Transcribed from the 1904 Gay and Bird edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Book cover]
A VILLAGE
STRADIVARIUS
BY
KATE DOUGLAS WIGGIN
[Picture: Decorative graphic]
LONDON
GAY AND BIRD
1904
* * * * *
THIS STORY APPEARS IN
‘THE VILLAGE WATCHTOWER.’
* * * * *
_All rights reserved_
I
“Goodfellow, Puck and goblins,
Know more than any book.
Down with your doleful problems,
And court the sunny brook.
The south-winds are quick-witted,
The schools are sad and slow,
The masters quite omitted
The lore we care to know.”
EMERSON’S _April_.
“FIND the three hundred and seventeenth page, Davy, and begin at the top
of the right-hand column.”
The boy turned the leaves of the old instruction book obediently, and
then began to read in a sing-song, monotonous tone:
“‘One of Pag-pag’”—
“Pag-a-ni-ni’s”
“‘One of Paggernyner’s’ (I wish all the fellers in your stories didn’t
have such tough old names!) ‘most dis-as-ter-ous triumphs he had when
playing at Lord Holland’s.’ (Who was Lord Holland, uncle Tony?) ‘Some
one asked him to im-provise on the violin the story of a son who kills
his father, runs a-way, becomes a high-way-man, falls in love with a girl
who will not listen to him; so he leads her to a wild country site,
suddenly jumping with her from a rock into an a-b-y-s-s’”
“Abyss.”
“‘—a—rock—into—an—abyss, where they disappear for ever. Paggernyner
listened quietly, and when the story was at an end he asked that all the
lights should be distinguished.’”
“Look closer, Davy.”
“‘Should be _ex_tinguished. He then began playing, and so terrible was
the musical in-ter-pre-ta-tion of the idea which had been given him that
several of the ladies fainted, and the sal-salon-s_a_lon, when relighted,
looked like a battle-field.’ Cracky! Wouldn’t you like to have been
there, uncle Tony? But I don’t believe anybody ever played that way, do
you?”
“Yes,” said the listener, dreamily raising his sightless eyes to the
elm-tree that grew by the kitchen door. “I believe it, and I can hear it
myself when you read the story to me. I feel that the secret of
everything in the world that is beautiful, or true, or terrible, is
hidden in the strings of my violin, Davy, but only a master can draw it
from captivity.”
“You make stories on your violin, too, uncle Tony, even if the ladies
don’t faint away in heaps, and if the kitchen doesn’t look like a
battle-field when you’ve finished. I’m glad it doesn’t, for my part, for
I should have more housework to do than ever.”
“Poor Davy! you couldn’t hate housework any worse if you were a woman;
but it is all done for to-day. Now paint me one of your pictures,
laddie; make me see with your eyes.”
The boy put down the book and leaped out of the open door, barely
touching the old millstone that served for a step. Taking a stand in the
well-worn path, he rested his hands on his hips, swept the landscape with
the glance of an eagle, and began like a young improvisator:
“The sun is just dropping behind Brigadier Hill.”
“What colour is it?”
“Red as fire, and there isn’t anything near it—it’s almost alone in the
sky; there’s only teeny little white feather clouds here and there. The
bridge looks as if it was a silver string tying the two sides of the
river together. The water is pink where the sun shines into it. All the
leaves of the trees are kind of swimming in the red light—I tell you,
nunky, just as if I was looking through red glass. The weather vane on
Squire Bean’s barn dazzles so the rooster seems to be shooting gold
arrows into the river. I can see the tip top of Mount Washington where
the peak of its snow-cap touches the pink sky. The hen-house door is
open. The chickens are all on their roost, with their heads cuddled
under their wings.”
“Did you feed them?”
The boy clapped his hand over his mouth with a comical gesture of
penitence, and dashed into the shed for a panful of corn, which he
scattered over the ground, enticing the sleepy fowls by insinuating calls
of “Chick, chick, chick, chick! _Come_, biddy, biddy, biddy, biddy!
_Come_, chick, chick, chick, chick, chick!”
The man in the doorway smiled as over the misdemeanour of somebody very
dear and lovable, and rising from his chair felt his way to a corner
shelf, took down a box, and drew from it a violin swathed in a silk bag.
He removed the covering with reverential hands. The tenderness of his
face was like that of a young mother dressing or undressing her child.
As he fingered the instrument his hands seemed to have become all eyes.
They wandered caressingly over the polished surface as if enamoured of
the perfect thing that they had created, lingering here and there with
rapturous tenderness on some special beauty—the graceful arch of the
neck, the melting curves of the cheeks, the delicious swell of the
breasts.
When he had satisfied himself for the moment, he took the bow, and
lifting the violin under his chin, inclined his head fondly toward it and
began to play.
The tone at first seemed muffled, but had a curious bite, that began in
distant echoes, but after a few minutes’ playing grew firmer and clearer,
ringing out at last with velvety richness and strength until the
atmosphere was satiated with harmony. No more ethereal note ever flew
out of a bird’s throat than Anthony Croft set free from this violin, his
_liebling_, his “swan song,” made in the year he had lost his eyesight.
Anthony Croft had been the only son of his mother, and she a widow. His
boyhood had been exactly like that of all the other boys in Edgewood,
save that he hated school a trifle more, if possible, than any of the
others; though there was a unanimity of aversion in this matter that
surprised and wounded teachers and parents.
