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Mr Crawley, in answer to this, had assured Mr Thumble that he would not be allowed to open his mouth in the church; and Mr Thumble, not seeing his way to any further successful action, had contented himself with attending the services in his surplice, making thereby a silent protest that he, and not Mr Crawley, ought to have been in the reading-desk and the pulpit.
He limited himself to these things, intending later on to hang a few drawings or paintings on the panels which remained bare; to place shelves and book racks of ebony around the walls; to spread the pelts of wild beasts and the skins of blue fox on the floor; to install, near a massive fifteenth century counting-table, deep armchairs and an old chapel reading-desk of forged iron, one of those old lecterns on which the deacon formerly placed the antiphonary and which now supported one of the heavy folios of Du Cange's Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis.
After it was over, and grace was said by one of our party, my lady rang her hand-bell, and the servants came in and cleared away the supper things: then they brought in a portable reading-desk, which was placed on the dais, and, the whole household trooping in, my lady called to one of my companions to come up and read the Psalms and Lessons for the day.
The coulpe or peccavi, is made for a very small matter a broken glass, a torn veil, an involuntary delay of a few seconds at an office, a false note in church, etc.; this suffices, and the coulpe is made. On festival days and Sundays four mother precentors intone the offices before a large reading-desk with four places.
I would not go into the reading-desk, but knelt in the church, and read the Litany. All the people seemed greatly affected. I spoke a few words to them, comparing our position to that of the Israelites when, on setting forth, full of hope and joy, on their road to the Promised Land, found their way suddenly barred before them by the Red Sea.
In this dilemma, I knew it would be useless to tell a noisy boisterous fellow to hold his tongue, so at once, quietly but quickly, reaching his book, I placed it in my reading-desk, and the fellow, without a murmur, resigned himself to his fate and went fast asleep.
The evening at length came for his very last appearance at that familiar little reading-desk, on Tuesday, the 15th of March, 1870, on the platform of the St. James's Hall, Piccadilly.
Irons was moping softly about in the neighbourhood of the reading-desk, and about to mark the places of psalms and chapters in the great church Bible and Prayer-book, and sidelong he beheld his crony of the angle marching, with a grim confidence and swiftness, up the aisle. 'I say, where's Martin? said Dangerfield, cheerfully. 'He's gone away, Sir. 'Hey! then you've no one with you? 'No, Sir.
By the window a single chair, and a small reading-desk, with the book lying open. The short day was not far from its close, but there was ample light still in the skies, and a serene if chilly stillness in the air without. Though expecting the relation she had just summoned to her presence, I fear she had half forgotten him.
The Chapel seemed on Maggie's entering it to be half in darkness, there was a thin splutter of gas over the reading-desk at the far end and some more light by the door, but the centre of the building was a shadowy pool. Only a few were present, gathered together in the middle seats below the desk, perhaps in all a hundred persons. Of these three-quarters were women.
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