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PHILIP
PHILIP
_The Story of a Boy Violinist_
By
T. W. O.
[Illustration]
Lamson, Wolffe and Company
Boston, New York and London
MDCCCXCVIII
Copyright, 1898
By Lamson, Wolffe and Company
_All rights reserved_
Press of
Rockwell and Churchill
BOSTON
Contents
Chapter Page
I. Philip’s Home 1
II. Dash 15
III. Philip’s Mother 29
IV. Mag’s Story 42
V. Philip’s Father 56
VI. A New Friend 73
VII. A Mining Tragedy 87
VIII. A Great Change 106
IX. Trials and Pleasures 120
X. Aunt Delia’s Secret 134
XI. A Day at Ashden 148
XII. The Renewal of an Acquaintance 163
XIII. Lord Ashden’s Plan 175
XIV. Off for Italy 190
XV. Drifting 210
XVI. Home Again 225
XVII. Marion 240
XVIII. The Concert 254
XIX. Fire 271
XX. The End 285
Philip
The Story of a Boy Violinist
Chapter I
Philip’s Home
His days were nearly all spent in a place where there were great
heights and depths, long corridors and galleries, with many people
passing to and fro, many chambers above and below, and elevators
running up and down. A great hotel, do you say? No, nothing so grand or
pleasant as that, but a deep, dark, dismal mine; and there, from dawn
till after nightfall, Philip and his mother spent the long, sun-bright
days in a sort of living death. It was really like that, for what is
life worth in a place where the sun never comes, where there is no
grass nor flowers nor trees, where the beautiful blue sky with its
snow-white flying cloudlets or great, gray, snow-capped cloud-mountains
cannot be seen, and where there is nothing but the darkness of night
all the day long!
But Philip was quite accustomed to this strange underground life, and
as he knew nothing of anything different or better he was as happy as
the day was long. After all, our lives are very much what we make them,
and Philip was blessed with a very sweet and cheerful nature, which
could make its own sunshine even at the bottom of a deep, dark mine;
he had beside a very strong and healthy fancy, and he had peopled the
dark recesses of the mine with all kinds of imaginary beings, who were
real companions for the lonely child. Instead, however, of creating,
as some foolish children would have done, only gnomes and goblins to
inhabit the deep caverns and underground chambers, Philip chose rather
to pretend that the soft sound of dropping water, which could always be
heard if one listened, was the musical language of the coal-fairies who
guarded the secrets of the mine, a language which only those who were
very pure and good could understand.
There was another sprite who lived in the mine, with whom Philip
used to hold long conversations, and who could always reply to him,
although the answer was sometimes unsatisfactory; this was the echo
of his own voice, and one day the little boy lost his way and caused
his mother great alarm by following this mocking voice deep into the
intricate windings of an unworked shaft. He found his way out again
on this particular occasion by the aid of some other spirit-friends
of his, the little lamps or candles which the miners carry in their
hats. At a distance these lights, glancing here and there as the men
moved about their work, looked exactly like large fireflies, and it
was by following these and answering the friendly voices of the miners
who shouted directions to him that Philip found his way back to his
mother’s side again.
And so you see that Philip led what I suppose most boys and girls would
have called a very hard and lonely life, for he had few companions of
his own age, and spent most of the time which other children have for
play in sober work, yet he was quite happy and contented; and indeed
he was much more fortunate than many of the people about him, who did
not, like him, come up when the day was over, but who spent days and
sometimes weeks or months down in the darkness of the mine, with never
a glimpse of the blessed light of day, except what little could be
seen from the long well-like shaft, up and down which went the buckets
or elevators by which the miners were carried to and from their work.
But when Philip’s day in the mine was over he had only to step aboard
the rough elevator which carried the miners up and down, and looking
upward, as he always did on this journey back to the outer world, he
could see the tall derrick which pointed skyward from the mouth of the
shaft like a black finger grow gradually more distinct against the blue
sky, and then in a moment more he would come out into the daylight once
again.
The bright sunshine always hurt his eyes at first, but how pleasant and
warm it seemed after the damp twilight down below! And how glorious it
was to be able to run straight ahead for miles without being obliged
to stoop beneath low, dripping walls, or to squeeze through narrow
openings into close, rocky chambers where the stagnant air made one
cough and choke! It was almost worth while, Philip thought, to spend
eight hours of the day away from this beautiful world of nature in
order to come back to it again each afternoon.
“Do ye think, mother dear,” he said thoughtfully, one beautiful summer
evening as they were walking home together through a field gay and
fragrant with innumerable wild flowers--“do ye think that heaven can be
a nicer place than this?”
His mother smiled at her boy’s earnest question, and laid her hard,
rough hand on his curly head in a loving way she had. “I reckon it is,
my little lad,” she said, “though we can’t quite think of it; but they
says the flowers there never wither nor die, and the sky is always
blue, not lowering and black as our sky is sometimes--ye mind how it
looked before the thunder-storm last night. The pleasures in that land
will leave no ugly sting behind them, folks tells us, as they does here
’most always.”