The school was the ordinary district school of that time; there were not
enough scholars for what Cyse Higgins called a “degraded” school. The
difference between Anthony and the other boys lay in the reason for as
well as the degree of his abhorrence.
He had come into the world a naked, starving human soul; he longed to
clothe himself, and he was hungry and ever hungrier for knowledge; but
never within the four walls of the village schoolhouse could he seize
hold of one fact that would yield him its secret sense, one glimpse of
clear light that would shine in upon the darkness of his mind, one
thought or word that would feed his soul.
The only place where his longings were ever stilled, where he seemed at
peace with himself, where he understood what he was made for, was out of
doors in the woods. When he should have been poring over the sweet,
palpitating mysteries of the multiplication table, his vagrant gaze was
always on the open window near which he sat. He could never study when a
fly buzzed on the window-pane; he was always standing on the toes of his
bare feet, trying to locate and understand the buzz that puzzled him.
The book was a mute, soulless thing that had no relation to his inner
world of thought and feeling. He turned ever from the dead
seven-times-six to the mystery of life about him.
He was never a special favourite with his teachers; that was scarcely to
be expected. In his very early years, his pockets were gone through with
every morning when he entered the school door, and the contents, when
confiscated, would comprise a jew’s-harp, a bit of catgut, screws
whittled out of wood, tacks, spools, pins, and the like. But when robbed
of all these he could generally secrete a fragment of india-rubber drawn
from an old pair of suspenders, and this, when put between his teeth and
stretched to its utmost capacity, would yield a delightful twang when
played upon with the forefinger. He could also fashion an interesting
musical instrument in his desk by means of spools and catgut and bits of
broken glass. The chief joy of his life was an old tuning-fork that the
teacher of the singing-school had given him, but, owing to the degrading
and arbitrary censorship of pockets that prevailed, he never dared bring
it into the schoolroom. There were ways, however, of evading inexorable
law and circumventing base injustice. He hid the precious thing under a
thistle just outside the window. The teacher had sometimes a brief
season of apathy on hot afternoons, when she was hearing the primer class
read, “_I see a pig_. _The pig is big_. _The big pig can dig_”; which
stirring phrases were always punctuated by the snores of the Hanks baby,
who kept sinking down on his fat little legs in the line and giving way
to slumber during the lesson. At such a moment Anthony slipped out of
the window and snapped the tuning-fork several times—just enough to save
his soul from death—and then slipped in again. He was caught
occasionally, but not often; and even when he was, there were mitigating
circumstances, for he was generally put under the teacher’s desk for
punishment. It was a dark close, sultry spot, but when he was well
seated, and had grown tired of looking at the triangle of black elastic
in the teacher’s “congress” shoe, and tired of wishing it was his instead
of hers, he would tie one end of a bit of thread to the button of his
gingham shirt, and, carrying it round his left ear several times, make
believe he was Paganini languishing in prison and playing on a violin
with a single string.
As he grew older there was no marked improvement, and Tony Croft was by
general assent counted the laziest boy in the village. That he was lazy
in certain matters merely because he was in a frenzy of industry to
pursue certain others had nothing to do with the case, of course.
If any one had ever given him a task in which he could have seen cause
working to effect, in which he could have found by personal experiment a
single fact that belonged to him, his own by divine right of discovery,
he would have counted labour or study all joy.
He was one incarnate Why and How; one brooding wonder and interrogation
point. “Why does the sun drive away the stars? Why do the leaves turn
red and gold? What makes the seed swell in the earth? From whence comes
the life hidden in the egg under the bird’s breast? What holds the moon
in the sky? Who regulates her shining? Who moves the wind? Who made
me, and what am I? Who, why, how, whither? If I came from God but only
lately, teach me his lessons first, put me into vital relation with life
and law, and then give me your dead signs and equivalents for real
things, that I may learn more and more, and ever more and ever more.”
These were the questions his eager soul was always asking of the outer
world.
There was no spirit in Edgewood bold enough to conceive that Tony learned
anything in the woods, but as there was never sufficient school money to
keep the village seat of learning open more than half the year, the boy
educated himself at the fountain head of wisdom and knowledge the other
half. His mother, who owned him for a duckling hatched from a hen’s egg,
and was never quite sure he would not turn out a black sheep and a
crooked stick to boot, was obliged to confess that Tony had more useless
information than any boy in the village. He knew just where to find the
first Mayflowers, and would bring home the waxen beauties when other
people had scarcely begun to think about the spring. He could tell where
to look for the rare fringed gentian, the yellow violet, the Indian pipe.
There were clefts in the high rocks by the river side where, when every
one else failed, he could find harebells and columbines.
When his tasks were done, and the other boys were amusing themselves each
in his own way, you would find Tony lying flat on the pine-needles in the
woods, listening to the notes of the wild birds, and imitating them
patiently, till you could scarcely tell which was boy and which was bird;
and if you could, the birds couldn’t, for many a time he coaxed the
bobolinks and thrushes to perch on the low boughs above his head, where
they chirped to him as if he were a feathered brother. There was nothing
about the building of nests with which he was not familiar. He could
have helped in the task, if the birds had not been so shy, and if he had
possessed beak and claw instead of clumsy fingers. He would sit near a
beehive for hours without moving, or lie prone in the sandy road, under
the full glare of the sun, watching the ants acting out their human
comedy; sometimes surrounding a favourite hill with stones, that the
comedy might not be turned into tragedy by a careless footfall. The
cottage on the river road grew more and more to resemble a museum and
herbarium as the years went by, and the Widow Croft’s weekly
house-cleaning was a matter that called for the exercise of Christian
grace.
