“I’ll join your Circle,” said the Old Lady promptly. She was determined she would do it, if she had to live on two meals a day to save the necessary fee.
She went to the Sewing Circle at James Martin’s the next Saturday, and did the most beautiful hand sewing for them. She was so expert at it that she didn’t need to think about it at all, which was rather fortunate, for all her thoughts were taken up with Sylvia, who sat in the opposite corner with Janet Moore, her graceful hands busy with a little boy’s coarse gingham shirt. Nobody thought of introducing Sylvia to Old Lady Lloyd, and the Old Lady was glad of it. She sewed finely away, and listened with all her ears to the girlish chatter which went on in the opposite corner. One thing she found out—Sylvia’s birthday was the twentieth of August. And the Old Lady was straightway fired with a consuming wish to give Sylvia a birthday present. She lay awake most of the night wondering if she could do it, and most sorrowfully concluded that it was utterly out of the question, no matter how she might pinch and contrive. Old Lady Lloyd worried quite absurdly over this, and it haunted her like a spectre until the next Sewing Circle day.
It met at Mrs. Moore’s and Mrs. Moore was especially gracious to Old Lady Lloyd, and insisted on her taking the wicker rocker in the parlour. The Old Lady would rather have been in the sitting-room with the young girls, but she submitted for courtesy’s sake—and she had her reward. Her chair was just behind the parlour door, and presently Janet Moore and Sylvia Gray came and sat on the stairs in the hall outside, where a cool breeze blew in through the maples before the front door.
They were talking of their favourite poets. Janet, it appeared, adored Byron and Scott. Sylvia leaned to Tennyson and Browning.
“Do you know,” said Sylvia softly, “my father was a poet? He published a little volume of verse once; and, Janet, I’ve never seen a copy of it, and oh, how I would love to! It was published when he was at college—just a small, private edition to give his friends. He never published any more—poor father! I think life disappointed him. But I have such a longing to see that little book of his verse. I haven’t a scrap of his writings. If I had it would seem as if I possessed something of him—of his heart, his soul, his inner life. He would be something more than a mere name to me.”
“Didn’t he have a copy of his own—didn’t your mother have one?” asked Janet.
“Mother hadn’t. She died when I was born, you know, but Aunty says there was no copy of father’s poems among mother’s books. Mother didn’t care for poetry, Aunty says—Aunty doesn’t either. Father went to Europe after mother died, and he died there the next year. Nothing that he had with him was ever sent home to us. He had sold most of his books before he went, but he gave a few of his favourite ones to Aunty to keep for me. HIS book wasn’t among them. I don’t suppose I shall ever find a copy, but I should be so delighted if I only could.”
When the Old Lady got home she took from her top bureau drawer an inlaid box of sandalwood. It held a little, slim, limp volume, wrapped in tissue paper—the Old Lady’s most treasured possession. On the fly-leaf was written, “To Margaret, with the author’s love.”
The Old Lady turned the yellow leaves with trembling fingers and, through eyes brimming with tears, read the verses, although she had known them all by heart for years. She meant to give the book to Sylvia for a birthday present—one of the most precious gifts ever given, if the value of gifts is gauged by the measure of self-sacrifice involved. In that little book was immortal love—old laughter—old tears—old beauty which had bloomed like a rose years ago, holding still its sweetness like old rose leaves. She removed the telltale fly-leaf; and late on the night before Sylvia’s birthday, the Old Lady crept, under cover of the darkness, through byways and across fields, as if bent on some nefarious expedition, to the little Spencervale store where the post-office was kept. She slipped the thin parcel through the slit in the door, and then stole home again, feeling a strange sense of loss and loneliness. It was as if she had given away the last link between herself and her youth. But she did not regret it. It would give Sylvia pleasure, and that had come to be the overmastering passion of the Old Lady’s heart.
The next night the light in Sylvia’s room burned very late, and the Old Lady watched it triumphantly, knowing the meaning of it. Sylvia was reading her father’s poems, and the Old Lady in her darkness read them too, murmuring the lines over and over to herself. After all, giving away the book had not mattered so very much. She had the soul of it still—and the fly-leaf with the name, in Leslie’s writing, by which nobody ever called her now.
The Old Lady was sitting on the Marshall sofa the next Sewing Circle afternoon when Sylvia Gray came and sat down beside her. The Old Lady’s hands trembled a little, and one side of a handkerchief, which was afterwards given as a Christmas present to a little olive-skinned coolie in Trinidad, was not quite so exquisitely done as the other three sides.
Sylvia at first talked of the Circle, and Mrs. Marshall’s dahlias, and the Old Lady was in the seventh heaven of delight, though she took care not to show it, and was even a little more stately and finely mannered than usual. When she asked Sylvia how she liked living in Spencervale, Sylvia said,
“Very much. Everybody is so kind to me. Besides”—Sylvia lowered her voice so that nobody but the Old Lady could hear it—“I have a fairy godmother here who does the most beautiful and wonderful things for me.”
Sylvia, being a girl of fine instincts, did not look at Old Lady Lloyd as she said this. But she would not have seen anything if she had looked. The Old Lady was not a Lloyd for nothing.
“How very interesting,” she said, indifferently.
“Isn’t it? I am so grateful to her and I have wished so much she might know how much pleasure she has given me. I have found lovely flowers and delicious berries on my path all summer; I feel sure she sent me my party dress. But the dearest gift came last week on my birthday—a little volume of my father’s poems. I can’t express what I felt on receiving them. But I longed to meet my fairy godmother and thank her.”
“Quite a fascinating mystery, isn’t it? Have you really no idea who she is?”
The Old Lady asked this dangerous question with marked success. She would not have been so successful if she had not been so sure that Sylvia had no idea of the old romance between her and Leslie Gray. As it was, she had a comfortable conviction that she herself was the very last person Sylvia would be likely to suspect.
Sylvia hesitated for an almost unnoticeable moment. Then she said, “I haven’t tried to find out, because I don’t think she wants me to know. At first, of course, in the matter of the flowers and dress, I did try to solve the mystery; but, since I received the book, I became convinced that it was my fairy godmother who was doing it all, and I have respected her wish for concealment and always shall. Perhaps some day she will reveal herself to me. I hope so, at least.”
“I wouldn’t hope it,” said the Old Lady discouragingly. “Fairy godmothers—at least, in all the fairy tales I ever read—are somewhat apt to be queer, crochety people, much more agreeable when wrapped up in mystery than when met face to face.”
“I’m convinced that mine is the very opposite, and that the better I became acquainted with her, the more charming a personage I should find her,” said Sylvia gaily.
Mrs. Marshall came up at this juncture and entreated Miss Gray to sing for them. Miss Gray consenting sweetly, the Old Lady was left alone and was rather glad of it. She enjoyed her conversation with Sylvia much more in thinking it over after she got home than while it was taking place. When an Old Lady has a guilty conscience, it is apt to make her nervous and distract her thoughts from immediate pleasure. She wondered a little uneasily if Sylvia really did suspect her. Then she concluded that it was out of the question. Who would suspect a mean, unsociable Old Lady, who had no friends, and who gave only five cents to the Sewing Circle when everyone else gave ten or fifteen, to be a fairy godmother, the donor of beautiful party dresses, and the recipient of gifts from romantic, aspiring young poets?
