Young Mr. Barlowe started so violently that he spilt his tea over his
knees; for just before James had uttered his last sentence the music
stopped, but as it had been somewhat loud in the final bars, and James
raised his voice in the same proportion, the inertia of his tone defied
any attempt to modulate it, so that it was almost with a shout that he
had declared that he had been sent to be educated in his profession to a
murderer.
Fanny was too much overcome by the ludicrous aspect of the contretemps
to be able to laugh. Her brother, who had had no intention of startling
anyone in the room except young Mr. Barlowe, hung his head and was
blushing under the South Sea tan of his skin; Sir Joshua Reynolds had
heard nothing after the crashing chords that concluded the duet; but poor
Miss Reynolds almost sprang from her chair in horror.
Mrs. Burney was very angry.
“You have been making a fool of yourself as usual, James,” she cried.
“Pray give Mr. Barlowe another cup of tea, Fanny. I vow that ’tis a shame
for you, James Burney, to treat such a company as though you were on the
deck of the _Adventure_ facing your South Sea savages.”
But Dr. Burney, with his customary tact, raised a hand half reprovingly
toward his wife.
“Give Mr. Barlowe his cup, and then pass one to me, Fanny,” he said,
rising from the piano. “You know that James has spoken no more than
the truth, my dear,” he added, smiling at his wife. “I can see that
the rascal has been fooling while our backs were turned to him; but we
know that he spoke no more than the truth—at least in that one sentence
which he bawled out for us. He was, indeed, sent to a school where he
was placed under an accomplished usher who was some time after hanged
as a murderer. You see, madam—” he had turned, still smiling, to Miss
Reynolds, thereby doing much to restore her confidence in the sanity of
the family—“You see that James was from the first so desperate a young
rascal that, just as a boy who is an adept at figures is educated for
the counting-house, and one who spends all the day before he is six
picking out tunes on the harpsichord should be apprenticed, as I was, to
a musician, so we thought our James should be sent whither he could be
properly grounded in the only profession at which he was likely to excel.
But, alas! the poor usher was carried off by the police, tried at the
next assizes and duly hanged before James had made much progress in his
studies; but I believe that a few years in the navy does as much for a
youth who has made up his mind to succeed, as a protracted course under a
fully qualified criminal.”
Miss Reynolds looked as if she were not quite certain that, in spite of
his smiles, Dr. Burney was jesting; but when Mrs. Burney, seeing how her
husband’s mock seriousness was likely to produce a wrong impression upon
plain people, said:
“You must recall hearing about Mr. Eugene Aram some years back, Mrs.
Reynolds,” that lady showed that her mind was greatly relieved.
“I recall the matter without difficulty,” she said. “The man was usher at
the grammar school at Lynn.”
“And no school had a more learned teacher than that unfortunate man,”
said Sir Joshua. Young Barlowe had been divided in his amazement at what
Dr. Burney had said, and at the sight of Sir Joshua holding the trumpet
to his ear, though the instrument remained mute. He had never found
himself within the circle of so startling a society. He wished himself
safe at home in the Poultry, where people talked sense and made no
attempt to blow a trumpet with their ears.
“James had acquired quite a liking for poor Aram,” said Dr. Burney,
“and, indeed, I own to having had a high opinion of the man’s ability
myself. It was to enable him to purchase books necessary for his studies
in philology that he killed his victim—a contemptible curmudgeon named
Johnstone. I fear that all our sympathy was on the side of the usher.”
“I was greatly interested in Mr. Aram, and read a full account of his
trial,” said Sir Joshua. “I wonder that a man of so sensitive a mind as
his did not so brood over his crime as to cause suspicion to fall on him
earlier than it did.”
“Only upon one occasion it seemed that he was affected by an incident
which might possibly have awakened some suspicion in the mind of a person
given to suspicion,” said Dr. Burney. “James had been presented with a
copy of the translation of Gessner’s ‘Death of Abel’—everyone was going
mad about the book that year—more copies were sold of it than of any
translation since Pope’s ‘Homer,’ but I fancy James found it dull enough
reading. He had it on his knee trying to get through a page or two in
case the kind donor might question him upon it, when the usher came up.