Still, Tony was a good son, affectionate, considerate, and obedient. His
mother had no idea that he would ever be able, or indeed willing, to make
a living; but there was a forest of young timber growing up, a small hay
farm to depend upon, and a little hoard that would keep him out of the
poorhouse when she died and left him to his own devices. It never
occurred to her that he was in any way remarkable. If he were difficult
to understand, it reflected more upon his eccentricity than upon her
density. What was a woman to do with a boy of twelve who, when she urged
him to drop the old guitar he was taking apart and hurry off to school,
cried, “Oh, mother! when there is so much to learn in this world, it is
wicked, wicked, to waste time in school.”
About this period Tony spent hours in the attic arranging bottles and
tumblers into a musical scale. He also invented an instrument made of
small and great, long and short pins, driven into soft board to different
depths, and when the widow passed his door on the way to bed she
invariably saw this barbaric thing locked to the boy’s breast, for he
often played himself to sleep with it.
At fifteen he had taken to pieces and put together again, strengthened,
soldered, mended, and braced, every accordion, guitar, melodeon,
dulcimer, and fiddle in Edgewood, Pleasant River, and the neighbouring
villages. There was a little money to be earned in this way, but very
little, as people in general regarded this “tinkering” as a pleasing
diversion in which they could indulge him without danger. As an example
of this attitude, Dr. Berry’s wife’s melodeon had lost two stops, the
pedals had severed connection with the rest of the works, it wheezed like
an asthmatic, and two black keys were missing. Anthony worked more than
a week on its rehabilitation, and received in return Mrs. Berry’s promise
that the doctor would “pull a tooth” for him some time! This, of course,
was a guerdon for the future, but it seemed pathetically distant to the
lad who had never had a toothache in his life. He had to plead with Cyse
Higgins for a week before that prudent young farmer would allow him to
touch his five-dollar fiddle. He obtained permission at last only by
offering to give Cyse his calf in case he spoiled the violin. “That
seems square,” said Cyse doubtfully, “but after all, you can’t play on a
calf!” “Neither will your fiddle give milk, if you keep it long enough,”
retorted Tony; and this argument was convincing.
So great was his confidence in Tony’s skill that Squire Bean trusted his
father’s violin to him, one that had been bought in Berlin seventy years
before. It had been hanging on the attic wall for a half-century, so
that the back was split in twain, the sound-post lost, the neck and the
tailpiece cracked. The lad took it home, and studied it for two whole
evenings before the open fire. The problem of restoring it was quite
beyond his abilities. He finally took the savings of two summers’
“blueberry money” and walked sixteen miles to the nearest town, where he
bought a book called “The Practical Violinist.” The supplement proved to
be a mine of wealth. Even the headings appealed to his imagination and
intoxicated him with their suggestions—On Scraping, Splitting, and
Repairing Violins, Violin Players, Great Violinists, Solo Playing, &c.;
and at the very end a Treatise on the Construction, Preservation, Repair,
and Improvement of the Violin, by Jacob Augustus Friedheim, Instrument
Maker to the Court of the Archduke of Weimar.
There was a good deal of moral advice in the preface that sadly puzzled
the boy, who was always in a condition of chronic amazement at the
village disapprobation of his favourite fiddle. That the violin did not
in some way receive the confidence enjoyed by other musical instruments,
he perceived from various paragraphs written by the worthy author of “The
Practical Violinist,” as for example:
“Some very excellent Christian people hold a strong prejudice against the
violin because they have always known it associated with dancing and
dissipation. Let it be understood that your violin is ‘converted,’ and
such an objection will no longer lie against it . . . Many delightful
hours may be enjoyed by a young man, if he has obtained a respectable
knowledge of his instrument, who otherwise would find the time hang heavy
on his hands; or, for want of some better amusement, would frequent the
dangerous and destructive paths of vice and be ruined for ever. I am in
hopes, therefore, my dear young pupil, that your violin will occupy your
attention at just those very times when, if you were immoral or
dissipated, you would be at the grogshop, gaming-table, or among vicious
females. Such a use of the violin, notwithstanding the prejudices many
hold against it, must contribute to virtue, and furnish abundance of
innocent and entirely unobjectionable amusement. These are the views
with which I hope you have adopted it, and will continue to cherish and
cultivate it.”
II
“There is no bard in all the choir,
. . . . . . .
Not one of all can put in verse,
Or to this presence could rehearse
The sights and voices ravishing
The boy knew on the hills in spring,
When pacing through the oaks he heard
Sharp queries of the sentry-bird,
The heavy grouse’s sudden whir,
The rattle of the kingfisher.”
EMERSON’S _Harp_.
NOW began an era of infinite happiness, of days that were never long
enough, of evenings when bedtime came all too soon. Oh, that there had
been some good angel who would have taken in hand Anthony Croft the boy,
and, training the powers that pointed so unmistakably in certain
directions, given to the world the genius of Anthony Croft, potential
instrument maker to the court of St. Cecilia; for it was not only that he
had the fingers of a wizard; his ear caught the faintest breath of
harmony or hint of discord, as
“Fairy folk a-listening
Hear the seed sprout in the spring,
And for music to their dance
Hear the hedge-rows wake from trance;
Sap that trembles into buds
Sending little rhythmic floods
Of fairy sound in fairy ears.