V. The September Chapter
In September the Old Lady looked back on the summer and owned to herself that it had been a strangely happy one, with Sundays and Sewing Circle days standing out like golden punctuation marks in a poem of life. She felt like an utterly different woman; and other people thought her different also. The Sewing Circle women found her so pleasant, and even friendly, that they began to think they had misjudged her, and that perhaps it was eccentricity after all, and not meanness, which accounted for her peculiar mode of living. Sylvia Gray always came and talked to her on Circle afternoons now, and the Old Lady treasured every word she said in her heart and repeated them over and over to her lonely self in the watches of the night.
Sylvia never talked of herself or her plans, unless asked about them; and the Old Lady’s self-consciousness prevented her from asking any personal questions: so their conversation kept to the surface of things, and it was not from Sylvia, but from the minister’s wife that the Old Lady finally discovered what her darling’s dearest ambition was.
The minister’s wife had dropped in at the old Lloyd place one evening late in September, when a chilly wind was blowing up from the northeast and moaning about the eaves of the house, as if the burden of its lay were “harvest is ended and summer is gone.” The Old Lady had been listening to it, as she plaited a little basket of sweet grass for Sylvia. She had walked all the way to Avonlea sand-hills for it the day before, and she was very tired. And her heart was sad. This summer, which had so enriched her life, was almost over; and she knew that Sylvia Gray talked of leaving Spencervale at the end of October. The Old Lady’s heart felt like very lead within her at the thought, and she almost welcomed the advent of the minister’s wife as a distraction, although she was desperately afraid that the minister’s wife had called to ask for a subscription for the new vestry carpet, and the Old Lady simply could not afford to give one cent.
But the minister’s wife had merely dropped in on her way home from the Spencers’ and she did not make any embarrassing requests. Instead, she talked about Sylvia Gray, and her words fell on the Old Lady’s ears like separate pearl notes of unutterably sweet music. The minister’s wife had nothing but praise for Sylvia—she was so sweet and beautiful and winning.
“And with SUCH a voice,” said the minister’s wife enthusiastically, adding with a sigh, “It’s such a shame she can’t have it properly trained. She would certainly become a great singer—competent critics have told her so. But she is so poor she doesn’t think she can ever possibly manage it—unless she can get one of the Cameron scholarships, as they are called; and she has very little hope of that, although the professor of music who taught her has sent her name in.”
“What are the Cameron scholarships?” asked the Old Lady.
“Well, I suppose you have heard of Andrew Cameron, the millionaire?” said the minister’s wife, serenely unconscious that she was causing the very bones of the Old Lady’s family skeleton to jangle in their closet.
Into the Old Lady’s white face came a sudden faint stain of colour, as if a rough hand had struck her cheek.
“Yes, I’ve heard of him,” she said.
“Well, it seems that he had a daughter, who was a very beautiful girl, and whom he idolized. She had a fine voice, and he was going to send her abroad to have it trained. And she died. It nearly broke his heart, I understand. But ever since, he sends one young girl away to Europe every year for a thorough musical education under the best teachers—in memory of his daughter. He has sent nine or ten already; but I fear there isn’t much chance for Sylvia Gray, and she doesn’t think there is herself.”
“Why not?” asked the Old Lady spiritedly. “I am sure that there can be few voices equal to Miss Gray’s.”
“Very true. But you see, these so-called scholarships are private affairs, dependent solely on the whim and choice of Andrew Cameron himself. Of course, when a girl has friends who use their influence with him, he will often send her on their recommendation. They say he sent a girl last year who hadn’t much of a voice at all just because her father had been an old business crony of his. But Sylvia doesn’t know anyone at all who would, to use a slang term, have any ‘pull’ with Andrew Cameron, and she is not acquainted with him herself. Well, I must be going; we’ll see you at the Manse on Saturday, I hope, Miss Lloyd. The Circle meets there, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” said the Old Lady absently. When the minister’s wife had gone, she dropped her sweetgrass basket and sat for a long, long time with her hands lying idly in her lap, and her big black eyes staring unseeingly at the wall before her.
Old Lady Lloyd, so pitifully poor that she had to eat six crackers the less a week to pay her fee to the Sewing Circle, knew that it was in her power—HERS—to send Leslie Gray’s daughter to Europe for her musical education! If she chose to use her “pull” with Andrew Cameron—if she went to him and asked him to send Sylvia Gray abroad the next year—she had no doubt whatever that it would be done. It all lay with her—if—if—IF she could so far crush and conquer her pride as to stoop to ask a favour of the man who had wronged her and hers so bitterly.
Years ago, her father, acting under the advice and urgency of Andrew Cameron, had invested all his little fortune in an enterprise that had turned out a failure. Abraham Lloyd lost every dollar he possessed, and his family were reduced to utter poverty. Andrew Cameron might have been forgiven for a mistake; but there was a strong suspicion, amounting to almost certainty, that he had been guilty of something far worse than a mistake in regard to his uncle’s investment. Nothing could be legally proved; but it was certain that Andrew Cameron, already noted for his “sharp practices,” emerged with improved finances from an entanglement that had ruined many better men; and old Doctor Lloyd had died brokenhearted, believing that his nephew had deliberately victimized him.
Andrew Cameron had not quite done this; he had meant well enough by his uncle at first, and what he had finally done he tried to justify to himself by the doctrine that a man must look out for Number One.
Margaret Lloyd made no such excuses for him; she held him responsible, not only for her lost fortune, but for her father’s death, and never forgave him for it. When Abraham Lloyd had died, Andrew Cameron, perhaps pricked by his conscience, had come to her, sleekly and smoothly, to offer her financial aid. He would see, he told her, that she never suffered want.
Margaret Lloyd flung his offer back in his face after a fashion that left nothing to be desired in the way of plain speaking. She would die, she told him passionately, before she would accept a penny or a favour from him. He had preserved an unbroken show of good temper, expressed his heartfelt regret that she should cherish such an unjust opinion of him, and had left her with an oily assurance that he would always be her friend, and would always be delighted to render her any assistance in his power whenever she should choose to ask for it.
The Old Lady had lived for twenty years in the firm conviction that she would die in the poorhouse—as, indeed, seemed not unlikely—before she would ask a favour of Andrew Cameron. And so, in truth, she would have, had it been for herself. But for Sylvia! Could she so far humble herself for Sylvia’s sake?
The question was not easily or speedily settled, as had been the case in the matters of the grape jug and the book of poems. For a whole week the Old Lady fought her pride and bitterness. Sometimes, in the hours of sleepless night, when all human resentments and rancours seemed petty and contemptible, she thought she had conquered it. But in the daytime, with the picture of her father looking down at her from the wall, and the rustle of her unfashionable dresses, worn because of Andrew Cameron’s double dealing, in her ears, it got the better of her again.