He took the volume in his hand and glanced at the title. Down the book
fell from his grasp and he hurried away without a word—‘as if he had been
stung,’ James said, in telling us about it, to excuse the broken cover.
Of course, I never gave a thought to the matter at the time; but when I
heard of the arrest of Eugene Aram the following year, I recalled the
incident.”
“I should like to make a picture of the scene, and name it ‘Remorse,’”
said Reynolds.
(He never did make such a picture; many years had passed, and Lieutenant
Burney had become an Admiral before his narration of the incident touched
the imagination of a poet who dealt with it in verse that has thrilled a
good many readers.)
Thomas Barlowe was not greatly thrilled by the story as told by Dr.
Burney. He seemed rather shocked to find himself at the table with
someone who had been taught by a murderer. He glanced furtively at James
Burney, who had remained silent since the contretemps that had prevented
him from perfecting his fooling of Thomas; and the result of Thomas’s
scrutiny at that moment was to cause Thomas a tremor; for who could say
what fearful knowledge Lieutenant Burney might have acquired during his
intercourse with the murderer—knowledge which might jeopardize the safety
of a simple visitor like himself? Thomas felt that no ordinary person
could be accounted absolutely safe in a company that included a tall,
able-bodied young naval man who had begun his education under a murderer
and had gone to complete it among the cannibals of the South Seas; and,
in addition, an elderly gentleman who fancied that he could bring any
sound out of a trumpet by pressing it to his ear instead of his lips, and
had shown himself ready to extol the scholarship of any man who had been
hanged.
But then Thomas looked at Fanny, and she pleased him more than ever. She
was so demure, so modest, so shy. She had a very pretty blush, and she
did not play on the piano. It was a thousand pities, he felt, that such
a girl should be compelled to remain in such uncongenial companionship.
All the time that Dr. Burney and his other daughter were playing a second
duet, and the silly gentleman holding the bell of his trumpet to the case
of the piano, still fondly believing that he was also a performer with
the mouth-piece in his ear, Thomas Barlowe was feeling wave after wave
of pity passing over him for the unhappy position of the shy girl in the
midst of so doubtful a household. Before long his compassion for her so
stimulated his imagination that he began to think of the possibility
of his rescuing her—he began to think of himself in the character of a
hero—he did not remember the name of any particular hero who had carried
off a young woman who was placed in a similar situation to that occupied
by Miss Burney; but he had no doubt that more than one romance was
founded upon the doings of such a man as he felt himself fully qualified
to be, if he made up his mind to assume such a rôle.
As the music continued—it was an arrangement of Gluck’s _Orfèo_—Thomas
Barlowe became more and more resolute. He would be the heroic person who
should appear at the right moment and achieve the emancipation of that
sweet and shy girl, who by no fault of hers was forced to live in that
house and remain, if she could, on friendly terms with her father and
sisters, who kept strumming on the piano, and with her brother, who was
ready to boast of having received the rudiments of his education from a
murderer. All that he needed was the opportunity to show his heroism,
and he did not doubt that when he set his mind to work on the matter, he
would have such an opportunity.
If anyone had whispered in his ear that his inward consciousness of being
equal to the doing of great deeds was solely due to the music which
was being played, and to which he was unwillingly listening, he would
have been indignant. He would have thought it preposterous had it been
suggested to him that the effect of that strumming was to make him feel
more like a god than a man—to be ready to face hell for the love of a
woman, as Jean Sebastian Bach imagined Orpheus doing for Eurydice. But
Christoph Gluck knew what he was about when he had composed his _Orfèo_,
and Dr. Burney was quite equal to the business of interpreting his aims,
and of urging his daughter Susan to join with him in impressing them upon
even so unimpressionable a nature as that of Thomas Barlowe; so that
while Thomas Barlowe believed that this music was one of the most petty
of all human interests, it was making him think such thoughts as had
never before entered his mind—it was giving him aspirations from which in
ordinary circumstances he would have shrunk.
