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The Larger Good is a slow, vicious, accumulative poison, and heaven only knows when it will come out and kill. It was a week after the pipe-organ recital at the church, when Mary Barclay, doing her day's marketing, ran into Colonel Culpepper standing rather forlornly in front of McHurdie's shop. He bowed to her with elaborate graciousness, and she stopped to speak with him.
The congregation slowly filed put of the pews and down the aisles, chatting in soft hushed voices, until the organist pulled out all the stops and played a lively air, and then the conversation rose to suit the accompaniment. Mr. McPherson had objected to the pipe-organ, to the hired organist from the city, and finally and most vigorously to the musical dispersion of the congregation.
If only she had known then the truth, the reality! But regrets were useless. By and by a craggy red wall loomed above the trees, and its pipe-organ conformation was familiar to Carley. She left the road and turned to go down to the creek.
The house is nearly two hundred feet long, but looks proportionate, from the Art-Gallery with its fine pictures and pipe-organ at one end, to its rich leather-finished dining-room at the other. It is of brownstone the real Fifth Avenue stuff. Fond du Lac stone is cheaper and perhaps just as good, but it has the objectionable light-colored spots. Nothing but the best will do for Hill.
He mended church roofs under which he never had sat; he bought church bells whose calls he never heeded; and paid the greater part of the pipe-organ debts in two stone churches. Colonel Morrison remarked in the office one day that John Markley was raising the price of popular esteem so high that none but the rich could afford it.
A wondrous instrument, this, finer even than the pipe-organ in an alcove at the far end of the room. It summed up all that the world's masters knew of instrument-production; and its cost, from factory to its present place at Idle Hour, represented twenty years' wages, and more, of any of Flint's slaves in the West Virginia mines or the Glenn Pool oil-fields of Oklahoma.
Instrumental music has been to some a rock of offense, exciting the spirit, through the sense of hearing, to wrong thoughts through "the lascivious pleasing of a lute." Others think dancing wicked, while a few allow square dances, but condemn the waltz. Some sects allow pipe-organ music, but draw the line at the violin; while others, still, employ a whole orchestra in their religious service.
One night the art gallery was closed, and he went into another big building where a crowd of people were seated. At one end of it was a great pipe-organ, and after a while some one began to play. With his cap tightly grasped in both hands, he tiptoed down the center aisle and stood breathlessly drinking in the wonderful tones that seemed to be coming from his own heart.
These voices burst in from any point, a perfect glee chorus, some high, some low, some singing words, and others merely humming resonantly, a deep, booming bass. The surf beating on the reef, the wind in the cocoanut-trees, entered into the volume of sound, and were mingled in the emmeleia, a resulting magnificence of accord that reminded me curiously of a great pipe-organ.
By the time they reached the little office on the twelfth floor, they were softened, mellowed, debrutalized, welded into a weird choirlike chant first high, then low, rising, swelling, dying away, rising again to a dull roar, with now and then vast undertones like the rumbling of a cathedral pipe-organ.
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