“Troth, Kate, if this is your malady, it appears in a more attractive form than most.” And then, lowering his voice, he spoke her aside: “Who is this stranger?”
“You should know,” she replied, hardly deigning to respond in kind. “Was it not you that warned me of her coming?”
“Ah!” he said, seeming enlightened, and just perceptibly shrugged his shoulders. “Is that so? Well, make us known to one another, child; for there’s no situation possible here without.”
“You said you had seen her.”
“Never to be remembered by her. I prithee, Kate.”
She could not; it stuck in her throat; but she conceded this much—she waved him with her hand towards the other two, where they stood together. Hamilton made the best of it.
“Will you, Phil?” says he, skipping up before, with a killing smile for the lady.
Chesterfield had no choice but to respond.
“Mrs. Davis,” he said, in a voice that seemed to carry an oath behind it; “this is my friend, Mr. George Hamilton.”
Moll curtsied, “a wicked little winkle” in her eye; and the gentleman, left hand on chest, right extended, and right toe advanced and pointed, swept a bow the very exaggeration of courtly.
“Charmed,” said he.
“Sure,” said Moll.
“You were speaking,” said he, “when it was my misfortune to interrupt you.”
“Was I?” said she. “Now I remember—it was about Kit.”
“Was it, faith? And who’s Kit?”
“Kit’s the devil.”
“The devil he is!”
“I never saidhe, now.”
“She, then.”
“Norshe. Kit’s Kit.”
“Zounds! Neither man nor woman?”
“Zounds! Why not? Doesn’t something come between man and woman?”
“What comes?”
“Why, the devil, sure.”
“Ah! Then Kitisthe devil.”
“Indeed, Kit is not. Kit is what the devil comes between.”
“Wait, now. I scent a quibble. Kit stands for Christopher, and Kit stands for Katherine—both man and woman. They go arm in arm.”
“Not they. Why, Chris could never look at a woman without blushing.”
“And how about Kate?”
“O,she!She’dgo arm in arm with a pair of breeches.”
My lord laughed, half vexedly: “She never could, you know.”
Moll turned on him.
“’Twas you, not me, called Kit the devil. Why don’t you answer for your own?” and, with a manner of playful fretfulness, she began to tease and rally himsotto voce.
Hamilton looked, with a grin, at his cousin, then moved to rejoin her. She stood with set lips and a disdainful frown on her brow.
“How can you encourage such intolerable stuff?” she said, in an undertone, as he approached.
“Come with me into the window,” he answered low; and, rebelling a moment, she succumbed. It was a large room, and the movement secured them a relative privacy.
“Stuff it may be,” said he; “but ’tis the sort of ready flippancy which leads your Philip Stanhopes by the nose. Is there any truth in this Kit?”
“How should I know or care? Some former flame of his, belike, with whom they play to perplex and insult me. It is no concern of mine. I am done with him.”
“Is that true, cousin?” He looked at her very earnestly. “Nay, I can see you are not speaking the truth.”
“Can you see? What true masculine eyes! I tell you that, having formed my resolve, I am quite unconcerned and happy!”
“Ah! Women think themselves what they want to be. That is why they never understand when they are accused of being what they are.”
“Indeed! And pray what am I that I do not think myself?”
“Jealous.”
“Never!”
“Jealous, I say—or you were not still so obsessed that you could fail to play the game I set you.”
“What game?”
“O! ‘What game?’ says she. Why,hisgame—or fatuity. Makehimjealous; hoist him with his own petard, and see this common jade deposed.”
Affecting, while he spoke, the simplest conversational manner, he had an acute eye all the time for the two across the room. He observed the little attention the Earl was paying to the wiles besieging him, his disturbed glances his way, the morose suspicion of his expression; and he knew that the man was still too corroded with jealousy to play adequately the part assigned him. And in so far the decoy had failed, it seemed, to justify her uses. It was evident that, as Chesterfield had stated, she had begun to weary him—a perilous situation, which must be stopped from developing itself at whatever cost. But this mischief had reserves of fascination not yet brought into action. Kate’s own guitar—the famous instrument—lay on a table hard by. The sight of it brought one of these reserves most opportunely into his mind. If he dared—but hemustdare.
Kate looked at her beguiler queerly. “I had forgotten,” she said. “Thank you, cousin. Is your advice very disinterested?”
“To that extreme,” said he, “that I offer myself, if you will, the fond instrument to this provocation. Purely to serve you, believe me. Why, watch him now, and judge if, for all his misbehaviour, he would relish that sort of retort on his infidelity.”
“I will not watch him,” she said, “or even look at him. You are very kind to me, cousin. I will think on what you say.”
He was so elated that he decided on the venture. Lifting the guitar, he ran his fingers over the strings.
“This, Mrs. Davis,” said he, advancing a few steps, “is thought, as no doubt you have been informed, the finest instrument of its kind in London. Do you play?”
The girl’s eyes sparkled. If she had a soul, it was to be evoked, small and indefinite, through music. Hamilton had calculated on that effect.
“I play,” she said. “Give it me.”
Her ladyship exclaimed angrily—
“No! Put it away, cousin. I will not have it so misused.”
He laughed.
