
 184 THE SENIOR SONGMAH. 
 
 That was all he said, after a rapid glance 
 at the visitor, and he seemed to think it 
 would be enough. 
 
 But Nanni stood there. 
 
 f I must see. You must tell milord 
 Montague.' 
 
 The man looked astonished, then said, 
 rudely, 
 
 ' What shall I tell him ?' 
 
 'Tell him 1 am of Milan.' 
 
 e That isn't telling him anything. What 
 is your name ?' 
 
 Nanni fixed him with her intense black 
 eyes and simply replied, in a keen, clear, icy 
 voice, 
 
 'Tell him I am of Milan.' 
 
 Leaving her standing there in the open 
 doorway, the servant went into the dining- 
 room to his master, who was sipping wine 
 with the gentlemen guests, and enjoying 
 conversation which could be carried on with
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 185 
 
 more freedom after the departure of the 
 ladies. For not a few of the companions 
 whom Sir Montague gathered around him 
 were such as did occasionally feel the 
 presence of ladies a restraint. 
 
 The servant delivered his message. An 
 expression of surprise, then of curiosity, then 
 of annoyance, chased away for a moment 
 the genial smile which a host should always 
 wear in the presence of his guests. But 
 only for a moment. 
 
 ' It is a mistake. Go and tell her she has 
 got to the wrong house, Bennet.' 
 
 Bennet went, but soon returned. The 
 woman said she was not mistaken, and she 
 would but send up the former message, that 
 she was from Milan. 
 
 1 1 am sorry for her then,' said Sir Mon- 
 tague, carelessly, ' because she has travelled 
 a long way. But she has made a mistake in 
 coming to this house. Tell her she must go
 
 188 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 away, or you will send a policeman to 
 remove her.' 
 
 'These people are so troublesome,' he 
 continued, turning with a bored look to the 
 gentleman at his side. 
 
 'Very much so,' replied the guest, 'especi- 
 ally when they know they are coming to a 
 charitable house.' 
 
 The baronet smiled. 
 
 ' I believe I have the reputation of being 
 a good-hearted fellow, so much the worse 
 for me. Here, Bennet, you can give her 
 this half-crown. I daresay she will find it 
 useful.' 
 
 And a minute or two afterwards he asked, 
 
 ' Has she gone, Bennet ?' 
 
 1 Yes, Sir Montague.' 
 
 And the conversation went on merrily as 
 before. 
 
 Just then another footman opened one
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 187 
 
 of the dining-room windows, for the air 
 was hot and heavy. 
 
 As he did so something was flung sharply 
 in. It fell at the feet of one of the guests. 
 It was a half-crown wrapped in a bit of 
 paper. 
 
 'Take it away, Bennet/ said Sir 
 Montague, angrily. * Insolent creature ! 
 If she wants gold she must go without P 
 And then he went on listening to old 
 Major Wardilow's very much oftener than 
 thrice told story about a gallant feat which 
 he and his men had accomplished during 
 one of the Indian campaigns. But that bit 
 of defiance about the half-crown had vexed 
 him. Which of them was it, the little 
 fair-haired peasant outside the city, or 
 the peppery prima donna, or some quite 
 forgotten favourite who had turned up and 
 tracked him to his respectable English
 
 1S8 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 home? It was well the ladies had left the 
 room, or they might have been inquisitive 
 to an inconvenient extent. 
 
 After flinging the coin away with a curse 
 and a sneer, Nanni crossed the Close, which 
 was dark enough now, and was going to 
 rest herself under a grim, narrow little 
 doorway which opened into the north 
 transept. It was the way Jacob Weird 
 generally entered, and the dean allowed 
 him to have a key of his own for it. But 
 happening to look up at the carved work, 
 which reminded her of another cathedral 
 far away, Nanni saw that a figure of the 
 Christ, with outstretched hands and face 
 bent down as if in pity, was sculptured in 
 a niche over the doorway ; and crossing her- 
 self, she turned away. 
 
 1 Not there,' she said, in a whisper. And 
 then, stumbling on for a few paces, she 
 paused where a grey and mouldering gar-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 189 
 
 goyle in the form of a dragon's head leered 
 out from a dark corner. 
 
 ' This is better/ she said, and seated her- 
 self beneath it. 
 
 For a while she rested there. She could 
 see the rosy light glowing through the 
 curtained windows of the Old Residence. 
 By-and-by she could hear music, a voice 
 singing. It was Sir Montague Barbegan's 
 voice. She got up and stepped proudly away, 
 very proudly, for a little while, and then 
 her strength failed her. She was faint, 
 hungry, worn out, and the ending of her 
 long, toilsome journey had not been what 
 she hoped, had indeed been quite different 
 from what she hoped. 
 
 Then the cathedral clock struck eight. 
 There was a train back again to London at 
 half-past, and what could she do now but 
 go ? The way to the station was not long. 
 The night's journey would give her a
 
 190 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 night's lodging as well. And if there was 
 only some good soul near who would bless 
 her with a drink of cold water. 
 
 Scarcely a stone's throw from her was 
 the gate of Jacob Weird's back garden. 
 It was open. Mrs. Pennydrop stood at it, 
 listening, as she did sometimes when there 
 was a party in the Close, to the music that 
 on summer evenings could be faintly heard 
 from the open window. 
 
 ' Would you perhaps give me a glass of 
 water ?' 
 
 Mrs. Pennydrop looked her in the face ; a 
 pale pinched face, with eyes unnaturally 
 large and hollow. And there was an air of 
 proud respectability about the woman. She 
 was no common ba^sa^e. 
 
 ' Only please a glass of water. I am very 
 tired.' 
 
 ' Indeed you don't need to say it, for you 
 carry it in your looks. Come your ways in,
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 191 
 
 and I'll give you something that will do you 
 a bit more good than water. Have you 
 come from far? 
 
 ' I have come from London and I so 
 there again at half-past eight.' 
 
 'Then you haven't a deal of time. The 
 kettle's boiling, for there's a young gentle- 
 man coming as it's any minute he may be 
 here now, and I could make you a cup of 
 tea while you sit you down to rest. The 
 master isn't one, bless him, that ever sends 
 the needy away from his door, and you 
 don't look as if you'd friends here.' 
 
 ' I have no friends here,' said the woman, 
 calmly. c That is true.' 
 
 ' Ah ! Well, then, I hope you've got 'em 
 somewheres else, or maybe you make shift 
 to do without 'em, same as I do. It isn't 
 a deal friends has ever done for me, but 
 there's times when they're a convenience all 
 the same. Your tea'll be ready in a minute,
 
 192 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 and here's a bit of cake with it. It's what 
 I set away cold, the master not wanting of 
 it when he come in from the prayers.' 
 
 Nanni refused the cake. She was not 
 hungry, she said, but she drank the tea 
 eagerly, and it seemed to put a little 
 strength into her. As the cathedral bells 
 struck a quarter past eight, she was on her 
 feet again. 
 
 ' I thank you,' she said, stepping out into 
 the garden. 
 
 And then, whilst Mrs. Pennydrop still 
 watched her, she returned and stood for a 
 moment upon the threshold, and in a quiet, 
 deliberate voice said, 
 
 ' Whoever the master of this house may 
 be, I bless him with my heart, for that you 
 say he never sends the needy from his 
 door.' 
 
 Then she walked quickly away.
 
 193 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE way back to the station was easier. 
 As Jacob Weird stood there upon the 
 platform, waiting the north train which was 
 to bring in Albion Grey, Nanni passed him 
 and asked of a porter which was the night 
 mail for London. 
 
 1 It's here, miss, alongside of you, and 
 you'll have to step in quick, for it's just on 
 starting.' 
 
 She hurried forward, the porter opened 
 a door, pushed her in, the man came and 
 looked at her ticket, the guard blew his 
 whistle, and the train moved away, but not 
 
 vol. i. o
 
 194 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 until Jacob Weird and Nanni had looked 
 once more into each other's eyes — looked 
 with a long, long look of remembrance and 
 yearning and regret. But the look had no 
 time to quicken itself into speech. And, 
 indeed, for Jacob Weird it seemed to him 
 only as a dream. 
 
 Long after the last carriage had disap- 
 peared, he stood there, leaning against one 
 of the iron pillars. The station lights were 
 dazzling all around him, crowds of excur 
 sionists were struggling about to find or 
 catch their trains. There was shouting 
 screaming, confusion, to an extent rarely 
 known in the usually quiet little Crawl 
 borough terminus. But amidst it all Jacob 
 Weird saw nothing but the vine-trellised 
 arbour at the bottom of the widow Valeria's 
 garden, with Nanni's face upturned to his 
 in the twilight, heard nothing but Nanni's
 
 THE SENIOR SOXGMAN. 195 
 
 voice as she said, her hands clasping his the 
 while — 
 
 ' I shall be here, and here for you.' 
 There was another outburst of steam, 
 shouting, and whistling. Porters came and 
 pushed the crowds back. The train from 
 the north turned out its cargo of passengers. 
 Little Dr. Sparke, panting and breathless, 
 just bustled up to the platform in time to 
 pick out his boy from the medley of arrivals, 
 and hand him over to the friend who had 
 kindly consented to accommodate him for 
 a few nights. 
 
 ' I was afraid I was going to be late, and 
 I thought you would be in such a haste, both 
 of you, if you had to find each other out in 
 the midst of all this scrimmage. I just 
 stopped to hear what I could of the discus- 
 sion, and I can tell you, Mr. Weird, you've 
 given them something to talk about, if 
 
 o 2
 
 196 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 you've given them nothing else. There 
 didn't seem as if there was any chance of 
 their ending when I came away, and they 
 had been at it a good hour.' 
 
 Jacob could not remember. And then it 
 came back to him, like something that had 
 happened years ago, that his paper had 
 been read that night in the mathematical 
 section — nay, that he had been listening to 
 it himself. 
 
 Meanwhile little Dr. Sparke was bustling 
 about amongst the luggage, and then hailed 
 a cab, and marshalled the boy and his 
 belongings into it. 
 
 ' Come along, Albion. Here, Mr. Weird, 
 this is the guest you have been so good as 
 to take in ; and now, my boy, pick up your 
 traps quick, for I want to be back again 
 and hear out the discussion, and, whatever 
 else you do, mind you don't bother Mr. 
 Weird with your talking, for he's had a
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 197 
 
 tiring day, and I daresay he wants to be 
 quiet/ 
 
 Jacob made no protest against this, and 
 the two drove to the Chantry almost in 
 silence, Albion, a bright-faced, clear-eyed 
 boy, rinding sufficient amusement in looking 
 out of the window at the flags, and banners, 
 and wreaths, and illuminations with which 
 Crawlborough was welcoming its scientific 
 guests. Mrs. Pennydrop was waiting for 
 them, and, after showing the boy into his 
 room, poured out her story to the master. 
 
 ' I've got the supper a- waiting for you, 
 sir, leastways, if it isn't waiting, it'll be there 
 before you've had time to turn round and 
 be ready for it. I could have dished it to 
 the minute, but just when I was going to 
 start upon the chops I thought I would 
 step down to the back gate to have a cool, 
 and there came a young person past, and 
 she stopped to beg a glass of water, and,
 
 198 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 thinks I to myself, a cup of tea would do 
 you a vast deal more good, and, knowing 
 that you wasn't a gentleman, sir, to grudge 
 it when there seemed a necessity, I made 
 bold to ask her to come in. A curious, 
 unhandy sort of person, sir, and had a deal 
 of trouble to get what she wanted said, 
 and not a bit like the sort one sees here- 
 abouts.' 
 
 ' You did right, Mrs. Pennydrop. Al- 
 ways be kind to strangers, and give them 
 what they need.' 
 
 ' Yes, sir ; 1 told her you was that sort. 
 And the cup of tea seemed to do her a 
 deal of good, for she picked up wonderful, 
 and set off as if she meant to catch her 
 train. Come by a trip, I reckon, to see 
 the place, and got overset, and, being alone 
 and that, seemed sort of scared. And 
 grateful too, for just before she started 
 she stood her up on the threshold of the
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 199 
 
 garden* door, and she said she blessed the 
 master of the house, whoever he might be, 
 that did not send the needy empty away. 
 And I stood up likewise, and gave it my 
 Amen; for she said it as solemn as any 
 prayer. And now, sir, I reckon the chops 
 will be ready.' 
 
