'As the man said this, he thrust his hand into the cage, and caught the Flicker by the wing. With a sharp cry, his victim struck him again on the finger, enraging him more than ever. He opened his pen-knife, pulled the birdout, drew the blade across its throat, and out of the cruel slash there poured, mingling with the blood, a bitter cry, like a woman's. I heard it, and every drop of my own blood returned to my heart. He let the bird drop upon the counter: it gave one hop, tumbled over in my hand, and its eye-lids slid shut.
''This day week, remember,' said the man, and went out of the shop, wiping his knife.
'I took up the bird, laid it in my neck, and, I am not ashamed to say, cried over it.
'There are a good many things which may happen between now and this day week. I am not one of those people who regard every misfortune that occurs to an enemy the judgment ofHeavenin their behalf. But I must say, that the event which occurred before that man's week was out, always seemed to me a direct blow from Nemesis. He was a very passionate fellow; subject to temporary fits of insanity. One of them came on in the morning while he was shaving, and he cut his own throat as he had the Flicker's.
'When his estate was settled, nobody thought of the bird. I inclosed the ten dollars he had given me for its education in an anonymous note to his executors, simply stating that my conscience demanded it; and having thus quieted that organ, kept the Flicker for myself. With a daguerreotype of Miss Brentnall's, found among a parcel of papers labelled, 'To be burned up,' and upon which alone, of all the parcel, I could not persuade myself to execute her will, I put the stuffed bird by. When I was too lonely to dare to be utterly alone, I went to the trunk, where they were preserved and looked at them.
Afterthe loss of my second only friend, a painful change came over me. I had risen from the shock of Miss Brentnall's death with an elasticity which surprised even myself. Partly for the reason that my constitution was better by several less months of anxiety, grief, and application to business. Partly because I felt assured that, as she said, we should some time or other meet again.
'When the Flicker died, I felt that this only thing hitherto left to love me, could never reäppear. The kind heart of the woman would beat again; the kind heart of the bird no more forever. And strangely enough, the whole sorrow that I had passed through for Miss Brentnall's loss revived, and I went about my day's work bearing the weight of a two-fold melancholy.
'The first thing that the bird-fancying public knew—indeed almost the first thing I knew myself, so abstracted, so moody was I—a paragraph appeared in the morning papers, to the effect that the celebrated Taxidermist and Aviarian Professor, Orloff Ruricson, was about to close his business, and make a voyage to Europe, Asia and Africa, from which parts he hoped to return in two or three years, with a large and interesting collection of rare animals, to establish a Natural History Museum.
'I had caused the appearance of this notice myself; but when I read it, felt quite as surprised by it as any body. In nerve and mind I was so worn out,that although thoroughly resolved to make the move, the consolidation of the purpose into such a fixed form shocked me.
'When the novelty of the idea passed off, I disposed of all my stock to various amateurs who knew me and had every disposition to help me by paying large prices. I put the thirty thousand dollars I was now worth into such a shape that I could get its increase in regular remittances; packed the bird, the daguerreotype, and a small wardrobe, and took passage by barque for Genoa.
'At sun-rise one Monday morning, the barque's yawl took me out to her anchorage. As I went up the ladder at the side, I heard an opera-air playing on board, and when I reached the deck, the first thing that met my eyes was an Italian grinder, with his organ and monkey.
''Is that man going the voyage with us?' I asked the captain.
''Yes, Sir,' he replied; 'but he shan't play without permission after we get to sea. He's a Genoese, who has made enough in this country to keep a fruit-stall in his own, and so he's going home.'
'Home! He had a home, and was going to it! I would have handed him my bank-book—taken his monkey and organ—to be able to saythat.
'As the tug hitched fast to us and we began walking down toward the Narrows, I crossed to the other side of the ship, that I might take a look at the fortunate man.
'Certainly, I said to myself, Fortuneisblind. He had a home; but he was one of the most ill-favored rascals I ever laid my eyes on. No body would have taken him for a Genoese—the New-Englander of Italy—rather for a Romanesque cut-throat, or a brigand of the mountain, who had found his stiletto or his carbine good for only the slowest kind of shilling and taken to the nimble six-pence of the hand-organ, on the principle that honesty was the best policy. You have seen a thousand pen-and-pencil pictures of the fellow, and need no description of him from me.
'As I stood beside him at the bulwarks, his monkey leapt upon me.
''Pardon, good gentleman,' said the Italian with an abject smirk, and gave a jerk to the chain that brought back the little animal flying.
''Never mind that,' said I; 'let him come to me. I am fond of monkeys: I would like to look at him.'
''As it pleases, then,' replied the Italian, with another smirk, and loosed the chain again. 'Go, Beppo!'
'Beppo needed no command, but jumped instantly upon my arm and laid his cheek upon my bosom. As I patted his head, I examined him curiously, and found him the most beautiful little monkey in the world. A Marmoset, with a great brown, tender eye like a gazelle's; a face which varied its expression constantly without ever degenerating into the brutal leer of the common ape; a winning, confiding mien of head and hand that was human, childlike; and a soft coronal of golden fur around his little skull, that added still more to his baby-like look, giving him the appearance of some mother's favorite, dressed for a walk in a bonnet of down. I don't know how I could have been guilty of the folly of becoming attached to the little fellow, after all the lessons of warning my life had taught me. But I did take a great fancy tohim. Never a day passed during the whole voyage, in which he did not get many a tit-bit from my hands. He spent far more of the time with me than with his own master, and before long obeyed me with a hearty good nature, which he never thought of showing toward that musical brigand.
'One sunny afternoon, when we were three weeks out, the captain, the grinder and myself stood upon the forecastle-deck, trying to make out a sail just visible on the horizon ahead of us. As usual, Beppo was cutting his pranks about me. For a moment he would sit demurely on my shoulder and hold his tail to his eye in mimicry of the captain's eye-glass. A second more, and he would be sitting in the fore-top. The next, and he came sliding down a halliard to his old perch. These antics interfered with our look-out, and I put my hand into my pocket to feel for something which might keep him still. Finding neither prune, nor nut, nor string, but only the purse which I always carried there, I drew it out and opened it, to look for a copper. As I committed this incautious act, I saw the eyes of the Italian cast a sidelong, sly glance at the gold that shone there, and I shut the clasp with an uncomfortable sense of having been very silly. At the same moment, he stole away, like a cat, to the fore-stays, and pretended to be more earnestly interested than any of us in the sail.
'The nights grew still warmer and warmer as we sailed on. The cabin became so close, that I ordered the steward to bring my mattress upon deck, and usually slept there under a shawl, unless we had rain.
'I had lain down at about half-past eleven, upon one night in particular, utterly fatigued, sick at heart, despairing. As the tall masts nodded past the stars—the stars rather than the masts seemed moving—and in my heart I believed that even heaven itself was not permanent; that all things flickered and danced, and passed away as earthly hope had passed from my heart; nothing was fixed, certain, and to be striven for. Finally, I only wished to sleep. 'Let me die this temporary death of slumber,' said I; 'there is happiness therein, and therein only.' I was more of a Lord Byron at that instant; more of a moral desperado; less of a Thomas Carlyle, a Goethe, sanguine Yankee, who believes that the best way to get rid of misery is to suffer andwork out, if you fall, always to fall on your feet andscramble out, than I had ever been in my life, Messrs. Tryon and Bonenfant! So, said I, let me go to sleep.