She spoke with a sad wistfulness in her voice which Philip was quick to
notice, and he slipped his little hand into hers and looked up into her
face with troubled eyes.
“Tell me, mother dear,” he said gently, “why you are always so sad when
we cross this field, especially in daisy time. Is it because my father
used to walk here with you in the time ye said ye was used be happy?”
How marvellously wise love makes us all! Philip’s mother looked down at
him wonderingly.
“However did the lad guess?” she said as though to herself; “for it was
in this very field we used to wander in those happy, foolish days. Oh,
it would have been far better had we never”--she did not finish the
sentence, but broke off quite suddenly, telling Philip to run on ahead;
and the boy did as he was bidden, but half reluctantly, for although
he seldom spoke of his father, feeling instinctively that the subject
was a painful one to his mother, yet he thought about him very often,
pondering as children will upon a theme not understood or only half
explained. He knew that his father was dead--so much his mother had
told him; and many a time he had heard her say that if it were not for
her boy she could find it in her heart to wish herself dead too. He
also knew that a locket which his mother always wore on a chain about
her neck contained a portrait which she had once shown to him, and
which she had told him was a perfect likeness of his father. Philip
looked wonderingly at the face of the handsome young gentleman, who
had clustering curls like his own, but whose clothes were of a cut and
texture quite unlike those worn by the men whom Philip saw every day;
and then as his glance had fallen upon his mother in her rough dress,
he said with a kind of awe, “What fine clothes my father wore, didn’t
he, mother dear?”
And his mother had snatched the miniature almost fiercely from his
hand, saying proudly:
“Of course he did, lad; your father was a _gentleman_.”
A gentleman! Philip thought of it often afterward, wondering what
his mother could have meant, for the only gentlemen the boy had ever
seen lived in fine houses, and their wives rode in carriages and wore
silk dresses and fine bonnets, while their home was a humble miner’s
cottage, and his mother--and then Philip, half ashamed of the thought,
had run and put his arms about his mother’s neck and smoothed the
coarse cotton cloth of her dress with his loving hands, telling himself
that although she did not wear the fine clothes of a lady, yet she was
as sweet and beautiful and good as any lady in the land.
It never occurred to Philip to wonder that Mag (the only name by which
his mother was known) could neither read nor write, for the people who
lived all about them, and who spent the greater part of their lives
in the mine, were of course very ignorant, there being no such things
in those days as compulsory education or laws forbidding child-labor
in the mines. Philip, therefore, at ten years of age did not know a
single letter of the alphabet, and had seen only one or two books in
his life. But although his mother was no wiser than her child so far
as books went, she seemed somehow to have gained a strange knowledge of
life; indeed, no one could look at her without feeling sure that she
had loved and felt and suffered much. She was a large, grand-looking
young woman, with a face and figure like a Greek statue, and she was
almost as silent. Philip had never heard her laugh, and she seldom
talked with the miners or joined in their rough merriment and sometimes
rather coarse jokes. In reply to their greetings or questions she
always gave short, civil enough answers, never voluntarily prolonging
the conversation. But her silence was never sullen, and they all seemed
to understand her; indeed, there was not one of them who would not
gladly have done her a good turn, and she always acknowledged their
favors gratefully.
It was often remarked that she seemed to take a sort of fierce pleasure
in doing the hardest and roughest kinds of work, labor which usually
was given only to the men; but she was still young and very strong, and
it may have been that she dreaded the time for thought which idleness
might have brought. At any rate, she chose the work and labored
faithfully and patiently for the wages which supported her father and
child.
Philip was constantly with his mother, and as he was a trifle shy and
made few friends among the rough boys and girls of the neighborhood, he
seemed to have concentrated all the affection of his warm little heart
upon Mag, who loved him in return with a passionate devotion.
Philip and Mag and her old father were happy together in their humble
home, which, although it was precisely the same as all the other huts
which were huddled together around the opening of the mine, had about
it an unusual air of comfort and refinement. There were white curtains
at the small windows, a honeysuckle climbed over the porch, and at one
side was a small garden, where it was Philip’s delight to work with his
grandfather; it was always gay with flowers, which seemed to thrive
in spite of the poor soil, and there were vegetables and berries too,
which often found their way to the tables of less fortunate neighbors.
Within the cottage were a few small comforts not usually to be found in
the miners’ dwellings, a square or two of carpet, faded and worn, but
warm and comfortable under the feet on cold nights, a red table-cover
to replace the white one used for meals (a most unusual luxury), and
a lamp with a colored silk shade. There was besides an easy-chair or
two, and in one corner a plain oak writing-desk which was regarded by
the neighbors with some awe; it was carefully locked, and Philip had
often wondered where the key which fitted it might be, but somehow he
had always hesitated to ask, feeling, perhaps almost instinctively,
that the explanation might cause his mother pain or embarrassment.