One day when Captain Maumbry entered his wife's drawing-room, filled with hired furniture, she thought he was somebody else, for he had not come upstairs humming the most catching air afloat in musical circles or in his usual careless way.
'What's the matter, Jack?' she said without looking up from a note she was writing.
'Well—not much, that I know.'
'O, but there is,' she murmured as she wrote.
'Why—this cursed new lath in a sheet—I mean the new parson! He wants us to stop the bandplaying on Sunday afternoons.'
Laura looked up aghast.
'Why, it is the one thing that enables the few rational beings hereabouts to keep alive from Saturday to Monday!'
'He says all the town flock to the music and don't come to the service, and that the pieces played are profane, or mundane, or inane, or something—not what ought to be played on Sunday. Of course 'tis Lautmann who settles those things.'
Lautmann was the bandmaster.
The barrack-green on Sunday afternoons had, indeed, become the promenade of a great many townspeople cheerfully inclined, many even of those who attended in the morning at Mr. Sainway's service; and little boys who ought to have been listening to the curate's afternoon lecture were too often seen lolling upon the grass and making faces behind the more dignified listeners.
Laura heard no more about the matter, however, for two or three weeks, when suddenly remembering it she asked her husband if any further objections had been raised.
'O—Mr. Sainway. I forgot to tell you. I've made his acquaintance. He is not a bad sort of man.'
Laura asked if either Maumbry or some others of the officers did not give the presumptuous curate a good setting down for his interference.
10