'Would you believe it, that confounded little Beppo would not hear of such a thing! Over my face this minute, over my legs the next; now tumbling down on my breast from a line; now, as the sailors say, working Tom Cox's traverse, up one hatchway and down the other, past my side.
'I could not get a wink of sleep. I tossed and I tumbled; I swore and I grumbled. I called Beppo to me, and for the first time without success.
'I was just about going after Luigi, his master, when I saw that person creeping to me in the shadow of the mizzen-mast. By the high cove of the after-hatch, I was quite hid from the stern, and the only person who happened to be there, the second mate, could see Luigi no more than me.
'At that instant the monkey gave me a tweak of the hair that nearly mademe scream out, and then ran away noiselessly forward. Luigi crept on and on. As he drew nearer, I could perceive a stiletto in his hand. Its blade gleamed faintly now and then in the star-light, so indistinctly that at first it seemed like a trailing white ribbon.
'I did not believe his first intention was to kill me. That would have been absurd as well as cruel. So I lay still and let him come close. I feigned myself fast asleep and snored heavily.
'He knelt at my side, and holding the knife over my heart with one hand, felt with the other in my pocket. Still I slept away for dear life. He found the purse: drew it out with a slow, gentle motion, and crept forward again on his hands and knees, thanking his saints in a whisper. I was on his back before he could turn around. He was lithe, but he was feeble, and I had him pinioned, prone upon his face, with the purse in his hand and the thanksgiving in his mouth, while it was yet only half-changed to a curse. Thus I forced from him both the stiletto and the purse, and threw the one over-board at the same time that I returned the other to my pocket. Then I arose, and we stood up face to face.
''Shall I have you hanged at the yard-arm in half-an-hour?' was my first question.
'The Italian looked me full in the face, his olive cheeks were like chalk, his lips quivered, but he did not speak. And then, as if suddenly understanding the cause of his failure, he ran forward to the fore-stay, where the marmoset was clinging and chattering.
'I hurried after him. Catching him by the shoulder, I whispered in his ear: 'If one hair of Beppo's head is hurt,youare a dead man before you can say your prayers. You came after my money. You are a villain, but you shall have it—two gold pieces, ten dollars, at least—if you sell him to me on the spot. Is Beppo mine, on these conditions? If he isn't, I will arouse the crew, and you shall dangle aloft before the next watch is set. Yes or no?'
''You shall have the monkey,' replied the Italian, with another of his infernal smirks. 'You shall have him, but the gentleman will not find him good fortune.'
'The devil take you and your fortune! If he brings me no better fortune than you deserve—and for the same reason—I shall wish, and not wait, to die.' So I brought the monkey aft, and made Luigi acknowledge him mine, while I counted out the ten dollars, in the presence of the second mate.
'After that night, warm as it might be, you will readily believe that I slept in the cabin. Beppo nestled by me, occupying as much of the berth as his little form required; and I declare to you, that had he needed it all I would have given it to him, and stretched myself on the floor, so warm an affection had I for the creature who had saved my money: possibly my life.
'At that time, perhaps you will say because I was young and visionary, I often believed that Beppo knew what he had been the means of doing for me. At this day I shall be still insaner in your eyes, for I hold that he was not only themeans, but the intentionalagent. I must stop. I am forerunning my story.
'It was amazing how I improved as soon as I had something to love! I became so strong, so hearty, that I was quite ashamed to think of having abandoned America for my health; and meditated going back with the barque's return voyage. Nothing but the presence on board of that cursed Luigi prevented my spirits from being better than since I could remember.
'We reached Genoa, and anchored in Quarantine. My trunk was on deck, and in all respects I was ready to go ashore. Already the infernal Italian had taken his seat in the health-officer's boat; and, with his elbow resting on his organ, looked up at me over the gunwale. Beppo, for very joy of seeing land again, had climbed clear to the main truck, and was chattering audibly as he whisked his tail.
''All ready, Beppo!' I cried: 'come down, boy!'
'In his haste at hearing my voice, as he tumbled head over heels down the main shrouds, for the first time in my life that I ever saw a monkey do such a thing, he missed his hold on a ratline, and tumbled into the water of the harbor. I sprang to the side, and called to the oarsmen of the boat:
''Save that monkey, and you shall have—whatever you ask!' Fool! I was talking English, and every man of them was an Italian! A language I had some understanding of, but could not speak.
''What says the gentleman?' asked one of the boat-crew, in his own tongue.
'And then I heard that olive-skinned brigand wretch, the organ-grinder, reply to the speaker: 'He says the beast who fell overboard is sick of the small-pox, and you must not touch him.'
'As he made this answer he turned around to me with one of his diabolical smirks, kissed his hand to me, spit at the drowning Beppo, then asked me blandly: 'Did I not tell the good gentleman his buying would be bad fortune? Are we settled of accounts, good gentleman?'
'I to hear this! I to look over the side; hear my last friend screaming his poor wordless agony; see him look up at me with that supplicating child's eye of his; see him fighting the water despairingly with his little unlearned hands, then go down in a bubbling circle out of sight; I who could not swim a stroke!
'The captain, seeing my distress, humanely put his own boat after the poor creature. With the boat-hook a sailor brought him up after he had gone down for the last time. And thus they laid him on the deck at my feet. I lifted him up; his child eyes were closed, and the golden crown of his fur lay matted and dripping over them. I tried to warm him in my bosom. I laid my hand on his heart: it had stopped.
'Beppo was dead. The Marmoset whom nature had given, only of all, to love the man!
'And I went into Quarantine at Genoa, once more alone in the world.'
'Ciel! and vat you do vith zat cursed Italian?'
'I? Nothing. Ten years afterward I saw him rowing in the galleys at Marseilles. He knew me; I knew him. He smirked as of old, but with such very visible teeth that I was glad he was chained; and passed on without even asking the overseer his crime.
'Mywanderings, dating from the day I landed at Genoa, would fill with their narrative a book far larger than 'Livingstone's Travels.' I journeyed over all the traversable regions of Africa; in India I have been wherever the foot of the white man has trodden; I spent a year and a half in China; almost as long in Syria; and I went every where over the continent of Europe. Then I passed six months in Sweden; most of that time living at my native town, Jönpöping, until at last the sound of my mother's tongue spoken by stranger mouths became absolutely unbearable to me, and I left the country never to return. I will see Great Britain, I said. No better place for that purpose, at least to begin with, than London. So I went there; and, with all the curiosities I had collected in my vagabond life, opened a shop as Exhibitor and Taxidermist, in Piccadilly.
'By this time, you will perceive, I had quite abandoned my original idea of returning to America to open a museum. It takes no longer for the world in general; or the world of New-York, to forget its largest man, than for a heaping measure of grain to close up the gap after a hand is withdrawn. And I was a long way from the conceit of fancying myself even a large man. Probably, I said to myself, there are a dozen in my place by this time. I will not go back to revive a name wiped out; it is at least more entertaining to stay here and try chalking out a new one. If I fail, why, the remittances still come regularly.