But the Old Lady’s love for Sylvia had grown so strong and deep and tender that no other feeling could endure finally against it. Love is a great miracle worker; and never had its power been more strongly made manifest than on the cold, dull autumn morning when the Old Lady walked to Bright River railway station and took the train to Charlottetown, bent on an errand the very thought of which turned her soul sick within her. The station master who sold her her ticket thought Old Lady Lloyd looked uncommonly white and peaked—“as if she hadn’t slept a wink or eaten a bite for a week,” he told his wife at dinner time. “Guess there’s something wrong in her business affairs. This is the second time she’s gone to town this summer.”
When the Old Lady reached the town, she ate her slender little lunch and then walked out to the suburb where the Cameron factories and warehouses were. It was a long walk for her, but she could not afford to drive. She felt very tired when she was shown into the shining, luxurious office where Andrew Cameron sat at his desk.
After the first startled glance of surprise, he came forward beamingly, with outstretched hand.
“Why, Cousin Margaret! This is a pleasant surprise. Sit down—allow me, this is a much more comfortable chair. Did you come in this morning? And how is everybody out in Spencervale?”
The Old Lady had flushed at his first words. To hear the name by which her father and mother and lover had called her on Andrew Cameron’s lips seemed like profanation. But, she told herself, the time was past for squeamishness. If she could ask a favour of Andrew Cameron, she could bear lesser pangs. For Sylvia’s sake she shook hands with him, for Sylvia’s sake she sat down in the chair he offered. But for no living human being’s sake could this determined Old Lady infuse any cordiality into her manner or her words. She went straight to the point with Lloyd simplicity.
“I have come to ask a favour of you,” she said, looking him in the eye, not at all humbly or meekly, as became a suppliant, but challengingly and defiantly, as if she dared him to refuse.
“DE-lighted to hear it, Cousin Margaret.” Never was anything so bland and gracious as his tone. “Anything I can do for you I shall be only too pleased to do. I am afraid you have looked upon me as an enemy, Margaret, and I assure you I have felt your injustice keenly. I realize that some appearances were against me, but—”
The Old Lady lifted her hand and stemmed his eloquence by that one gesture.
“I did not come here to discuss that matter,” she said. “We will not refer to the past, if you please. I came to ask a favour, not for myself, but for a very dear young friend of mine—a Miss Gray, who has a remarkably fine voice which she wishes to have trained. She is poor, so I came to ask you if you would give her one of your musical scholarships. I understand her name has already been suggested to you, with a recommendation from her teacher. I do not know what he has said of her voice, but I do know he could hardly overrate it. If you send her abroad for training, you will not make any mistake.”
The Old Lady stopped talking. She felt sure Andrew Cameron would grant her request, but she did hope he would grant it rather rudely or unwillingly. She could accept the favour so much more easily if it were flung to her like a bone to a dog. But not a bit of it. Andrew Cameron was suaver than ever. Nothing could give him greater pleasure than to grant his dear Cousin Margaret’s request—he only wished it involved more trouble on his part. Her little protege should have her musical education assuredly—she should go abroad next year—and he was DE-lighted—
“Thank you,” said the Old Lady, cutting him short again. “I am much obliged to you—and I ask you not to let Miss Gray know anything of my interference. And I shall not take up any more of your valuable time. Good afternoon.”
“Oh, you mustn’t go so soon,” he said, with some real kindness or clannishness permeating the hateful cordiality of his voice—for Andrew Cameron was not entirely without the homely virtues of the average man. He had been a good husband and father; he had once been very fond of his Cousin Margaret; and he was really very sorry that “circumstances” had “compelled” him to act as he had done in that old affair of her father’s investment. “You must be my guest to-night.”
“Thank you. I must return home to-night,” said the Old Lady firmly, and there was that in her tone which told Andrew Cameron that it would be useless to urge her. But he insisted on telephoning for his carriage to drive her to the station. The Old Lady submitted to this, because she was secretly afraid her own legs would not suffice to carry her there; she even shook hands with him at parting, and thanked him a second time for granting her request.
“Not at all,” he said. “Please try to think a little more kindly of me, Cousin Margaret.”
When the Old Lady reached the station she found, to her dismay, that her train had just gone and that she would have to wait two hours for the evening one. She went into the waiting-room and sat down. She was very tired. All the excitement that had sustained her was gone, and she felt weak and old. She had nothing to eat, having expected to get home in time for tea; the waiting-room was chilly, and she shivered in her thin, old, silk mantilla. Her head ached and her heart likewise. She had won Sylvia’s desire for her; but Sylvia would go out of her life, and the Old Lady did not see how she was to go on living after that. Yet she sat there unflinchingly for two hours, an upright, indomitable old figure, silently fighting her losing battle with the forces of physical and mental pain, while happy people came and went, and laughed and talked before her.
At eight o’clock the Old Lady got off the train at Bright River station, and slipped off unnoticed into the darkness of the wet night. She had two miles to walk, and a cold rain was falling. Soon the Old Lady was wet to the skin and chilled to the marrow. She felt as if she were walking in a bad dream. Blind instinct alone guided her over the last mile and up the lane to her own house. As she fumbled at her door, she realized that a burning heat had suddenly taken the place of her chilliness. She stumbled in over her threshold and closed the door.
VI. The October Chapter
On the second morning after Old Lady Lloyd’s journey to town, Sylvia Gray was walking blithely down the wood lane. It was a beautiful autumn morning, clear and crisp and sunny; the frosted ferns, drenched and battered with the rain of yesterday, gave out a delicious fragrance; here and there in the woods a maple waved a gay crimson banner, or a branch of birch showed pale golden against the dark, unchanging spruces. The air was very pure and exhilarating. Sylvia walked with a joyous lightness of step and uplift of brow.
At the beech in the hollow she paused for an expectant moment, but there was nothing among the gray old roots for her. She was just turning away when little Teddy Kimball, who lived next door to the manse, came running down the slope from the direction of the old Lloyd place. Teddy’s freckled face was very pale.
“Oh, Miss Gray!” he gasped. “I guess Old Lady Lloyd has gone clean crazy at last. The minister’s wife asked me to run up to the Old Lady, with a message about the Sewing Circle—and I knocked—and knocked—and nobody came—so I thought I’d just step in and leave the letter on the table. But when I opened the door, I heard an awful queer laugh in the sitting-room, and next minute, the Old Lady came to the sitting-room door. Oh, Miss Gray, she looked awful. Her face was red and her eyes awful wild—and she was muttering and talking to herself and laughing like mad. I was so scared I just turned and run.”
Sylvia, without stopping for reflection, caught Teddy’s hand and ran up the slope. It did not occur to her to be frightened, although she thought with Teddy that the poor, lonely, eccentric Old Lady had really gone out of her mind at last.