“O, Kate! Never so churlish. Those fingers, I’ll go bail, were not made for hurt or discord. I prithee, sweet Kate.”
“Give it me,” said Moll entreatingly. “I’ll use it so I’ll make you all love me.”
Too indignant and too proud to protest further, the young Countess contented herself by flinging into a chair, where she sat with her back turned obstinately on the performer.
And Moll played, her fingers fluttering over the strings like butterflies, and drawing honey wheresoever they alighted. It was not great music, accomplished, soul-stirring; but it was very natural and very moving, quite true, quite simple, welling from the little spring that was her one pure sincerity. And presently—just as, sympathetically, when notes and chords are struck you may see a caged bird’s throat swell and throb, until the responsive rapture comes irresistibly bubbling forth and overflowing—her voice melted into, or took up, the melodious refrain her hands were shaping; and in a moment she was singing a little song, as sweet as a thrush upon a tree—
When my love comes, O, I will not upbraid him!He meant but for kindness the gift that he gave.Is he to blame for the Heaven that made himA heart full of tenderness meet to enslave?When my love comes I will promise him roses,Gift for the gift that he laid in my breast.O, for that promise his kindness discloses,Will he not kiss me and make me his blest?There’s a cry in the air of the cuckoo, sweet comer;The daffodils blow and there’s green on the tree;There’s a nest in the roof that is empty since summer—When my love comes will he warm it for me?
When my love comes, O, I will not upbraid him!He meant but for kindness the gift that he gave.Is he to blame for the Heaven that made himA heart full of tenderness meet to enslave?When my love comes I will promise him roses,Gift for the gift that he laid in my breast.O, for that promise his kindness discloses,Will he not kiss me and make me his blest?There’s a cry in the air of the cuckoo, sweet comer;The daffodils blow and there’s green on the tree;There’s a nest in the roof that is empty since summer—When my love comes will he warm it for me?
When my love comes, O, I will not upbraid him!
He meant but for kindness the gift that he gave.
Is he to blame for the Heaven that made him
A heart full of tenderness meet to enslave?
When my love comes I will promise him roses,
Gift for the gift that he laid in my breast.
O, for that promise his kindness discloses,
Will he not kiss me and make me his blest?
There’s a cry in the air of the cuckoo, sweet comer;
The daffodils blow and there’s green on the tree;
There’s a nest in the roof that is empty since summer—
When my love comes will he warm it for me?
It took her hearers by surprise, Hamilton not least. He was so moved, indeed, for the moment, that he failed to observe its effect on Chesterfield. They all dwelt silent for a little, while the girl, conscious of the impression she had made, looked down, still softly touching the strings. And then in a twinkle her mood changed. She shook her curls, laughed, touched out a lively air, and began to dance.
Her dancing was like her playing, her singing—native, unaffected, captivating, a rhythm of lightness, seeming to mock gravitation. It was to help to make her famous by and by—in days when the susceptible Mr. Pepys was to go into raptures over seeing “little Miss Davis” jigging at the play-end; and, indeed, it was very pretty, so elf-like, so unforced. It roused the enthusiasm of at least two of her company. When, laughing and rosy, she ceased, Chesterfield came to her all in a glow.
“It was prettier than the frisking of your own lambs,” said he. “Did you learn it of a shepherd’s piping, and your song of the nightingale? I vow I envy the country its possession of such a Corisande.”
My lady rose from her chair, and, without turning her head, walked erect from the room. Hamilton, watching the Earl with a furtive smile, heard her go, and breathed a silent benediction on his own success.
Mr. Pepys—to mention him once again—kept, as we know, a commonplace book, in which he was accustomed to jot down (in shorthand, let us hope) the good stories, post-prandial and otherwise, which came his way. It must have been a rich if unseemly collection, and is ill lost in these days to a world which, whatever its mental capital, has never more than enough of refreshing anecdotes to go round. Included in it, one may be sure, were those gems of information (as related in the Diary) proffered at my lord Crewe’s table by one Templer on the habits of the viper and the tarantula. This Mr. Templer, we note, was a clergyman, and by virtue of his cloth should be exonerated from the suspicion, otherwise irresistible, that he was pulling our Samuel’s fat leg. But it is worth quoting the passagein extensothat the reader may judge for himself—
“He told us some [i.e. serpents] in the waste places of Lancashire do grow to a great bigness, and do feed upon larkes which they take thus: They observe, when the lark is soared to the highest, and do crawl till they come to be just underneath them; and there they place themselves with their mouth uppermost, and there, as is conceived, they do eject poyson upon the bird; for the bird do suddenly come down again in its course of a circle, and falls directly into the mouth of the serpent; which is very strange.”
Itisvery strange; and that lark at his highest, be it observed—how many hundred feet up?—and the stupendous accuracy of the aim! But Mr. Templer was “a great traveller”—and, of course, therefore, not at all a great liar—and necessarily, on the other hand, too shrewd a man to be himself taken in by the gammoning of local naturalists. Of the tarantula he goes on to say that “All the harvest long” (in Italy presumably) “there are fiddlers go up and down the fields everywhere, in expectation of being hired by those that are stung.” Bless him! and bless his admirable chronicler, who never recorded a more ingenious tale—save that, perhaps, which relates of his friend, Batalier, the jovial but conscienceless, cheapening a butt of Bordeaux wine of some merchant, on the score that it was soured by a thunderstorm, the said storm having been just produced by an artful rogue hired to counterfeit the noise of one, with rain and hail, “upon a deale board”—an incident which reminds one of Peter Simple and Captain Kearney.
