And so the musician and the dying boy were made friends--a quaint,
brief intimacy which the former could never recall in after-years
without a pang, half pitiful, half humorous, for its oddity. Its
relation here is purely in the nature of an interlude, and may be
wholly skipped, without hurt to the main narrative, by those who have
an unconquerable repugnance of sentiment. But for those
others--whether the majority or not I do not know--who like to warm
their hearts now and then at the little fire of compassion, the
episode, as constituting an odd chapter in the life of a famous
executant, may possess a transitory charm. It is for them it is
narrated.
From that poignant midnight, Bannister, both by day and evening, was
often in the sick boy’s room. By nature tender-hearted, how, indeed,
could he deny to suffering that wonderful new emollient discovered in
his art? His music succeeded where all dietetics, therapeutics,
pharmaceutics, lenitives, palliatives, analeptics, galenics, and other
such “ics” and “ives” as appertain to orthodox leechcraft, had failed,
however fondly applied, to give relief. It was an anodyne under which
peace and resignation came gradually to be substituted for the weary
fretfulness which long, fruitless devotion had only helped to
aggravate. The father saw, and sighed, and was sadly grateful. Often
he would come and listen to the throbbing strains, sitting quite
quietly apart, and watching, with a furtive wistfulness, the rapt
face, on which all his ministering love had never been able to draw
such lines of restful content. And the slackness of his jaw on these
occasions seemed somehow to add a curious pathos to the moral. He had
meant so well and done so little.
But it was not alone on the subject of music that the stranger and
child drew together. One could not, for that matter, always be
harping; and in the intervals, at odd times, they conversed much, and
familiarly, and generally on recondite themes. They were both, in
their different ages and degrees, mystics--the older from temperament,
the younger from his spiritual isolation. Lying there through the
age-long seasons, what commune was possible to him but with fancies
and unrealities? The world was a shadow to him; only his dreams were
actual. For them his fruitfullest pastures lay in the spars and
splinters of jewelled light which glowed from the stained glass in the
casement. Thence he gathered, or thereinto read, the strange
phantasies which haunted his brain--thoughts and visions which were
like things glimpsed from beyond the veil. This glass was old work,
acquired piecemeal from many sources, and let into the upper halves of
the windows, without correlation in its parts and with no regard but
for effect--a disarrangement infinitely more suggestive than any
formal pattern. A few leaves, a golden apple, a section of trellis, a
hand grasping a sword-hilt, here and there a head of saint or
warrior--such, interspersed with spaces of plain glass, crimson, or
deep blue, or sunny yellow, formed the embroidered patchwork for a
thousand fancies to play about. One had to remember, hearing the
child’s strange brooding rhapsodies thereon, the years which his
shrunken appearance belied. Moreover, the intellectual light in him,
as is frequently the case with cripples, was precocious, abnormally
brilliant. And though he confessed his dreams to a lesser intellect,
it was to a corresponding sympathy. The simple of heart are often the
purest of vision. Bright wits must whet themselves on the concrete;
they cannot sharpen on abstractions. It is for the unworldly to know
what they cannot speak. And so it was with this harpist.
There was one fragment which, more than any other, fascinated the boy.
It was in colour a splendid azure, mysteriously liquid, and on it hung
from nowhere a little white hand, minutely finished to the nails.
Whose had it been--what queen’s or angel’s?
“Sometimes,” he would say, “when the lamp is low and there is
moonlight in the street, I see it move; and then a shadow grows above,
and out of it a face, too dim to distinguish; but if I shut my eyes, I
know it has come down and is bending over me.”
“The Lady Mother, belike, Colin.”
“Think you so, dear Jack? It were sweet to have a mother in my room.
Do you ever see faces, framed in little blots of light, when you close
your lids hard?”
“Surely I do!”
“What are they? Whence do they come? I have no memories of such in all
my life. They are strangers to me, yet as clear and actual as yours I
look on now. Human--the faces of men and women--some good, some evil;
but, if I try to hold and fix ’em, they slide and melt, this one
laughing, that wickedly deriding.”
“I know them, evanescent phantoms, that poise, like the shining
dragonfly, one instant on wing, and, so you make a movement to look
closer, are gone--darted to extinction. Well, may they not be the
faces of those we saw through former eyes of ours, in lives before
this life?”
The boy lay staring at him, pondering his words as if half tranced.
“I think you say truth,” he answered presently. “What odd surprises
come floating sometimes into one’s head, like glimpses of a great
secret--bright bubbles that break just as you seem on the point of
remembering what the lovely little pictures in them are reflections
of. That is a bubble of yours I have often tried to catch.”
“What does it seem to tell you, child?”
“It seems to tell me how I that am I must have _been_ since the
beginning of things; how I must have lain in the life that was the
first life as surely as I lay in the life that was my mother. Think
back, and you will find it must be. All through the countless ages I
have been passed on from prison to prison, waiting the release which
is to come to me at length in Death--is to come to me through this
last phase of conscious existence, which is indeed my trial and
sentence. And then the scaffold, Jack; we all have to mount the
scaffold; and at last the opened door--the escape--the rapture--and I
shall remember why it all was!” He clasped his thin hands; his face
seemed lit up with an inward glow, like a porcelain lamp enclosing a
dim flame. “Is not that what you mean?” he said.