The Old Lady was sitting on the kitchen sofa when Sylvia entered. Teddy, too frightened to go in, lurked on the step outside. The Old Lady still wore the damp black silk dress in which she had walked from the station. Her face was flushed, her eyes wild, her voice hoarse. But she knew Sylvia and cowered down.
“Don’t look at me,” she moaned. “Please go away—I can’t bear that YOU should know how poor I am. You’re to go to Europe—Andrew Cameron is going to send you—I asked him—he couldn’t refuse ME. But please go away.”
Sylvia did not go away. At a glance she had seen that this was sickness and delirium, not insanity. She sent Teddy off in hot haste for Mrs. Spencer and when Mrs. Spencer came they induced the Old Lady to go to bed, and sent for the doctor. By night everybody in Spencervale knew that Old Lady Lloyd had pneumonia.
Mrs. Spencer announced that she meant to stay and nurse the Old Lady. Several other women offered assistance. Everybody was kind and thoughtful. But the Old Lady did not know it. She did not even know Sylvia Gray, who came and sat by her every minute she could spare. Sylvia Gray now knew all that she had suspected—the Old Lady was her fairy godmother. The Old Lady babbled of Sylvia incessantly, revealing all her love for her, betraying all the sacrifices she had made. Sylvia’s heart ached with love and tenderness, and she prayed earnestly that the Old Lady might recover.
“I want her to know that I give her love for love,” she murmured.
Everybody knew now how poor the Old Lady really was. She let slip all the jealously guarded secrets of her existence, except her old love for Leslie Gray. Even in delirium something sealed her lips as to that. But all else came out—her anguish over her unfashionable attire, her pitiful makeshifts and contrivances, her humiliation over wearing unfashionable dresses and paying only five cents where every other Sewing Circle member paid ten. The kindly women who waited on her listened to her with tear-filled eyes, and repented of their harsh judgments in the past.
“But who would have thought it?” said Mrs. Spencer to the minister’s wife. “Nobody ever dreamed that her father had lost ALL his money, though folks supposed he had lost some in that old affair of the silver mine out west. It’s shocking to think of the way she has lived all these years, often with not enough to eat—and going to bed in winter days to save fuel. Though I suppose if we had known we couldn’t have done much for her, she’s so desperate proud. But if she lives, and will let us help her, things will be different after this. Crooked Jack says he’ll never forgive himself for taking pay for the few little jobs he did for her. He says, if she’ll only let him, he’ll do everything she wants done for her after this for nothing. Ain’t it strange what a fancy she’s took to Miss Gray? Think of her doing all those things for her all summer, and selling the grape jug and all. Well, the Old Lady certainly isn’t mean, but nobody made a mistake in calling her queer. It all does seem desperate pitiful. Miss Gray’s taking it awful hard. She seems to think about as much of the Old Lady as the Old Lady thinks of her. She’s so worked up she don’t even seem to care about going to Europe next year. She’s really going—she’s had word from Andrew Cameron. I’m awful glad, for there never was a sweeter girl in the world; but she says it will cost too much if the Old Lady’s life is to pay for it.”
Andrew Cameron heard of the Old Lady’s illness and came out to Spencervale himself. He was not allowed to see the Old Lady, of course; but he told all concerned that no expense or trouble was to be spared, and the Spencervale doctor was instructed to send his bill to Andrew Cameron and hold his peace about it. Moreover, when Andrew Cameron went back home, he sent a trained nurse out to wait on the Old Lady, a capable, kindly woman who contrived to take charge of the case without offending Mrs. Spencer—than which no higher tribute could be paid to her tact!
The Old Lady did not die—the Lloyd constitution brought her through. One day, when Sylvia came in, the Old Lady smiled up at her, with a weak, faint, sensible smile, and murmured her name, and the nurse said that the crisis was past.
The Old Lady made a marvellously patient and tractable invalid. She did just as she was told, and accepted the presence of the nurse as a matter of course.
But one day, when she was strong enough to talk a little, she said to Sylvia,
“I suppose Andrew Cameron sent Miss Hayes here, did he?” “Yes,” said Sylvia, rather timidly.
The Old Lady noticed the timidity and smiled, with something of her old humour and spirit in her black eyes.
“Time has been when I’d have packed off unceremoniously any person Andrew Cameron sent here,” she said. “But, Sylvia, I have gone through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and I have left pride and resentment behind me for ever, I hope. I no longer feel as I felt towards Andrew. I can even accept a personal favour from him now. At last I can forgive him for the wrong he did me and mine. Sylvia, I find that I have been letting no ends of cats out of bags in my illness. Everybody knows now how poor I am—but I don’t seem to mind it a bit. I’m only sorry that I ever shut my neighbours out of my life because of my foolish pride. Everyone has been so kind to me, Sylvia. In the future, if my life is spared, it is going to be a very different sort of life. I’m going to open it to all the kindness and companionship I can find in young and old. I’m going to help them all I can and let them help me. I CAN help people—I’ve learned that money isn’t the only power for helping people. Anyone who has sympathy and understanding to give has a treasure that is without money and without price. And oh, Sylvia, you’ve found out what I never meant you to know. But I don’t mind that now, either.”
Sylvia took the Old Lady’s thin white hand and kissed it.
“I can never thank you enough for what you have done for me, dearest Miss Lloyd,” she said earnestly. “And I am so glad that all mystery is done away with between us, and I can love you as much and as openly as I have longed to do. I am so glad and so thankful that you love me, dear fairy godmother.”
“Do you know WHY I love you so?” said the Old Lady wistfully. “Did I let THAT out in my raving, too?”
“No, but I think I know. It is because I am Leslie Gray’s daughter, isn’t it? I know that father loved you—his brother, Uncle Willis, told me all about it.”
“I spoiled my own life because of my wicked pride,” said the Old Lady sadly. “But you will love me in spite of it all, won’t you, Sylvia? And you will come to see me sometimes? And write me after you go away?”
“I am coming to see you every day,” said Sylvia. “I am going to stay in Spencervale for a whole year yet, just to be near you. And next year when I go to Europe—thanks to you, fairy godmother—I’ll write you every day. We are going to be the best of chums, and we are going to have a most beautiful year of comradeship!”
The Old Lady smiled contentedly. Out in the kitchen, the minister’s wife, who had brought up a dish of jelly, was talking to Mrs. Spencer about the Sewing Circle. Through the open window, where the red vines hung, came the pungent, sun-warm October air. The sunshine fell over Sylvia’s chestnut hair like a crown of glory and youth.
“I do feel so perfectly happy,” said the Old Lady, with a long, rapturous breath.
The honey-tinted autumn sunshine was falling thickly over the crimson and amber maples around old Abel Blair’s door. There was only one outer door in old Abel’s house, and it almost always stood wide open. A little black dog, with one ear missing and a lame forepaw, almost always slept on the worn red sandstone slab which served old Abel for a doorstep; and on the still more worn sill above it a large gray cat almost always slept. Just inside the door, on a bandy-legged chair of elder days, old Abel almost always sat.
