She was awakened from her reverie by the door being flung open, and she leapt from her perch as Mr. Sharnall entered the room.
“Heyday! heyday!” he said, “what have we here? Fire out, and window open; missy dreaming of Sir Arthur Bedevere, and catching a cold—a very poetic cold in the head.”
His words jarred on her mood like the sharpening of a slate-pencil. She said nothing, but brushed by him, shut the door behind her, and left him muttering in the dark.
The excitement of Lord Blandamer’s visit had overtaxed Miss Joliffe. She took the gentlemen their supper—and Mr. Westray was supping in Mr. Sharnall’s room that evening—and assured Anastasia that she was not in the least tired. But ere long she was forced to give up this pretence, and to take refuge in a certain high-backed chair with ears, which stood in a corner of the kitchen, and was only brought into use in illness or other emergency. The bell rang for supper to be taken away, but Miss Joliffe was fast asleep, and did not hear it. Anastasia was not allowed to “wait” under ordinary circumstances, but her aunt must not be disturbed when she was so tired, and she took the tray herself and went upstairs.
“He is a striking-looking man enough,” Westray was saying as she entered the room; “but I must say he did not impress me favourably in other respects. He spoke too enthusiastically about the church. It would have sat on him with a very good grace if he had afterwards come down with five hundred pounds, but ecstasies are out of place when a man won’t give a halfpenny to turn them into reality.”
“He is a chip of the old block,” said the organist.
“Leap year’s February twenty-nine days,
And on the thirtieth Blandamer pays.
“That’s a saw about here. Well, I rubbed it into him this afternoon, and all the harder because I hadn’t the least idea who he was.”
There was a fierce colour in Anastasia’s cheeks as she packed the dirty plates and supper debris into the tray, and a fiercer feeling in her heart. She tried hard to conceal her confusion, and grew more confused in the effort. The organist watched her closely, without ever turning his eyes in her direction. He was a cunning little man, and before the table was cleared had guessed who was the hero of those dreams, from which he had roused her an hour earlier.
Westray waved away with his hand a puff of smoke which drifted into his face from Mr. Sharnall’s pipe.
“He asked me whether anyone had ever approached the old lord about the restoration, and I said the Rector had written, and never got an answer.”
“It wasn’t to the old lord he wrote,” Mr. Sharnall cut in; “it was to this very man. Didn’t you know it was to this very man? No one ever thought it worth ink and paper to write to old Blandamer. I was the only one, fool enough to do that. I had an appeal for the organ printed once upon a time, and sent him a copy, and asked him to head the list. After a bit he sent me a cheque for ten shillings and sixpence; and then I wrote and thanked him, and said it would do very nicely to put a new leg on the organ-stool if one should ever break. But he had the last word, for when I went to the bank to cash the cheque, I found it stopped.”
Westray laughed with a thin and tinkling merriment that irritated Anastasia more than an honest guffaw.
“When he stuck at seven thousand eight hundred pounds for the church, I tried to give you a helping hand with the organ. I told him you lived in the house; would he not like to see you? ‘Oh no, not now,’ he said; ‘some other day.’ ”
“He is a chip of the old block,” the organist said again bitterly. “Gather figs of thistles, if you will, but don’t expect money from Blandamers.”
Anastasia’s thumb went into the curry as she lifted the dish, but she did not notice it. She was only eager to get away, to place herself outside the reach of these slanderous tongues, to hide herself where she could unburden her heart of its bitterness. Mr. Sharnall fired one more shaft at her as she left the room.
“He takes after his grandfather in other ways besides close-fistedness. The old man had a bad enough name with women, and this man has a worse. They are a poor lot—lock, stock, and barrel.”
Lord Blandamer had certainly been unhappy in the impression which he created at Bellevue Lodge; a young lady had diagnosed his countenance as hard and cruel, an architect had detected niggardliness in his disposition, and an organist was resolved to regard him at all hazards as a personal foe. It was fortunate indeed for his peace of mind that he was completely unaware of this, but, then, he might not perhaps have troubled much even if he had known all about it. The only person who had a good word for him was Miss