Thus all beauty that appears
Has birth as sound to finer sense
And lighter-clad intelligence.”
As the universe is all mechanism to one man, all form and colour to
another, so to Anthony Croft the world was all melody. Notwithstanding
these many gifts and possibilities, the doctor’s wife advised the Widow
Croft to make a plumber of him, intimating delicately that these freaks
of nature, while playing no apparent part in the divine economy, could
sometimes be made self-supporting.
The seventeenth year of his life marked a definite epoch in his
development. He studied Jacob Friedheim’s treatise until he knew the
characteristics of all the great violin models, from the Amatis,
Hieronymus, Antonius, and Nicolas, to those of Stradivarius, Guarnerius,
and Steiner.
It was in this year, also, that he made a very precious discovery. While
browsing in the rubbish in Squire Bean’s garret to see if he could find
the missing sound-post of the old violin, he came upon a billet of wood
wrapped in cloth and paper. When unwrapped, it was plainly labelled
“Wood from the Bean Maple at Pleasant Point; the biggest maple in York
County, and believed to be one of the biggest in the State of Maine.”
Anthony found that the oldest inhabitant of Pleasant River remembered the
stump of the tree, and that the boys used to jump over it and admire its
proportions whenever they went fishing at the Point. The wood,
therefore, was perhaps eighty or ninety years old. The squire agreed
willingly that it should be used to mend the ancient violin, and told
Tony he should have what was left for himself. When, by careful
calculation, he found that the remainder would make a whole violin, he
laid it reverently away for another twenty years, so that he should be
sure it had completed its century of patient waiting for service, and
falling on his knees by his bedside said, “I thank Thee, Heavenly Father,
for this precious gift, and I promise from this moment to gather the most
beautiful wood I can find, and lay it by where it can be used some time
to make perfect violins, so that if any creature as poor and as helpless
as I am needs the wherewithal to do good work, I shall have helped him as
Thou hast helped me.” And according to his promise so he did, and the
pieces of richly curled maple, of sycamore, and of spruce began to
accumulate. They were cut from the sunny side of the trees, in just the
right season of the year, split so as to have a full inch thickness
towards the bark, and a quarter-inch towards the heart. They were then
laid for weeks under one of the falls in Wine Brook, where the musical
tinkle, tinkle of the stream fell on the wood already wrought upon by
years of sunshine and choruses of singing birds.
This boy, toiling not alone for himself, but with full and conscious
purpose for posterity also, was he not worthy to wear the mantle of
Antonius Stradivarius?
“That plain white-aproned man who stood at work
Patient and accurate full fourscore years,
Cherished his sight and touch by temperance
And since keen sense is love of perfectness,
Made perfect violins, the needed paths
For inspiration and high mastery.”
And as if the year were not full enough of glory, the school-teacher sent
him a book with a wonderful poem in it.
That summer’s teaching had been the freak of a college student, who had
gone back to his senior year strengthened by his experience of village
life. Anthony Croft, who was only three or four years his junior, had
been his favourite pupil and companion.
“How does Tony get along?” asked the Widow Croft when the teacher came to
call.
“Tony? Oh, I can’t teach him anything.”
Tears sprang to the mother’s eyes.
“I know he ain’t much on book learning,” she said apologetically, “but
I’m bound he don’t make you no trouble in deportment.”
“I mean,” said the school-teacher gravely, “that I can show him how to
read a little Latin and do a little geometry, but he knows as much in one
day as I shall ever know in a year.”
Tony crouched by the old fireplace in the winter evenings, dropping his
knife or his compasses a moment to read aloud to his mother, who sat in
the opposite corner knitting:
“Of old Antonio Stradivari—him
Who a good century and a half ago
Put his true work in the brown instrument,
And by the nice adjustment of its frame
Gave it responsive life, continuous
With the master’s finger-tips, and perfected
Like them by delicate rectitude of use.”
The mother listened with painful intentness. “I like the sound of it,”
she said, “but I can’t hardly say I take in the full sense.”
“Why, mother,” said the lad, in a rare moment of self-expression, “you
know the poetry says he cherished his sight and touch by temperance; that
an idiot might see a straggling line and be content, but he had an eye
that winced at false work, and loved the true. When it says his
finger-tips were perfected by delicate rectitude of use, I think it means
doing everything as it is done in heaven, and that anybody who wants to
make a perfect violin must keep his eye open to all the beautiful things
God has made, and his ear open to all the music he has put into the
world, and then never let his hands touch a piece of work that is crooked
or straggling or false, till, after years and years of rightness, they
are fit to make a violin like the squire’s, a violin that can say
everything, a violin that an angel wouldn’t be ashamed to play on.”
Do these words seem likely ones to fall from the lips of a lad who had
been at the tail of his class ever since his primer days? Well, Anthony
was seventeen now, and he was “educated,” in spite of sorry
recitations—educated, the Lord knows how! Yes, in point of fact the Lord
does know how! He knows how the drill and pressure of the daily task,
still more the presence of the high ideal, the inspiration working from
within, how these educate us.
