After their early dinner, when Joey and Ernest and their father were left
alone, Theobald rose and stood in the middle of the hearthrug under the
Elijah picture, and began to whistle in his old absent way. He had two
tunes only, one was "In my Cottage near a Wood," and the other was the
Easter Hymn; he had been trying to whistle them all his life, but had
never succeeded; he whistled them as a clever bullfinch might whistle
them--he had got them, but he had not got them right; he would be a
semitone out in every third note as though reverting to some remote
musical progenitor, who had known none but the Lydian or the Phrygian
mode, or whatever would enable him to go most wrong while still keeping
the tune near enough to be recognised. Theobald stood before the middle
of the fire and whistled his two tunes softly in his own old way till
Ernest left the room; the unchangedness of the external and changedness
of the internal he felt were likely to throw him completely off his
balance.
He strolled out of doors into the sodden spinney behind the house, and
solaced himself with a pipe. Ere long he found himself at the door of
the cottage of his father's coachman, who had married an old lady's maid
of his mother's, to whom Ernest had been always much attached as she also
to him, for she had known him ever since he had been five or six years
old.
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