'So up went the old sign on a fresh board: 'Orloff Ruricson, Taxidermist and Aviarian Professor.' In about three months from the opening of the establishment, the collection was a little more than self-supporting, and the Taxidermy throve at the rate of ten guineas a week. I got some favorable critiques in theTimes; some body called me the Minor Zoological Gardens; and gradually my aviarianism came into play. Lord Crinkum consulted me about his Chinese pheasants, and Lord Crankum got my general views on fighting-cocks. The Honorable Miss Dingleton, like Mr. Pecksniff, only with more money to bestow on the object, thought she would like to see my ideas of a grotto. I gave it to her, and of course every alderman's wife must have me fussing about her cobble-stones out in what she called a suburban willer. That's the great beauty of art in England, looked at in the paying light; the moment you're so fortunate as to get a lord by the nose, you lead all Cockneydom whithersoever you will. It's a country where every body shuts his eyes, and grabs the next bigger man by the coat-tail. So, on the whole, I got along.'
'That was all very well, looked at in the paying light, as you say,' interrupted John Tryon, 'but you must have been terribly lonely during the long winter evenings. Didn't you have any body to speak to: any body tolove?'
'Nobody. I had learned the misery of that by lessons enough, I should think. Even in the desert I never made a pet of my camel, and most people do that, to the extent, at least, of complimenting the lovely beast upon his patience. I had nothing to care for and cared for nothing. I was now thirty years old, you see, and had travelled.
'I had kept the shop in Piccadilly for a year. I stood one morning, at the expiration of that period, in a room of the back-shop, where I prepared specimens, and was consulted. My clerks had just taken down the shutters, and were chattering to each other behind the counter. I was pensive that morning, a mighty unusual thing for me, and their gabble disturbed me. I meditated calling out to them to be still, when the shop-door opened, the front-door looking on the street, and some one said:
''Please, Sir, can you give me any work?'
'Good heavens! I started to my feet, and yet seemed in such a dream that I could scarcely move them after I was erect. Who spoke? It was a low, sweet, woman's voice, the like whereof I had not heard for nine years! Not that it was low, or sweet, or a woman's; not that it was all these together, but that it wasthe voice.
''Get out with you, beggar!' answered the chattering clerks, with unanimous fierceness; and I heard the front shop-door shut slowly, as by a tired, feeble hand.
'In a second more and she would be gone; I should never see her again! That thought awakened me, and gave wings to my feet. I dashed through the shop; my clerks looking at me as if they thought I had suddenly gone mad. I jerked the door open, and saw a lithe girl's figure moving wearily away among the hurrying crowd: her back toward me.
''Who asked for work?' I called out aloud.
Among the few that turned to look was this lithe figure. She turned hastily, anxiously, deprecatingly, and again I heard that wonderful voice.
''It was I, Sir.'
''Come into the shop, if you please. Let us talk about it.'
''You are not vexed with me, Sir?'
'As the girl said this she cast her great brown eyes upon me so piteously, so helplessly, seeming so intensely to fear displeasure, yet so wistfully to beg help, that all at once there flashed before me the harbor of Genoa! I saw it for an instant as distinctly as we now see the Kaaterskill Clove; saw the villainous Italian smirking across his organ; saw the glassy, shining waters of the Mediterranean; and the drowning face of Beppo going down therein;with those same eyes in it!
''Vexed with you? Withyou?Godknows I am not!' was my first wild exclamation, as soon as this strange phantasmagoria passed by; and I saw Piccadilly, and its crowd, and the slender girl, again, standing there uncared for, like myself, in the great ocean of London being.
''Come in, I say! Come in! For the love ofGod, come in!' I continued passionately, reckless who heard me.
''Work, food, money, help, any thing, every thing! I will give you all.'
'This I said beseechingly, yet neither this nor the passionate command did the girl, timid as she was, seem to regard as at all strange or out of place. She only came confidingly toward me, put her hand in mine, and I led her into the back-shop, while the chatterers stared.
'I bade her take off her faded bonnet, and sit down. As she obeyed, her golden brown hair caught on a pin in the bonnet behind; its soft, well-grownmass lifted from her neck, and there I beheld, close where the brown joined the white,a small red crescent mark reaching almost from ear to ear!
'I seemed to be wandering through a chain of dreams. I tried to speak, but in vain. To think, but as vainly. She disengaged the bonnet, and let it droop upon her shoulders. Her face, thus disclosed, was the most beautiful array of human features, flushed through by the light of the most beautiful human soul, I ever saw, or mused of, or believed in, in my life!
'She sat in the chair opposite me. As for me, I gazed and gazed. Modestly inviting questions, she looked me frankly in the eyes; and then, as in wonder that I did not speak, threw her head backward, and perused my face curiously. This posture elevated her chin. I was about to say something, but just thenI saw under that chin another crimson mark, the slenderest of slender lines, as if the finest knife-point dipped in blood had been drawn clear across the throat by a nervous hand. I durst not say to myself what I was reminded of bythat. Not even to think of it at all. I half-feared that I had become insane, rubbed my forehead, and kept repeating: 'Oh! it is only her bonnet-strings tied too tightly, that is all!'
'I would not trust myself with questioning her then. Not a word of any kind did I speak to her, except to say gently, that she might consider herself my apprentice in the art of bird-stuffing; and that all her necessities should be provided for.
'I had a little bed made for her in the room of the old Yorkshire woman, who minded my solitary establishment for me. She was an orphan, so she said afterward; and had walked all the way from the Stafford Potteries, where her only relative, an aunt, was just dead: hoping to find work in London, that might keep her from the street. She was eighteen years of age, and had never known father or mother.
'Once more I had a living creature to feel an interest in, to become attached to. Whatever was mysterious in her arrival, her appearance, or her voice, I dismissed from my mind as mere curious coincidences, at once too frivolous, too perplexing to be followed up. There was the real substantial fact: a girl without home or friends. Now what was to be done with her?
'I settled that question gradually day by day. I taught her, in the daytime, to help me at my specimen-table; in the evening, to read and write. The rapidity with which she caught by the right end, and made her own every new process, either of brain or fingers, was astonishing. She was my constant wonder and delight. So imitative yet so original; so talented but so modest withal; so bright and sportive, so docile and grateful; she soon became my right hand and right eye in all I had to do.
'As soon as I had dressed her presentably, the clerks saw her superiority as they could not through old clothes, and did it unquestioning reverence. But for thisreverenceI verily believe they would have come in a body, and thrown themselves at her feet, entreating her to take her pick within the first month after she was domesticated with me. For they were all desperately in love with her: devouring her with their eyes as she went in and out among them so modestly and yet so loftily, like a queen in disguise.
'Well, I did not wonder; I could forgive them. For, six months after she had entered my shop-door, the homeless wayfarer, I awoke to the fact that I was in love with her myself. For the first time in all the days of my manhood, did I know what it was to feel a woman wrought into the texture of my life, so that pulling her away seemed an endless pain to look forward to; and before I knew that it had happened. And that combination of circumstances only, as I view it, is adequate to constitutelove, on which marriage may be honorably founded.