The blind Anthony Croft sitting in the kitchen doorway had seemingly
missed the heights of life he might have trod, and had walked his close
on fifty years through level meadows of mediocrity, a witch in every
finger-tip waiting to be set to work, head among the clouds, feet
stumbling, eyes and ears open to hear God’s secret thought; seeing and
hearing it, too, but lacking force to speak it forth again; for while
imperious genius surmounts all obstacles, brushes laws and formulas from
its horizon, and with its own free soul sees its “path and the outlets of
the sky,” potential genius for ever needs an angel of deliverance to set
it free.
Poor Anthony Croft, or blessed Anthony Croft, I know not which—God knows!
Poor he certainly was, yet blessed after all. “One thing I do,” said
Paul. “One thing I do,” said Anthony. He was not able to realise his
ideals, but he had the angel aim by which he idealised his reals.
O waiting heart of God! how soon would Thy kingdom come if we all did our
allotted tasks, humble or splendid, in this consecrated fashion!
III
“Therein I hear the Parcæ reel
The threads of man at their humming wheel,
The threads of life and power and pain,
So sweet and mournful falls the strain.”
EMERSON’S _Harp_.
OLD Mrs. Butterfield had had her third stroke of paralysis, and died of a
Sunday night. She was all alone in her little cottage on the river bank,
with no neighbour nearer than Croft’s, and nobody there but a blind man
and a small boy. Everybody had told her it was foolish for a frail old
woman of seventy to live alone in a house on the river road, and
everybody was pleased, in a discreet and chastened fashion of course,
that it had turned out exactly as they had predicted.
Aunt Mehitable Tarbox was walking up to Milliken’s Mills, with her little
black reticule hanging over her arm, and noticing that there was no smoke
coming out of the Butterfield chimney, and that the hens were gathered
about the kitchen door clamouring for their breakfast, she thought it
best to stop and knock. No response followed the repeated blows from her
hard knuckles. She then tapped smartly on Mrs. Butterfield’s bedroom
window with her thimble finger. This proving of no avail, she was
obliged to pry open the kitchen shutter, split open the screen of
mosquito netting with her shears, and crawl into the house over the sink.
This was a considerable feat for a somewhat rheumatic elderly lady, but
this one never grudged trouble when she wanted to find out anything.
When she discovered that her premonitions were correct, and old Mrs.
Butterfield was indeed dead, her grief at losing a pleasant acquaintance
was largely mitigated by her sense of importance at being first on the
spot, and chosen by Providence to take command of the situation. There
were no relations in the village; there was no woman neighbour within a
mile: it was therefore her obvious Christian duty not only to take charge
of the “remains,” but to conduct such a funeral as the remains would have
wished for herself.
The fortunate Vice-President suddenly called upon by destiny to guide the
ship of state, the soldier who sees a possible Victoria Cross in a
hazardous engagement, can have a faint conception of Aunt Hitty’s feeling
on this momentous occasion. Funerals were the very breath of her life.
There was no ceremony, either of public or private import, that, to her
mind, approached a funeral in real satisfying interest. Yet, with
distinct talent in this direction, she had always been “cabined, cribbed,
confined” within hopeless limitations. She had assisted in a secondary
capacity at funerals in the families of other people, but she would have
revelled in personally conducted ones. The members of her own family
stubbornly refused to die, however, even the distant connections living
on and on to a ridiculous old age; and if they ever did die, by reason of
a falling roof, shipwreck, or conflagration, they generally died in Texas
or Iowa, or some remote State where Aunt Hitty could not follow the
hearse in the first carriage. This blighted ambition was a heart-sorrow
of so deep and sacred a character that she did not even confess it to
“Si,” as her appendage of a husband was called.
Now at last her chance for planning a funeral had come. Mrs. Butterfield
had no kith or kin save her niece, Lyddy Ann, who lived in Andover, or
Lawrence, or Haverhill, Massachusetts—Aunt Hitty couldn’t remember which,
and hoped nobody else could. The niece would be sent for when they found
out where she lived; meanwhile the funeral could not be put off.
She glanced round the house preparatory to locking it up and starting to
notify Anthony Croft. She would just run over and talk to him about
ordering the coffin; then she could attend to all other necessary
preliminaries herself. The remains had been well-to-do, and there was no
occasion for sordid economy, so Aunt Hitty determined in her own mind to
have the latest fashion in everything, including a silver coffin-plate.
The Butterfield coffin-plates were a thing to be proud of. They had been
sacredly preserved for years and years, and the entire
collection—numbering nineteen in all—had been framed, and adorned the
walls of the deceased lady’s best room. They were not of solid silver,
it is true, but even so it was a matter of distinction to have belonged
to a family that could afford to have nineteen coffin-plates of any sort.
Aunt Hitty planned certain dramatic details as she walked down the road
to Croft’s. It came to her in a burst of inspiration that she would have
two ministers: one for the long prayer, and one for the short prayer and
the remarks. She hoped that Elder Weeks would be adequate in the latter
direction. She knew she couldn’t for the life of her think of anything
interesting to say about Mrs. Butterfield, save that she possessed
nineteen coffin-plates, and brought her hens to Edgewood every summer for
their health; but she had heard Elder Weeks make a moving discourse out
of less than that. To be sure, he needed priming, but she would be equal
to the occasion. There was Ivory Brown’s funeral: how would that have
gone on if it hadn’t been for her? Wasn’t the elder ten minutes late,
and what would his remarks have amounted to without her suggestions? You
might almost say she was the author of the discourse, for she gave the
elder all the appropriate ideas. As she had helped him out of the waggon
she had said: “Are you prepared? I thought not; but there’s no time to
lose. Remember there are aged parents; two brothers living—one
railroading in Spokane Falls, the other clerking in Washington, D.C.