 It never occurred to Jacob Weird that 
 Nanni was the wanderer who had found 
 shelter under his roof. Indeed he had 
 scarcely dwelt upon the actual fact of her 
 appearance at all, so powerfully had his 
 thoughts been flung back into the past. 
 And when he came to himself, and remem- 
 bered what he had seen, the slight figure 
 hurrying past him, the noise, bustle, hurry, 
 the decreasing lights, the moving train, the 
 startled, searching, hungry look of the eyes 
 that were fastened upon him, the face that 
 had come as a vision, and as a vision had 
 faded away again into the darkness, he was
 
 200 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 unable to account for it to himself in any 
 way. He could almost have believed the 
 whole an illusion ; the effect of some power- 
 ful impression upon his mind, working itself 
 into an outward, but entirely deceptive ap- 
 pearance. The thought of Nanni was so 
 often present with him. He had but to 
 close his eyes upon the things that sur- 
 rounded him, and the old life was real 
 again, quick with its old love, its old hopes, 
 its old purposes. And, weary, worn out, 
 excited as he was with the events of the 
 day, that old life had become momentarily 
 actual. Nanni's eyes had looked out upon 
 him from the face of a stranger. He had 
 read his own thoughts, his own memories, 
 in the moving scene before him, and so for 
 him they were once more real. 
 
 At any rate, that was how he at last 
 decided it, telling no one of what he had 
 seen or had seemed to see.
 
 201 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 A LBTON GREY did not leave the 
 -^*- Chantry house so soon as was ex- 
 pected. The bustle of the Association 
 meetings had been too much for Mrs. 
 Sparke, and, when her overflow of guests 
 had departed, she broke down, and ap- 
 peared, as her physician thought, on the 
 brink of a serious illness. She must go 
 away from home, and Dr. Sparke must go 
 with her, only returning for his Sunday 
 work at the cathedral, leaving the rest of 
 the music to his assistant. Of course, whilst 
 things were in this way at the organist's
 
 202 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 establish ment, Albion Grey could not con- 
 veniently be received into it ; and as Jacob 
 had taken a great fancy to the bright young 
 lad, and as Mrs. Pennydrop, moreover, said 
 that he was like sunshine in the house, there 
 seemed no better arrangement than that 
 he should stay there. And when the lad 
 got fairly settled down at the Chantry, and 
 still there seemed no prospect of Mrs. 
 Sparke being permanently better, though 
 she had been able to come back to Crawl- 
 borough, Jacob said he would be glad to 
 keep him on for good, at least so long as he 
 needed to go to the grammar-school. So 
 that was settled. 
 
 On holiday afternoons the two would go 
 down to the Crawl farm together, and 
 Jacob would smoke his pipe in the orchard 
 or have a talk with Mrs. Weird in the grassy 
 bend by the river side, while Albion 
 amused himself with little Hertha.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 203 
 
 'Those two do well together, Jacob,' said 
 Grace, as the elder couple sat one sunny 
 autumn afternoon, watching the changing 
 lights upon the river and listening to the 
 merry voices of the children who were 
 perched on one of the long roots of the elm 
 tree, where it stretched down to a shallow 
 part of the water amongst the willow herbs. 
 Albion had made a couple of little boats 
 out of chestnut burrs, with tall pins for 
 masts, and flower petals for sails, his a red 
 rose leaf, hers white. And they were 
 setting them off upon a race towards a 
 willow trunk just down the stream. A 
 pretty picture they made. Hertha's face 
 was full of childish delight as she watched 
 the little crafts set out upon their voyage. 
 She was bending forward until her long, 
 fair hair almost dipped into the water, her 
 hands were clasped round her knees, her 
 little figure was rigid in its watching, waiting
 
 204 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 attitude. She had no thought but for the 
 safety of the white-sailed boat which seemed 
 to be making its way into a tangle amongst 
 the river weed. Albion, standing over her, 
 with one arm round her to steady her lest 
 she should overbalance, took things more 
 quietly. If the little craft did come to 
 grief, why he could make twenty more, and 
 the race could start again. But Hertha 
 evidently felt that she had made her 
 venture once for all. 
 
 'They do well together, those two, 
 Jacob. I've known many a marriage come 
 about in that way, and, to my thinking, 
 there are none so safe.' 
 
 Jacob said nothing, only there was a world 
 of thought and speculation in his eves as he 
 looked at the children. Mrs. Weird con- 
 tinued. 
 
 ' You are a backward one, brother Jacob, 
 and always were so, to speak your mind
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 205 
 
 when it's a question of marrying that comes 
 to be talked about. But all the same these 
 things do grow up we scarcely know 
 how/ 
 
 'And grow up the better for being let 
 alone/ said Jacob. 
 
 'Yes, the better for being let alone. 
 There's no one feels that more than I do. 
 But one may watch and take notice and 
 have one's own opinions, for all that. And 
 I do say, Jacob, that when children are 
 brought up together, or at least see a good 
 deal of each other when they are children, 
 and then meet again when they're older, it 
 often falls out that they become man and 
 wife ; and the happiest marriages I've ever 
 seen have been of that sort.' 
 
 ' I don't doubt it, Grace, at least some- 
 times. You know what }Wre doing, and 
 there's less risk. It was so with you and 
 Hiram.'
 
 206 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 ' Yes. How we used to play together 
 like brother and sister when we were little ; 
 and then you see with you being almost 
 brought up by your uncle, there was 
 nobody but Hiram at home when I used to 
 come here to play. Is Albion to spend his 
 Christmas with you ?' 
 
 ' I don't know. I suppose it will have to 
 depend upon how Mrs. Sparke is. If she 
 doesn't pick up a little more than she is 
 doing now, I should say she is better with- 
 out a bright, active lad like Albion, ram- 
 paging about the house.' 
 
 ' And I should think so too, for he is 
 one of the rampaging sort, always must 
 have something to do, and doesn't care to 
 sit studying as you used to do when you 
 were a boy. Well then, Jacob, if he is 
 with you, you must bring him here for 
 Christmas. He'll find a deal more to amuse 
 him on the farm than shut up at the Chan-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 207 
 
 try house with you and Mrs. Pennydrop. 
 That's settled, Jacob.' 
 
 'Thank you. Yes, it shall be settled if 
 you like. At least the boy shall come. I 
 don't know but what I shall spend ray 
 Christmas alone. I feel more myself in 
 the old place, and it's easier for me to go 
 in and out to the singing. But Albion 
 is always happy when he gets on the farm. 
 As you say, he likes it better than his 
 books.' 
 
 ' Yes. Then you have noticed it too, 
 Jacob. I was remarking it to my husband 
 only a while ago. You may laugh at me if 
 you like, but there might be many a worse 
 thing happen than for Albion to come here 
 as pupil, and then marry Hertha.' 
 
 And Mrs. Weird, with a mother's love 
 and a little of a mother's pride in her 
 eyes too, looked away to little Hertha, who, 
 shielded by Albion's protecting arm, was
 
 208 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 still bending over the water, watching her 
 petal-sailed vessel. 
 
 'You're one to heat the oven a good 
 while before it's time to put the bread in,' 
 said Jacob, drily. 'And that wastes 
 the wood, and your loaf doesn't bake so 
 well either.' 
 
 'That may be, Jacob. All the same 
 it's a poor cook that doesn't clean her oven 
 out and have it well ready the night before. 
 And, when your oven's prepared, half the 
 wood heats it. You don't need to tell me 
 anything that belongs to a kitchen, Jacob. 
 I've baked bread too many times for 
 that.' 
 
 Jacob smiled and shook his pipe into the 
 grass. Grace had got the better of him for 
 once. When she did say a smart thing, she 
 said it so simply that it did the work ten 
 times better. If he wanted to floor Grace 
 with a simile, he must look out for one at
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 209 
 
 a safe distance from domestic economy. 
 
 ' Well, we'll let the baking alone, 
 Grace. They do say a man is wise to 
 keep out of the kitchen, and I'll do it 
 next time. Suppose we talk then about 
 counting one's chickens before they're 
 hatched.' 
 
 'That's a thing I never need to do 
 either, Jacob, for if you choose your eggs 
 wisely, and put them under the right hen, 
 and keep your wits about you whilst she is 
 sitting, you may reckon safely enough upon 
 a chick to a shell. I wish I could reckon 
 as safely upon everything else. And I 
 don't think there is any harm in getting 
 ready for these things before they come. 
 I can see, even now, that Hertha is not of 
 the contriving sort that will look about 
 and do the best she can for herself You 
 can tell it by her eyes. They are full of 
 thinkings and questionings that don't belong 
 
 VOL. I. P
 
 210 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 to her own interests at all. And in her 
 little way now, if she takes trouble, it isn't 
 for herself.' 
 
 ' So much the better for her. It is soon 
 enough to begin with that. 9 
 
 And Jacob Weird's thoughts iourneved 
 to Milan, to the little fruit shop where the 
 widow Valeria's clever management had- 
 done so much. Nanni, too, had not been 
 backward in finding out where she could 
 better herself. 
 
 ' You are right, Jacob. But just because 
 she does not think of herself, and never 
 will as some girls do, there is the more 
 reason that I should think for her. Her 
 father and I have often said we should like 
 nothing better than for her to live here a 
 wife, where she has lived all her life a 
 daughter. And then we could go to the 
 little cottage at Crawlthorpe where your 
 father died. I shall be quite ready when
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 211 
 
 my time comes to give up, and so will 
 Hiram. He doesn't care for money- 
 making, only for the proper comfort that 
 money brings. And, when Hertha is pro- 
 vided for, he won't need to think about it 
 at all.' 
 
 6 Sometimes people think about it all the 
 more, Grace, when there is no need to think 
 about it at all.' 
 
 ' That isn't the way with Hiram, Jacob, 
 and you should know it. He only works 
 for what is necessary. And, next to having 
 a son of our own to put upon the farm, I 
 would like to see Albion Grey there, and 
 Hertha his wife. It wouldn't be so good, 
 but it would be the next best thing, as far 
 as we can tell.' 
 
 ' Well, all I say is, let them alone and 
 you'll find you've lost nothing by being 
 quiet. It's putting out our hand ^to steady 
 what doesn't belong to us, that does most 
 
 p2
 
 212 THP] SENIOR SCNGMAN. 
 
 of the mischief amongst well-meaning 
 people.' 
 
 1 1 daresay you're right, Jacob. Where 
 you make a mistake, it isn't for want of 
 caution. All the same when Dr. Sparke 
 comes down this way, and it's pretty often 
 he comes, now that Hiram isn't so much 
 upon the farm, I shall make an opening to 
 ask him if he has any plans for Albion. 
 And I shall tell him that the boy seems to 
 have a leaning towards country life. You 
 think so yourself.' 
 
 1 There is no harm in that, Grace, so far.' 
 
 4 No. And I shall say, too, that Hiram 
 has often remarked, things being with us as 
 they are now, and no son of our own to take 
 to the land, he should like to meet with a 
 gentlemanly youth as a farming pupil.' 
 
 ' With a view to marrying Hertha to him/ 
 put in Jacob. 
 
 'No, not with a view to marrying Hertha
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 213 
 
 to him, I'm not such a simpleton as that, 
 Jacob. If you prepare your oven overnight 
 it's soon enough. But prepare it I shall, 
 and then if it's wanted, it will be ready. 
 Albion is only thirteen now, and as fine, 
 straightforward a lad as ever I looked upon ; 
 but it will be time enough, in three or four 
 years' time, to settle what he means to be. 
 Dr. Sparke may as well have it in his mind 
 though, as not.' 
 
 'Well, Grace, all I have to say is, take 
 care where you tread. You've been very 
 happy ; you and Hiram here on the farm by 
 yourselves, with nobody to interfere.' 
 