He was sitting there this afternoon—a little old man, sadly twisted with rheumatism; his head was abnormally large, thatched with long, wiry black hair; his face was heavily lined and swarthily sunburned; his eyes were deep-set and black, with occasional peculiar golden flashes in them. A strange looking man was old Abel Blair; and as strange was he as he looked. Lower Carmody people would have told you.
Old Abel was almost always sober in these, his later years. He was sober to-day. He liked to bask in that ripe sunlight as well as his dog and cat did; and in such baskings he almost always looked out of his doorway at the far, fine blue sky over the tops of the crowding maples. But to-day he was not looking at the sky, instead, he was staring at the black, dusty rafters of his kitchen, where hung dried meats and strings of onions and bunches of herbs and fishing tackle and guns and skins.
But old Abel saw not these things; his face was the face of a man who beholds visions, compact of heavenly pleasure and hellish pain, for old Abel was seeing what he might have been—and what he was; as he always saw when Felix Moore played to him on the violin. And the awful joy of dreaming that he was young again, with unspoiled life before him, was so great and compelling that it counterbalanced the agony in the realization of a dishonoured old age, following years in which he had squandered the wealth of his soul in ways where Wisdom lifted not her voice.
Felix Moore was standing opposite to him, before an untidy stove, where the noon fire had died down into pallid, scattered ashes. Under his chin he held old Abel’s brown, battered fiddle; his eyes, too, were fixed on the ceiling; and he, too, saw things not lawful to be uttered in any language save that of music; and of all music, only that given forth by the anguished, enraptured spirit of the violin. And yet this Felix was little more than twelve years old, and his face was still the face of a child who knows nothing of either sorrow or sin or failure or remorse. Only in his large, gray-black eyes was there something not of the child—something that spoke of an inheritance from many hearts, now ashes, which had aforetime grieved and joyed, and struggled and failed, and succeeded and grovelled. The inarticulate cries of their longings had passed into this child’s soul, and transmuted themselves into the expression of his music.
Felix was a beautiful child. Carmody people, who stayed at home, thought so; and old Abel Blair, who had roamed afar in many lands, thought so; and even the Rev. Stephen Leonard, who taught, and tried to believe, that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain, thought so.
He was a slight lad, with sloping shoulders, a slim brown neck, and a head set on it with stag-like grace and uplift. His hair, cut straight across his brow and falling over his ears, after some caprice of Janet Andrews, the minister’s housekeeper, was a glossy blue-black. The skin of his face and hands was like ivory; his eyes were large and beautifully tinted—gray, with dilating pupils; his features had the outlines of a cameo. Carmody mothers considered him delicate, and had long foretold that the minister would never bring him up; but old Abel pulled his grizzled moustache when he heard such forebodings and smiled.
“Felix Moore will live,” he said positively. “You can’t kill that kind until their work is done. He’s got a work to do—if the minister’ll let him do it. And if the minister don’t let him do it, then I wouldn’t be in that minister’s shoes when he comes to the judgment—no, I’d rather be in my own. It’s an awful thing to cross the purposes of the Almighty, either in your own life or anybody else’s. Sometimes I think it’s what’s meant by the unpardonable sin—ay, that I do!”
Carmody people never asked what old Abel meant. They had long ago given up such vain questioning. When a man had lived as old Abel had lived for the greater part of his life, was it any wonder he said crazy things? And as for hinting that Mr. Leonard, a man who was really almost too good to live, was guilty of any sin, much less an unpardonable one—well, there now! what use was it to be taking any account of old Abel’s queer speeches? Though, to be sure, there was no great harm in a fiddle, and maybe Mr. Leonard was a mite too strict that way with the child. But then, could you wonder at it? There was his father, you see.
Felix finally lowered the violin, and came back to old Abel’s kitchen with a long sigh. Old Abel smiled drearily at him—the smile of a man who has been in the hands of the tormentors.
“It’s awful the way you play—it’s awful,” he said with a shudder. “I never heard anything like it—and you that never had any teaching since you were nine years old, and not much practice, except what you could get here now and then on my old, battered fiddle. And to think you make it up yourself as you go along! I suppose your grandfather would never hear to your studying music—would he now?”
Felix shook his head.
“I know he wouldn’t, Abel. He wants me to be a minister. Ministers are good things to be, but I’m afraid I can’t be a minister.”
“Not a pulpit minister. There’s different kinds of ministers, and each must talk to men in his own tongue if he’s going to do ‘em any real good,” said old Abel meditatively. “YOUR tongue is music. Strange that your grandfather can’t see that for himself, and him such a broad-minded man! He’s the only minister I ever had much use for. He’s God’s own if ever a man was. And he loves you—yes, sir, he loves you like the apple of his eye.”
“And I love him,” said Felix warmly. “I love him so much that I’ll even try to be a minister for his sake, though I don’t want to be.”
“What do you want to be?”
“A great violinist,” answered the child, his ivory-hued face suddenly warming into living rose. “I want to play to thousands—and see their eyes look as yours do when I play. Sometimes your eyes frighten me, but oh, it’s a splendid fright! If I had father’s violin I could do better. I remember that he once said it had a soul that was doing purgatory for its sins when it had lived on earth. I don’t know what he meant, but it did seem to me that HIS violin was alive. He taught me to play on it as soon as I was big enough to hold it.”
“Did you love your father?” asked old Abel, with a keen look.
Again Felix crimsoned; but he looked straightly and steadily into his old friend’s face.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t; but,” he added, gravely and deliberately, “I don’t think you should have asked me such a question.”
It was old Abel’s turn to blush. Carmody people would not have believed he could blush; and perhaps no living being could have called that deepening hue into his weather-beaten cheek save only this gray-eyed child of the rebuking face.
“No, I guess I shouldn’t,” he said. “But I’m always making mistakes. I’ve never made anything else. That’s why I’m nothing more than ‘Old Abel’ to the Carmody people. Nobody but you and your grandfather ever calls me ‘Mr. Blair.’ Yet William Blair at the store up there, rich and respected as he is, wasn’t half as clever a man as I was when we started in life: you mayn’t believe that, but it’s true. And the worst of it is, young Felix, that most of the time I don’t care whether I’m Mr. Blair or old Abel. Only when you play I care. It makes me feel just as a look I saw in a little girl’s eyes some years ago made me feel. Her name was Anne Shirley and she lived with the Cuthberts down at Avonlea. We got into a conversation at Blair’s store. She could talk a blue streak to anyone, that girl could. I happened to say about something that it didn’t matter to a battered old hulk of sixty odd like me. She looked at me with her big, innocent eyes, a little reproachful like, as if I’d said something awful heretical. ‘Don’t you think, Mr. Blair,’ she says, ‘that the older we get the more things ought to matter to us?’—as grave as if she’d been a hundred instead of eleven. ‘Things matter SO much to me now,’ she says, clasping her hands thisaway, ‘and I’m sure that when I’m sixty they’ll matter just five times as much to me.’ Well, the way she looked and the way she spoke made me feel downright ashamed of myself because things had stopped mattering with me. But never mind all that. My miserable old feelings don’t count for much. What come of your father’s fiddle?”