But, for Mr. Pepys’s book of tales; no part of it survives, so far as I know, to supplement the Diary, or very possibly there might be found in it some mention of the adventure of Jack Bannister with the cly-faker. This adventure had befallen our musician some time before his encounter with the Clerk of the Acts, which had turned out so signally to his advantage, and one may be certain that the grateful protégé, in the course of unburdening his heart to that generous patron, would not have omitted to mention an incident so poignantly associated with his recent hard experiences. The story, however, may be given in our own words.
In the days precedent to that lucky contretemps in Duke Street, Sad Jack had once possessed a donkey. Acquiring the beast, by a stroke of good fortune, through a raffle conducted in an inn yard over the effects of a deceased tinker, he had used her to bear the burden of the instrument which, in his ploddings abroad, made so heavy physical an addition to the weight of melancholy which oppressed him. Thenceforth patient Griselda acted the part of minstrel-boy to the wandering harpist, bearing on her sturdy little back the dumb intervals between performance and performance, and standing apathetic by while the pence for her night’s board and lodging and her master’s were being charmed from a reluctant public. She was a docile little ass and intelligent, and between her and her owner was quickly established a comradeship which made their too soon severance a source of poignant grief to at least the human one of them. It happened in this way—
They came chancing together one day into the broad thoroughfare of Cornhill, where, about the neighbourhood of the great conduit, near the east end, they halted and prepared for their parts. Here, hard by, stood the “tun,” or lock-up, a square detached building used for the temporary impounding of night offenders; and it may have been their contiguity to that place of ill savour which procured them the company which was responsible for their separation. Rogues gravitate of instinct towards the gallows, and your thief is never to be found hovering so certainly as about the buildings where Justice inhabits.
However that might be, and whether it were owing to the insolvency or the insensibility of his audience I cannot say; but the net result to the musician showed itself in such a beggarly taking, that he was driven to bring his performance to a short end, with a view to shifting his ground and endeavouring to discover a more profitable pitch. He loaded up Griselda and moved off, his expression, perhaps, reflecting the nature of his inward disappointment.
But he had not trudged fifty paces when his dismal preoccupation became conscious of a voice that pursued and arrested him.
“Hillo, my troll-away!”
He turned about, to see a figure approaching. It was that of a common young fellow, white-faced, dirty, but with a world of shifty cunning in his diminutive optics. His dress—some refuse of finery cheapened from the hangman—overhung his puny limbs, he had packthread in his shoes, and he wore his hat with a jack-a-dandy cock that did nothing but emphasize its extreme age and greasiness No one less unworldly than our musician would have stopped to parley with a creature so obviously questionable. But in truth Jack was, in the slang of the canting tribe, a born “buzzard,” or pigeon.
“What now?” demanded he.
“Heard ye,” said the stranger, coming up with a rather panting grin, “harping it yonder, over against lob’s pound; and, thinks I to myself, ‘Here be the very man for my master.’”
“What master?”
The stranger jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Salvator they call him—a great learned doctor.”
“Well, what about him?”
“A needs a merry-Andrew, so to speak.”
“I fail to smoke you, friend.”
“One to play outside his door and attract custom.”
“Ah!”
He thought he understood. It was being suggested that he should devote his gift to the services of an empiric, by drawing, siren-like, chance patients to his lure.
Well, why not? There was no moral degradation implied in the business. This Salvator might be a perfectly honest practitioner; and in any case his own art would be used for no purpose baser than its wont—to procure him, that was to say, a profitable audience. And with that his responsibility would cease. The issue, for Salvator, would be his own affair. He thought of the comparative rest implied, of his empty pockets.
“What sayest thou, Grisel?” said he.
The little she ass grunted—a small purr of affection.
“Would he make it worth my while?” asked Jack of the pallid rogue.
“Take my word for’t,” says he, “and demand your own terms.”
The musician hesitated a moment longer, then succumbed. After all, he was committing himself to no more than an interview. “Lead on,” he said, and, the rascal going before, he followed, with the beast, in his tracks.
They were here in a wide place of gabled houses, all having stalls below, with a common pent-roof over, and signs of trades innumerable hung, like flags, from its eaves. Out of this spacious thoroughfare they turned sharply into an alley, sunless like a ravine from the overtopping of its tenements, but full of life and bustle. This was Birchin Lane, much inhabited of dealers in second-hand frippery and upholstery, yet with spaces of quiet between, where in the shadows lurked here and there a doorway enclosing some business less officious in its character. And before one of these doors the stranger stopped. A modest sign hung over it, showing the inscription, “Salvator, Physician,” with a tiny pestle and mortar depicted in the top outer corner, and its base was sunk a single step below the street level.
“Wait you here,” said the fellow, “the whiles I go before to acquaint my master.”