As soon as I knew that I loved Bessie Cartwright—that was her name—I began to torture myself with the question whether I ought to tell her of ityet. Whether, if I did so, her simple heart, out of mere gratefulness, would not instantly give itself up as a matter of debt and honor to the man whom she regarded only in the light of a benefactor. And I had rather have any thing happen than this, my own loneliness till I died even, than this, so galling to me if I discovered it when it was too late, so ruinous to every thing that was best in her young growing womanhood.
'As in the old days, it was my custom still to look at the memorials of my lost friends, when times went hard with me, and my spirits fell. So, one evening, after I had been musing painfully in my room for a couple of hours, I took from my battered old trunk Miss Brentnall's portrait, the Flicker, and the Marmoset, which I had embalmed after his death in the harbor of Genoa.
'I ranged them on my table, and with a feeling of mournful pleasure gazed from one to the other, dwelling upon all the past which they recalled.
'As I sat thus employed, I heard Bessie's tap at the door; I called, 'Come in!' and she entered, with her reading-book for the evening's lesson. Seeing the unusual array upon my table, she asked me: 'What! working still?'
''No; not working, Bessie,' I replied; 'thinking.'
''May I see who that is?' said she artlessly, pointing to the daguerreotype.
''Oh! certainly. Though you must not laugh at it. It is a very homely lady, but a very good one; and, while she lived, my dearest friend.' So I handed it to her.
'She bent her brown head down to the shaded drop-light on my table, and held the portrait close to it. I watched her to see the effect of that strange world-wronged face on the beautiful, Heaven-favored one.
'I saw Bessie Cartwright grow pale as death! Her eyes became fixed like a cataleptic person's. But her head moved, from the portrait to the Flicker, from the Flicker to the Marmoset. The portrait fell from her hand, she grasped hurriedly at the table, and then fell to the floor.
''Dead: dead like the rest!' said I, with a fierce coldness; 'and because I have loved her.'
'I pulled the shade from the drop-light, and drew it to the edge of the table, so that the light fell full on the prostrate girl. I called her by name, and got no answer. I loosened her dress, and in doing so pushed the heavy knot of her brown hair away from her neck. That scarlet crescent glowed there in the midst of the marble whiteness, like a flame!
'I turned her upon her back, and beneath her chin saw the slender crimson line, burning also brighter than ever, while all the throat was deadly pale. 'Bessie! Bessie! speak to me once, only once more.' I spoke passionately at her ear.
'Still no answer. I looked in agony at the dead things which had once been mine; saw plainest of all the Flicker; and again that strange suspicion which I had felt the first day I ever saw the girl, awoke in my brain.
'I bent my mouth to her ear, and softly said: 'Brenta!' At that instant her great dark eyes opened, she read my face wistfully, and then her lips murmured:
''Orloff, dear Orloff! I told you I would meet you again; I have kept my word.'
'It was the voice that became silent ten years before in the sick-room next my own!
''Miss Brentnall!' I exclaimed, not knowing what I said.
''Orloff, dear Orloff!' repliedthe voice, once more from the lips of Bessie Cartwright.
'And then the blood came rushing back to the young girl's face. Timidly she sat up, passed her hand across her eyes, and said faintly:
''Oh! I have hadsucha dream!'
''What was it, dear child?' I asked.
''I thought that picture you showed me was I. Then I felt myself dying. You were by me till all the room grew dark. I hardly remember what came then; but I have had, oh! so many strange thoughts, and been in so many strange places! I thought I was killed with a little knife: I was on the sea; I was close by a great town that rose from the water's side; I was drowning: then I was myself again in the old dress I wore when I came to you; then I seemed to be all things at once, and you called me a name I had heard before, when I lay in the bed dying; and oh! forgive me, Sir, I called you by your Christian name, Orloff,dearOrloff! I said, do forgive me: I will never do it again.'
''You must do something else than that,' said I, no longer awe-stricken and trembling, for in a moment the mystery of my life had parted like a fog, and I saw its meaning beyond in the clearest of heaven's twilight. 'Something else than that, Bessie. You must never call me by any other name thandearOrloff! Can you call me that? ForI love you:Godonly knows how I love you. Can you?'
'The girl looked at me with parted lips; caught her breath quickly; hid her face in my bosom; and once more after all those years the beloved voice, knowing what it said, replied:
''Orloff,dearOrloff.'
'Bessie Cartwright is my wife. Not until years afterward did I tell her the meaning of her dream; nor how through lives and deaths she had followed me to save and claim her own. She knows it now; we both keep it for the grateful wonder of our prayers; a mystery like all mysteries had we but thekey, with its grand, beneficent meaning, unmeaning, contemptible only to those who read it wrong or not at all.'
'And you do mean to tell to me zat ze beautiful lady you have now espouse, be vonce in ze body of ze vare ugly woman, ze red-head bird vat you call him, and ze marmosette; you mean to say to me zat?'
'I'd like to ask that question too,' said John Tryon.
'I mean to tell you both,' answered Orloff Ruricson, 'that you can putyour own interpretationonmy facts. Also, that if you ever break our confidence in telling my history with its proper names, then good-by to your friendship with Orloff Ruricson.'
I have been permitted to state the facts without the names. Let me also be permitted to state them without my interpretation.
A STATUE BY PALMER, OF ALBANY.
BY R. S. CHILTON.
Unstrungby her heart's first sorrow,In the dawn of her life she stands,With listless fingers holdingA vacant nest in her hands.The grass at her feet no longerIs bright with the light of the skies,As downward she looks through the tear-dropsThat stand in her heaven-blue eyes.For the nest, so cold and forsaken,Has taught her the lesson to-day,That the dearest of earthly treasuresHave wings, and can fly away.Yet she clings to the empty casket,And sighs that no more is left,As a mother clings to the cradleOf its dimpled treasure bereft.Alas! for the early shadowsThat fall about our way,When the beautiful light has vanished,And the hill-tops are cold and gray.
Unstrungby her heart's first sorrow,In the dawn of her life she stands,With listless fingers holdingA vacant nest in her hands.
The grass at her feet no longerIs bright with the light of the skies,As downward she looks through the tear-dropsThat stand in her heaven-blue eyes.
For the nest, so cold and forsaken,Has taught her the lesson to-day,That the dearest of earthly treasuresHave wings, and can fly away.
Yet she clings to the empty casket,And sighs that no more is left,As a mother clings to the cradleOf its dimpled treasure bereft.
Alas! for the early shadowsThat fall about our way,When the beautiful light has vanished,And the hill-tops are cold and gray.
BY HARRIET E. PRESCOTT.
"Sweetmusic has been heardIn many places; some has been upstirredFrom out its crystal dwelling in a lake,By a swan's ebon bill; from a thick brake,Nested and quiet in a valley mild,Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wildAbout the earth."
"Sweetmusic has been heardIn many places; some has been upstirredFrom out its crystal dwelling in a lake,By a swan's ebon bill; from a thick brake,Nested and quiet in a valley mild,Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wildAbout the earth."
Inan old sea-board town, once famous from its commerce and fisheries, lived a boy, who, as his mother told her gossip, had a good talent for music. Over his adopted place the salt winds blew; beside it, a river rolled its murmurous, mountain-born waters; behind it, green woods forever rustled. A poet still blows his bugle-notes across the three streams that braid its garment in silver; a painter has left there the shadow of cherubs cleaving the clouds; but till Fauntleroy Verrian came, music had owned there no apostle.
