For some weeks after the incident of the violin and the carving-knife,
it looked as if a permanent cloud had settled upon the spirits of
Fiddlin' Jack. He was sad and nervous; if any one touched him, or
even spoke to him suddenly, he would jump like a deer. He kept out of
everybody's way as much as possible, sat out in the wood-shed when he
was not at work, and could not be persuaded to bring down his fiddle. He
seemed in a fair way to be transformed into “the melancholy Jaques.”
It was Serena who broke the spell; and she did it in a woman's way, the
simplest way in the world--by taking no notice of it.
“Ain't you goin' to play for me to-night?” she asked one evening,
as Jacques passed through the kitchen. Whereupon the evil spirit was
exorcised, and the violin came back again to its place in the life of
the house.
But there was less time for music now than there had been in the winter.
As the snow vanished from the woods, and the frost leaked out of the
ground, and the ice on the lake was honeycombed, breaking away from the
shore, and finally going to pieces altogether in a warm southeast storm,
the Sportsmen's Retreat began to prepare for business. There was a
garden to be planted, and there were boats to be painted. The rotten old
wharf in front of the house stood badly in need of repairs. The fiddler
proved himself a Jack-of-all-trades and master of more than one.
In the middle of May the anglers began to arrive at the Retreat--a
quiet, sociable, friendly set of men, most of whom were old-time
acquaintances, and familiar lovers of the woods. They belonged to the
“early Adirondack period,” these disciples of Walton. They were not very
rich, and they did not put on much style, but they understood how to
have a good time; and what they did not know about fishing was not worth
knowing.
Jacques fitted into their scheme of life as a well-made reel fits the
butt of a good rod. He was a steady oarsman, a lucky fisherman, with a
real genius for the use of the landing-net, and a cheerful companion,
who did not insist upon giving his views about artificial flies and
advice about casting, on every occasion. By the end of June he found
himself in steady employment as a guide.
He liked best to go with the anglers who were not too energetic, but
were satisfied to fish for a few hours in the morning and again at
sunset, after a long rest in the middle of the afternoon. This was just
the time for the violin; and if Jacques had his way, he would take it
with him, carefully tucked away in its case in the bow of the boat; and
when the pipes were lit after lunch, on the shore of Round Island or
at the mouth of Cold Brook, he would discourse sweet music until the
declining sun drew near the tree-tops and the veery rang his silver
bell for vespers. Then it was time to fish again, and the flies danced
merrily over the water, and the great speckled trout leaped eagerly to
catch them. For trolling all day long for lake-trout Jacques had little
liking.
“Dat is not de sport,” he would say, “to hol' one r-r-ope in de 'and,
an' den pool heem in wid one feesh on t'ree hook, h'all tangle h'up
in hees mout'--dat is not de sport. Bisside, dat leef not taim' for la
musique.”
Midsummer brought a new set of guests to the Retreat, and filled the
ramshackle old house to overflowing. The fishing fell off, but there
were picnics and camping-parties in abundance, and Jacques was in
demand. The ladies liked him; his manners were so pleasant, and they
took a great interest in his music. Moody bought a piano for the parlour
that summer; and there were two or three good players in the house,
to whom Jacques would listen with delight, sitting on a pile of logs
outside the parlour windows in the warm August evenings.
Some one asked him whether he did not prefer the piano to the violin.
“NON,” he answered, very decidedly; “dat piano, he vairee smart; he
got plentee word, lak' de leetle yellow bird in de cage--'ow you call
heem--de cannarie. He spik' moch. Bot dat violon, he spik' more deep, to
de heart, lak' de Rossignol. He mak' me feel more glad, more sorree--dat
fo' w'at Ah lak' heem de bes'!”
Through all the occupations and pleasures of the summer Jacques kept as
near as he could to Serena. If he learned a new tune, by listening to
the piano--some simple, artful air of Mozart, some melancholy echo of
a nocturne of Chopin, some tender, passionate love-song of Schubert--it
was to her that he would play it first. If he could persuade her to a
boat-ride with him on the lake, Sunday evening, the week was complete.
He even learned to know the more shy and delicate forest-blossoms that
she preferred, and would come in from a day's guiding with a tiny bunch
of belated twin-flowers, or a few purple-fringed orchids, or a handful
of nodding stalks of the fragrant pyrola, for her.