He rapped on the door with the iron knocker, shaped like a sphinx, that hung there, and in a little it was opened to him by a strong, hard-faced woman, who inquired his business. That fact again should have warned our harpist; but the man was a dreamer and simpleton. He noted only that his escort was admitted, and thereafter was content to await his reappearance with patience.
Salvator sat alone in an upper room when the rogue was shown in to him. The physician was of a piece with his chamber, moth-blown and fusty. He wore a long black robe with a fur tippet, and a fur cap was on his head, from which his locks hung down, the colour of dry ginger. He looked spoiled and stained, from much handling of medicaments, and his jaw seemed to goggle with his eyes. The room, beyond a table, an astral globe, a bookcase stuffed with treatises, and a chair or two, possessed little furniture, and no sign whatever of the usual mummified paraphernalia of a dealer in the healing arts. He turned, from his occupation of filling a test-tube from a glass phial, to face, somewhat impatiently, the visitor.
“Well, friend, and what is thy need?”
The rogue fumbled his doffed hat.
“None of my own, master, but my brother’s. A waits in the street below, unwitting of my purpose.”
“What need? What purpose? State, state, and be done with it.”
“The purpose to have his wits cured, if so be I can entice him into your honour’s presence.”
“What, then, hath befallen his wits?”
“What not, great sir? A thinks every one he meets doth owe him money, and importunes the same for payment.”
“A kleptomaniacal symptom; from mental possession to material. You did well to approach me timely. Since when—— But I can judge nothing without I see him. Send him up to me.”
“Mayhap he’ll be persuaded so he come alone. But he’ll ask you payment.”
“That were to put the cart before the horse; to fee the patient—husteron proteron. But dispatch, dispatch.”
The rogue descended to the street, and took Griselda’s bridle from her master.
“Go, make your own terms,” said he, as if well pleased, “while I hold this. A waits you up above.”
Soberly, and without suspicion, the musician mounted the stairs. At the top Salvator met him, and, conducting him into his room, shut the door.
“A moment,” said he, “while I examine your eyes.”
He took a lens to the astonished man, and effected a minute scrutiny, muttering the while—
“A visible wildness; dilation of the pupil and congestion. You have never slept in the moonlight, now?”
“Never, sir.”
“H’m! Nor been disappointed of a fortune, nor suffered a blow on the head, nor brooded on the covetous infidelity of a loved mistress?”
“Will you tell me plainly, sir, what are the terms you offer for my services?”
“We’ll come to that. Though ’tis true a physician usually asks a fee, not gives it. My services are to you, good man.”
“Then, sir, I decline at once. What? pay you for bringing you custom!”
“You bring me none, I assure you, if not yourself.”
“I’ll bring you none, indeed, nor prostitute my art to such a bargain. Why, do you think I lead the life I do for pleasure?”
“What life, now?”
“The life of a beggar, sir; the life of one who harps about the streets for alms.”
“Harps?”
“Do not you know? Else why was I brought here?”
“Why, indeed? Your brother must explain.”
“Brother! What brother?”
“Him that came first.”
“A stranger, sir, who accosted me in the streets not half an hour gone, and brought me, on plea of an engagement, to you his master.”
“His master? Not I. I’d never set eyes on the man before.”
One blank minute the musician stood staring at the speaker, then turned and, pounding down the stairs, half crying, half sobbing, as he went, “A thief, a thief, a rogue! Stop him! He’s robbed me!” burst from the door and into the street. The stranger had disappeared, the beast, the instrument—beloved pet and the means to a livelihood all vanished at a stroke.
Aimless, distracted, with skirts flying, Bannister flew hither and thither seeking and questioning. Some scoffed at him, some sympathized; not one had any clue to offer. Amid that labyrinth of lanes and byways, stretching its network to the very waterside, it had been easy for the scamp to make good his escape. Exhausted and broken, the musician had to desist at last from his efforts.
To do him justice, the poor fellow lamented more for his Griselda than for his instrument, though the loss of the latter presented the more desperate problem to him. He could not afford from his scanty savings enough to buy him a new harp, and without one how was he to procure himself a living? In a last hope that he might find his conclusions premature, and the truants back where he had left them, he was returning dejectedly to the scene of his bereavement, when he caught sight of the figure of Salvator peering from his own doorway.
“What fortune?” quoth the medicus, with anxiety, and the other, his lips grimly pursed, only shook his head.
“Come in, good man, and explain,” said the physician kindly, “since I perceive there is more here than meets the eye, and that I have been in some manner I wot not of the unconscious instrument of your undoing. Nay, by your favour. I, who have been giving good advice all my years of discretion, may yet find enough to help a fellow-creature’s necessity.”
It was such a revelation of human charity that Sad Jack was moved to comply. He followed that Good Samaritan to his sanctum, and there, with some heartfelt lamenting for his ravished pet, frankly confided to sympathetic ears his circumstances and the nature of the trick which had victimized him. He had no reason to repent his candour. A practised, if a generous, reader of humankind, Salvator was soon enough convinced of the innate honesty and simplicity of soul which underlay the frozen surface of this nature. He saw a man here to be commiserated and trusted, and, in the end—to cut the story short—agreed to advance him the price of a new instrument, on the mere undertaking that he should repay the loan in such instalments as his success might justify. And to that arrangement, very delicately suggested, Bannister was persuaded to subscribe.