“Grandfather took it away when I came here. I think he burned it. And I long for it so often.”
“Well, you’ve always got my old brown fiddle to come to when you must.”
“Yes, I know. And I’m glad for that. But I’m hungry for a violin all the time. And I only come here when the hunger gets too much to bear. I feel as if I oughtn’t to come even then—I’m always saying I won’t do it again, because I know grandfather wouldn’t like it, if he knew.”
“He has never forbidden it, has he?”
“No, but that is because he doesn’t know I come here for that. He never thinks of such a thing. I feel sure he WOULD forbid it, if he knew. And that makes me very wretched. And yet I HAVE to come. Mr. Blair, do you know why grandfather can’t bear to have me play on the violin? He loves music, and he doesn’t mind my playing on the organ, if I don’t neglect other things. I can’t understand it, can you?”
“I have a pretty good idea, but I can’t tell you. It isn’t my secret. Maybe he’ll tell you himself some day. But, mark you, young Felix, he has got good reasons for it all. Knowing what I know, I can’t blame him over much, though I think he’s mistaken. Come now, play something more for me before you go—something that’s bright and happy this time, so as to leave me with a good taste in my mouth. That last thing you played took me straight to heaven,—but heaven’s awful near to hell, and at the last you tipped me in.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Felix, drawing his fine, narrow black brows together in a perplexed frown.
“No—and I wouldn’t want you to. You couldn’t understand unless you was an old man who had it in him once to do something and be a MAN, and just went and made himself a devilish fool. But there must be something in you that understands things—all kinds of things—or you couldn’t put it all into music the way you do. How do you do it? How in—how DO you do it, young Felix?”
“I don’t know. But I play differently to different people. I don’t know how that is. When I’m alone with you I have to play one way; and when Janet comes over here to listen I feel quite another way—not so thrilling, but happier and lonelier. And that day when Jessie Blair was here listening I felt as if I wanted to laugh and sing—as if the violin wanted to laugh and sing all the time.”
The strange, golden gleam flashed through old Abel’s sunken eyes.
“God,” he muttered under his breath, “I believe the boy can get into other folk’s souls somehow, and play out what HIS soul sees there.”
“What’s that you say?” inquired Felix, petting his fiddle.
“Nothing—never mind—go on. Something lively now, young Felix. Stop probing into my soul, where you haven’t no business to be, you infant, and play me something out of your own—something sweet and happy and pure.”
“I’ll play the way I feel on sunshiny mornings, when the birds are singing and I forget I have to be a minister,” said Felix simply.
A witching, gurgling, mirthful strain, like mingled bird and brook song, floated out on the still air, along the path where the red and golden maple leaves were falling very softly, one by one. The Reverend Stephen Leonard heard it, as he came along the way, and the Reverend Stephen Leonard smiled. Now, when Stephen Leonard smiled, children ran to him, and grown people felt as if they looked from Pisgah over to some fair land of promise beyond the fret and worry of their care-dimmed earthly lives.
Mr. Leonard loved music, as he loved all things beautiful, whether in the material or the spiritual world, though he did not realize how much he loved them for their beauty alone, or he would have been shocked and remorseful. He himself was beautiful. His figure was erect and youthful, despite seventy years. His face was as mobile and charming as a woman’s, yet with all a man’s tried strength and firmness in it, and his dark blue eyes flashed with the brilliance of one and twenty; even his silken silvery hair could not make an old man of him. He was worshipped by everyone who knew him, and he was, in so far as mortal man may be, worthy of that worship.
“Old Abel is amusing himself with his violin again,” he thought. “What a delicious thing he is playing! He has quite a gift for the violin. But how can he play such a thing as that,—a battered old hulk of a man who has, at one time or another, wallowed in almost every sin to which human nature can sink? He was on one of his sprees three days ago—the first one for over a year—lying dead-drunk in the market square in Charlottetown among the dogs; and now he is playing something that only a young archangel on the hills of heaven ought to be able to play. Well, it will make my task all the easier. Abel is always repentant by the time he is able to play on his fiddle.”
Mr. Leonard was on the door-stone. The little black dog had frisked down to meet him, and the gray cat rubbed her head against his leg. Old Abel did not notice him; he was beating time with uplifted hand and smiling face to Felix’s music, and his eyes were young again, glowing with laughter and sheer happiness.
“Felix! what does this mean?”
The violin bow clattered from Felix’s hand upon the floor; he swung around and faced his grandfather. As he met the passion of grief and hurt in the old man’s eyes, his own clouded with an agony of repentance.
“Grandfather—I’m sorry,” he cried brokenly.
“Now, now!” Old Abel had risen deprecatingly. “It’s all my fault, Mr. Leonard. Don’t you blame the boy. I coaxed him to play a bit for me. I didn’t feel fit to touch the fiddle yet myself—too soon after Friday, you see. So I coaxed him on—wouldn’t give him no peace till he played. It’s all my fault.”
“No,” said Felix, throwing back his head. His face was as white as marble, yet it seemed ablaze with desperate truth and scorn of old Abel’s shielding lie. “No, grandfather, it isn’t Abel’s fault. I came over here on purpose to play, because I thought you had gone to the harbour. I have come here often, ever since I have lived with you.”
“Ever since you have lived with me you have been deceiving me like this, Felix?”
There was no anger in Mr. Leonard’s tone—only measureless sorrow. The boy’s sensitive lips quivered.
“Forgive me, grandfather,” he whispered beseechingly.
“You never forbid him to come,” old Abel broke in angrily. “Be just, Mr. Leonard—be just.”
“I AM just. Felix knows that he has disobeyed me, in the spirit if not in the letter. Do you not know it, Felix?”
“Yes, grandfather, I have done wrong—I’ve known that I was doing wrong every time I came. Forgive me, grandfather.”
“Felix, I forgive you, but I ask you to promise me, here and now, that you will never again, as long as you live, touch a violin.” Dusky crimson rushed madly over the boy’s face. He gave a cry as if he had been lashed with a whip. Old Abel sprang to his feet.
“Don’t you ask such a promise of him, Mr. Leonard,” he cried furiously. “It’s a sin, that’s what it is. Man, man, what blinds you? You ARE blind. Can’t you see what is in the boy? His soul is full of music. It’ll torture him to death—or to worse—if you don’t let it have way.”
“There is a devil in such music,” said Mr. Leonard hotly.
“Ay, there may be, but don’t forget that there’s a Christ in it, too,” retorted old Abel in a low tense tone.
Mr. Leonard looked shocked; he considered that old Abel had uttered blasphemy. He turned away from him rebukingly.
“Felix, promise me.”
There was no relenting in his face or tone. He was merciless in the use of the power he possessed over that young, loving spirit. Felix understood that there was no escape; but his lips were very white as he said,
“I promise, grandfather.”