So the summer passed, and the autumn, with its longer hunting
expeditions into the depth of the wilderness; and by the time winter
came around again, Fiddlin' Jack was well settled at Moody's as
a regular Adirondack guide of the old-fashioned type, but with a
difference. He improved in his English. Something of that missing
quality which Moody called ambition, and to which Hose Ransom gave the
name of imagination, seemed to awaken within him. He saved his wages. He
went into business for himself in a modest way, and made a good turn in
the manufacture of deerskin mittens and snow-shoes. By the spring he had
nearly three hundred dollars laid by, and bought a piece of land from
Ransom on the bank of the river just above the village.
The second summer of guiding brought him in enough to commence building
a little house. It was of logs, neatly squared at the corners; and there
was a door exactly in the middle of the facade, with a square window
at either side, and another at each end of the house, according to the
common style of architecture at Bytown.
But it was in the roof that the touch of distinction appeared. For this,
Jacques had modelled after his memory of an old Canadian roof. There was
a delicate concave sweep in it, as it sloped downward from the peak, and
the eaves projected pleasantly over the front door, making a strip of
shade wherein it would be good to rest when the afternoon sun shone hot.
He took great pride in this effort of the builder's art. One day at the
beginning of May, when the house was nearly finished, he asked old Moody
and Serena to stop on their way home from the village and see what he
had done. He showed them the kitchen, and the living-room, with the
bed-room partitioned off from it, and sharing half of its side window.
Here was a place where a door could be cut at the back, and a shed built
for a summer kitchen--for the coolness, you understand. And here were
two stoves--one for the cooking, and the other in the living-room for
the warming, both of the newest.
“An' look dat roof. Dat's lak' we make dem in Canada. De rain ron off
easy, and de sun not shine too strong at de door. Ain't dat nice? You
lak' dat roof, Ma'amselle Serene, hein?”
Thus the imagination of Jacques unfolded itself, and his ambition
appeared to be making plans for its accomplishment. I do not want any
one to suppose that there was a crisis in his affair of the heart. There
was none. Indeed, it is very doubtful whether anybody in the village,
even Serena herself, ever dreamed that there was such an affair. Up
to the point when the house was finished and furnished, it was to be a
secret between Jacques and his violin; and they found no difficulty in
keeping it.
Bytown was a Yankee village. Jacques was, after all, nothing but a
Frenchman. The native tone of religion, what there was of it, was
strongly Methodist. Jacques never went to church, and if he was
anything, was probably a Roman Catholic. Serena was something of a
sentimentalist, and a great reader of novels; but the international
love-story had not yet been invented, and the idea of getting married
to a foreigner never entered her head. I do not say that she suspected
nothing in the wild flowers, and the Sunday evening boat-rides, and the
music. She was a woman. I have said already that she liked Jacques very
much, and his violin pleased her to the heart. But the new building by
the river? I am sure she never even thought of it once, in the way that
he did.
Well, in the end of June, just after the furniture had come for the
house with the curved roof, Serena was married to Hose Ransom. He was a
young widower without children, and altogether the best fellow, as well
as the most prosperous, in the settlement. His house stood up on the
hill, across the road from the lot which Jacques had bought. It was
painted white, and it had a narrow front porch, with a scroll-saw fringe
around the edge of it; and there was a little garden fenced in with
white palings, in which Sweet Williams and pansies and blue lupines and
pink bleeding-hearts were planted.
The wedding was at the Sportsmen's Retreat, and Jacques was there, of
course. There was nothing of the disconsolate lover about him. The noun
he might have confessed to, in a confidential moment of intercourse with
his violin; but the adjective was not in his line.
The strongest impulse in his nature was to be a giver of entertaininent,
a source of joy in others, a recognized element of delight in the
little world where he moved. He had the artistic temperament in its
most primitive and naive form. Nothing pleased him so much as the act of
pleasing. Music was the means which Nature had given him to fulfil
this desire. He played, as you might say, out of a certain kind of
selfishness, because he enjoyed making other people happy. He was
selfish enough, in his way, to want the pleasure of making everybody
feel the same delight that he felt in the clear tones, the merry
cadences, the tender and caressing flow of his violin. That was
consolation. That was power. That was success.
And especially was he selfish enough to want to feel his ability to give
Serena a pleasure at her wedding--a pleasure that nobody else could give
her. When she asked him to play, he consented gladly. Never had he drawn
the bow across the strings with a more magical touch. The wedding guests
danced as if they were enchanted. The big bridegroom came up and clapped
him on the back, with the nearest approach to a gesture of affection
that backwoods etiquette allows between men.
