The way of all flesh - Samuel Butler [70]
After a time, however, Christina got used to the idea, and then considerations occurred to her which made her throw herself into it with characteristic ardour. If Miss Pontifex had been a railway stock she might have been said to have been buoyant in the Battersby market for some few days; buoyant for long together she could never be, still for a time there really was an upward movement. Christina’s mind wandered to the organ itself; she seemed to have made it with her own hands; there would be no other in England to compare with it for combined sweetness and power. She already heard the famous Dr Walmisley of Cambridge mistaking it for a Father Smith. It would come, no doubt, in reality to Battersby Church, which wanted an organ, for it must be all nonsense about Alethea’s wishing to keep it, and Ernest would not have a house of his own for ever so many years, and they could never have it at the Rectory. Oh, no! Battersby Church was the only proper place for it.
Of course, they would have a grand opening, and the Bishop would come down, and perhaps young Figgins might be on a visit to them—she must ask Ernest if young Figgins had yet left Roughborough—he might even persuade his grandfather Lord Lonsford to be present. Lord Lonsford and the Bishop and everyone else would then compliment her, and Dr Wesley or Dr Walmisley, who should preside (it did not much matter which), would say to her, “My dear Mrs Pontifex, I never yet played upon so remarkable an instrument.” Then she would give him one of her very sweetest smiles and say she feared he was flattering her, on which he would rejoin with some pleasant little trifle about remarkable men (the remarkable man being for the moment Ernest) having invariably had remarkable women for their mothers—and so on and so on. The advantage of doing one’s praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
Theobald wrote Ernest a short and surly letter à propos of his aunt’s intentions in this matter.
“I will not commit myself,” he said, “to an opinion whether anything will come of it; this will depend entirely upon your own exertions; you have had singular advantages hitherto, and your kind aunt is showing every desire to befriend you, but you must give greater proof of stability and steadiness of character than you have given yet if this organ matter is not to prove in the end to be only one disappointment the more.
“I must insist on two things: firstly that this new iron in the fire does not distract your attention from your Latin and Greek”—(“They aren’t mine,” thought Ernest, “and never have been”)—“and secondly, that you bring no smell of glue or shavings into the house here, if you make any part of the organ during your holidays.”
Ernest was still too young to know how unpleasant a letter he was receiving. He believed the innuendoes contained in it to be perfectly just. He knew he was sadly deficient in perseverance. He liked some things for a little while, and then found he did not like them any more—and this was as bad as anything well could be. His father’s letter gave him one of his many fits of melancholy over his own worthlessness, but the thought of the organ consoled him, and he felt sure that here at any rate was something to which he could apply himself steadily without growing tired of it.