As for Anastasia, she laughed at the idea of there being any foundation underlying these fancies; she laughed at Mr. Sharnall, and rallied Westray, saying she believed that they both were going to embark on the quest of the nebuly coat. To Miss Euphemia it was no laughing matter.
“I think, my dear,” she said to her niece, “that all these searchings after wealth and fortune are not of God. I believe that trying to discover things”—and she used “things” with the majestic comprehensiveness of the female mind—“is generally bad for man. If it is good for us to be noblemen and rich, then Providence will bring us to that station; but to try to prove one’s self a nobleman is like stargazing and fortune-telling. Idolatry is as the sin of witchcraft. There can be no blessing on it, and I reproach myself forever having given dear Martin’s papers to Mr. Sharnall at all. I only did so because I could not bear to go through them myself, and thought perhaps that there might be cheques or something valuable among them. I wish I had burnt everything at first, and now Mr. Sharnall says he will not have the papers destroyed till he has been through them. I am sure they were no blessing at all to dear Martin. I hope they may not bewitch these two gentlemen as well.”
XII
The scheme of restoration had been duly revised in the light of Lord Blandamer’s generosity, and the work had now entered on such a methodical progress that Westray was able on occasion to relax something of that close personal supervision which had been at first so exacting. Mr. Sharnall often played for half an hour or more after the evening-service, and on such occasions Westray found time, now and then, to make his way to the organ-loft. The organist liked to have him there; he was grateful for the token of interest, however slight, that was implied in such visits; and Westray, though without technical knowledge, found much to interest him in the unfamiliar surroundings of the loft. It was a curious little kingdom of itself, situate over the great stone screen, which at Cullerne divides the choir from the nave, but as remote and cut off from the outside world as a desert island. Access was gained to it by a narrow, round, stone staircase, which led up from the nave at the south end of the screen. After the bottom door of this windowless staircase was opened and shut, anyone ascending was left for a moment in bewildering darkness. He had to grope the way by his feet feeling the stairs, and by his hand laid on the central stone shaft which had been polished to the smoothness of marble by countless other hands of past times.
But, after half a dozen steps, the darkness resolved; there was first the dusk of dawn, and soon a burst of mellow light, when he reached the stairhead and stepped out into the loft. Then there were two things which he noticed before any other—the bow of that vast Norman arch which spanned the opening into the south transept, with its lofty and over-delicate roll and cavetto mouldings; and behind it the head of the Blandamer window, where in the centre of the infinite multiplication of the tracery shone the sea-green and silver of the nebuly coat. Afterwards he might remark the long-drawn roof of the nave, and the chevroned ribs of the Norman vault, delimiting bay and bay with a saltire as they crossed; or his eyes might be led up to the lantern of the central tower, and follow the lighter ascending lines of Abbot Vinnicomb’s Perpendicular panelling, till they vanished in the windows far above.
Inside the loft there was room and to spare. It was formed on ample lines, and had space for a stool or two beside the performer’s seat, while at the sides ran low bookcases which held the music library. In these shelves rested the great folios of Boyce, and Croft, and Arnold, Page and Greene, Battishill and Crotch—all those splendid and ungrudging tomes for which the “Rectors and Foundation of Cullerne” had subscribed in older and richer days. Yet these were but the children of a later birth. Round about them stood elder brethren, for Cullerne Minster was still left in possession of its seventeenth-century music-books. A famous set they were, a hundred or more bound in their old black polished calf, with a great gold medallion, and “Tenor: Decani,” or “Contra-tenor: Cantoris,” “Basso,” or “Sopra,” stamped in the middle of every cover. And inside was parchment with red-ruled margins, and on the parchment were inscribed services and “verse-anthems” and “ffull-anthems,” all in engrossing hand and the most uncompromising of black ink. Therein was a generous table of contents—Mr. Batten and Mr. Gibbons, Mr. Mundy and Mr. Tomkins, Doctor Bull and Doctor Giles, all neatly filed and paged; and Mr. Bird would incite singers long since turned to churchyard mould to “bring forthe ye timbrell, ye pleasant harp and ye violl,” and reinsist with six parts, and a red capital letter, “ye pleasant harp and ye violl.”
It was a great place for dust, the organ-loft—dust that fell, and dust that rose; dust of wormy wood, dust of crumbling leather, dust of tattered mothy curtains that were dropping to pieces, dust of primeval green baize; but Mr. Sharnall had breathed the dust for forty years, and felt more at home in that place than anywhere else. If it was Crusoe’s island, he was Crusoe, monarch of all he surveyed.
“Here, you can take this key,” he said one day to Westray; “it unlocks the staircase-door; but either tell me when to expect you, or make a noise as you come up the steps. I don’t like being startled. Be sure you