 ' We have, Jacob, there is nothing truer/ 
 And Mrs. Weird looked round with wifely 
 satisfaction to her own pleasant old home, 
 nestled beside its sheltering elm trees, the 
 big moss-roofed barn behind glowing in the 
 afternoon sunshine, the kine lowing in the 
 yard, the hens clucking amongst the dry
 
 214 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 orchard grass, the hay and corn stacks ris- 
 ing beyond the fruit-laden apple trees like 
 the tents of an encampment. And yonder 
 was Hiram in the distance, riding home 
 from Crawlborough market. She could 
 see the glitter of Bonnie's well-kept harness 
 as he tossed his head with joy at being so 
 near home. Yes, she had much to be 
 thankful for. 
 
 ' There is nothing truer, Jacob. If ever 
 I've had an anxious thought since I was mar- 
 ried, it is that Hiram might have chosen some 
 one to have made more of an appearance. I 
 wasn't brought up to it, and it doesn't come 
 natural to me, and I know he would be 
 better pleased with a little style about the 
 home. My sister-in-law, Phillis, talks to 
 me sometimes. She is always one for ris- 
 ing when there's a chance. Now if Hiram 
 had had one like her.' 
 
 ' He wouldn't have been half so happy,
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 215 
 
 Grace, so just you let it alone. You're the 
 very wife out of all the world that Hiram 
 ought to have had. 5 
 
 1 If you think so, Jacob, that's a comfort 
 to me. But I know my husband would 
 like Hertha to marry well. Thers's no 
 harm in parents wanting their children to 
 be a little better off than they have been 
 themselves, especially when it's an only 
 child, and no one else for the property. 
 And she's almost like yours, too, Jacob.' 
 
 Mrs. Weird said this tentatively, with 
 just a momentary keen look at her brother- 
 in-law. She was not a grasping woman, 
 nor a scheming, still one naturally liked to 
 know. Jacob had never said anything 
 about what he meant to do. He was not a 
 man who ever did say anything. Yet he 
 could not have less than four hundred a 
 year of unincumbered property, property 
 accumulating too, since he lived so simply,
 
 216 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 and no one in the ordinary course of things 
 for it but Hertha. And he loved the child. 
 And he had often said he should never 
 marry. Well, so long as he was comfort- 
 able it was better so. Still she would not 
 have stirred a finger to keep him from a 
 wife, if the right one came in his way. Nay, 
 she could say from her heart she would 
 rather see him with children of his own 
 about him, and a tender, gentle-hearted 
 woman at his fireside, who would comfort 
 him as only such could do. 
 
 Jacob interpreted the look aright. 
 
 ' I shall behave to Hertha just as if she 
 was my own/ he said. ' There is no one 
 has a nearer claim upon me.' 
 
 ' No, nor so near, Jacob, if it comes to 
 that,' replied Mrs. Weird, feeling satisfied 
 now. ' And my husband and myself think- 
 ing of you as we do. But even anyway we 
 have a right to expect that Hertha should
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 217 
 
 do well for herself in marrying, though I 
 would never bring her up to think too much 
 about her own prospects.' 
 
 f No, Grace, nor to think that what was 
 good enough for her father and mother is 
 not good enough for herself.' 
 
 Mrs. Weird drew herself up with a fine 
 flash in her usually meek blue eyes. 
 
 i She shan't do that, Jacob. I may be a 
 plain sort of woman, but I'm a proud too, 
 and I'd rather lie in the churchyard any 
 day than see my own child sitting where 
 she would look down upon her mother. 
 Let her go as high as she will, but let her 
 remember who it is that's put her there.' 
 
 And the red burned on little Mrs. Weird's 
 cheeks. Ay, if she had been a duchess 
 born, it could have burned there no redder, 
 as she rose now and stepped along the river 
 path by Jacob's side, watching the children 
 at their play.
 
 218 THE SENIOR SONGMAX. 
 
 Hertha's boat had drifted into a little 
 pool. Albion's hovered near it for a while ; 
 then, caught by an opposing current, drifted 
 far away down the river, the white-petalled 
 craft tossing helplessly there amongst the 
 tangled weed. 
 
 4 That doesn't look as if it was to be as 
 you think, Grace,' said Jacob, as the water- 
 logged boat vainly endeavoured to right 
 itself. 
 
 And Mrs. Weird said nothing. 
 
 Hertha's face was keen with pain and 
 disappointment. Struggling away from Al- 
 bion's hold, she caught a bit of mossy branch 
 that lay near her, and flung it with all her 
 force amongst the tangled river weed. The 
 little boat sank. 
 
 * If it is to be that way,' said her mother, 
 1 it's because she will do it herself.' 
 
 But a moment afterwards it came to the 
 surface again. The branch had only broken
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 219 
 
 away the clasping weeds ; and now, with the 
 sunlight shining bravely on its wet white 
 sail, the little chestnut craft careered out 
 into the open water, and the current bore 
 it onwards to where Albion's was already 
 nearing the willow trunk. 
 
 And this time Jacob Weird said nothing.
 
 220 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 1\ /TRS. WEIRD went to make ready for 
 -L'J" her husband. Jacob stayed by the 
 river path, thinking of what he had seen. 
 
 Thinking of his own little life-venture, 
 swamped so soon in the reed beds of 
 circumstance, and which no boldly hurled 
 weapon of action, passion, or determination 
 had first submerged, and then freed into 
 the open current, for sunshine and fair 
 winds to speed it to the haven where it 
 would be. 
 
 Was it that he had yielded too quietly ? 
 Was it that boldness would have conquered
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 221 
 
 where despair had drifted him into the 
 mudbanks of his present stagnant position ? 
 But he had done according to his lights. 
 A man could do no more. And what was 
 ill for him might not be so for others. If 
 Nanni was warmed and comforted in some 
 good man's love, he must needs live on his 
 life alone. And it would be better for the 
 child Hertha. For he loved Hertha more 
 after seeing what she had done. And then 
 he went to meet Hiram, who must be almost 
 within the farm boundaries now. 
 
 What a difference between the two bro- 
 thers as they returned together ! Jacob, 
 small, pale, with that stoop in his shoulders, 
 that intense, inward, meditative expression 
 in his face, the outcome of years of study. 
 Hiram, broad-fronted, ruddy-faced, blue- 
 eyed, shoulders back, head up, chest square, 
 as though to push right on through the 
 world, and get his share of what was his
 
 222 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 own therein ; with his cheery, genial smile, 
 and his jest for everyone, and his good 
 story to be told over wine and walnuts, for 
 he could afford to let the work go easily 
 now. 
 
 .And let it go with an easy heart, too. 
 Things had prospered with him. The land 
 was his own, every acre of it, and there was 
 more lying conveniently about, which might 
 in the course of a few years be added to it ; 
 nay, might be added sooner, if the shares 
 which he had just taken in the Trolgooth 
 mining company paid as well as they had 
 been doing for some time past. 
 
 Not that Hiram craved wealth for its own 
 sake. He always said that to himself when 
 he counted up his possessions, or looked 
 over his title deeds. He only wanted to be 
 what his people had been before him, until 
 his grandfather, old Adam Weird, impover- 
 ished the estate so by gambling. If his
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 223 
 
 grandfather had been content to let well 
 alone, and if his father had succeeded to a 
 comfortable unencumbered property, instead 
 of having had to toil all his life almost like 
 a common farm labourer to keep the place 
 together at all, he might when he took 
 to the farm himself, fifteen years back, have 
 ranked amongst the Crawlborough gentry, 
 instead of only just now beginning to feel 
 his footing in their midst. 
 
 And then Hiram Weird would wish, as 
 indeed he very often did wish now, that 
 Grace had been a more ambitious woman. 
 She was a good wife, as good as any man 
 was blessed with, but so long as her house 
 was scrupulously clean, and her table plenti- 
 fully supplied of the best, and her eggs the 
 finest and her butter the richest in all the 
 country round, she was content. 
 
 For still, entering that sturdy substantial 
 four-square old place down by the river side,
 
 224 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 you felt that it was a farm-house, good 
 measure of comfort in it, pressed down and 
 shaken together and running over, but of 
 modern elegance none at all. Still the 
 drawing-room, or best parlour as Mrs. 
 Weird called it, nodded friendlily across the 
 wide passage to the dairy on the other side, 
 whose door, wire gauzed, let anyone look 
 through to the trays of thick clotted cream 
 standing for the week's churning. And still 
 morning or afternoon callers could not be 
 shown into that best parlour without walk- 
 ing past the kitchen, and having a full pros- 
 pect, unless Betsy had been careful, of bread, 
 or pudding, or cake making, going on be- 
 neath the rows of hams and broadsides of 
 bacon. And, if Betsy had been careful, 
 there was still the glass-fronted pantry to 
 pass, and the apple cellar from which such a 
 fragrant scent of ribstones and golden pip- 
 pins was always coming up.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 225 
 
 But that never vexed Mrs. Weird. She 
 was not a woman who despised appear- 
 ances, but she liked comfort better, and 
 to know that things were going on pro- 
 perly about her, as they were pretty sure 
 to go when the servants knew that at any 
 moment the mistress might be popping out 
 upon them on her way to and from the 
 garden. 
 
 ' It makes such a difference,' she would 
 say to her sister-in-law, the solicitor's wife, 
 ' when your kitchen is a thoroughfare to the 
 garden, or any place where you're constantly 
 coming and going. It keeps the girls won- 
 derfully up to the mark, especially when 
 they know that you don't make any hesita- 
 tion at taking a visitor through as well. 
 Hiram talks sometimes of making a new- 
 way out to the fruit garden, but I tell him 
 he had a great deal better let it alone. I 
 always like to feel that I can go through the 
 
 vol. i. ^i
 
 226 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 kitchen and give a look round, without 
 saying what I've come for.' 
 
 Mrs. Bellfield, who affected more of the 
 modern style in her arrangements, and even 
 kept a page to answer the door and wait at 
 table, did not quite see it. Sister Grace's ways 
 were just a little annoying to her now and 
 then, though she could not deny that they 
 tended to comfort. And she thought that, 
 when people were making money, they 
 ought to act accordingly, especially when 
 there was an only daughter to be suitably 
 settled in life. Hertha would have a very 
 good fortune one of these days, might 
 expect to marry into a very respectable 
 class of society, if only her manners and 
 associations were judiciously attended to. 
 
 ' I don't know that you need make any 
 change just at present, Grace,' said Mrs. 
 Bellfield one da}', when she had driven 
 over in her little pony-carriage to have
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 227 
 
 luncheon with the Weirds at their early 
 dinner, 'but there are many things that 
 will have to be done by-and-by, if you 
 intend Hertha to take her proper position. 
 And I think, if you were a wise woman, 
 you would begin to get into the way of 
 doing them now. A change can't help 
 sitting awkwardly upon you just at first, 
 and so it is best to make it betimes.' 
 
 : I don't think a change ever would sit 
 anything but awkwardly upon me,' said 
 Mrs. Weird, looking round with an expres- 
 sion in no wise discontented upon her hand- 
 some, old-fashioned furniture, the faded 
 Turkey carpet, the polished mahogany 
 bureaus and bookshelves, the peacock's 
 feathers crossed over the family portraits, 
 the shelves of china, china well crowded 
 up, too, as if the difficulty was how to 
 get it all upon them, not how to spread 
 it out to the best possible advantage ; the 
 
 Q2
 
 228 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 stout, voluminous, brown damask curtains, 
 that had been new, with their bobbing 
 fringes and festoons and tassels and cords, 
 when David Weird brought his bride home, 
 well on to fifty years before. 
 
 ' I'm very fond of seeing things as I've 
 been used to them. Hiram says to me 
 himself sometimes, that, now the income is 
 increasing, we ought to make a little more 
 appearance ; but, until there is a need for 
 it, I would rather keep as I am.' 
 