It was indeed an oasis to have discovered in this desert of a great city; and when, in the course of months, fame and fortune, at the instigation of an appreciative patron, leaped upon the humble street player, he did not forget to whom his success had been primarily due, but he sought out Salvator in his abode, and insisted on renting from him at a princely figure a suite of upper rooms in the house in Birchin Lane. And there he made his lodging, greatly to the satisfaction of his landlord, who, for all he was in no need of having patients harped to his door, was yet by far too upright a man ever to be counted a rich one.
“Phlebotomy, the conduct of a clyster, the sane mixing of a potion, the spreading of an adequate plaster—what more,” he would say to his tenant, “is needed to fulfil the functions of an honest practitioner? There be some, plain quacksalvers, who, seeking to supplement the legitimate by abstruse suggestion, adorn their chambers with the dried bodies of toads, crocadilloes, venomous asps contained in spirit, and other suchmonstra horrendaof a cheating fancy; whereby, indeed, if they show their improbity, they exhibit a true knowledge of the uses of the imagination, which will for ever pay to mystery the treble of what reason would pay to knowledge. But not of suchsuggestio falsiis my dealing: and, though I suffer by it, I would rather suffer in the company of Galen than prosper in that of Cornelius Tilbury.”
“Yet,” says Bannister, pointing to the astral globe, “you are not, it seems, for limiting your prescriptions to the terrestrial?”
“Why,” answered Salvator (whose real unprofessional name, by the way, was Shovel), “am I so dense and blind to the sources of light and life as to claim an independence for our planet? The herb is as much of heaven as the star, and the sign-manual of our origin is printed on man and flower alike. So must we consult man for heaven and heaven for man, his lines, his indications, whether derived from this celestial House or the other. For which reason I believe in astrology as in chiromancy, since both guide me to the association of a particular humour in a patient’s blood with its corresponding cause and remedy, they all being contained in his nativity, or horoscope, that is to say—man and season and herb alike. Without subscribing to the fantastical conceits of Gaule and Indagine, who profess to find in the palm of the hand a country of seven hills, each, as it were, a watershed laced with innumerable descending rivulets of tendency, I confess that I see no reason why what life hath marked on a man the Source of life had not in the first instance predestined there. Light is what I seek, and that comes not from the earth.”
So was this worthy doctor, sane, humane and religious in one—a very practical Samaritan. Yet, as it came to appear, not all his honest theories were able to serve him in the single direction where most he pined to see them vindicated. He was a widower, and possessed of an only child, a hopelessly crippled boy of fifteen.
Bannister had been an inmate of the house for a full week before he learned of the existence of this pathetic incubus. The building was well-sized, its upper part, until he came to occupy it, delivered to gloom and emptiness, and, to reach his rooms, he had to pass by a door on the first landing which, in his early notice of it, was invariably closed. But one night, as he went by, he observed the door ajar, and saw a light and heard a voice within. The voice was not that of his landlord, nor of the hard-faced woman who acted as his sole servant and housekeeper. It was a weak voice and a querulous, and it seemed to be expostulating over the meagreness of some concession grudgingly vouchsafed. The musician paused in some astonishment, resting momentarily the foot of the harp he shouldered on a stair-tread. He never parted from his loved instrument, though in these days he used a good packhorse to convey it to and from the places where he performed.
It was near midnight, and the house, but for the voice, was dead silent. The woman, after admitting him, had preceded him up the flight and vanished. It had never occurred to him that the place contained other than the two with whom he was familiar. He stood, petrified for the moment, and, as the sound of his footstep ceased, so did that of the low and feeble complaint. And then suddenly the woman came to the door and appeared before him.
Bannister had always rather mentally recoiled from this person—her bony sallowness, her silence, the gloom of seeming tragedy in her eyes. He never learned from first to last what was her history; and yet, if tragedy there were connected with it, it had likely proved a tragedy no more heroic than that of lovelessness, and drudgery, and the hard resignation to that lot of unfulfilment which, foredoomed of personal ill-favour, is perhaps, to a woman, the bitterest tragedy of all. She served him, and waited on him well; she did everything efficiently save smile. Yet, for all her unemotional presence, he thought he perceived now, in the guttering light of the landing lamp, a sign of perturbation on her face.
“I was surprised,” he said; “and stopped—no witting eavesdropper. I thought I heard a voice I did not recognize.”
“’Twas Colin’s,” she said.
“Anan?” He used, being country bred, the country expression.
“Colin’s,” she repeated—“the master’s child.”
“I never knew he had one.”
“One.” She responded like an echo.
“And ill?”
“He’s always ill.”
“Poor boy! Does this vigil signify——?”
She answered the unfinished question.
“He wanted the door left ajar that he might see you pass with your harp.”
“See me pass?”
“Aye, since he cannot hear you play.”
He looked at her in silence; then, in a quick, unaccountable impulse, placed a firm hand on her arm. “Let me go in;” and, almost to his wonder, she acquiesced, and moved aside to admit him.