The master musician and his interpreters were making sport of him,
leading him if not quite into the region of the heroic, at least to the
boundary of that region, and supplying him with a perspective glass, as
the Interpreter did to the Pilgrims, by the aid of which he might see the
wonderful things that had been beyond his natural scope.
And that was how it came about that he gazed into Miss Burney’s eyes and
pressed her hand at parting with a tenderness he had never previously
associated with his leave-taking. He felt sure that Miss Burney would
understand what he meant, though he knew that he would have difficulty
in expressing it all to her in words; for the effect of the music was
to make him feel that he could put so much feeling into a look, into
a squeeze of the hand, as would touch the heart of any young woman and
cause her to be certain that she might trust him though all other help
might fail her.
That was the effect which the heroic music had upon him, though he did
not know it; it made him feel willing to face hell for her sake at that
moment, and even until he had walked through more than a mile of the
network of streets that lay between Leicester Fields and the Poultry.
But the effect of such an intoxicant as music upon such a nature as his
is not lasting. Before he had reached Cheapside his own individuality was
beginning to assert itself; and he wondered if he had not gone too far
for discretion—discretion being, according to his reckoning, the power to
withdraw from a position that might compromise him. And before he reached
his home he had got the length of wondering how he had so far forgotten
himself as to yield to that compromising impulse represented by the gaze
and the squeeze. He could not for the life of him understand what had
come over him at that moment; for he had by no means satisfied himself
that Miss Burney was the young woman who would make him comfortable as
his wife. He still thought highly of her on account of her modesty and
her dainty shyness, but marriage was a serious matter, and he was not
sure that he should take her for his wife.
On the whole, he felt that he had had a very trying evening—between the
Lieutenant who had so nearly qualified to practise as a murderer, and the
father and daughter who seemed ready to strum their duets until midnight,
to say nothing of the foolish gentleman who tried to play the trumpet
with his ear; and Thomas made up his mind that he would not trust
himself into the midst of so unusual a circle until he was certain that
he wanted to marry the young woman whose hand he had, for some reason or
other, pressed at parting.
But Mrs. Burney had noticed much more clearly than Fanny had done the
expression that the face of Thomas Barlowe had worn when he had looked
into the girl’s eyes; she had measured to the fraction of a second the
duration of his holding of her hand beyond the time essential for the
discharge of the ordinary courtesy of a hand-shake; and she was satisfied
that Thomas was progressing in his wooing of the least attractive and
certainly the least accomplished member of the family. The good woman
thought, however, that it was rather a pity that her husband and Susan
had persisted in the practice of their duets; for by doing so they had
not given a chance to Thomas and Fanny of being alone together.
But, looking back upon the incidents of the evening, she came to the
conclusion that, on the whole, she had no reason to complain of the
progress that was being made in the young man’s wooing. She was no
believer in undue haste in this respect; and had not Thomas looked into
Fanny’s eyes at the close of the evening? Yes, at the close; and that
proved to her satisfaction that he had not suffered discouragement by
the maladroit conversation about Mr. Eugene Aram. The unhappy episode
upon which her husband had dwelt with far too great attention to its
details, was one to which she herself had never alluded; for at Lynn,
where she had lived all her life previous to being married to Dr. Burney,
the Eugene Aram episode was regarded as a scandal to be ignored by those
of the inhabitants whose children had attended the school where he had
been usher. It was a distinctly favourable sign of the impression made
upon young Mr. Barlowe by Fanny, that he had gazed into her eyes in spite
of his having been made aware of the connection of the family with the
tragedy of that wretched schoolmaster. Mrs. Burney took no account of the
effect of Bach’s marvellous music upon a young man who was a lover in the
rough. In this respect, as has been indicated, she did not differ from
the young man himself.