Don’t mention the Universalists—there’s be’n two in the fam’ly; nor
insanity—there’s be’n one o’ them. The girl in the corner is the one
that the remains has be’n keeping comp’ny with. If you can make some
genteel allusions to her, it’ll be much appreciated by his folks.”
As to the long prayer, she knew that the Rev. Mr. Ford could be relied on
to pray until Aunt Becky Burnham should twitch him by the coat-tails.
She had done it more than once. She had also, on one occasion, got up
and straightened his ministerial neckerchief, which he had gradually
“prayed” around his saintly neck until it had lodged behind the right
ear.
These plans proved so fascinating to Aunt Hitty that she walked quite
half a mile beyond Croft’s, and was obliged to retrace her steps.
Meantime, she conceived bands of black alpaca for the sleeves and hats of
the pall-bearers, and a festoon of the same over the front gate, if there
should be any left over. She planned the singing by the choir. There
had been no real choir-singing at any funeral in Edgewood since the Rev.
Joshua Beckwith had died. She would ask them to open with—
[Picture: Music: Rebel mourner, cease your weepin’. You too must die]
This was a favourite funeral hymn. The only difficulty would be in
keeping Aunt Becky Burnham from pitching it in a key where nobody but a
soprano skylark, accustomed to warble at a great height, could possibly
sing it. It was generally given at the grave, when Elder Weeks
officiated; but it never satisfied Aunt Hitty, because the good elder
always looked so unpicturesque when he threw a red bandanna handkerchief
over his head before beginning the twenty-seven verses. After the long
prayer, she would have Almira Berry give for a solo—
[Picture: Music: This gro-o-oanin’ world’s too dark and dre-e-ar for the
saints’ e-ter-nal rest]
This hymn, if it did not wholly reconcile one to death, enabled one to
look upon life with sufficient solemnity. It was a thousand pities, she
thought, that the old hearse was so shabby and rickety, and that Gooly
Eldridge, who drove it, would insist on wearing a faded peach-blow
overcoat. It was exasperating to think of the public spirit at Egypt,
and contrast it with the state of things at Pleasant River. In Egypt,
they had sold the old hearse-house for a sausage-shop, and now they were
having “hearse sociables” every month to raise money for a new one.
All these details flew through Aunt Hitty’s mind in fascinating
procession. There shouldn’t be “a hitch” anywhere. There had been a
hitch at her last funeral, but she had been only an assistant there.
Matt Henderson had been struck by lightning at the foot of Squire Bean’s
old nooning tree, and certain circumstances combined to make the funeral
one of unusual interest, so much so much so that fat old Mrs. Potter from
Deerwander created a sensation at the cemetery. She was so anxious to
get where she could see everything to the best advantage that she crowded
too near the bier, stepped on the sliding earth, and pitched into the
grave. As she weighed over two hundred pounds, and was in a position of
some disadvantage, it took five men to extricate her from the dilemma,
and the operation made a long and somewhat awkward break in the religious
services. Aunt Hitty always said of this catastrophe, “If I’d ’a’ be’n
Mis’ Potter, I’d ’a’ be’n so mortified I believe I’d ’a’ said, ‘I wa’n’t
plannin’ to be buried, but now I’m in here I declare I’ll stop.’”
* * * * *
Old Mrs. Butterfield’s funeral was not only voted an entire success by
the villagers, but the seal of professional approval was set upon it by
an undertaker from Saco, who declared that Mrs. Tarbox could make a
handsome living in the funeral line anywhere. Providence, who always
assists those who assist themselves, decreed that the niece Lyddy Ann
should not arrive until the aunt was safely buried; so, there being none
to resist her right or grudge her the privilege, Aunt Hitty, for the
first time in her life, rode in the next buggy to the hearse. Si, in his
best suit, a broad weed and weepers, drove Cyse Higgins’ black colt, and
Aunt Hitty was dressed in deep mourning, with the Widow Buzzell’s crape
veil over her face, and in her hand a palm-leaf fan tied with a black
ribbon. Her comment to Si, as she went to her virtuous couch that night,
was: “It was an awful dry funeral, but that was the only flaw in it. It
would ’a’ be’n perfect if there’d be’n anybody to shed tears. I come
pretty nigh it myself, though I ain’t no relation, when Elder Weeks said,
‘You’ll go round the house, my sisters, and Mis’ Butterfield won’t be
there; you’ll go int’ the orchard, and Mis’ Butterfield won’t be there;
you’ll go int’ the barn, and Mis’ Butterfield won’t be there; you’ll go
int’ the shed, and Mis’ Butterfield wont be there; you’ll go int’ the
hencoop, and Mis’ Butterfield won’t be there!’ That would ’a’ draw’d
tears from a stone, ’most, ’specially sence Mis’ Butterfield set such
store by her hens.”
And this is the way that Lyddy Butterfield came into her kingdom, a
little lone brown house on the river’s brim. She had seen it only once
before when she had drives, out from Portland, years ago, with her aunt.