The name that he wore had been his father's, and seemed sufficient, in itself, to prove him of gentle blood—the father, of whom no one knew much, who had married his mother against the wish of her friends, and who one day went out, having kissed his young wife, and never returned. She hoped, at last, that he was dead; but something in her heart assured her that he would one day meet the son whom he had never seen. And later, as that son matured, she remembered strange stories once read by her, where demon or Afrite, in the guise and mask of most dark and fascinating manhood, has espoused such lady as he chose; and she trembled with half a fear lest the father of Fauntleroy might be such an one, and traced with terror the growing likeness there, remembering her brief period of passion and delight. But name and face were not the only gifts that the child inherited from his father.
For a time the mother remained in the town where her husband had left her, lest some day he might come to find her, and fail; but the impression of the past, instead of wearing off, daily cut deeper into her soul, and at length the perpetual remembrance grew too painful. Thus, although in this place she procured sufficiently genial occupation in teaching, exertion being necessary, since part of her little store had been deposited in some unknown quarter, she nevertheless chose to remove to another spot; and now all alone in the world, but for her child, she labored fitfully at her needle. So she lived in the small house by the water-side, owning it herself, and renting the larger half.
All things were auspicious to the youth of this boy, though nothing seemed so. His mother was, it appeared, a widow, and therefore he encountered few but the gentle influences of feminine culture. She was poor, and poverty is a discipline. She had received, of course, an education beyond her present station,and poured it lavishly into his thirsty mind. When he numbered fourteen years, she died, and a loneliness befell him which is the crown of genius, and out of which marvellous jewels may be plucked.—Very early in his life, he had manifested an ardent love of the art to which subsequently he devoted himself. Before he spoke, he sang his own lullabies; when he first went alone, his mother lost him all one summer's day, and he was found only at moon-rise, fast asleep beside a fence, whither, bare-footed, bare-headed, and all day without food, he had followed the band of a street company, still repeating in his pretty sleep parts of the tunes they had lent him. He was scarcely older, when two tickets for a rare concert (in a day when concerts were like rain in the desert) were given to his mother, and the poor seamstress, who could neither leave her child nor resign the pleasure, took him with her as a protector. The gay lights, the brilliant toilettes and bouquets, the chandelier swinging all its waxen flames in the glitter of ormulu and prismatic pendents, the laughing and commotion previous to the opening, these filled the child with strange exhilaration, so that he danced upon the seat, repeatedly embraced his mother, and sung to her once or twice, in a low caressing voice, a few notes of his choicest remembrance. But when the musicians had spread their magical pages before them, and, out of a wilderness of sweet sounds, his childish ear drew the measure and melody of one air, his transport knew no bounds. The music was not of a difficult order, nor did it require a great effort of comprehension; yet, while one child, who had been taken that the effect upon him might be observed, whispered dismally, 'What a yacket!' Fauntleroy stood with his clasped hands hanging before him, his head bent forward, and his little face bathed in tears. The last piece was a fantasia upon several of the exquisite waltzes of Beethoven: during the performance one of the sheets fluttered from the stage to the floor, and lay there unnoticed; at the conclusion, as they stepped into the aisle, it caught the child's eye, and, springing forward, he seized it. The strange characters enchanted him, he followed them along with his finger; of their meaning he was, of course, ignorant; but they had some connection with the passing splendor, they were akin to the music that had brimmed his childish soul, they were precious to those gods upon the stage, and so he made a theft of them; or rather, one should say, bore them off calmly, as if by his own right and possession.
His letters he found it difficult to conquer, but day after day he sat in the sun, poring over the stolen sheet, singing the air as he recalled it, dividing it first into parts, and then into distinct sounds, until, if he had been conscious of the fact, he had almost literally deciphered the meaning of those quaint emblems. Hornbook and catechism retired before them, for to those worthies he had given but an inconsiderable portion of his acquaintance.
At the completion of his sixth year, there came a memorable day to Fauntleroy Verrian. He was no longer to remain with the other lodger during Sabbath mornings of perfect calm, that breathed of woods and brooks and dewy winds, and brought to him vague sensations of distant and unknown delights; but jacket and trowsers lay, one sunrise, by his bedside, and he waspromoted, not only to the dignity of breeches, but to that other goal of his desires, to see clouds of music, laden with all gorgeous imaginings, blown from the great golden organ-pipes; to go, morning and afternoon, to church. Through the quiet prime, he discoursed of this anticipation to his mother, and she, with maternal wont, did her best to check it, telling him, not the choir, but the preacher, and the sweet voice of the prayers, should draw him there, where she took him not to delight his ear but to save his soul. Fauntleroy had thought his soul safe enough, if he took it round with him, and did not understand his mother's dogmas. 'I know,' he answered, when she tried to elicit his ideas of immortal things, 'thatGodholds me in my sleep, and makes the ocean cry so in the night, and all the winds whistle and clap their wings when the dark comes, because you told me, and I always thankHimin my prayers, mother. I wish, sometimes,Hehad made a field for me, with flowers in it; but I suppose there is one growing against I am a man.'
'But, in all this,' said his mother, 'you think too much of yourself, and very little ofGod.'
'Mother, I loveGodwith all my heart,' he replied; 'but when I say it, somehow I feel like a bird, and sing it.'
His mother's seat at church commanded a view of the choir, and here, regardless of every thing else, Fauntleroy remained, his eyes fixed on the loft, and his ears expectant of the moment when the great crypt of silent sound should open its gates, and send forth its winged worshipping ghosts. At last, through the vestry-door, stole the white-robed priest, and a hush reigned in the assembled congregation. As the first hum stole over their heads, like the breath of a wandering wind, slowly flanking itself with allies of massive chords, and winding into vast volumes of involved harmonies, the boy sat rapt in a seraphic trance. No motion marred the marble-like repose, his shadow never quivered, and, but for the blood that bounded up and down the cheek, one could have dreamed him transmuted into some delicate sculpture. At length, the little statue gave a sigh, the lashes fell and hid the starry eyes, and he covered his face with his hands. In the confession, a slight motion did not disturb his mother, but when, on rising, he was not to be seen in the pew, she knew he had gone to seek an ascent to the idol, where she soon caught sight of the dark little head, as its owner sat perched on a stool beside the organist. The service over, the mother remains in the pew, with a mouthful of reproofs for the truant; but he still lingers in the loft.
'Well, what is it?' asks the organist, amused at the unceremonious freedom of the visitor.
'Would you be so kind,' asks the latter, with much sweetness, but no fear, 'as to let me put my fingers on the music?'
'On the keys? With pleasure.'
The child extends his hands, and lays them on the polished ice, although extracting no murmur.
'Well, what do they say to you, the sirens? What do they tell you?'
'O Sir! all sweet things!'
'Do they, little enthusiast? And, if they say so much without sound, what do they say when their lips move?'
The child lifts his hands from the keys, crosses them behind him, and says imperiously: 'Play!'
