The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [30]
The hymn had seven verses, and Pamela and Mrs. Gascogne were going inexorably through them all; the schoolmaster and schoolmistress, an estimable couple, sole prop of the choir on wet Sundays, were braying brazenly beside him, and this was only the second hymn. Christopher’s D sharp melted into a yawn, and before he could screen it with his hymn-book, Miss Fitzpatrick looked round and caught him in the act. A suppressed giggle and a quick lift of the eyebrows instantly conveyed to him that his sentiments were comprehended and sympathised with, and he as instantly was conscious that Miss Mullen was following the direction of her niece’s eye. Lady Dysart’s children did not share her taste for Miss Mullen; Christopher vaguely felt some offensive flavour in the sharp smiling glance in which she included him and Francie, and an unexplainable sequence of thought made him suddenly decide that her niece was as second rate as might have been expected.
Never had the choir dragged so hopelessly; never had Mrs. Gascogne and Pamela compelled their victims to deal with so many and difficult tunes, and never at any previous choir practice had Christopher registered so serious a vow that under no pretext whatever should Pamela entice him there again. They were all sitting down now, while the leaders consulted together about the Kyrie, and the gallery cushions slowly turned to stone in their well-remembered manner. Christopher’s ideas of church-going were inseparably bound up with those old gallery cushions. He had sat upon them ever since, as a small boy, he had chirped a treble beside his governess, and he knew every knob in their anatomy. There is something blighting to the devotional tendencies in the atmosphere of a gallery. He had often formulated this theory for his own exculpation, lying flat on his back in a punt in some shady backwater, with the Oxford church bells reminding him reproachfully of Lismoyle Sundays, and of Pamela, the faithful, conscientious Pamela, whipping up the pony to get to church before the bell stopped. Now, after a couple of months’ renewed acquaintance with the choir, the theory had hardened into a tedious truism, and when at last Christopher’s long legs were free to carry him down the steep stairs, the malign influence of the gallery had brought their owner to the verge of free thought.
He did not know how it had happened or by whose disposition of the forces it had been brought about, but when Miss Mullen’s tea-party detached itself from the other members of the choir at the churchyard gate, Pamela and Miss Hope-Drummond were walking on either side of their hostess, and he was behind with Miss Fitzpatrick.
“You don’t appear very fond of hymns, Mr. Dysart,” began Francie at once, in the pert Dublin accent that, rightly or wrongly, gives the idea of familiarity.
“People aren’t supposed to look about them in church,” replied Christopher with the peculiar suavity which, combined with his disconcerting infirmity of pausing before he spoke, had often baffled the young ladies of Barbadoes, and had acquired for him the reputation, perhaps not wholly undeserved, of being a prig.
“Oh, I daresay!” said Francie; “I suppose that’s why you sit in the back seat, that no one’ll see you doing it!”
There was a directness about this that Lismoyle would not have ventured on, and Christopher looked down at his companion with an increase of interest.
“No; I sit there because I can go to sleep.”
“Well, and do you? and who do you get to wake you?”—her quick voice treading sharply on the heels of his quiet one—”I used always to have to sit beside Uncle Robert in church to pinch him at the end of the sermon.”
“I find it very hard to wake at the end of the sermon too,” remarked Christopher, with an experimental curiosity to see what Miss Mullen