 4 Perhaps so ; Hertha being only a child 
 yet. You will send her to a first-class 
 school, Grace?' 
 
 1 1 shall have her properly educated, of 
 course,' said Mrs. Weird, mentally glancing 
 at the possibilities which she had been dis- 
 cussing a few days before with her hus- 
 band's brother. And with that there fell 
 a little silence between them. She did not 
 feel that she could mention her hopes about
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 229 
 
 Hertha to Mrs. Bellfield. You might think 
 your inmost thoughts to brother Jacob, and 
 feel that they were as safe as if you had 
 dropped them into a new-made grave ; but 
 Phillis picked up things very quickly, put 
 her own construction on them, and then, 
 even if she did not talk about them to 
 other people, she had no hesitation in 
 bringing them up as often as she thought 
 proper to the one who had first mentioned 
 them to her. And that was a sort of thing 
 which annoyed Grace. She had a strong 
 sense of personal dignity, and of the things 
 that ought, or ought not, to be talked about 
 to her. 
 
 'I shall probably look out for a good 
 governess for her, and then she can go into 
 Crawlborough for lessons. One can always 
 get masters there, on account of the gram- 
 mar-school.' 
 
 'It isn't masters I'm thinking about,
 
 230 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 Grace. It's the sort of finish a girl gets 
 at a first-class school. Hertha won't get 
 it unless you send her away from home.' 
 
 1 1 don't know what Uncle Jacob would 
 say to her going, though,' replied Mrs. 
 Weird. 
 
 Mrs. Bellfield shrugged her shoulders. 
 
 ' If you bring her up as her uncle Jacob 
 would like, she will be a curious sort of 
 girl. It's a great pity he hasn't more 
 notion of keeping up his position, with the 
 clean taking so much notice of him, and the 
 Close people asking him amongst them as 
 they have done since the British Associa- 
 tion. He might, if he had the least sort of 
 tact, get you into very good society, indeed 
 quite as good as James and I move in. 
 But James says he never saw a man with so 
 little ambition.' 
 
 1 1 don't think James need say anything 
 about it, Phillis. He is not a man that has
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 231 
 
 a great deal of ambition himself. Ambition 
 is a thing that there never was much of in 
 our family. 5 
 
 f Well, in one way you are right, Grace. 
 Now James's ambition is a different one from 
 mine, but he has it all the same. You 
 know he is in the Corporation now, and 
 he means to be mayor some day, and to 
 be a foremost man in public improve- 
 ments, and all that sort of thing. But, as 
 for caring to push himself up in society, 
 why, I don't suppose he ever has a thought 
 of the kind.' 
 
 'Well, then, PhilJis, I must say I call 
 that the best sort of ambition, because it is 
 an ambition which does something for other 
 people.' 
 
 f All right, I never said it wasn't. James 
 is everything that I care for him to be, 
 whatever sort of ambition it is that he has. 
 It was you who began to talk about ambi-
 
 232 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 tion at all, because I said Mr. Weird — I 
 mean your brother-in-law — was such a very 
 retiring man. I am sure of this, that if he 
 was my brother-in-law, and visited at the 
 deanery, it would not be very long before I 
 visited there myself.' 
 
 ' But Jacob does not what I call visit at 
 the deanery. He goes to have mathematical 
 talks with Dr. Barbegan, that is all. It is 
 very different from being asked to dine and 
 meet other people.' 
 
 ' He has been asked to dine and meet 
 other people, Grace. If you don't know 
 about it, I do. He was there with the 
 leading members of the Association during 
 the week of the meetings.' 
 
 'Yes, as a matter of course, because he 
 had prepared a paper which was read in 
 one of the sections. I heard that it was a 
 remarkably clever paper, and the people 
 made a great many inquiries about who
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 233 
 
 had written it, and it was a very nice piece 
 of attention on the part of the dean to in- 
 vite him ; but that sort of thing doesn't 
 mean going again, and to meet ladies. I 
 call being asked anywhere to meet ladies as 
 well, being really received into the society 
 of the people who ask you.' 
 
 1 Well, all I can tell you, Grace, is that it 
 did mean going again, and to meet ladies 
 too. He was dining there with Canon and 
 Mrs. Carrobel only the other evening. What 
 can you make of that but that he is received 
 into the Close society r' 
 
 1 He never told me about it, but I should 
 not say that it said much. People of that 
 sort will ask an unmarried man sometimes, 
 because it doesn't mean going to call ; but 
 let him get a wife in his own rank, that is 
 the rank you and I move in, and then see 
 if the Close people would call upon her. If 
 he wrote another splendid paper they might
 
 234 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 ask him to dinner again, but his wife would 
 have nothing to do with it. I call that 
 being patronised, not being received into 
 society.' 
 
 ' Grace,' and Mrs. Bellfield looked at her 
 sister-in-law with a half amused, half won- 
 dering expression in her hard, good-temper- 
 ed, matter-of-fact face, 'though you have 
 such a meek manner you are one of the 
 proudest women I ever set eyes upon. 
 You were just the same at school. Do you 
 remember one Christmas holidays our 
 schoolmistress's swell pupil, Augusta Gran- 
 some, old Captain Gransome's daughter, 
 you know, who used to live out at Crawl- 
 borough Hall, getting her mother to ask us 
 there to spend the day, because we had 
 helped her over her examination, or some- 
 thing of that sort. And we went. And 
 Mrs. Gransome had a hot hash got ready
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 235 
 
 for us, and boiled potatoes, because she 
 said she supposed we always dined in the 
 middle of the day ; but she was so very 
 careful to make us understand that Augusta 
 was only lunching. Oh, how vexed you 
 were !' 
 
 ' I should think I was. It was about the 
 finest piece of snobbishness I ever came 
 across. If Mrs. Gransome had been half 
 as much a gentlewoman as she thought she 
 was, she would have let Miss Augusta do 
 such a dreadfully vulgar thing, just for once, 
 as dine in the middle of the day, rather 
 than let her guests feel that they were put 
 below the salt in that way. Mrs. Magnifi- 
 cence never asked me again, I don't know 
 whether she did you.' 
 
 ' Oh ! yes, and, what was more, I went, 
 and did not feel a bit uncomfortable either ; 
 and, next time Augusta wanted a lift over
 
 236 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 her French parsing, I gave it to her on the 
 chance of being asked again to hash and 
 potatoes in the middle of the day. And we 
 had some splendid fragments, too, from a 
 party that had been given the night before. 
 I don't feel that sort of thing, Grace, as 
 you do.' 
 
 ' I don't feel it a bit, Phillis. I see it, 
 and it makes me despise the people; that 
 is all. I wonder if poor Augusta is married 
 now.' 
 
 ' Oh, yes — to somebody about fifty years 
 older than herself, and they are so grand 
 that they never dine until to-morrow morn- 
 ing. That is late enough for anything, you 
 know. But we were talking about your 
 brother-in-law, and the great people he 
 goes to see now, and the honours put upon 
 him. James says he wishes he only had 
 half his chances.' 
 
 ' I daresay. But Jacob would laugh at
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 237 
 
 the idea of its being any honour to him to 
 be amongst the Close families. You have 
 no idea how proud he is/ 
 
 'Then he is very foolish. It is a great 
 pity when people do not live up to their 
 opportunities. But, at the same time, it is 
 a good thing for you that he does not care 
 for appearances. If he did, and went in 
 for all that a man of his means generally 
 likes, there would not be much to leave 
 when he has done with it. And I suppose 
 Hertha will come in for what there is.' 
 
 1 1 don't trouble Jacob about these things,' 
 said Mrs. Weird, prudently. She was al- 
 ways conscious of a certain stand-offishness 
 with her sister-in-law when they got upon 
 family matters, Phillis seeming to think she 
 had a right to ask as many questions as she 
 liked about them. And, where Hiram 
 Weird's wife thought people were pre- 
 suming, she could be as stiff as a baroness.
 
 238 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 ' Of course you don't trouble him,' said 
 Mrs. Bellfield, not in anywise repulsed. 
 1 It would be the most foolish thing in the 
 world to d,o that. But, at the same time, 
 it would be a very convenient thing if he 
 did see his way to leave Hertha what he 
 has. I should take it for granted if I were 
 you. And he is never likely to marry 
 now.' 
 
 ' I don't know that. He is young yet, 
 and he might see a lady that would suit 
 him. I tell him myself, sometimes, that I 
 wouldn't be better pleased than to see him 
 with a wife and children of his own, even 
 though it did make the difference of what 
 he had to leave to Hertha. It's all I want 
 for him to see him happy.' 
 
 And Mrs. Weird, saying that, said no 
 more than she felt ; though she would, of 
 course, have had a touch of disappointment
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 239 
 
 at her own child not getting the property. 
 But Mrs. Bellfield laughed incredulously. 
 
 1 Well, Grace, you are an idiot, and that 
 is all I can say about it. The idea of going 
 out of your way to suggest marrying to a 
 man in your brother-in-law's position, and 
 so comfortable as he is, too, and with his 
 relations doing their utmost for him. Why, 
 it's flying in the face of Providence to think 
 of such a thing. Mr. Jacob Weird is cut 
 out for a bachelor. One has only to look 
 at him to see that, and all you have got to 
 do is to see that Hertha goes to the Chantry 
 as often as she can, so that he may get to 
 look upon her almost like his own child. 
 And I'm sure he couldn't have a child with 
 a fairer face or a sweeter disposition. She 
 takes after you, Grace, as to her disposition. 
 I used to tell you, you know, when we were 
 at school at Miss Crumble's, that, though
 
 240 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 you were not at all the sort of person to 
 get on in the world, you had one of the 
 best of dispositions.' 
 
 1 I don't know that I have got on badly,' 
 said Mrs. Weird, with a touch of pride. 
 She was a meek woman, but she did not 
 choose to be patronised for all that. And 
 besides, Phillis was implying that Hiram 
 might have chosen a wife to help him for- 
 ward more, and that was always a sore 
 point with her. She could discuss it with 
 Jacob, but, if her brother's wife ever so 
 much as hinted it to her, she was on her 
 dignity in a moment. ' My husband and I 
 are very comfortable. I don't know that 
 we have either of us anything to complain 
 of.' 
 
 ' Oh, dear no ! nothing to complain of. I 
 wish James was half as well off, and had 
 an unmarried brother with four or five hun- 
 dred a year. I was only thinking that, if
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 241 
 
 I had your advantages with my own abili- 
 ties, I would have been at the top of Crawl- 
 borough society long before this. And 
 here you are, poking about with your old- 
 fashioned furniture and faded curtains, and 
 rhubarb-beds up to the drawing-room win- 
 dow, and dinner at one o'clock, and I 
 daresay Hiram in the chimney corner every 
 night of his life with a white clay pipe.' 
 
 * Nay, you are wrong there. Hiram never 
 smokes a pipe now. He has taken to cigars, 
 and he is as particular as anyone about what 
 sort he gets, too.' 
 
 < Is he ? Well, I'm glad of it. And I 
 always say a man is in the right road when 
 he gives up a clay pipe and takes to cigars. 
 He might give James a box now and then, 
 for I am sure he can afford it. You needn't 
 be vexed with me, Grace, for saying it, for 
 you and I understand each other, and al- 
 ways have done ; but if Hiram had had a 
 
 VOL. I. R
 
 242 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 more aspiring sort of a wife, you would 
 have been having your invitations to the 
 balls now, just as I am having, and Bella 
 Lastingham and Mrs. Fairfield, who were 
 schoolgirls with both of us. And I mean 
 before I've done to be asked to the County 
 ball, which is what Mrs. Fairfield has never 
 managed yet.' 
 
 ' Well, I had rather you were there than 
 myself,' said Mrs. Weird, folding up the 
 last pair of her husband's home-knit stock- 
 ings from the wash, and beginning to feel 
 what she called ' raspy.' Phillis always 
 ruffled her up, and yet she could never at 
 the time think of the right thing to say. 
 Afterwards, when brooding over it, the 
 most crushing replies would suggest them- 
 selves to her. ' So long as Hiram has things 
 comfortable, and the house is well looked 
 after, I am content. If I should ever see
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 243 
 
 ray duty differently, I hope I shall be able 
 to rise to it.' 
 