Mr. Leonard drew a long breath of relief. He knew that promise would be kept. So did old Abel. The latter crossed the floor and sullenly took the violin from Felix’s relaxed hand. Without a word or look he went into the little bedroom off the kitchen and shut the door with a slam of righteous indignation. But from its window he stealthily watched his visitors go away. Just as they entered on the maple path Mr. Leonard laid his hand on Felix’s head and looked down at him. Instantly the boy flung his arm up over the old man’s shoulder and smiled at him. In the look they exchanged there was boundless love and trust—ay, and good-fellowship. Old Abel’s scornful eyes again held the golden flash.
“How those two love each other!” he muttered enviously. “And how they torture each other!”
Mr. Leonard went to his study to pray when he got home. He knew that Felix had run for comforting to Janet Andrews, the little, thin, sweet-faced, rigid-lipped woman who kept house for them. Mr. Leonard knew that Janet would disapprove of his action as deeply as old Abel had done. She would say nothing, she would only look at him with reproachful eyes over the teacups at suppertime. But Mr. Leonard believed he had done what was best and his conscience did not trouble him, though his heart did.
Thirteen years before this, his daughter Margaret had almost broken that heart by marrying a man of whom he could not approve. Martin Moore was a professional violinist. He was a popular performer, though not in any sense a great one. He met the slim, golden-haired daughter of the manse at the house of a college friend she was visiting in Toronto, and fell straightway in love with her. Margaret had loved him with all her virginal heart in return, and married him, despite her father’s disapproval. It was not to Martin Moore’s profession that Mr. Leonard objected, but to the man himself. He knew that the violinist’s past life had not been such as became a suitor for Margaret Leonard; and his insight into character warned him that Martin Moore could never make any woman lastingly happy.
Margaret Leonard did not believe this. She married Martin Moore and lived one year in paradise. Perhaps that atoned for the three bitter years which followed—that, and her child. At all events, she died as she had lived, loyal and uncomplaining. She died alone, for her husband was away on a concert tour, and her illness was so brief that her father had not time to reach her before the end. Her body was taken home to be buried beside her mother in the little Carmody churchyard. Mr. Leonard wished to take the child, but Martin Moore refused to give him up.
Six years later Moore, too, died, and at last Mr. Leonard had his heart’s desire—the possession of Margaret’s son. The grandfather awaited the child’s coming with mingled feelings. His heart yearned for him, yet he dreaded to meet a second edition of Martin Moore. Suppose Margaret’s son resembled his handsome vagabond of a father! Or, worse still, suppose he were cursed with his father’s lack of principle, his instability, his Bohemian instincts. Thus Mr. Leonard tortured himself wretchedly before the coming of Felix.
The child did not look like either father or mother. Instead, Mr. Leonard found himself looking into a face which he had put away under the grasses thirty years before—the face of his girl bride, who had died at Margaret’s birth. Here again were her lustrous gray-black eyes, her ivory outlines, her fine-traced arch of brow; and here, looking out of those eyes, seemed her very spirit again. From that moment the soul of the old man was knit to the soul of the child, and they loved each other with a love surpassing that of women.
Felix’s only inheritance from his father was his love of music. But the child had genius, where his father had possessed only talent. To Martin Moore’s outward mastery of the violin was added the mystery and intensity of his mother’s nature, with some more subtle quality still, which had perhaps come to him from the grandmother he so strongly resembled. Moore had understood what a career was naturally before the child, and he had trained him in the technique of his art from the time the slight fingers could first grasp the bow. When nine-year-old Felix came to the Carmody manse, he had mastered as much of the science of the violin as nine out of ten musicians acquire in a lifetime; and he brought with him his father’s violin; it was all Martin Moore had to leave his son—but it was an Amati, the commercial value of which nobody in Carmody suspected. Mr. Leonard had taken possession of it and Felix had never seen it since. He cried himself to sleep many a night for the loss of it. Mr. Leonard did not know this, and if Janet Andrews suspected it she held her tongue—an art in which she excelled. She “saw no harm in a fiddle,” herself, and thought Mr. Leonard absurdly strict in the matter, though it would not have been well for the luckless outsider who might have ventured to say as much to her. She had connived at Felix’s visits to old Abel Blair, squaring the matter with her Presbyterian conscience by some peculiar process known only to herself.
When Janet heard of the promise which Mr. Leonard had exacted from Felix she seethed with indignation; and, though she “knew her place” better than to say anything to Mr. Leonard about it, she made her disapproval so plainly manifest in her bearing that the stern, gentle old man found the atmosphere of his hitherto peaceful manse unpleasantly chill and hostile for a time.
It was the wish of his heart that Felix should be a minister, as he would have wished his own son to be, had one been born to him. Mr. Leonard thought rightly that the highest work to which any man could be called was a life of service to his fellows; but he made the mistake of supposing the field of service much narrower than it is—of failing to see that a man may minister to the needs of humanity in many different but equally effective ways.
Janet hoped that Mr. Leonard might not exact the fulfilment of Felix’s promise; but Felix himself, with the instinctive understanding of perfect love, knew that it was vain to hope for any change of viewpoint in his grandfather. He addressed himself to the keeping of his promise in letter and in spirit. He never went again to old Abel’s; he did not even play on the organ, though this was not forbidden, because any music wakened in him a passion of longing and ecstasy which demanded expression with an intensity not to be borne. He flung himself grimly into his studies and conned Latin and Greek verbs with a persistency which soon placed him at the head of all competitors.
Only once in the long winter did he come near to breaking his promise. One evening, when March was melting into April, and the pulses of spring were stirring under the lingering snow, he was walking home from school alone. As he descended into the little hollow below the manse a lively lilt of music drifted up to meet him. It was only the product of a mouth-organ, manipulated by a little black-eyed, French-Canadian hired boy, sitting on the fence by the brook; but there was music in the ragged urchin and it came out through his simple toy. It tingled over Felix from head to foot; and, when Leon held out the mouth-organ with a fraternal grin of invitation, he snatched at it as a famished creature might snatch at food.
Then, with it half-way to his lips, he paused. True, it was only the violin he had promised never to touch; but he felt that if he gave way ever so little to the desire that was in him, it would sweep everything before it. If he played on Leon Buote’s mouth-organ, there in that misty spring dale, he would go to old Abel’s that evening; he KNEW he would go. To Leon’s amazement, Felix threw the mouth-organ back at him and ran up the hill as if he were pursued. There was something in his boyish face that frightened Leon; and it frightened Janet Andrews as Felix rushed past her in the hall of the manse.
“Child, what’s the matter with you?” she cried. “Are you sick? Have you been scared?”
“No, no. Leave me alone, Janet,” said Felix chokingly, dashing up the stairs to his own room.
He was quite composed when he came down to tea, an hour later, though he was unusually pale and had purple shadows under his large eyes.
