“Pardon me; scarcely so long as a quarter of an hour, I think.”
“Well, do not let us waste words. What I wanted to tell you was that it has been arranged for the Lord Bishop of Carisbury to hold a confirmation in the minster on the eighteenth of next month, at three o’clock in the afternoon. We must have a full musical service, and I shall be glad if you will submit a sketch of what you propose for my approval. There is one point to which I must call your attention particularly. As his lordship walks up the nave, we must have a becoming march on the organ—not any of this old-fashioned stuff of which I have had so often to complain, but something really dignified and with tune in it.”
“Oh yes, we can easily arrange that,” Mr. Sharnall said obsequiously—“ ‘See the Conquering Hero comes,’ by Handel, would be very appropriate; or there is an air out of one of Offenbach’s Operas that I think I could adapt to the purpose. It is a very sweet thing if rendered with proper feeling; or I could play a ‘Danse Maccabre’ slowly on the full organ.”
“Ah, that is from the ‘Judas Maccabaeus,’ I conclude,” said the Rector, a little mollified at this unexpected acquiescence in his views. “Well, I see that you understand my wishes, so I hope I may leave that matter in your hands. By the way,” he said, turning back as he left the vestry, “what was the piece which you played after the service just now?”
“Oh, only a fugal movement—just a fugue of Kirnberger’s.”
“I wish you would not give us so much of this fugal style. No doubt it is all very fine from a scholastic point of view, but to most it seems merely confused. So far from assisting me and the choir to go out with dignity, it really fetters our movements. We want something with pathos and dignity, such as befits the end of a solemn service, yet with a marked rhythm, so that it may time our footsteps as we leave the choir. Forgive these suggestions; the practical utility of the organ is so much overlooked in these days. When Mr. Noot is taking the service it does not so much matter, but when I am here myself I beg that there may be no more fugue.”
The visit of the Bishop of Carisbury to Cullerne was an important matter, and necessitated some forethought and arrangement.
“The Bishop must, of course, lunch with us,” Mrs. Parkyn said to her husband; “you will ask him, of course, to lunch, my dear.”
“Oh yes, certainly,” replied the Canon; “I wrote yesterday to ask him to lunch.”
He assumed an unconcerned air, but with only indifferent success, for his heart misgave him that he had been guilty of an unpardonable breach of etiquette in writing on so important a subject without reference to his wife.
“Really, my dear!” she rejoined—“really! I hope at least that your note was couched in proper terms.”
“Psha!” he said, a little nettled in his turn, “do you suppose I have never written to a Bishop before?”
“That is not the point; any invitation of this kind should always be given by me. The Bishop, if he has any breeding, will be very much astonished to receive an invitation to lunch that is not given by the lady of the house. This, at least, is the usage that prevails among persons of breeding.” There was just enough emphasis in the repetition of the last formidable word to have afforded a casus belli, if the Rector had been minded for the fray; but he was a man of peace.
“You are quite right, my dear,” was the soft answer; “it was a slip of mine, which we must hope the Bishop will overlook. I wrote in a hurry yesterday afternoon, as soon as I received the official information of his coming. You were out calling, if you recollect, and I had to catch the post. One never knows what tuft-hunting may not lead people to do; and if I had not caught the post, some pushing person or other might quite possibly have asked him sooner. I meant, of course, to have reported the matter to you, but it slipped my memory.”
“Really,” she said, with fine deprecation, being only half pacified, “I do not see who there could be to ask the Bishop except ourselves. Where should the Bishop of Carisbury lunch in Cullerne except at the Rectory?” In this unanswerable conundrum she quenched the smouldering embers of her wrath. “I have no doubt, dear, that you did it all for the best, and I hate these vulgar pushing nobodies, who try to get hold of everyone of the least position quite as much as you do. So let us consider whom we ought to ask to meet him. A small party, I think it should be; he would take it as a greater compliment if the party were small.”
She had that shallow and ungenerous mind which shrinks instinctively from admitting any beauty or intellect in others, and which grudges any participation in benefits, however amply sufficient they may be for all. Thus, few must be asked to meet the Bishop, that it might the better appear that few indeed, beside the Rector and Mrs. Parkyn, were fit to associate with so distinguished a man.
“I quite agree with you,” said the Rector, considerably relieved to find that his own temerity in asking the Bishop might now be considered as condoned. “Our party must above all things be select; indeed, I do not know how we could make it anything but very small; there are so few people whom we could ask to meet the Bishop.”
“Let me see,” his wife said, making a show of reckoning Cullerne respectability with the fingers of one hand on the fingers of the other. “There