“Jack, you're the boss fiddler o' this hull county. Have a drink now? I
guess you 're mighty dry.”
“MERCI, NON,” said Jacques. “I drink only de museek dis night. Eef I
drink two t'ings, I get dronk.”
In between the dances, and while the supper was going on, he played
quieter tunes--ballads and songs that he knew Serena liked. After supper
came the final reel; and when that was wound up, with immense hilarity,
the company ran out to the side door of the tavern to shout a noisy
farewell to the bridal buggy, as it drove down the road toward the house
with the white palings. When they came back, the fiddler was gone. He
had slipped away to the little cabin with the curved roof.
All night long he sat there playing in the dark. Every tune that he had
ever known came back to him--grave and merry, light and sad. He played
them over and over again, passing round and round among them as a leaf
on a stream follows the eddies, now backward, now forward, and returning
most frequently to an echo of a certain theme from Chopin--you remember
the NOCTURNE IN G MINOR, the second one? He did not know who Chopin
was. Perhaps he did not even know the name of the music. But the air had
fallen upon his ear somewhere, and had stayed in his memory; and now it
seemed to say something to him that had an especial meaning.
At last he let the bow fall. He patted the brown wood of the violin
after his old fashion, loosened the strings a little, wrapped it in its
green baize cover, and hung it on the wall.
“Hang thou there, thou little violin,” he murmured. “It is now that I
shall take the good care of thee, as never before; for thou art the wife
of Jacques Tremblay. And the wife of 'Osee Ransom, she is a friend to
us, both of us; and we will make the music for her many years, I
tell thee, many years--for her, and for her good man, and for the
children--yes?”
But Serena did not have many years to listen to the playing of
Jacques Tremblay: on the white porch, in the summer evenings, with
bleeding-hearts abloom in the garden; or by the winter fire, while the
pale blue moonlight lay on the snow without, and the yellow lamplight
filled the room with homely radiance. In the fourth year after her
marriage she died, and Jacques stood beside Hose at the funeral.
There was a child--a little boy--delicate and blue-eyed, the living
image of his mother. Jacques appointed himself general attendant, nurse
in extraordinary, and court musician to this child. He gave up his work
as a guide. It took him too much away from home. He was tired of it.
Besides, what did he want of so much money? He had his house. He could
gain enough for all his needs by making snow-shoes and the deerskin
mittens at home. Then he could be near little Billy. It was pleasanter
so.
When Hose was away on a long trip in the woods, Jacques would move up
to the white house and stay on guard. His fiddle learned how to sing the
prettiest slumber songs. Moreover, it could crow in the morning, just
like the cock; and it could make a noise like a mouse, and like the cat,
too; and there were more tunes inside of it than in any music-box in the
world.
As the boy grew older, the little cabin with the curved roof became
his favourite playground. It was near the river, and Fiddlin' Jack was
always ready to make a boat for him, or help him catch minnows in the
mill-dam. The child had a taste for music, too, and learned some of the
old Canadian songs, which he sang in a curious broken patois, while his
delighted teacher accompanied him on the violin. But it was a great day
when he was eight years old, and Jacques brought out a small fiddle, for
which he had secretly sent to Albany, and presented it to the boy.
“You see dat feedle, Billee? Dat's for you! You mek' your lesson on
dat. When you kin mek' de museek, den you play on de violon--lak' dis
one--listen!”
Then he drew the bow across the strings and dashed into a medley of the
jolliest airs imaginable.
The boy took to his instruction as kindly as could have been expected.
School interrupted it a good deal; and play with the other boys carried
him away often; but, after all, there was nothing that he liked much
better than to sit in the little cabin on a winter evening and pick out
a simple tune after his teacher. He must have had some talent for it,
too; for Jacques was very proud of his pupil, and prophesied great
things of him.
“You know dat little Billee of 'Ose Ransom,” the fiddler would say to a
circle of people at the hotel, where he still went to play for parties;
“you know dat small Ransom boy? Well, I 'm tichin' heem play de feedle;
an' I tell you, one day he play better dan hees ticher. Ah, dat 's
gr-r-reat t'ing, de museek, ain't it? Mek' you laugh, mek' you cry, mek'
you dance! Now, you dance. Tek' your pardnerre. EN AVANT! Kip' step to
de museek!”