Mr. Leonard scrutinized him somewhat anxiously; it suddenly occurred to the old minister that Felix was looking more delicate than his wont this spring. Well, he had studied hard all winter, and he was certainly growing very fast. When vacation came he must be sent away for a visit.
“They tell me Naomi Clark is real sick,” said Janet. “She has been ailing all winter, and now she’s fast to her bed. Mrs. Murphy says she believes the woman is dying, but nobody dares tell her so. She won’t give in she’s sick, nor take medicine. And there’s nobody to wait on her except that simple creature, Maggie Peterson.”
“I wonder if I ought to go and see her,” said Mr. Leonard uneasily.
“What use would it be to bother yourself? You know she wouldn’t see you—she’d shut the door in your face like she did before. She’s an awful wicked woman—but it’s kind of terrible to think of her lying there sick, with no responsible person to tend her.”
“Naomi Clark is a bad woman and she lived a life of shame, but I like her, for all that,” remarked Felix, in the grave, meditative tone in which he occasionally said rather startling things.
Mr. Leonard looked somewhat reproachfully at Janet Andrews, as if to ask her why Felix should have attained to this dubious knowledge of good and evil under her care; and Janet shot a dour look back which, being interpreted, meant that if Felix went to the district school she could not and would not be held responsible if he learned more there than arithmetic and Latin.
“What do you know of Naomi Clark to like or dislike?” she asked curiously. “Did you ever see her?”
“Oh, yes,” Felix replied, addressing himself to his cherry preserve with considerable gusto. “I was down at Spruce Cove one night last summer when a big thunderstorm came up. I went to Naomi’s house for shelter. The door was open, so I walked right in, because nobody answered my knock. Naomi Clark was at the window, watching the cloud coming up over the sea. She just looked at me once, but didn’t say anything, and then went on watching the cloud. I didn’t like to sit down because she hadn’t asked me to, so I went to the window by her and watched it, too. It was a dreadful sight—the cloud was so black and the water so green, and there was such a strange light between the cloud and the water; yet there was something splendid in it, too. Part of the time I watched the storm, and the other part I watched Naomi’s face. It was dreadful to see, like the storm, and yet I liked to see it.
“After the thunder was over it rained a while longer, and Naomi sat down and talked to me. She asked me who I was, and when I told her she asked me to play something for her on her violin,”—Felix shot a deprecating glance at Mr. Leonard—“because, she said, she’d heard I was a great hand at it. She wanted something lively, and I tried just as hard as I could to play something like that. But I couldn’t. I played something that was terrible—it just played itself—it seemed as if something was lost that could never be found again. And before I got through, Naomi came at me, and tore the violin from me, and—SWORE. And she said, ‘You big-eyed brat, how did you know THAT?’ Then she took me by the arm—and she hurt me, too, I can tell you—and she put me right out in the rain and slammed the door.”
“The rude, unmannerly creature!” said Janet indignantly.
“Oh, no, she was quite in the right,” said Felix composedly. “It served me right for what I played. You see, she didn’t know I couldn’t help playing it. I suppose she thought I did it on purpose.”
“What on earth did you play, child?”
“I don’t know.” Felix shivered. “It was awful—it was dreadful. It was fit to break your heart. But it HAD to be played, if I played anything at all.”
“I don’t understand what you mean—I declare I don’t,” said Janet in bewilderment.
“I think we’ll change the subject of conversation,” said Mr. Leonard.
It was a month later when “the simple creature, Maggie” appeared at the manse door one evening and asked for the preached.
“Naomi wants ter see yer,” she mumbled. “Naomi sent Maggie ter tell yer ter come at onct.”
“I shall go, certainly,” said Mr. Leonard gently. “Is she very ill?”
“Her’s dying,” said Maggie with a broad grin. “And her’s awful skeered of hell. Her just knew ter-day her was dying. Maggie told her—her wouldn’t believe the harbour women, but her believed Maggie. Her yelled awful.”
Maggie chuckled to herself over the gruesome remembrance. Mr. Leonard, his heart filled with pity, called Janet and told her to give the poor creature some refreshment. But Maggie shook her head.
“No, no, preacher, Maggie must get right back to Naomi. Maggie’ll tell her the preacher’s coming ter save her from hell.”
She uttered an eerie cry, and ran at full speed shoreward through the spruce woods.
“The Lord save us!” said Janet in an awed tone. “I knew the poor girl was simple, but I didn’t know she was like THAT. And are you going, sir?”
“Yes, of course. I pray God I may be able to help the poor soul,” said Mr. Leonard sincerely. He was a man who never shirked what he believed to be his duty; but duty had sometimes presented itself to him in pleasanter guise than this summons to Naomi Clark’s death-bed.
The woman had been the plague spot of Lower Carmody and Carmody Harbour for a generation. In the earlier days of his ministry to the congregation he had tried to reclaim her, and Naomi had mocked and flouted him to his face. Then, for the sake of those to whom she was a snare or a heart-break, he had endeavoured to set the law in motion against her, and Naomi had laughed the law to scorn. Finally, he had been compelled to let her alone.
Yet Naomi had not always been an outcast. Her girlhood had been innocent; but she was the possessor of a dangerous beauty, and her mother was dead. Her father was a man notorious for his harshness and violence of temper. When Naomi made the fatal mistake of trusting to a false love that betrayed and deserted, he drove her from his door with taunts and curses.
Naomi took up her quarters in a little deserted house at Spruce Cove. Had her child lived it might have saved her. But it died at birth, and with its little life went her last chance of worldly redemption. From that time forth, her feet were set in the way that takes hold on hell.
For the past five years, however, Naomi had lived a tolerably respectable life. When Janet Peterson had died, her idiot daughter, Maggie, had been left with no kin in the world. Nobody knew what was to be done with her, for nobody wanted to be bothered with her. Naomi Clark went to the girl and offered her a home. People said she was no fit person to have charge of Maggie, but everybody shirked the unpleasant task of interfering in the matter, except Mr. Leonard, who went to expostulate with Naomi, and, as Janet said, for his pains got her door shut in his face.
But from the day when Maggie Peterson went to live with her, Naomi ceased to be the harbour Magdalen.
The sun had set when Mr. Leonard reached Spruce Cove, and the harbour was veiling itself in a wondrous twilight splendour. Afar out, the sea lay throbbing and purple, and the moan of the bar came through the sweet, chill spring air with its burden of hopeless, endless longing and seeking. The sky was blossoming into stars above the afterglow; out to the east the moon was rising, and the sea beneath it was a thing of radiance and silver and glamour; and a little harbour boat that went sailing across it was transmuted into an elfin shallop from the coast of fairyland.
Mr. Leonard sighed as he turned from the sinless beauty of the sea and sky to the threshold of Naomi Clark’s house. It was very small—one room below, and a sleeping-loft above; but a bed had been made up for the sick woman by the down-stairs window looking out on the harbour; and Naomi lay on it, with a lamp burning at her head and another at her side, although it was not yet dark. A great dread of darkness had always been one of Naomi’s peculiarities.