The Skeleton Key by Bernard Capes

Jake was a boy of imagination, though one would never have thought it to look at his jolly rubicund face and small sturdy form. The very gaiters on his stout calves, spruce and workmanlike, would have precluded any such idea. His master, Sir Francis Orsden -- the son of one of whose gamekeepers he was -- would never, though a young man of imagination himself, have guessed in Jake a kindred spirit. Yet, when Sir Francis played on the organ in the little church at Leighway, and Jake blew for him, it was odds which of the two brought the more inspiration to his task. Sir Francis would practise there occasionally, and bring the boy with him, because Jake was dogged and strong of muscle, and not easily tired. He never knew what secret goad to endurance the small rascal possessed in his imagination. The business in hand-blowing was to watch a plummet's rise and fall: you pumped for the fall and slackened for the rise. That was the hard prose of it; but Jake knew a better way. He would imagine himself blowing up a fire with a bellows. When a full organ was needed, he had to blow like the devil to keep the plummet down, and then the fire roared under his efforts; otherwise, a gentle purring glow was easily stimulated. At another time he would be filling a bucket at a well for a succession of thirsty horses, and would so nicely time the allowance for each that the bucket was descending again on the very point of its being sucked dry. Or he would be the landlord of the Bit and Halter, dozing over his parlour fire, nodding, nodding down in little jerks, and then recovering himself with an indrawn rising sigh. Sometimes, when the music was very liquid, he would work a beer engine -- one or two good pulls, and then the upward flow through the syphon; sometimes he would fish, and, getting a bite, pull in. These make-believes greatly ameliorated the tedium of his office by importing a sense of personal responsibility into it. It was not so much the music he had to keep going as his fancy of the moment.

One morning he was blowing for his master -- and pretending, rather gruesomely, to be an exhausted swimmer struggling for a few strokes, and then relaxing and drifting until agonised convulsively to fresh efforts -- when he became aware of a young lady standing by him and amusedly watching his labours. Jake ducked, even in the process of pumping, and Miss Kennett put a finger to her lips. She was quite a popular young lady among the villagers, whom she treated on terms of sociability which her father would strongly have disapproved had he known. There was nothing of Touchstone's rosy Audrey about Miss Kennett, but there was a good deal of the graceful and graceless rebel. Grievance, mutely felt, had thrown her into another camp than that of her order.