Mrs. Butterfield lived in Portland, but spent her summers in Edgewood on
account of her chickens. She always explained that the country was
dreadful dull for her, but good for the hens; they always laid so much
better in the winter time.
Lyddy liked the place all the better for its loneliness. She had never
had enough of solitude, and this quiet home, with the song of the river
for company, if one needed more company than chickens and a cat,
satisfied all her desires, particularly as it was accompanied by a snug
little income of two hundred dollars a year, a meagre sum that seemed to
open up mysterious avenues of joy to her starved, impatient heart.
When she was a mere infant, her brother was holding her on his knee
before the great old-fashioned fireplace heaped with burning logs. A
sudden noise startled him, and the crowing, restless baby gave an
unexpected lurch, and slipped, face downward, into the glowing embers.
It was a full minute before the horror-stricken boy could extricate the
little creature from the cruel flame that had already done its fatal
work. The baby escaped with her life, but was disfigured for ever. As
she grew older, the gentle hand of time could not entirely efface the
terrible scars. One cheek was wrinkled and crimson, while one eye and
the mouth were drawn down pathetically. The accident might have changed
the disposition of any child, but Lyddy chanced to be a sensitive,
introspective bit of feminine humanity, in whose memory the burning flame
was never quenched. Her mother, partly to conceal her own wounded
vanity, and partly to shield the timid, morbid child, kept her out of
sight as much as possible; so that at sixteen, when she was left an
orphan, she had lived almost entirely in solitude.
She became, in course of time, a kind of general nursery governess in a
large family of motherless children. The father was almost always away
from home; his sister kept the house, and Lyddy stayed in the nursery,
bathing the babies and putting them to bed, dressing them in the morning,
and playing with them in the safe privacy of the garden or the open
attic.
They loved her, disfigured as she was—for the child despises mere
externals, and explores the heart of things to see whether it be good or
evil—but they could never induce her to see strangers, nor to join any
gathering of people.
The children were grown and married now, and Lyddy was nearly forty when
she came into possession of house and lands and fortune; forty, with
twenty years of unexpended feeling pent within her. Forty—that is rather
old to be interesting, but age is a relative matter. Haven’t you seen
girls of four-and-twenty who have nibbled and been nibbled at ever since
they were sixteen, but who have neither caught anything nor been caught?
They are old, if you like, but Lyddy was forty and still young, with her
susceptibilities cherished, not dulled, and with all the “language of
passion fresh and rooted as the lovely leafage about a spring.”
IV
“He shall daily joy dispense
Hid in song’s sweet influence.”
EMERSON’S _Merlin_.
LYDDY had very few callers during her first month as a property owner in
Edgewood. Her appearance would have been against her winning friends
easily in any case, even if she had not acquired the habits of a recluse.
It took a certain amount of time, too, for the community to get used to
the fact that old Mrs. Butterfield was dead, and her niece Lyddy Ann
living in the cottage on the river road. There were numbers of people
who had not yet heard that old Mrs. Butterfield had bought the house from
the Thatcher boys, and that was fifteen years ago; but this was not
strange, for, notwithstanding Aunt Hitty’s valuable services in
disseminating general information, there was a man living on the Bonny
Eagle road who was surprised to hear that Daniel Webster was dead, and
complained that folks were not so long-lived as they used to be.
Aunt Hitty thought Lyddy a Goth and a Vandal because she took down the
twenty silver coffin-plates and laid them reverently away. “Mis’
Butterfield would turn in her grave,” she said, “if she could see her
niece. She ain’t much of a housekeeper, I guess,” she went on, as she
cut over Dr. Berry’s old trousers into briefer ones for Tommy Berry.
“She gives considerable stuff to her hens that she’d a sight better heat
over and eat herself, in these hard times, when the missionary societies
can’t hardly keep the heathen fed and clothed and warmed—no, I don’t mean
warmed, for most o’ the heathens live in hot climates, somehow or
’nother. My back door’s jest opposite hers; it’s across the river, to be
sure, but it’s the narrer part, and I can see everything she does as
plain as daylight. She washed a Monday, and she ain’t taken her clothes
in yet, and it’s Thursday. She may be bleachin’ of ’em out, but it looks
slack. I said to Si last night I should stand it till ’bout
Friday—seein’ ’em lay on the grass there—but if she didn’t take ’em in
then, I should go over and offer to help her. She has a fire in the
settin’-room ’most every night, though we ain’t had a frost yet; and as
near’s I can make out, she’s got full red curtains hangin’ up to her
windows. I ain’t sure, for she don’t open the blinds in that room till I
get away in the morning, and she shuts ’em before I get back at night.
Si don’t know red from green, so he’s useless in such matters. I’m going
home late to-night, and walk down on that side o’ the river, so ’t I can
call in after dark and see what makes her house light up as if the sun
was settin’ inside of it.”