 'Well, you will see it differently, Grace, 
 when James is Mayor of Crawlborough, 
 which he will be, I hope, when Hertha is 
 ready to go out into society. It isn't often 
 the city gets a professional man for a mayor, 
 but, when it does, his wife can get into any 
 society she chooses. And, as I have no 
 grown-up daughters of my own to look 
 after, I shall take care that she has more 
 opportunities of doing well for herself than 
 you are ever likely, with the best of inten- 
 tions, to give her. Grace, you are a good 
 soul, but as incapable of standing up for 
 yourself as one of your own chickens.' 
 
 'Then I'm not badly off, Phillis. If you 
 could see them fighting over a bit of skin, 
 you wouldn't say they didn't know how to 
 stand up for themselves. I don't know a 
 
 r2
 
 244 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 great deal, but I do know that a chicken 
 knows how to take care of itself.' 
 
 1 Then, Grace, you're worse than a chicken, 
 that's all ; and you with an only daughter 
 to look after. But Hertha has me, and, 
 being her god-mother, I'll see to it that she 
 is not brought up to renounce anything that 
 is for her own worldly interests, let the 
 Catechism say what it will. Yonder is 
 Hiram coming up the road, and Jacob 
 Weird beside him ; and, if your husband is 
 not cut out to be the gentleman of the 
 family, I don't know what he is cut out for. 
 He has his own share of good looks and his 
 brother's too. But, Grace, do let us have a 
 cup of tea, and then I'll go.'
 
 245 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 MRS. BELLFIELD, wife of the rising 
 Crawlborough solicitor, had her cup 
 of tea and took her departure, leaving her 
 sister-in-law there in the best parlour with 
 just a touch of weariness and annoyance 
 upon her fair face. 
 
 Grace did feel always more or less out of 
 temper when Phillis had been spending the 
 day with her, especially when she touched, 
 as she was very apt to touch, upon the duty 
 of keeping up appearances. Phillis Bell- 
 field was a common-place, clever woman, a 
 worshipper of success, fond of her husband
 
 246 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 and her home, and she would have been 
 fond of her children, too, only she had 
 none. However, that was not much of a 
 privation, the motherly instinct not being 
 strong in her. Indeed, if she ever dwelt 
 at all upon that want in her life, it was to 
 regret that the pleasant task of training 
 them up with a view to marriage, and then 
 establishing them one after another in pros- 
 perous homes of their own, had been de- 
 nied to her. But at the same time she was 
 an admirable wife, and her husband owed 
 his position in Crawlborough as much to her 
 tact as to his own talent. 
 
 And that matter of tact, social tact, was 
 the one on which she and Grace most fre- 
 quently broke a lance together. Grace had 
 no ambition to rise in society — nay, as her 
 sister-in-law said, she had almost worse than 
 none, for, if she went out of her way to seek 
 acquaintances at all, they were generally
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 247 
 
 those who could give her help in domestic 
 matters, those who had the greatest repu- 
 tation for light bread and spongy cakes and 
 firm butter, people whose custards were the 
 richest and smoothest, who could preserve 
 their apricots to look the most transparent, 
 and whose home-made wines were of the 
 clearest. Amongst such people, provided 
 they were straightforward and comfortable 
 along with it, Mrs. Weird was almost sure 
 to look for her friends. 
 
 So that you never knew whom you might 
 happen to meet when you went to her 
 house. As likely as not Mrs. Ainderley, 
 from the little farm-house across the river, 
 might be there — Mrs. Ainderley who stood 
 in the Crawlborough market with her own 
 butter and eggs, if the carrier failed to call 
 for them, and who might be seen any morn- 
 ing of the week except Sunday, polishing 
 her own windows, or carrying out her
 
 248 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 clothes to air, or even spreading her 
 * starch things ' on the thorn-hedge by the 
 lane, without any regard to appearances. 
 Indeed, for exclusiveness, Grace was not 
 even equal to her husband's brother ; for, 
 though Jacob Weird was as blind as a bat 
 to the advantages which he might have en- 
 joyed amongst the Close people, yet, when 
 he did consort with people, they were not 
 of the baser sort ; and, if by rare chance you 
 did meet anyone at the Chantry house, that 
 one was generally worth meeting. 
 
 But Grace knew her shortcomings. Per- 
 haps that was just why she avoided the 
 subject with Phillis Bellfield. Her husband 
 had hinted at them, and done it a little 
 more frequently since those mining shares 
 began to pay so well. Hiram Weird had 
 considerable sympathy with the solicitor's 
 wife on matters connected with social ad- 
 vancement. Her words were as seed sown
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 249 
 
 in good ground when she told him of vari- 
 ous little improvements which might be 
 made in the conducting of the Crawl farm 
 establishment. It was Hiram who had lis- 
 tened most favourably when she suggested 
 changing the name of the place to Crawl- 
 hurst, and having it printed on the top of 
 the note-paper under the family crest, what- 
 ever that might be. It was Hiram who 
 went forthwith to root out the old plans 
 and surveys when Phillis said how the place 
 could be modernised, how the farm prem- 
 ises could be removed to a suitable distance, 
 the stackyard placed beyond the plantation, 
 a conservatory built out on the ground now 
 occupied by the barn, ribbon-borders ar- 
 ranged instead of the rhubarb-beds in front 
 of the drawing-room windows, the kitchen 
 entrance made from another part, the 
 larder and china-pantries thrown together 
 into a breakfast-room, and the dairy con-
 
 250 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 verted into a library or billiard-room ; so 
 that when, in the course of a few years, 
 Hertha began to go into society, and more 
 company needed to be kept, the house 
 might have the air of a gentleman's 
 residence. 
 
 That was just the air that Hiram Weird 
 wanted it to have, and for the same reason 
 too, that the life lived in it might, for Her- 
 tha's sake, be made to blossom into a little 
 more outside beauty. At least, he thought 
 it was for Hertha's sake. That was how he 
 always put it when urging upon his wife the 
 expediency of any alterations. It was not 
 vanity. It was not display, it was not a 
 desire to appear better than their neigh- 
 bours, it was a sense of duty to their child, 
 their only child. 
 
 Mrs. Weird had her sense of duty too, 
 but she would rather have followed it after 
 a loving mother's fashion, by preparing the
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 251 
 
 way for what she felt would be a comfort- 
 able, if not a brilliant, marriage for Hertha. 
 When she looked back, she saw that her own 
 had been brought about in very much the 
 way that she was proposing to herself now. 
 She had been a constant guest when a child 
 at the Crawl farm, where now she was 
 mistress, wife, and mother. She and Hiram 
 Weird had sailed their boats together in 
 that bit of river bend by the elm-tree roots, 
 where, only a few days before, she had 
 watched Hertha and Albion starting theirs 
 for a race to the willow-trunk further up 
 the stream ; the only difference being that 
 for her no vexing tangle of difficulty had 
 ever caught the little vessel, nor blow of 
 desperation first engulfed and then freed it. 
 Hiram had played with her in the meadows, 
 and tossed her in the hay, and lifted her 
 over the stiles, and helped her to search 
 for eggs in the big old farm buildings, and
 
 252 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 they had given each other keepsakes, and 
 had a good cry together when she went 
 away with Phillis to boarding-school; 
 Jacob, living with his uncle Jonathan at 
 the Chantry, being pretty much a stranger 
 all the time. 
 
 And when, six months afterwards, she 
 came home for the holidays, there was 
 just a faint, sweet touch of shyness between 
 them. She had not liked any more to be 
 tossed in the hay, or lifted over the stiles, 
 though it was pleasanter than ever to ramble 
 with him amongst the farm buildings, and 
 make a nest for themselves in the straw 
 stacks on the sunny side of the house. And 
 next time it was Hiram who was shy, she 
 having a quite new consciousness of power 
 over him ; and that kept on until, when she 
 came home for good, they seemed uncon- 
 sciously to grow into the relations of those 
 who are to belong to each other as hus-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 253 
 
 band and wife. And when at last he asked 
 her for that, she could say him yes with 
 no fears, and for all the years since then 
 they had been happy, save that there was 
 no son to keep their name upon the 
 land. 
 
 These things Mrs. Weird recalled, with a 
 feeling that she could wish nothing better 
 for her child than to live her own life over 
 again ; only that Hertha should not need to 
 leave her home, but should stay as wife 
 where once she had dwelt as daughter, 
 whilst the elders went to old David's 
 cottage down at Crawlthorpe. 
 
 And this was why she was so anxious 
 for Albion Grey to come as farming pupil 
 to her husband. She had watched him 
 closely, as mothers can watch boys who may 
 one day be men and husbands. He was 
 bold, adventurous, honourable, well set in 
 the following of his own will, yet able to
 
 254 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 see where another will was better, not to 
 say stronger; frank, simple, energetic, just 
 the } T outh that under right training would 
 develop into trusty manhood. Then he 
 was well connected, belonging to the family 
 of Dr. Sparke, and though, as the organist 
 said, he had scarcely a sixpence to bless 
 himself with, save what he earned with his 
 own head and hands, he had what was 
 better than inherited wealth, the power to 
 make for himself a good name in the 
 world. And of sixpences, Hertha had 
 enough for them both. 
 
 Then, if it should come to that, Mrs. 
 Weird would feel that she had done her 
 duty, both to her husband and child, and 
 that she had justified herself to Phillis, 
 who would have no more need to talk 
 about social advantages, and the necessity of 
 rising to one's position. 
 
 And with a sigh of relief at having
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 255 
 
 established such a satisfactory foundation 
 for the future, and with another sigh of 
 regret that these things would not grow, 
 like the lilies of the field, without care or 
 forethought of any human mind, Mrs. 
 Weird went to superintend the skimming 
 of the cream.
 
 256 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 fTlHAT was late in the autumn of an 
 •*■ unusually mild season, so mild that 
 people who knew about such things said 
 that, when the cold did come, it would 
 come with a will. But the harvest was 
 well got in. There had not been such a 
 good 'back end,' as the labourers called it, 
 for many a year; and as Mr. Weird rode 
 round his farm — for he always rode now, 
 and in gloves too, as became a gentleman — 
 and loitered in front of his well-filled stack- 
 yard, which he intended to keep stocked 
 as it was until well on into next year, he
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 257 
 
 not being of the sort who had to sell their 
 wheat as soon as it was reaped and threshed, 
 he was conscious of a glow of satisfaction, 
 only experienced by the successful man. 
 And along with this glow of satisfaction 
 there came the faintest little undercurrent 
 of discontent that his wife was not a differ- 
 ent kind of woman, one who could better 
 appreciate the blessings that wealth brings. 
 
 However, she was of his own choosing, 
 and, barring her unworldliness and over 
 simplicity, he was thankful for her. Only 
 he would have been still more thankful 
 if she had been possessed of a little of 
 Phillis Bellfield's disposition. 
 
 The people who knew about such things 
 were right. The cold weather, when it 
 came, did come with a will. It set in a 
 week before Christmas, after a fashion for 
 which the memory of the oldest inhabitant 
 of Crawlborough could find no precedent. 
 
 vol. I. s
 
 258 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 Seasonable, as the healthy, warm-blooded 
 folk said, facing its rigour with their good 
 broad chests and thick great-coats, and 
 coming home to a warm fireside and a 
 well-spread dinner. But trying enough for 
 the scantily covered, either with flesh or 
 clothing; who shivered at the entries, and 
 looked wistfully into the cook-shops, and 
 clamoured at the doors of the soup-kitchens, 
 where Lazarus was fed with the crumbs 
 which fell from the rich man's table. And 
 sitting, well warmed and comforted, in their 
 own homes, people read from time to time 
 in the columns of the daily papers para- 
 graphs headed : — 
 
 1 Death from Starvation' 
 
 The result of which reading, for the most 
 part, was that they leaned back a little 
 farther into their down cushions, and thank-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 259 
 
 ed Providence that they were not as other 
 men. 
 