The man obeys, and evolves a slow movement from Cherubini. If the composer's soul never mirrored the extremest depths of Nature, or if the present performer has in his own soul no complete expression for the strain, there is yet enough. The child's eyes sparkle over cheeks whiter than snow, his quivering lips part, he shivers at each roll of harmony, he stands with self-forgetful, outstretched hands, and, as it closes, every pulse thrills beneath the surge of the silver thunders. He had found that day a new revelation, and unconsciously to himself had learned that in the organ—'great omnipotence of sound'—was slumbering all the delight and purpose of his life.
His mother had often taken him with her, when calling on an elderly lady who lived a few streets higher than herself, the town sloping up from the river; and during these visits he had amused himself with an old English piano that stood, neglected and forlorn, on very slender legs, in a corner of the room. Round the edges, ivory had once been damaskeened in the notes of an air in vogue at the time of its construction; but they, together with the harp of St. Cecilia, elaborately let into the centre of the lid, had long been yellow as gold. Opened, it displayed the delightful mysteries of the black and white key-board. But alas! what different sounds issued thence; what tormented sprites shrieked in short pain from the shrunken wires, and how many others refused to answer his summons at all. Just over it was a small window, which Fauntleroy incidentally noticed to be destitute of fastening. A few weeks after his first attendance at church, he learned from his mother that this neighbor was dead, and that the house would be closed until her heirs, who were foreign, should send an agent from Europe, preparatory to the settlement of her affairs, and the sale of household stuff. During these weeks, his mother had been greatly harassed by her son's evident propensity to music, for though he now learned and digested whatever was set before him, all his avidity was manifested in the former direction. In despair of his ever becoming a useful member of society, she took from him the precious sheet of Beethoven, forbade him to speak on the subject of his predilection, broke in pieces and consumed the violin left behind by his father, and, above all, commanded him never to approach the piano at the old lady's house, and, finally, since she saw the restless longings of the little face at every visit, ceased to go there at all herself. At last, when Fauntleroy heard the announcement, he resolved to attain the mastery of that valueless old piano, and revolved a thousand schemes by which his object could be effected. Music drew him as a magnet draws a needle; resistance never occurred tohim, but concealment was absolutely necessary. The more his mother opposed, the more she pushed him forward: with a pertinacity equal to her own, Fauntleroy followed his bent. On his way home from school, he passed the deserted house, even opened the little gate, and took a quick but satisfactory survey of the premises, and as hasty a resolution.
That night at tea-time, his share was taken away untouched, he went early to bed, but not to sleep, frequently calling on his mother to put by her work. It seemed as if the evening would never end, while he tossed impatiently about, yet entertaining myriad fantastic presences, and marshaling an ever-shifting procession of varied song. At length his mother lay down by his side, and the candle was extinguished. Soon the regular breathing of the tired needle-woman announced her sleep, and her treacherous little boy slipped down the other side, silently donned his clothes, and stole from the house into the mid-night street, leaving the door and his mother at the mercy of the open bolt. Up the long street he ran till out of hearing distance, past the churchyard like a spirit, and over the garden-wall. He stopped at last on the moss-grown flags of the garden-walk to look about him. The softest brilliancy of a June moon, but two hours high, flooded all the nodding boughs with a silver frosting; the althea and flox and narcissi dropped their heads, heavy with dew, and spread their untrained fragrance on the sweet, cool wind—the wind that wandered in and out the darker green glooms of the aromatic alleys, and was the only stirring thing beside himself. How free he was, and how glorious such liberty! He hardly believed that another soul in the world was up and in a garden at this hour. The garden, which had been his admiration all his summers, with its beds of pansies and violets, and its great swinging boughs of juiciest fruit, down whose walks he had timidly stepped with dainty delight, this garden was now his own dominion, as much his as ever it had been any bee's; the people who owned it slept and forgot it, and cancelled their right in oblivion; any one of the flowers he could pluck if he chose. The universal hush and peace waited upon him. Truly he was Lord of the Night. At least, without having been stated in words to himself, this was the sum and meaning of his sensations. But when the first bloom of his midnight experience wore away, he remembered the piano, and sought the window that opened behind it. It was almost higher than he could reach, but by dint of an arbor-seat, which, inch by inch, the little burglar dragged along, he raised himself to a sufficient height. A sweet-brier climbed round this window, and, in feeling for the sash, the thorns tore and scratched his hands. When found, all his strength could not raise it. He hesitated a little while, and then took a big stone, deliberately broke through the space of two panes, inserted his head and arm, and drew himself through. In a moment, the mystic instrument was open and tinkling outrageously beneath his empiric hands. To his horror, this was not the music he wanted, and the connection between each separate key and the characters on his excommunicated sheet suddenly flashed upon him. Solving the riddle with a patience most wonderful, he sat working in the slowly-wheeling moonlight until the clock of the oppositechurch struck three: still delaying, minute after minute, till the last quarter warned him how near the day might be, he hastily closed the lid, and retreated as he had entered. Passing the graves, this time he was hardly so fearless, but scampered down the gray street at full speed. Nevertheless an unutterable satisfaction filled him, and noiselessly securing the door, he crept up the stair, tore off his clothes, and slipped into bed again, silently giving a little prayer of thanks that he had succeeded in his naughtiness. Having the first time accomplished so much, he on the next night lost no sleep, but woke when his mother retired, and again, when she slept, escaped. A half-dozen nights, while the moon lasted, the child continued his excursions, but at length was obliged to cease for want of the friendly light.
During the intervening space, he employed himself in running errands and gathering sixpences, till he had amassed a sum sufficient for the purchase of strings, which, in his search through the mechanism of the instrument, he had found requisite. One sunset he returned with them in his pocket, carefully secreted among peg-top, white ally, whittlings and ginger-bread, and great was his joy when the thin crescent of the new moon lay above a long orange cloud, but equally great his sorrow to see the slender boat float down the lucid currents of the west, and leave no sign. A few nights more, however, and she was again his leaguer, fortified and reïnforced by certain candles pillaged from his mother's scanty store. Meanwhile he had lost no time for ingratiating himself with the church organist, had not suffered a day to pass without seeing him, had beset him with flocks of questions, had received hints and instructions that seemed to him as comprehensive as a library, and had, as he soon found, acquired, in this interval of rest, real knowledge and satisfactory progress.
The June passed into the harvest moon, October began to array herself in all the beautiful decadence of the year, and still his new pleasure had not palled upon Fauntleroy. He had repaired to the best of his ability the injuries time had wrought on this mine of enjoyment, had tuned it according to his inventive skill, and, when in the latter business strength failed, had resorted to a thousand expedients, had contrived infantile levers and screws, and, at one time, had even secured the refractory subject by a cord to the jambs across the room, thinking that being thoroughly wetted it would contract, as he had seen his mother's clothes-line do, and draw the tone to the required pitch. And although I doubt if by these methods he effected much, still he met with a certain success that sufficed, and they were excellent schemes of instruction. Remembering as he did, every line and mark of his one-paged volume of Beethoven, he had compared with it what every hour over the instrument taught him, and having obtained a book of tunes from the organ-desk at church, together with much more assistance from the friend there, had found his knowledge to be perfectly accurate if small, and that from these notes he could produce, though in how much less degree! the same melodies that enraptured him on Sabbaths. Moreover, so much attained, he now by practice became to a great extent master of difficulties towhich most pupils yield, and of a convenient if not always elegant style, in which his little fingers would twinkle over the keys at some prestissimo, or slowly oar along through what seemed to him a sea of solemn harmony.