As a matter of fact, Lyddy was revelling in house-furnishing of a humble
sort. She had a passion for colour. There was a red-and-white straw
matting on the sitting-room floor. Reckless in the certain possession of
twenty dollars a month, she purchased yards upon yards of turkey red
cotton; enough to cover a mattress for the high-backed settle, for long
curtains at the windows, and for cushions to the rocking-chairs. She
knotted white fringes for the table-covers and curtains, painted the
inside of the fireplace red, put some pots of scarlet geraniums on the
window-sills, filled a wall-pocket with ferns and tacked it over an ugly
spot in the plastering, edged her work-basket with a tufted trimming of
scarlet wool, and made an elaborate photograph case of white crash and
red cotton that stretched the entire length of the old-fashioned
mantelshelf, and held pictures of Mr. Reynolds, Miss Elvira Reynolds,
George, Susy, Anna, John, Hazel, Ella, and Rufus Reynolds, her former
charges. When all this was done, she lighted a little blaze on the
hearth, took the red curtains from their bands, let them fall gracefully
to the floor, and sat down in her rocking-chair, reconciled to her
existence for absolutely the first time in her forty years.
I hope Mrs. Butterfield was happy enough in Paradise to appreciate and
feel Lyddy’s joy. I can even believe she was glad to have died, since
her dying could bring such content to any wretched living human soul. As
Lydia sat in the firelight, the left side of her poor face in shadow, you
saw that she was distinctly harmonious. Her figure, clad in a plain
black-and-white print dress, was a graceful, womanly one. She had
beautifully sloping shoulders and a sweet waist.
Her hair was soft and plentiful, and her hands were fine, strong, and
sensitive. This possibility of rare beauty made her scars and burns more
pitiful, for if a cheap chromo has a smirch across its face, we think it
a matter of no moment, but we deplore the smallest scratch or blur on any
work of real art.
Lydia felt a little less bitter and hopeless about life when she sat in
front of her own open fire, after her usual twilight walk. It was her
habit to wander down the wooded road after her simple five-o’clock
supper, gathering ferns or goldenrod or frost flowers for her vases; and
one night she heard, above the rippling of the river, the strange, sweet,
piercing sound of Anthony Croft’s violin.
She drew nearer, and saw a middle-aged man sitting in the kitchen
doorway, with a lad of ten or twelve years leaning against his knees.
She could tell little of his appearance, save that he had a fine
forehead, and hair that waved well back from it in rather an unusual
fashion. He was in his shirt-sleeves, but the gingham was scrupulously
clean, and he had the uncommon refinement of a collar and necktie. Out
of sight herself, Lyddy drew near enough to hear; and this she did every
night without recognising that the musician was blind. The music had a
curious effect upon her. It was a hitherto unknown influence in her
life, and it interpreted her, so to speak, to herself. As she sat on the
bed of brown pine needles, under a friendly tree, her head resting
against its trunk, her eyes half closed, the tone of Anthony’s violin
came like a heavenly message to a tired, despairing soul. Remember that
in her secluded existence she had heard only such harmony as Elvira
Reynolds evoked from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute, and the
Reynolds temperament was distinctly inartistic.
Lyddy lived through a lifetime of emotion in these twilight concerts.
Sometimes she was filled with an exquisite melancholy from which there
was no escape; at others, the ethereal purity of the strain stirred her
heart with a strange, sweet vision of mysterious joy; joy that she had
never possessed, would never possess; joy whose bare existence she never
before realised. When the low notes sank lower and lower with their soft
wail of delicious woe, she bent forward into the dark, dreading that
something would be lost in the very struggle of listening; then, after a
pause, a pure human tone would break the stillness, and soaring,
birdlike, higher and higher, seem to mount to heaven itself, and,
“piercing its starry floors,” lift poor scarred Lydia’s soul to the very
gates of infinite bliss. In the gentle moods that stole upon her in
those summer twilights she became a different woman, softer in her
prosperity than she had ever been in her adversity; for some plants only
blossom in sunshine. What wonder if to her the music and the musician
became one? It is sometimes a dangerous thing to fuse the man and his
talents in this way; but it did no harm here, for Anthony Croft was his
music, and the music was Anthony Croft. When he played on his violin, it
was as if the miracle of its fashioning were again enacted; as if the
bird on the quivering bough, the mellow sunshine streaming through the
lattice of green leaves, the tinkle of the woodland stream, spoke in
every tone; and more than this, the hearth-glow in whose light the
patient hands had worked, the breath of the soul bending itself in
passionate prayer for perfection, these, too, seemed to have wrought
their blessed influence on the willing strings until the tone was laden
with spiritual harmony. One might indeed have sung of this little red
violin—that looked to Lyddy, in the sunset glow, as if it were veneered
with rubies—all that Shelley sang of another perfect instrument:
“The artist who this viol wrought
To echo all harmonious thought,
Fell’d a tree, while on the steep
The woods were in their winter sleep,
Rock’d in that repose divine
Of the wind-swept Apennine;
And dreaming, some of Autumn past,
And some of Spring approaching fast,
And some of April buds and showers,
And some of songs in July bowers,
And all of love; and so this tree—
O that such our death may be!—
Died in sleep, and felt no pain,
To live in happier form again.”
The viol “whispers in enamoured tone”:
“Sweet oracles of woods and dells,
And summer winds in sylvan cells; . . .
The clearest echoes of the hills,
The softest notes of falling rills,
The melodies of birds and bees,
The murmuring of summer seas,
And pattering rain, and breathing dew,
And airs of evening; all it knew . . .
—All this it knows, but will not tell
To those who cannot question well
The spirit that inhabits it; . . .
But, sweetly as its answers will
Flatter hands of perfect skill,
It keeps its highest, holiest tone
For one beloved Friend alone.”