 And now those who had never blessed 
 Lady Anne Barbegan before, began to men- 
 tion her in their prayers for the manner 
 in which she had stirred about six months 
 ago to get Crawlborough Cathedral warmed 
 and lighted. Many a poor old woman, 
 shaking and shivering even in her sub- 
 stantial charity flannel petticoat, went in 
 there, and got both body and soul com- 
 forted at the big cast-iron stoves which 
 stood, like Solomon's love, black but come- 
 ly, all down the length of the nave. Many 
 a frosty-nosed little urchin doffed his cap, 
 and stole quietly in, and had a pleasant 
 sense of some unseen merciful presence as 
 the warmth laid itself lovingly about him. 
 And those who had none other to cherish 
 them, waifs and strays, whom chance had 
 
 s2
 
 260 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 drifted from afar off, gathered into the 
 genial heart of the old cathedral, and knew 
 for once what it was to have a moment's 
 peace from cold. 
 
 And to none of these waifs and strays 
 did Crawlborough Minster give shelter more 
 utterly needed than one poor woman 
 needed it, who on Christmas Eve of that 
 year turned in there for rest and warmth. 
 She had just come away from the Old 
 Residence, which was shut up now, for the 
 baronet and his wife were away in London, 
 keeping Christmas with some of my lady's 
 friends. My lady had got as much out of 
 Crawlborough as there was to get in the 
 way of gaiety, and she was not minded to 
 spend her first married Christmas after 
 the tedious fashion of the Close. And 
 though there was not much doing just then 
 in London society, still there was enough 
 to keep the days from dragging on as they
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 261 
 
 had already begun to drag on in the sole 
 company of her elderly husband. So the 
 doors were barred and the windows were 
 blinded, and not so much as a soul was left 
 in the place, while her ladyship made her- 
 self as merry as she could in Belgrave 
 Square. 
 
 It was Nanni who turned away shivering 
 and hopeless from the tall, grey, desolate- 
 looking house ; Nanni with a four months' 
 old baby closely folded to her bosom. 
 And she had come to ask for it what had 
 been refused to herself before ; come, 
 stifling down her pride and her hate, 
 everything but her mother's love, that the 
 little one might not starve. 
 
 The times had gone hardly with Nanni. 
 There was no more any laughing brightness 
 in the eyes that had once been lifted 
 lovingly to Jacob Weird's, and afterwards 
 to other than his. No longer any soft
 
 262 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 curves in cheek and throat, nor any rosy 
 red on the lips ; and the arms that held the 
 little baby were lean, and the face that bent 
 over it pinched with hunger. She had 
 only her beautiful long black hair left, and 
 a locket that she used to wear when she 
 was a girl, and these she must sell if in no 
 other way she could keep the life in her. 
 And, these things being so, she had found 
 her way once more to Crawlborough, know- 
 ing nothing but that one should be there in 
 the old house by the cathedral, whose right 
 it was to give her all she needed, whose 
 fashionable young wife she could startle 
 considerably by only a little of her own 
 story. 
 
 Ay, and she would do it, too. For 
 what was life now to her, what had it been 
 for many a month? Not so merciful as 
 death. And death was what she meant for
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 263 
 
 herself when she had told her tale, and 
 showed the father his child. 
 
 But now she had come all the weary 
 way and there was no one to tell, no one 
 to curse, no one on whom to pour out 
 the bitter flood of her reproach, no one at 
 whose feet to. fling down her burden. 
 Not even a servant to toss into her hand a 
 pitiful half crown of charity ; into her hand 
 to whom all should have belonged, to 
 whom he had promised it should belong. 
 Nothing but the empty desolate house, the 
 snow drifting whitely into the shut eyelids 
 of its windows, the winter wind chattering 
 a mocking welcome to her as it rattled the 
 oaken doors and shook the branches of the 
 tall elm-trees hard by. No more welcome 
 than that for her now. 
 
 Nanni turned away. Afternoon service 
 was being performed in the cathedral. She
 
 264 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 could see lights gleaming through the 
 stained windows. As she passed by an 
 open doorway, warm air breathed out upon 
 her. The sound of the organ music seem- 
 ed to be calling her. She entered and sat 
 down with her little baby in a dark corner 
 of the nave, well away out of sight of the 
 strangers who kept dropping in as the 
 time drew near for the singing of the 
 Christmas anthem — ' Behold I bring you 
 glad tidings.' 
 
 That was the anthem in which Jacob 
 Weird had won his laurels when he was a 
 little boy. How the Crawlborough people 
 had thronged to hear his bright, young 
 child voice in the treble solo. And Jacob 
 was there in his place now, behind Dr. 
 Premonay. whose shoulders were broader 
 and his surplice more ample than ever. 
 Every Christmas, for the last twelve years, 
 standing in the old place, looking away past
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 265 
 
 the choir lights in the far-stretching gloom 
 of the nave, Jacob, as one little lad after 
 another had taken up that treble solo, 
 though none since himself so sweetly again, 
 used to go back along the chain of memory 
 to the days in Milan when he loved, and 
 hoped, and was happy. And in his heart 
 he said a prayer for Nanni. For, though 
 she had been untrue to him, it was yet 
 through her love that he had known what 
 sweetness life could bring. He remember- 
 ed her as the one from whose hand he had 
 taken all that would ever be given to him 
 of a woman's love, and in his remembrance 
 now there was no more bitterness. 
 
 On this Christmas Eve, all unknown to 
 him, Nanni herself sat there, crouching 
 amidst the warm gloom, into which, his 
 thoughts being far away, he gazed. He 
 there in the choir amidst the light and 
 beauty and colour, she far out in the dark-
 
 266 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 ness of the nave, seeing only now and then 
 a gleam of the white robes of the choristers, 
 hearing as in a dream the music of their 
 voices, and the murmur of the prayers, and 
 the lingering sweetness of the chanted 
 amens. And then the Christmas anthem 
 began. 
 
 Nanni had heard it many a time before. 
 Nay, beggar as she was now, sitting out 
 there in the shadow, her little shivering 
 baby close wrapped under her shawl, she 
 could remember the time when, as white- 
 robed as those choristers, and as white- 
 souled too, she had stood by Jacob Weird's 
 side in the great class-room of the Milan 
 school, and sung those words so as no other 
 voice in all the conservatoire could sing 
 them. And she lausrhed to herself to think 
 how she could have gone up into that choir 
 now, in her worn, rusty garments, gone up
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 267 
 
 amongst them all and swept the little lad 
 away, and poured forth to the astonished 
 priests and canons and doctors a great 
 piercing flood of song, which would have 
 thrilled them through and through. 
 
 Only that such words were not for her now. 
 1 Behold I bring you glad tidings ?' Ah, no ! 
 For the quiet-hearted shepherds ages ago, 
 looking up with wondering, innocent eyes 
 from their sleeping flocks, yes ; and for 
 these little white-robed choristers, wrapped 
 round with mother's love and tenderness, 
 yes ; and for the respectable hum-drum 
 people who, prayer-book in hand, listened 
 decorously, yes ; such glad tidings as they 
 had soul enough to hear. But for her, glad 
 tidings never again, unless they came to tell 
 of death, not birth. That there was a 
 grave waiting for her somewhere not far 
 off; that she could lie down and sleep into
 
 268 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 forgetfulness, everlasting forgetfulness of 
 human love and human cruelty; these 
 would be the tidings glad for her, not any 
 other. 
 
 But, at least, she could be let alone there 
 for a while, in the dark behind the tomb 
 of the old bishop, whose stony arms, big 
 with sculptured episcopal lawn, were a better 
 shelter for her from the scorn of respectable 
 people than other arms from other scorn. 
 And the little baby, soothed by the music, 
 slept, and Nanni leaned her head against 
 the old bishop's cheek and slept too. 
 
 'Sorry to disturb you, ma'am,' said the 
 verger, ' but our orders is to put out the 
 lights and see the place empty before we 
 shut up for the night. It don't do to leave 
 no one in a place like this, or there's no 
 telling what might happen.' 
 
 Nanni roused herself. Again the in-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 269 
 
 exorable ' move on ' of circumstances. No 
 rest for her anywhere, no silence, no 
 quietness. 
 
 The place was almost in darkness, the 
 music had ceased, the people had dispersed. 
 A single glimmering light up in the organ- 
 loft showed where Dr. Sparke was packing 
 away his anthem books ; and another was 
 cast in her face now by the verger going 
 his rounds. 
 
 'Very sorry, ma'am, and I don't doubt 
 you're tired, but this isn't a place to go to 
 sleep in, nor to pretend it neither. It isn't 
 over twenty years back since all the plate 
 was stolen out of the vestry by a party as 
 hid himself behind that very moniment 
 where you're sitting now ; stopped there 
 after all was shut up, and slipped away 
 when the doors was opened next morning, 
 and ever since it's been the rule to clear 
 out sharp after prayers. And you'll need
 
 270 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 to stir yourself too, ma'am, for I've all the 
 crypt to go round yet.' 
 
 Nanni gathered her shawl together over 
 the baby, and looked helplessly about. 
 
 'That's your way, ma'am.' And the man 
 pointed to the little north door, opening out 
 into the bit of close just opposite Jacob 
 Weird's garden-gate. As she reached it, 
 Jacob was going out, with a music-book 
 under his arm. 
 
 She was but a poor woman, and meanly 
 clad, but he stepped back, and, with his 
 head uncovered, held the door open for 
 her to pass. She acknowledged his courtesy 
 with a grace he could scarcely have ex- 
 pected from one of her poverty-stricken 
 appearance ; and then she went out to her 
 place in the cold, and he to his in his 
 warmly lighted little room at the Chantry 
 house. But for both of them the going
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 271 
 
 out was into loneliness, the loneliness of 
 hearts that have to live uncompanioned 
 always, whether the living be in poverty or 
 fulness.
 
 272 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 nnHAT was the regular afternoon service, 
 -*- which, for the last fifty years or so, had 
 concluded the duties of the Crawlborough 
 cathedral choristers, so far as Christmas 
 Eve was concerned. But this year the dean 
 and chapter, instigated by the irrepressible 
 Lady Anne, were resuscitating an old cus- 
 tom which had been allowed to lapse since 
 the death of Dean Parramount, who came 
 to the cathedral in George III.'s time. 
 This custom was that the choristers should 
 make their appearance at nine o'clock on 
 the battlements of the west front, and there
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 273 
 
 sing a Christmas carol, the bells ringing 
 out a merry peal between each stanza of it. 
 
 The ceremony was abolished by old Dean 
 Parramount, because, the very Christmas 
 before his death, one of the singers, having 
 perhaps been indulging a little too much 
 during the day, lost his footing, fell over 
 the battlement, and was killed. They 
 picked him up, carried him home to his 
 house, and the Christmas chime was changed 
 to a muffled peal, that being an attention 
 always paid to a departed singer or bell- 
 ringer. And then an order was issued that 
 the Christmas carol should never be suns; 
 again from those battlements. 
 
 But Lady Anne had been accustomed to 
 hear a carol sung from the battlements of 
 her father's parish church on Christmas Eve 
 every year of her life, as long as she could 
 remember; and she was anxious to hear 
 the same sort of thing at Crawlborough, 
 
 VOL. I. T
 
 274 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 especially as it was an old custom. Ac- 
 cordingly, there had been a stout railing 
 put up within the battlements to such a 
 height that no chorister, without taking a 
 great amount of trouble, could get over it, 
 and behind that railing the entire musical 
 force of the cathedral was to assemble at 
 nine o'clock, those who wished it going 
 afterwards into the deanery for hot ale and 
 cakes. 
 
 The choir had agreed, and not unwilling- 
 ly either, especially as this carol was to 
 supersede the former practice of singing at 
 midnight round the Close, under the win- 
 dows of the respective church dignitaries. 
 But this midnight singing had always been 
 excused to Jacob Weird, partly on account 
 of his feeble health, and partly by reason of 
 the acknowledged social difference between 
 himself and the other choristers ; for it was 
 well understood that his work at the cathe-
 
 THE SENIOR SOXGMAN. 275 
 
 <iral for some years past had been rather a 
 labour of love than one of reward, the 
 training of the boys in the singing-school 
 being the only part of it for which he 
 accepted payment. 
 