It was a fair-sized room, and quite handsomely appointed. What luxuries the house could command seemed mostly accumulated here. There were soft mats on the floor; jewels of stained glass let into the diamond-paned casements; a silver lamp glowing among books and illuminated manuscripts strewed over a table. And, in the midst, in vivid contrast with the dark panelling, on a white bed lay a white boy. His face, which, for its structure, might have been a pretty one, was wasted to the bone; his eyes were prominent and of an unearthly blue; though fifteen, he looked in weight and size less than a child of nine. Sad, sad is it to see young life in any sickness—its pathetic patience, its uncomplaining acceptance of its cruel, uncomprehended heritage; but sadder is the sight of one doomed from his cradle to pain and helplessness. To be born, like this, to death, not life, to the visible processes of dissolution from the very threshold of existence; to be fated never to know but by report the meaning of health, as the blind must shape in their imaginations the world they can never see—truly that is to suffer the worst loss of possession, which is never to have possessed, while reading in the happiness of others the measure of one’s own eternal deprivation. Here was some constitutional atrophy, already, fifteen years ago, disputing with its unborn victim the world to come, and proving, on release, stronger than the life it clung to. The boy had been an invalid from his birth—a lamp guttering before it was well lighted—a nativity most fondly lending itself, one would have thought, to the triumphant vindication of its parent doctrines. But that vindication never came; the father could not cure his child, and there was the anguish. The life he loved most on earth was the life that most baffled his efforts to mend and prolong it. His arts could not even win it surcease from the mortal languor and weariness which accompanied its dissolution. He felt himself a hypocrite, an impostor, in the eyes that, turning to him for relief, found only helplessness and impotence. He who to all others was so glib in professional assurance had nothing here to offer but empty commiseration and an agony of devotion. It was very pitiful.
Bannister, pausing a moment on the threshold, stepped softly in, with wonder and compassion at his heart. The boy, propped up on his pillows, regarded his entrance with shy, fascinated eyes. But the grave face of the new-comer, its simplicity, its kindly melancholy, were nothing but reassuring adjuncts to the midnight quiet of the room. The musician shifted the harp from his shoulder.
“Would you like to hear me play,” he said: “here and now, in the silence of the house?” The instant rapture called to the emaciated features was his sufficient answer. He smiled. “Cannot you sleep?” he said. “It is late to lie awake.”
The boy shook his head.
“What is time to me, sir?”
He said it without affectation. It had seemed less touching otherwise.
“Well,” said Bannister, “it must be a Lydian measure, lest those more concerned with sleep than we resent it. Lie still, child, while I drug thy tired brain.”
He knew his own power in that way which is the last from vainglory. True genius has no self-consciousness. It was his soul that played, his fingers obeying; and what conceit can there be in immortality? Seated, he touched the strings, and his soul spoke—spoke all the pity and soft sympathy which were its burden. It was tender music, sighing, sweetly subdued to the occasion. And as he proceeded he lost himself in it, lost all but the sense of that divine compassion which was moving and inspiring him. Still, the sure instinct of the artist came presently to decree a period; and ending, short of surfeit, on a dying note, he came to earth.
The child was lying with closed lids, heavy tears trickling from them upon the pillow; the woman stood in the shadows, one hand placed over her eyes. What faint, angelic melodies must have stricken, half fearfully, half joyfully, the ears of dark watchers in the streets that night! Stepping very gently, the musician bent above the boy.
“Good-night, Colin,” he whispered. “And shall I come again anon?”
With a convulsive movement, two thin arms were flung about his neck.
“O, come, come again and play to me!”
“I will come. But now, my child, I am very weary. See, I will leave my harp to stand with you all night in earnest of my promise.”
As he opened the door a gaunt and ghastly apparition faced him. It was the father himself, awakened, and brought from his bed in doubt and trembling. He closed the latch, and, turning on the musician, seized him by the arms in a fierce and strenuous grip.
“I was listening, I was watching!” he whispered hoarsely. “Shall I curse you or love you!” And then he fell upon his knees, pawing and mumbling the sensitive hands. “No, no,” he gasped in a broken voice; “be you his true physician—not like this empty charlatan, who, for all his pretended knowledge, hath never learned the magic that one touch of thy hands can dispense.”
Andso the musician and the dying boy were made friends—a quaint, brief intimacy which the former could never recall in after-years without a pang, half pitiful, half humorous, for its oddity. Its relation here is purely in the nature of an interlude, and may be wholly skipped, without hurt to the main narrative, by those who have an unconquerable repugnance of sentiment. But for those others—whether the majority or not I do not know—who like to warm their hearts now and then at the little fire of compassion, the episode, as constituting an odd chapter in the life of a famous executant, may possess a transitory charm. It is for them it is narrated.
From that poignant midnight, Bannister, both by day and evening, was often in the sick boy’s room. By nature tender-hearted, how, indeed, could he deny to suffering that wonderful new emollient discovered in his art? His music succeeded where all dietetics, therapeutics, pharmaceutics, lenitives, palliatives, analeptics, galenics, and other such “ics” and “ives” as appertain to orthodox leechcraft, had failed, however fondly applied, to give relief. It was an anodyne under which peace and resignation came gradually to be substituted for the weary fretfulness which long, fruitless devotion had only helped to aggravate. The father saw, and sighed, and was sadly grateful. Often he would come and listen to the throbbing strains, sitting quite quietly apart, and watching, with a furtive wistfulness, the rapt face, on which all his ministering love had never been able to draw such lines of restful content. And the slackness of his jaw on these occasions seemed somehow to add a curious pathos to the moral. He had meant so well and done so little.
