'No sorrow is like a soldier's bidding farewell to flag and comrades.
Happily politics and I have no business together. If the country favours
me with active service I'm satisfied for myself. You asked me for my
opinions: I was bound to give them. Generally I let them rest.'
Could she have had the temerity? Jane marvelled at herself.
She doubted that the weighty pair of tears had dropped for the country.
Captain Con would have shed them over Erin, and many of them. Captain
Philip's tone was too plain and positive: he would be a most practical
unhistrionic rebel.
'You would countenance a revolt?' she said, striking at that extreme to
elicit the favourable answer her tones angled for. And it was instantly:
'Not in arms.' He tried an explanation by likening the dissension to a
wrangle in a civilised family over an unjust division of property.
And here, as he was marking the case with some nicety and difficulty, an
itinerant barrel-organ crashed its tragic tale of music put to torture
at the gate. It yelled of London to Jane, throttled the spirits of the
woods, threw a smoke over the country sky, befouled the pure air she
loved.
The instrument was one of the number which are packed to suit all
English tastes and may be taken for a rough sample of the jumble of
them, where a danceless quadrille-tune succeeds a suicidal Operatic
melody and is followed by the weariful hymn, whose last drawl pert polka
kicks aside. Thus does the poor Savoyard compel a rich people to pay for
their wealth. Not without pathos in the abstract perhaps do the wretched
machines pursue their revolutions of their factory life, as incapable of
conceiving as of bestowing pleasure: a bald cry for pennies through the
barest pretence to be agreeable but Jane found it hard to be tolerant of
them out of London, and this one affecting her invalid and Mrs. Adister
must be dismissed. Wayland was growling; he had to be held by the
collar. He spied an objectionable animal. A jerky monkey was attached
to the organ; and his coat was red, his kepi was blue; his tailor had
rigged him as a military gentleman. Jane called to the farm-wife. Philip
assured her he was not annoyed. Jane observed him listening, and by
degrees she distinguished a maundering of the Italian song she had one
day sung to Patrick in his brother's presence.
'I remember your singing that the week before I went to India,' said
Philip, and her scarlet blush flooded her face.
'Can you endure the noise?' she asked him.
'Con would say it shrieks “murder.” But I used to like it once.'
Mrs. Lappett came answering to the call. Her children were seen up
the garden setting to one another with squared aprons, responsive to a
livelier measure.
'Bless me, miss, we think it so cheerful!' cried Mrs. Lappett, and
glanced at her young ones harmonious and out of mischief.
'Very well,' said Jane, always considerate for children. She had
forgotten the racked Mrs. Adister.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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