 However, on this occasion, spite of the 
 cold and the bitter wind which was sure to 
 beat upon them there, the senior songman 
 was determined that his voice should be 
 heard on the battlements of the west front. 
 He had a sort of romantic interest in the 
 thought of climbing out there, and feeling 
 himself amongst the sculptured saints and 
 angels under their Gothic canopies. And 
 besides, it brought back to his mind the 
 days, so long ago now, when he had climbed 
 by moonlight, with Nanni at his side, up 
 the little narrow stair of Milan Cathedral 
 tower, and stood under the battlements 
 there, and listened to the Christmas bells 
 chiming and clanging out on the still mid- 
 
 t2
 
 276 THE SENIOR 80NGMAN. 
 
 night air; with no Christmas carol, truly, 
 but, what was sweeter for him then, her 
 voice for music in the pauses of theirs. 
 
 Half-past eight saw him starting from the 
 Chantry house, having been previously well 
 muffled up by Mrs. Penny drop, and fortified 
 with a glass of spirits and water. 
 
 ' Not that it's a thing you're given to, Mr. 
 Weird, sir,' said the careful woman, as she 
 measured it out hot and strong, 'but, taking 
 it as rarely as you do, there'll be the more 
 effect in it. All the same, I think Lady 
 Anne might have had more charity than to 
 set such a senseless custom on its legs again, 
 and, if it was a death that followed it, I 
 should say it was no more than a judgment 
 upon her for what she's done. To my 
 thinking, if folks as has been chrisomed and 
 confirmed all proper, does their singing and 
 praying inside of the church walls regular, 
 with their minds given to it, so as you may
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 277 
 
 see they know what they're after, that's as 
 much as anybody has a right to expect. 
 And it's neither the dean nor anybody else 
 had ought to go setting them up on the 
 outside, where the winter wind is fit to 
 blow the very bones out of their bodies. It 
 isn't Christian work, isn't that.' 
 
 ' Never mind, Mrs. Pennydrop. You 
 can comfort yourself by remembering that 
 the wind is in the north-east to-night, and 
 we shall scarcely so much as get a pinch of 
 it up there on the west front, amongst the 
 saints and martyrs. It won't hurt me.' 
 
 ' Mr. Weird, sir, I don't care where the 
 wind comes from. It's a winter wind, call 
 it what you like, and as a winter wind you 
 may trust it to do its work. And then 
 there'll be my work to do afterwards, for 
 there never was a man like you, sir, to 
 keep a cold when once you've taken it.' 
 
 ; That is putting the matter in a different
 
 278 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 light, Mrs. Pennydrop. I am sure you 
 have enough to do without taking care of 
 my colds. But I think I may safely ven- 
 ture to say that, if I get a cold to-night, I 
 will take care of it myself.' 
 
 ' Very well, sir. If you will, you must. 
 I can say no more than that. And one 
 thing I'm sure of, if you go on like this, 
 you'll soon be up among the saints and 
 martyrs — ay, and angels too — in a better 
 place than the west front of Crawlborough 
 Minster.' 
 
 1 So long as the place is good, one cannot 
 be there too soon,' said Mr. Weird, begin- 
 ning to button up his coat as if for the 
 journey. 
 
 1 Amongst them on the west front, sir, or 
 amongst them higher up in the other place ? 
 If it's going right up to the top you mean, 
 I should be very sorry to see you make a 
 start yet awhile, for there isn't so many
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 279 
 
 kind masters to be found that a lone woman 
 like me can afford to lose one. It's a deal 
 better care I've been took of here than 
 when I'd one whose duty it was to do it for 
 me. Aud I'd rather keep you where you 
 are, sir, if you've no objection.' 
 
 1 All right, Mrs. Pennydrop. It is not 
 for me to say when that move shall be 
 made. I am quite content to sing amongst 
 the stone angels on the west front of Crawl- 
 borough Minster, until my turn comes to 
 sing amongst the others higher up. And I 
 think it must be time for me to be starting 
 too. Where is my umbrella? The night 
 looks like snow.' 
 
 1 Yes sir, and I don't doubt but what it 
 will come. And then a curious sight you'll 
 all of you look, up there. If you could 
 only keep still, there would be no telling 
 which was stone and which wasn't. And 
 you will have to be starting, sir, that's a
 
 280 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 fact, if it's going you're set upon. I was 
 never one to have anything to say against 
 punctuality. I don't think, Mr. Weird, sir, 
 you've ever had a minute to wait for one of 
 your meals since I came housekeeper to the 
 Chantry, saving and except that one night 
 when you was gone to meet Master Albion, 
 and that poor young woman come to ask 
 could she have a glass of cold water.' 
 
 Jacob Weird stood looking out into the 
 dark. They were at the little door leading 
 into the garden, for that was his nearest 
 way to the Minster. Mrs. Pennydrop's 
 words took his thoughts back to the past 
 which had flashed upon him so strangely 
 from a woman's eyes as the London mail 
 bore her rapidly away. That face, those 
 eyes, had been present with him many a 
 time since, and yet he could never look 
 upon the occurrence as anything but an 
 illusion.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 281 
 
 1 Yes sir,' said Mrs. Pennydrop, f it was 
 on this very threshold where your foot is 
 now, that she stood, after I had given her 
 what she needed. And she left her blessing 
 for the master of the house, whoever he 
 might be, that would not send the poor 
 empty away. And there came such a 
 solemn feeling to me as she said it, that I 
 could but say my Amen all the same as if it 
 had been a prayer. And that made me 
 late with the chops, sir, and Peggy not a 
 girl I could leave them to with satisfaction 
 to myself; for a chop's a thing that, if you 
 don't do your duty to it, you'd better let it 
 alone, both for your own credit and for 
 them that has to eat it, likewise.' 
 
 ' But deary me ! Mr. Weird, sir,' she con- 
 tinued, seeing her master stand there, 
 looking out into the dark, thinking doubt- 
 less what a cruel fate it was that com- 
 pelled him from his warm fireside to
 
 282 THE SENIOR SCNGMAN. 
 
 the snowy battlements of the west front, 
 'deary me, sir, it is a shame Christian 
 folk can't be let stay in their own homes 
 such a night as this. Why, I wouldn't turn 
 the cat out in it, for as cold as it looks, 
 and the wind blowing up for a storm. If 
 Lady Anne don't get a judgment for it, I 
 should say it's no use judgments going 
 about anywhere, and her called so charit- 
 able as she is. To my thinking, it will take a 
 deal of soup and flannel petticoats to even 
 what she's doing to-night, and all because 
 she'd been used to hear the like at her 
 father's place.' 
 
 'Never mind, Mrs. Pennydrop, let me 
 
 go' 
 
 And buttoning his coat, and cdvin^ his 
 woollen scarf an extra twist round his 
 throat, Jacob Weird went forth into the 
 December frost, Airs. Pennydrop looking 
 after him for some time with a pitying ex-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 283 
 
 pression of countenance, before she finally 
 closed the door and made herself comfort- 
 able by the kitchen fire with Peggy. 
 
 But sweetly the voices of those choristers 
 sounded by and by in the dim moonlight, as 
 they chanted the old Christmas carol : 
 
 ' Good King Wenceslas looked out 
 On the feast of Stephen ; 
 When the snow lay round about, 
 White and crisp and even.' 
 
 Pleasantly the music was heard in many a 
 home to which the sons and daughters had 
 gathered from afar. And lovers, sitting 
 together, hushed their whisperings to catch 
 the sounds, and children, waking in their 
 little beds, wondered what it could be ; and 
 here and there a white-haired old man 
 listened, putting up a trembling hand to 
 his ear, lest the notes should escape him. 
 For he remembered how, fifty years ago, 
 when all the world was young, and he
 
 284 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 young too, he had climbed to his place on 
 the west front, and sent his voice ringing 
 down into the quiet Close, to hear it wafted 
 to and fro by the December wind. And then 
 the music had suddenly stopped, and there 
 was rushing and hurrying and tumult ; 
 and a mangled something which had once 
 been a man with a voice as brave 
 and bold as any of them, was picked up on 
 the crimsoned snow beneath, and the ringers 
 were bidden do a muffled peal, instead of 
 the merry seven-voiced chime which had 
 sounded out so cheerily in the pauses of 
 the carol. Fifty years ago, and no song 
 had ever been heard from amongst those 
 saints and martyrs again, until to-night. 
 
 This time no such gruesome check fell 
 upon the music. Sweetly the verses floated 
 down, and, as the last note of each was sung, 
 a merry peal clashed out, rhyming, chiming, 
 and clanging, rhyming, chiming, and clang-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 285 
 
 ing. Then a pause ; then the measured 
 choral harmony again, sweet order and 
 cadence after the melodious discord of the 
 bells. 
 
 ' Sire, the night grows darker now, 
 
 And the wind blows stronger. 
 Fails my heart, I know not how ; 
 
 I can go no longer. 
 Mark my footsteps, good my page, 
 
 Tread thou in them boldly ; 
 Thou shalt find the winter's rage 
 
 Freeze thy blood less coldly.' 
 
 As the choristers stood upon the west 
 front, singing these words, the moon, which 
 had been shining dimly before, hid herself 
 behind a cloud, and the snow came silently 
 down, until the men and boys, one and all, 
 looked as grey as the carven people amongst 
 whom they sang. Nay, indeed, as Mrs. Pen- 
 nydrop had said, but that they moved now 
 and then, one might have thought saints 
 and martyrs and men alike were all of 
 stone.
 
 286 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 A strange sight, even the Lady Anne 
 herself was obliged to admit, who had had 
 the thing ordered to pleasure her own 
 whim. They were like a choir of ghosts, 
 and not of living beings, up there behind 
 the battlements. And, though the words 
 they sang were brave and the music cheery, 
 Dr. Barbegan, standing by his wife's side in 
 the oriel window of the deanery, which 
 faced the cathedral front, could but think, 
 to look up to the long line of grey figures 
 still whitening as the snow fell upon them, 
 that it was for death they were singing, and 
 not for the birth which gave life to all. It 
 was with a sort of relief that he heard the 
 last words — 
 
 ' Wherefore, Christian men, be sure, 
 Rank and wealth possessing ; 
 He who now shall bless the poor, 
 Shall himself find blessing.' 
 
 As the echoes wore themselves away,
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 287 
 
 there rose the merry clash and clang of 
 bells again. And the moon came out, and 
 its light slanted athwart the great west 
 tower, and was given back in a faint flicker 
 from the dining-room window of the Old 
 Residence, the window through which 
 Nanni had flung Sir Montague's dole back 
 to him. He had the rank and wealth, but 
 it was not his sort of blessing which would 
 brino; much rrood to those who either crave 
 
 DO D 
 
 or received it. And there the moonlight 
 lay when all else was dark, as though to 
 point out the place, and write its master's 
 condemnation.
 
 2S8 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 "VTANNI, with her little babe folded under 
 -**• ^ her shawl, heard that song, She had 
 wandered away after the Christmas anthem 
 was over, not knowing whither to go. She 
 had a remembrance of one house where, a 
 few months before, kindness had been 
 shown her ; but, how to find it again now, 
 she could not tell. Its master, whom she 
 had blessed, had no name that she could 
 call him by. And perhaps that broad- 
 shouldered, comely-faced woman, with the 
 curious speech and the hospitable ways, 
 would not look so favourably upon her now
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 289 
 
 that she came with a little helpless baby in 
 her arms, and no wedding-ring upon her 
 ringer to show that that little baby had 
 come into the world trailing the proper 
 cloud of respectability with it. 
 
 For Nanni had learned now, bitterly 
 enough, how a woman's sin is visited upon 
 her, whilst the man who lured her to it 
 still holds up his head as an honourable 
 member of society, can gather virtuous 
 wives and mothers round his table, and 
 afford, with a beautiful smile of benevolence 
 on his lips and a halo of glorified generosity 
 upon his brow, to send out half-crowns to 
 the starving outcasts whom his lust has 
 beggared of all that can make life other 
 than a curse. It was just six months since 
 she had been turned out of a London lodg- 
 ing, because there were doubts, and very 
 reasonable ones too, upon her character. 
 The landlady thanked goodness that she 
 
 VOL. I. U
 
 290 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 was a respectable woman, and would have 
 none but such in her house. And though 
 Miss Valery, as her lodger called herself, 
 had lived a decent enough life up to a few 
 months before, and had earned enough by 
 teaching singing to pay for rent and food 
 and clothes; still, when she came back from 
 Milan after what she called a visit to her 
 friends there, in the condition that she did, 
 it was time that people who considered 
 their own reputation got rid of her. 
 