But it was not alone on the subject of music that the stranger and child drew together. One could not, for that matter, always be harping; and in the intervals, at odd times, they conversed much, and familiarly, and generally on recondite themes. They were both, in their different ages and degrees, mystics—the older from temperament, the younger from his spiritual isolation. Lying there through the age-long seasons, what commune was possible to him but with fancies and unrealities? The world was a shadow to him; only his dreams were actual. For them his fruitfullest pastures lay in the spars and splinters of jewelled light which glowed from the stained glass in the casement. Thence he gathered, or thereinto read, the strange phantasies which haunted his brain—thoughts and visions which were like things glimpsed from beyond the veil. This glass was old work, acquired piecemeal from many sources, and let into the upper halves of the windows, without correlation in its parts and with no regard but for effect—a disarrangement infinitely more suggestive than any formal pattern. A few leaves, a golden apple, a section of trellis, a hand grasping a sword-hilt, here and there a head of saint or warrior—such, interspersed with spaces of plain glass, crimson, or deep blue, or sunny yellow, formed the embroidered patchwork for a thousand fancies to play about. One had to remember, hearing the child’s strange brooding rhapsodies thereon, the years which his shrunken appearance belied. Moreover, the intellectual light in him, as is frequently the case with cripples, was precocious, abnormally brilliant. And though he confessed his dreams to a lesser intellect, it was to a corresponding sympathy. The simple of heart are often the purest of vision. Bright wits must whet themselves on the concrete; they cannot sharpen on abstractions. It is for the unworldly to know what they cannot speak. And so it was with this harpist.
There was one fragment which, more than any other, fascinated the boy. It was in colour a splendid azure, mysteriously liquid, and on it hung from nowhere a little white hand, minutely finished to the nails. Whose had it been—what queen’s or angel’s?
“Sometimes,” he would say, “when the lamp is low and there is moonlight in the street, I see it move; and then a shadow grows above, and out of it a face, too dim to distinguish; but if I shut my eyes, I know it has come down and is bending over me.”
“The Lady Mother, belike, Colin.”
“Think you so, dear Jack? It were sweet to have a mother in my room. Do you ever see faces, framed in little blots of light, when you close your lids hard?”
“Surely I do!”
“What are they? Whence do they come? I have no memories of such in all my life. They are strangers to me, yet as clear and actual as yours I look on now. Human—the faces of men and women—some good, some evil; but, if I try to hold and fix ’em, they slide and melt, this one laughing, that wickedly deriding.”
“I know them, evanescent phantoms, that poise, like the shining dragonfly, one instant on wing, and, so you make a movement to look closer, are gone—darted to extinction. Well, may they not be the faces of those we saw through former eyes of ours, in lives before this life?”
The boy lay staring at him, pondering his words as if half tranced.
“I think you say truth,” he answered presently. “What odd surprises come floating sometimes into one’s head, like glimpses of a great secret—bright bubbles that break just as you seem on the point of remembering what the lovely little pictures in them are reflections of. That is a bubble of yours I have often tried to catch.”
“What does it seem to tell you, child?”
“It seems to tell me how I that am I must havebeensince the beginning of things; how I must have lain in the life that was the first life as surely as I lay in the life that was my mother. Think back, and you will find it must be. All through the countless ages I have been passed on from prison to prison, waiting the release which is to come to me at length in Death—is to come to me through this last phase of conscious existence, which is indeed my trial and sentence. And then the scaffold, Jack; we all have to mount the scaffold; and at last the opened door—the escape—the rapture—and I shall remember why it all was!” He clasped his thin hands; his face seemed lit up with an inward glow, like a porcelain lamp enclosing a dim flame. “Is not that what you mean?” he said.
“I think it is, Colin. Yet what could that imperishable seed have known, until this last phase of realities? Foritthe faces could not have existed.”
“Why not, since they existed for the lives of which it was?”
“That is true. Life is not contained in this or that of me, but is the sum of all.”
The casement formed a shallow recess of five lights. It stood opposite the bed, looking out on the street. Dimly, seen through its latticed lower half, the houses across the lane towered like dark phantoms. With their faces to the north, they were never but plunged in gloom; but when the south sun was high, and struck upon the stained glass, the contrastive glow, to tranced eyes, made them appear impalpable things. That was how the boy liked to regard them—silvery abodes of mystery, where any strange things might be happening, and appearing framed between the floor and that upper frieze of glowing transparencies. Then the lower windows looked mere cobwebs, in which sparks and glints of light hung caught like fireflies. It was all a dream of mist and sparkle, in which the sense of close confinement seemed dissolving.