Such frequent loss of sleep, as might be expected, soon showed its results in the boy. Languid and pale during day-light, with large purple shadows beneath his eyes, thin and without appetite, yet animated by a constant liveliness of mind, joyous and over-flowing with inner happiness, he grew the subject of his mother's tenderest anxieties, and often in her sleep she turned to take the truant into her bosom. Once or twice not touching him in her drowsiness, his absence did not occur to her, but another time she started up filled with keen alarm, as he closed the street-door. Her quick call was smothered in affright. It was the work of an instant to gather a few garments and follow him just as he turned the corner of the street. Never dreaming of looking behind him, Fauntleroy hurried on, scaled the wall, and for the last time entered his sanctuary. His mother, less nimble, toiled up the hill, and, despairing at the wall, ran round to the gate. In the tremor that ruled her, she found it locked, and succeeded only, after several minutes, in remembering a broken part of the inclosure. Here she effected an entrance, but Fauntleroy was no where to be seen. Down one aisle and up another, across grassy plots and weed-choked flower-beds she ran breathlessly, and perhaps had not found him to this day, if a thought of the old piano had not struck her simultaneously with its sound. With suddenly-illumined thoughts she turned to the window whither the thread of music led her, and bending from one side, looked in. There was the dark, old-fashioned book-case, filling one side of the room from floor to ceiling, with a white bust of some irate Apollo in a niche of the arched carving, like a crown; the curtains swept apart for all the light the night could give; the buffet yielding a sidelong gleam, half drowned in shade, of silver and glass and gorgeously-flowered china; the chancel-chairs and velvet-covered table; and the mysterious portrait above the chimney-piece, that gathered all the spare light into itself and leaned from the dingy frame a pale, witch-like face, in a net of golden hair. All this his mother received at a glance, although that glance lighted instantly on her child, where he sat rapt in a softly-improvised welcome to his Egeria. So motionless was he, with uplifted eyes in the clear moon-light that streamed upon and over him into the room, that she half-feared him to be in a somnambulic state. Yet those violet eyes, so dark, so lustrous, wore no fixed stare, nor any trace of sleep; they were rather filled with spirit, brimmed with the wakefulness of life, and the heavenly dream of music alone overshadowed the transfigured face. The mother felt this as she gazed, and hung on the sweetness that his fingers drew into the air. Did ever any one do so beautifully, she thought; and, as if to mock her, a golden robin stirred in his nest and trilled his mid-night song, as full of joy as the whippowil's of sorrow.
As Fauntleroy's fancy lightened from the theme he followed, his eye pursued a cloud across the sky, and falling, lay upon his mother's face. He ceased a moment in terrible dismay, then starting to his feet, looked back at the portrait on the wall, lest she had stolen out of her frame, mastered by all thecharm of the old house. But as quietly as ever, in the Greek cap of vivid scarlet and gold zequins falling from her hair, she looked through her prison-door. Again his fascinated eyes sprung back to the white face pressed against the vacant panes. It was all quicker than thought, and hardly a minute had elapsed when he comprehended it. If his mother had been Solomon, he would have expected summary chastisement; as it was, he resumed his seat and played with his best execution the very piece upon which she had laid her ban. He fancied himself to have accomplished a fine revenge, but silly child! his mother no more understood his meaning than did the portrait, for of the identity between what he played and what the sheet contained his unskilled senses were ignorant. Hardly had he struck the closing chord, when the door behind him opened, and a tall gentleman, in flowing robes and with long, dark hair, entered, bearing a light, which the draught at once extinguished.
'What does this mean?' he asked in apparent amazement, first of the child and then of the white face beyond. The mother pushed up the sash.
'Sir,' she cried, 'he is my son; and having been forbidden by me, when Madame Fardeau was living, to touch this piano, has escaped from me in the night! Send him here to me, I implore you.'
'Is this so?' asked the stranger doubtingly, and with that strange manner which, however perfectly one speaks the tongue, always indicates the foreigner.
'Yes, it is so!' answered Fauntleroy stoutly, as his mother's words were impugned. 'Mother never knew of my coming till to-night; and where's the harm?'
'You have been here before, then?'
'Oh! yes,' answered Fauntleroy, into whose nature there had not been instilled sufficient awe of any one to make it seem to him worth while to tell a lie.
'Several times?'
'Several times.'
'When did you first come?'
'Oh! a great while ago; a great many years, I should think.'
'A great many years, Fauntleroy!' exclaimed his mother, while the gentleman moved uneasily as she spoke. 'Madame Fardeau has not been dead a great many years. You are not a great many years old!'
'Why, mother, the little lilies were in bloom, the first time.'
'And that was in June, Sir,' she said, half-laughingly, and appealing to the stranger.
''Well, well, you make too much noise to be about a bad business. So you like this tinkling cymbal?'
'Sir—so much!'
'Who taught you to play?'
'I do not yet play; but I shall.'
'That does not answer my question. Have you had a teacher?'
'No.'
The gentleman stooped and examined the piano. 'Who keeps your instrument in order?' he asked with a comical shrug.
'I do.'
It was all like a dream to Fauntleroy, and which was real, which false, he could not tell; suddenly two hands seized his waist, swung him through the casement to his mother. 'See, little monkey,' said the great black-bearded face close to his own, while the cheery laugh rung in his terrified ear like a booming bell, 'I shall set a trap here to-morrow. Good night!' and he abruptly closed the sash.
Fauntleroy felt as if he had just fallen out of bed, and expecting that the next minute would reveal the falsehood of so long and so delightful a hallucination, was yet farther surprised when his mother took his hand and led him home without a word. She was trembling in every nerve herself, she did not cease throwing a frightened glance over her shoulder as they walked, and she seemed unable to recal her thoughts from the region to which they had strayed.
'Naughty child,' said she at last with tears, as she sat once more in the little bed-chamber; 'cruel boy, to occasion me such trouble!'
'Mother, didn't you like to hear me play?'
'You played well; but you have stolen it all.'
'No one else has lost it.'
'Fauntleroy, I would rather you had never played a note than to have deceived me so.'
'Did you hear the piece you took away from me?'
'Are you going to increase your disobedience by dishonesty? Have you been at my trunk? Have you unlocked that, and got it?'
'Pooh! no. I remembered that.'
'I wish you would learn your multiplication-table as easily.'
'Sixteen times sixteen are two hundred and fifty-six, and that's as far as the table goes!'
'You are in high glee to-night. Does it make you happy to be wicked?'
'O mother! not to be wicked! but to be up, to have been out, to have seen my beauty, and oh! I never shall see her any more, I never can go there again!' and bursting into tears, he went crying to bed and sobbing to sleep.
The next day, when the mournful Fauntleroy returned at night from school, there stood in his mother's small sitting-room the beloved piano, a roll of old and invaluable musicalMSS.upon it, and an envelope containing a sum of money, with directions that it should be employed in paying a teacher for Master Fauntleroy Verrian.