 Which the landlady did accordingly, after 
 the due week's notice, during which week 
 Nanni, it being then July, had come to 
 Crawlborough to see what her splendid 
 friend would do for her. And she had 
 found him married, living an eminently 
 decorous life, with a better character than 
 her own, in that the rich and the reputable 
 of Crawlborough would sit at his table, 
 whilst she was not good enough to be al-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 291 
 
 lowed to hide her head in a dingy London 
 lodging-house. This was the world's way. 
 Perhaps it would be as well now to keep 
 far off from even the threshold where once, 
 none knowing what manner of woman she 
 was, she had been welcomed before. 
 
 She wandered hopelessly up and down 
 the streets. The one door at which in 
 God's name, the name of justice and love, 
 if not in man's name, the name of legal 
 right, she could have demanded shelter for 
 herself and her child, was barred and bolted 
 against her, its master enjoying himself else- 
 where with his newly- married wife, wanting 
 none of her now, wanting quite other than 
 her. As she paced to and fro, she saw 
 through curtained windows the firelight 
 gleaming cheerily. Now and then a blind 
 would be pushed aside, and a happy little 
 child-face peered out to see the unwonted 
 bustle and brightness of the streets. But if
 
 292 THE SENIOR SONGMAX. 
 
 she paused even a moment to comfort her- 
 self with a glimpse of that home-warmth, 
 the blind would be dropped, or the ' move 
 on' of a policeman startled her, or some 
 porter, carrying his basket of Christmas 
 cheer, jostled rudely up against her, bid- 
 ding her not block his way. There was no 
 place for such as her when all the homes in 
 Crawlborough were gathering in their loved 
 ones for the morrow. 
 
 Then at one door after another she asked 
 for bread, and none was given her. And 
 the night was dark, and she was faint and 
 helpless. Would it not be better to die ? 
 Only there was the baby. 
 
 Not far away, close by the bridge over 
 the Crawl river, the tall iron gates of St. 
 Anne's convent gave entrance to the little 
 bit of grassed yard in front of the chapel. 
 Nanni knew that place. She had been 
 there to ask her way when she came to
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 293 
 
 Crawlborough, six months before. There 
 was a cross over the gate, and she had seen 
 the nuns go in, and she knew the badge 
 they wore upon their cloaks. And, wher- 
 ever the nuns of St. Anne were, there were 
 women who would be good to the poor and 
 the needy, let their poverty and their need 
 have come even from guilt. 
 
 She would not ask their help for herself. 
 It was too late for that. She did not want 
 anything that they could do for her. But 
 she would wait until the streets were quiet, 
 and then she would lay her baby down on 
 the convent steps, and ring the bell, and 
 hide away somewhere for a few moments, 
 to see what became of it. The good nuns 
 would not leave it out there, she knew. 
 They would take it in and care for it, as 
 one amongst the other duties which St. 
 Anne required of them. After that, the 
 river would do for herself.
 
 294 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 She went to the bridge, which was but a 
 step or two away, and looked over. 
 
 It was very cold and very dark. Still 
 there were things colder and very much 
 darker, human hearts amongst them. And 
 she would not need to do it just yet. In 
 a couple of hours' time she would be so 
 starved and so hungry — she who had once 
 worn the richest and fed on the daintiest 
 of Sir Montague's giving — that death would 
 not seem very dreadful, even death that the 
 cold Crawl river could bring. By-and-by, 
 when the good people of the city were 
 sleeping the sleep of the virtuous, she would 
 come. Until then she must keep on wan- 
 dering about, no churches being open at that 
 time of the evening either for saint or 
 sinner. 
 
 She found her way back to the cathedral. 
 Of course it would be shut too, but in that 
 quiet little corner at the north end, where
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 295 
 
 she had taken shelter before, where few 
 people passed, and no lamps were lighted, 
 she might perhaps creep into some archway 
 to rest for awhile, until the time for the 
 longer rest should come. So she found her 
 way to the door by which Jacob Weird 
 generally went into the cathedral, and there 
 she crouched, with the little one closely 
 folded to her. 
 
 She was not disturbed. For once Jacob 
 did not go in by that door. He had some 
 arrangements to make with Dr. Sparke 
 about the carol singing, and so he went 
 on first to the organist's house, on the south 
 side of the Close, near which there was 
 another private entrance more convenient 
 for him. And as, out of ordinary service 
 times, no one but the senior songman used 
 that north door, Nanni had a quiet enough 
 time of it on the cold stone steps. 
 
 She could just see across to the front of
 
 296 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 the Old Residence, looming grey in the dim 
 December moonlight ; the grand, tall, state- 
 ly old house, whose master, grand, and tall, 
 and stately, too, and once so loving to her, 
 but not at all loving now, was not to be 
 troubled any more. So the liveried foot- 
 man had said, bringing her out that half- 
 crown. And she could not trouble him 
 now, for where he was she knew not. 
 
 Loneliness, beggary, shame. And once 
 all was so different. Sitting there in the 
 cold, within call, had she but known it, of 
 the man whose tender, faithful love was 
 once the crown of her life ; nearer still to 
 the dwelling of that other whose passing 
 fancy had not crowned her life, but blasted 
 it ; and, nearer to her than either, death, 
 which should bring an end of strife, Nanni's 
 thoughts went back to the past, in which 
 she had been happy. Once more she was 
 a child in St. Anne's convent, on the olive-
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 297 
 
 clad slopes of the little hill near Milan, 
 saying her prayers with the good nuns ; 
 singing over her work ; gathering flowers 
 morning by morning, to deck the chapel 
 altar, with no thought of anv other life than 
 to do her duty and be content. Ah ! how 
 far off it was. 
 
 And then she came to Milan to her aunt, 
 and it would have been so dreary there 
 with the endless rubbing, and dusting, and 
 scolding, but that the Signor Jacobo was 
 good to her. And to have him look into 
 her eyes was sweet, for his were so tender 
 and so true. What good hours those were 
 when they sang together in the Scala ; 
 better still when he used to sit beside her 
 in the arbour under the vines ; best of all 
 when, by the good Cardinal Borromeo's 
 shrine down in the cathedral crypt, he had 
 drawn her closely to him, and given her 
 that little golden locket to wear for his
 
 298 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 sake. And once they had climbed, hand in 
 hand, to the great cathedral roof, and heard 
 the music of the bells, smiting upward past 
 dome, and battlement, and pinnacle, sur- 
 rounding them with its mighty harmonies as 
 they stood, only they two, in the darkness 
 of the December night, high up there above 
 the sleeping city. And then the good 
 Signor Jacobo left her for a little while, 
 and she left him for ever. 
 
 Nanni roused herself, leaning back there 
 under the doorway of Crawlborough Mins- 
 ter, and felt in her pocket, and took out a 
 purse. There w T as no money in it, only a 
 scrap of folded paper and a locket, attached 
 to a bit of black ribbon. All the money, 
 and more too, she had needed to pay her 
 fare from London that day. What was 
 short she had contrived to raise by selling 
 part of her dress ; but the little locket she 
 would not sell. It was all she had to
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 299 
 
 remind her of the days when she was good 
 and happy. 
 
 She took it now, and looked at the faded 
 picture inside. Ah ! those were eyes which 
 had never been bent upon her but with the 
 love of a reverent and holy man for the 
 woman whom he has chosen from all others 
 to care for and cherish. Those were lips 
 which had never spoken falsely to her. If 
 the promise hers had given had but been as 
 true, she would not have had the cold 
 stone for her pillow now, and the face of 
 the sculptured Christ above bent down upon 
 her with such pitying rebuke. She had 
 sinned, and her sin had found her out. 
 
 She bowed her head and wept bitterly, 
 wept until the hot tears, falling upon the 
 baby's face, woke it, and it began to struggle 
 uneasily. She hushed it to sleep again. 
 When it was quiet, she tied the locket 
 round its little neck, first kissing the faded
 
 300 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 picture inside. She felt as if the child could 
 but be safe and blessed, carrying that 
 presence with it. 
 
 And then, weary, she lay back. A not 
 unwelcome stupor was stealing over her. 
 She yielded to it, and gradually sank until 
 she was lying at full length, with the child 
 held closely to her, across the doorway. 
 
 Whether she waked or whether she 
 dreamed she knew not, but the present, 
 with all its misery, fell away from her, 
 and the past, which memory had just re- 
 called, was again actual. Hand in hand 
 she and Jacob Weird were climbing the 
 narrow stair which led to Milan cathedral 
 roof. As they climbed, they could hear 
 the bells ringing out from the great west 
 towers, louder and louder as they passed 
 the open galleries, fainter and fainter as 
 they entered the winding stairways and 
 climbed ever higher.
 
 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 301 
 
 And now they were standing on the 
 highest tower, and the moon shone upon 
 them clear and cold, and they were in white 
 clothing, shining white, and all round and 
 about them were the white carven figures of 
 the saints on the spires and pinnacles of the 
 cathedral roof, an innumerable company of 
 them, saints and angels too. Ay, angels 
 too. For as she stood there by Jacob 
 Weird's side, her hand fast held in his, his 
 arms close folded round her to shield her 
 from the cold, there came sweeping through 
 that mighty marble multitude a strain of 
 joyful music, such as only angels' lips, who 
 had known no sin, spoken no falsehood, 
 could utter. 
 
 She had no part in it, white-robed though 
 she stood. But Jacob Weird sang, and his 
 voice seemed to fold her round as with 
 silver wings, folded her so closely that him- 
 self she could no longer see. Onward and
 
 302 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 onward the choral harmony swelled, now 
 ascending as though for heaven alone to 
 hear, now falling soft and low as if for a 
 benediction upon the sleeping city at their 
 feet. 
 
 And then the music ceased, and there 
 was a joyous clash and clangour of bells, 
 smiting upwards, smiting downwards, filling 
 the moonlight with their, keen, clear, ring- 
 ing laughter, as the angels with folded 
 wings paused in their singing. And then 
 there was another silence; and then, but 
 more faintly now, the voices again told 
 their sweet story ; and then, but only as a 
 faint distant murmur, there fell the last 
 lingering tones of a chime ; and then, as 
 she stood there, close by Jacob Weird, but 
 seeing him no more, there was silence round 
 them and a great calm. 
 
 All this passed, whether sleeping or 
 waking she knew not, as Nanni lay on the
 
 THE SENIOR SOXGMAN. 303 
 
 stone steps of the little north door of Crawl- 
 borough Minster, just beneath the sculptured 
 figure of the Christ who with infinite pity 
 looked down upon her. All the rebuke in 
 His face now the rebuke of love which 
 would win the wanderer home. 
 
 And as she lay there the December 
 wind arose sharp and cold, and the moon 
 hid behind a cloud, and the last flicker 
 faded away from the window of the Old 
 Eesidence, and the place showed black and 
 bare in its emptiness. And a light shone 
 kindly and welcoming from the upper case- 
 ment of the Chantry house, but shone not 
 so far as to the north door. 
 
 And as she slept, the snow flakes came 
 and covered her, sinful woman though she 
 was, with a shroud whiter than any human 
 hands could have woven for the purest saint 
 that ever died. And with the music of the 
 minster bells smiting down upon her, and
 
 304 THE SENIOR SONGMAN. 
 
 with the sweetness of Jacob Weird's voice 
 stealing more and more faintly around her 
 dulling sense, Nanni, forsaken by those 
 whom she trusted, but cared for unto the 
 end by the love, human and Divine, of those 
 whom she trusted not, slept the sleep which 
 has no waking to any pain or sorrow that 
 this life can give. 
 
 END OF THE FIRST VOLUME, 
 
 LONDON : PRINTED BY DUNCAN MACDONALD, BLENHEIM HOUSE.
 
 UNIVER9ITY OF ILLINOI9-URBANA 
 
 3 0112 042231370