But it was not so for the most part. He hated the houses in their common, hard aspect of nearness and oppression. Only when the rain fell thickly, spouting from their eaves and gutters, and half hiding them behind a veil of dropping water, or when the snow, clinging to their sills and window-frames, seemed to cut them into sugared sections, could he endure to look on them without impatience. They were the jealous barriers which imprisoned him from the infinite. Some boys, so conditioned, would have found their main pathetic interest in such sights and sounds of outer life as might penetrate to them in their isolation. It was not so with him. His spirit, like an entombed flower, yearned always towards the light, stretching pallidly in a vain passion to attain the blue heaven of health and freedom.
Perhaps, strange little soul, he was happiest in those long moonlit nights when, the curtains being drawn about the lower casement, he and his jewelled book of stories in the window were left alone together. Then he would lie for hours, quite motionless, as if hypnotized, his eyes fixed on the dimly luminous scroll, dreaming what unearthly dreams only the painted heads themselves might tell. He liked to hear the watchman crying out the hours, hollow and mysterious, in the streets below; he loved to see by day the not unrare vision of a pigeon pecking and preening on his window-sill, or the shadow of a hopping sparrow cross the panes. Those were his events, until the harp came. And then all at once he was transformed. Some long-dumb chord in his soul leaped and vibrated to the rapture with a force that shook the life out of him. I think that was the truth. He died to all intents of joy. The frail frame could not stand the exquisite tension of the bliss evoked in it.
Now, in the days of that brief friendship, scarce one day passed but found the boy and man at some time together. There was no more midnight playing; but Bannister would look in as occasion offered, and mostly with his instrument accompanying. Then there would be sweet music a spell, and talk a spell, and perhaps unutterable silences to link them. Somehow it suggested the soul affinity, formal but transcendent, between a dying saint and his confessor. There was a subtle thrill in the atmosphere, of which all were conscious—Bannister himself, the father, the woman with the hard, pathetic face, whose eyes were always hidden by her hand when she was privileged to listen to the music. They felt it like an unseen presence—a sense of warning, of change, as when one feels spring moving in the grass under one’s feet. And not one would own to itself that it knew. Yet they all knew.
Always to the last it was the little white hand in the blue pane which most fascinated the boy. His wandering fancy would lose itself among the cluster of leaves, as in an antique forest; would find in the glowing fruit a very garden of Hesperus, sweet with nightingales and the warm scent of flowers; would endow with a hundred characters the faces peering from that arras of bright hues: but it was to the hand he for ever returned, its beauty, its severed mystery. “I should dearly like to learn to whom it belonged,” he would say. “But this I know very well—if I could only reach it, it would help me up and away. It is the boy Christ’s, I think.”
It was on a dark midsummer morning, chill and stormy, that the end came. There had been signs, and in their hearts they were prepared. The father sat by his child’s pillow, holding one of the frail hands in his, the woman, dry-eyed and silent, busied herself noiselessly among the shadows; near the foot of the bed sat the musician, his harp before him, touching little more than a melodious murmur from its strings. He faced the casement, which, because of the wind, had been close shut.
Perhaps it was the drugged stillness of the room, the spell wrought upon his brain by the soft “woven paces” of the chords his fingers trod; perhaps he really dreamt; but this is what seemed to happen before his eyes. He was gazing, unconscious that he was gazing, on the window, when he saw the shadow of a dove moving on the sill outside. It dipped and strutted, curtseying back and forth, as if restless or impatient; and as it hurried, now this way now that, of a sudden the noise of the wind ceased utterly, and a flood of sunlight broke upon the window. And in that same moment the player noticed a little white hand at the latch, and the casement swung noiselessly open. There was a sigh as of wings—within, without—and his fingers stopped on a broken chord. And as he stared, dazzled, incredulous, he heard a quick rustle behind him, and a startled cry: “My God! He’s gone!”
He rose, he turned, half stupefied, and saw the father on his feet, bending with an agonized expression over the face on the pillow. It was quite still; a ray of sunlight touched it; a smile of the most rapturous peace was on its lips. In a spasm of emotion he caught the poor man’s hand in one of his, and with the other pointed mutely to the open window. The physician, giving vent to his tears, leaned himself upon his shoulder.
“’Twas thy music,” he said, “broke his prison and freed his soul.”
“’Twas thy unselfish love,” said Bannister, “freed the music.”
The woman, her stern face all softened and agitated, went to close the casement.
“Nay, dame,” said the father—“let be; he cannot take cold now. To think he is seeing the blue sky and the white clouds for the first time!”
And at that she cast herself upon the floor and hid her face. Only the convulsive heaving of her body witnessed to the breaking of the storm which had been so long pent up within her. Alas! what unsuspected woman was revealed here, what passion undercrushed, and what desolation!
It was remarked that night in Spring Garden that never yet had the famous harpist so divinely justified his reputation. He played like one transported, lost to earth. Many of his ravished audience were in tears, while the very pigeons, petted and fearless, seemed to gather about his feet. Nay, there was one, it was said, a tender white dove, that flew to his shoulder and settled there for a while, making love at his ear. But that may pass for a legend.
Itmay appear to some people that Hamilton was taking a prodigious amount of trouble to reach by a roundabout way a conclusion at least as presumptively attainable by direct means as by sinuous; and, in this connection, Montrose’s quatrain may possibly occur to them—