The mother entering soon from an unusual day's work abroad—for she was assisting at a trousseau—first looked about her in amaze, and then hung long above the writing on the envelope, holding it to the light, and trying it by a thousand whims.
'Yes,' she murmured at length, 'with all the false color of hair and beard, with all the disguised tones and hidden pen-strokes, he is unchanged. This is he, and strange it is that my heart does not break. Of what, of what can I be made? How hard that heart must be; for my love is as utterly extinct as his.'
Nevertheless, she hurried on shawl and hood again, and returned to the house from which she had lately issued. She never had occasion to seek itagain, for the trousseau upon which she had worked, was from that evening abandoned.
For two or three days the money lay untouched, the music unrolled, the piano unopened. At their close his mother extracted the confession, that if he had been dishonest he was 'making up for it,' and that he would show her how well he could deny himself.
At the end of another week, during which the donor had settled his affairs and departed, as she heard, she engaged a music-teacher, herself displayed the crabbed manuscript, opened the piano, and placed him before it.
'You have my leave, dear,' she said, and with a sigh perhaps, resigned the laudable intention which all American mothers are supposed to entertain, of making him on one day President of the Republic; for the fine arts, as we all know, are not the road to that distinction.
'Mother,' said Fauntleroy, a few days afterward, 'I never shall enjoy my music the way I did when it was, as you say, stolen.'
There was little for his teacher to correct in what he had previously gained, and at every lesson he astonished and outstripped her. Finally she buried him in the intricacies of the science till it became clear and glorious as the firmament, and reflected back to him the features of his own mind like the brazen sea of the Temple crowned at the brim with flowers of lilies. The gradual opening of the child's genius gave his mother a great awe; with that she dared no longer interfere, but in the moral part of his character he was, she saw, fearfully deficient. He met all her arguments with an unconscious sophistry, and was almost incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. The creature of impulse, she declared it providential that all his impulses were good.
As time passed, Fauntleroy's supple fingers gathered strength, and he was pronounced equal to the anticipation of his life. To be a great performer on any instrument, or to create fresh forms for any or all instruments to unfold, did not at that time belong to his visions; he only desired to live for and in music, however humbly, and to serve it entirely. It was not, meantime, so easy a task to obtain an opportunity for this exercise. Wealthy committees of wealthy churches declined affording his genius the assistance; had they willed it, they might have ministered to the heavenly visitant, but unwilling, he was nevertheless not to lose his service. At last the organ of a poorer church, fine and powerful for its size, was placed at his disposal, and he entered with the years of childhood upon the career of a man. Frequently, after becoming accustomed, he played for the usual organist of his place: his performances being so excellent that ungodly crowds flocked to hear them; and on the departure of his first friend from the church which his mother attended, he was invited to fill his place, at a salary which, far too small as it was, was a fabulous amount to the boy and his mother.
Thus he grew. His teacher had no more to impart; if it were possible, he had exhausted theMSS.with which he had been so unexpectedly enriched: he had finished fourteen years, and his mother died. Slowly and imperceptibly, yet with the sureness of fate, she had drooped and wearied from the day, eightyears since, in which she had abandoned her son to his determination; and without ever knowing that it was so, Fauntleroy watched his mother fade away before his eyes. Had he been an ordinary person, the reäction would now inevitably have come. But the grief that so suddenly overwhelmed him only goaded to farther effort, and in almost unbroken seclusion he turned himself partially to a more general study, pursued with no less ardor or success. Nothing that he attempted seemed to require an effort, or rather the effort he saw fit to put forth always covered the attempt, and thus in time his learning became more than liberal. Again then he returned to his chosen pursuit, and day after day he sat in the old church alone, except for his single attendant, pouring forth melodies, and teaching the echoes of the place such resonances as they had never breathed before.
There was at no great distance from the church a school, the tumult of whose greetings and recesses reached the young organist in a murmur, as he sat studying black tomes in the sheltered choir. Often through the blush of sunrise he passed its neat grounds, and its bells broke in upon his sweetest reveries. The boy grows as he dreams, and Fauntleroy was already gathering a look into his face that did not belong to the child. Up the gallery-stairs now, unperceived by him, stole every day a little girl—pale, though not from lack of health, and elegantly clad—who sat upon the upper step and listened to his music. When the bell struck she would hasten down, as frequently taking the balustrade for her method of conveyance as any other. Time increasing, she became more daring, and stole on tip-toe round the organ, though never obtaining a view of the performer's face, and never caring to do so. Sometimes now the stroke of the bell was disregarded by her, and until some motion of the organist surprised her, she sat listening through the warm noons to his necromancy; the long roll of the sound made her tremble with a delicious pain, and her face grew paler as the childish soul fed upon such ecstatic sweetness. Pinafore and pantalette vanished by degrees, while a maturer maidenly attire assumed predominance; and the flying hair, swept away in a long satin gloss, was secured in twisted coils. Once she had brought a cluster of the school-girls to partake her feast, but each borrowing courage from the other, their congregated boldness frightened her, and she did not repeat the experiment.
One noon she had stood sheltered by the wing of the organ; so entranced through the music, and so lost in the mazes whither it had led her, that when its last throb died away she was first startled from her abstraction by the clang of the church-door. She ran down, but the organist and his attendant had gone, and she was locked in. Knowing he would return, she entered the body of the church, and, having wandered at her pleasure over the forbidden precincts, ensconced herself finally among the piled hassocks of a square pew, and opened the school-book which to save her conscience she had brought in her hand. Never a very courageous student, the book ere long wearied her, letter chased letter over the page, and the head sinking among the crimson cushions, she was soon fast asleep. In a short time the young organist returned,quietly ascended, and busied himself in fresh problems, combinations and intervals, over the old cabalistic volumes. Rising at length, he leaned over the rail of the gallery, and looked down into the church: his mind full of pleasant dreaming. Thus the girl slumbering in the warm coloring of the old pew below, with a broad pencil of light guarding her presence as it slanted through the chancel window and swum in gorgeous motes, seemed to him like a fay curled in the cups of ruby cacti, or the visible spirit and creation of his music, and so passed along his dream without exciting other emotions than its thousand fantasies and gay processions were wont to do. Turning again to the keys, he was soon lost in the more beautiful ideas of men older and greater than he. Soon there stole through the girl's half-waking mind a gentle murmuring, swelling till all the air about her pulsed with long waves of melody, and she awoke to hear the golden pipes pealing as she had never dreamed they could, while every atom throbbed with conscious sound.
So the music stole along the aisles, shaking from its flowing folds fragments of delicious airs, dim remembrances of meadow-greens, wreaths of palest wood-flowers. Now the quiet ripple of a forest-brook crept down; and now the summer wind, taking the pine-tree tops, shook them in a hurried storm of notes till the wild crescendo broke into a myriad murmurs, each rocking in the breeze. Slowly through this, out of untrodden depths, a grander and more solemn movement rose, and all the mysterious beauty of a fugue of Bach bathed the place in a fairer sanctity. Filled with indescribable awe, she glided from the church at its close, and returned to her vacant seat at school, regardless of reprimand and trifles, and only repeating in her mind the sublime strains she had heard.