“I think it is, Colin. Yet what could that imperishable seed have
known, until this last phase of realities? For _it_ the faces could
not have existed.”
“Why not, since they existed for the lives of which it was?”
“That is true. Life is not contained in this or that of me, but is the
sum of all.”
The casement formed a shallow recess of five lights. It stood opposite
the bed, looking out on the street. Dimly, seen through its latticed
lower half, the houses across the lane towered like dark phantoms.
With their faces to the north, they were never but plunged in gloom;
but when the south sun was high, and struck upon the stained glass,
the contrastive glow, to tranced eyes, made them appear impalpable
things. That was how the boy liked to regard them--silvery abodes of
mystery, where any strange things might be happening, and appearing
framed between the floor and that upper frieze of glowing
transparencies. Then the lower windows looked mere cobwebs, in which
sparks and glints of light hung caught like fireflies. It was all a
dream of mist and sparkle, in which the sense of close confinement
seemed dissolving.
But it was not so for the most part. He hated the houses in their
common, hard aspect of nearness and oppression. Only when the rain
fell thickly, spouting from their eaves and gutters, and half hiding
them behind a veil of dropping water, or when the snow, clinging to
their sills and window-frames, seemed to cut them into sugared
sections, could he endure to look on them without impatience. They
were the jealous barriers which imprisoned him from the infinite. Some
boys, so conditioned, would have found their main pathetic interest in
such sights and sounds of outer life as might penetrate to them in
their isolation. It was not so with him. His spirit, like an entombed
flower, yearned always towards the light, stretching pallidly in a
vain passion to attain the blue heaven of health and freedom.
Perhaps, strange little soul, he was happiest in those long moonlit
nights when, the curtains being drawn about the lower casement, he and
his jewelled book of stories in the window were left alone together.
Then he would lie for hours, quite motionless, as if hypnotized, his
eyes fixed on the dimly luminous scroll, dreaming what unearthly
dreams only the painted heads themselves might tell. He liked to hear
the watchman crying out the hours, hollow and mysterious, in the
streets below; he loved to see by day the not unrare vision of a
pigeon pecking and preening on his window-sill, or the shadow of a
hopping sparrow cross the panes. Those were his events, until the harp
came. And then all at once he was transformed. Some long-dumb chord in
his soul leaped and vibrated to the rapture with a force that shook
the life out of him. I think that was the truth. He died to all
intents of joy. The frail frame could not stand the exquisite tension
of the bliss evoked in it.
Now, in the days of that brief friendship, scarce one day passed but
found the boy and man at some time together. There was no more
midnight playing; but Bannister would look in as occasion offered, and
mostly with his instrument accompanying. Then there would be sweet
music a spell, and talk a spell, and perhaps unutterable silences to
link them. Somehow it suggested the soul affinity, formal but
transcendent, between a dying saint and his confessor. There was a
subtle thrill in the atmosphere, of which all were
conscious--Bannister himself, the father, the woman with the hard,
pathetic face, whose eyes were always hidden by her hand when she was
privileged to listen to the music. They felt it like an unseen
presence--a sense of warning, of change, as when one feels spring
moving in the grass under one’s feet. And not one would own to itself
that it knew. Yet they all knew.
Always to the last it was the little white hand in the blue pane which
most fascinated the boy. His wandering fancy would lose itself among
the cluster of leaves, as in an antique forest; would find in the
glowing fruit a very garden of Hesperus, sweet with nightingales and
the warm scent of flowers; would endow with a hundred characters the
faces peering from that arras of bright hues: but it was to the hand
he for ever returned, its beauty, its severed mystery. “I should
dearly like to learn to whom it belonged,” he would say. “But this I
know very well--if I could only reach it, it would help me up and
away. It is the boy Christ’s, I think.”
It was on a dark midsummer morning, chill and stormy, that the end
came. There had been signs, and in their hearts they were prepared.
The father sat by his child’s pillow, holding one of the frail hands
in his, the woman, dry-eyed and silent, busied herself noiselessly
among the shadows; near the foot of the bed sat the musician, his harp
before him, touching little more than a melodious murmur from its
strings. He faced the casement, which, because of the wind, had been
close shut.
Perhaps it was the drugged stillness of the room, the spell wrought
upon his brain by the soft “woven paces” of the chords his fingers
trod; perhaps he really dreamt; but this is what seemed to happen
before his eyes. He was gazing, unconscious that he was gazing, on the
window, when he saw the shadow of a dove moving on the sill outside.
It dipped and strutted, curtseying back and forth, as if restless or
impatient; and as it hurried, now this way now that, of a sudden the
noise of the wind ceased utterly, and a flood of sunlight broke upon
the window. And in that same moment the player noticed a little white
hand at the latch, and the casement swung noiselessly open. There was
a sigh as of wings--within, without--and his fingers stopped on a
broken chord. And as he stared, dazzled, incredulous, he heard a quick
rustle behind him, and a startled cry: “My God! He’s gone!”
He rose, he turned, half stupefied, and saw the father on his feet,
bending with an agonized expression over the face on the pillow. It
was quite still; a ray of sunlight touched it; a smile of the most
rapturous peace was on its lips. In a spasm of emotion he caught the
poor man’s hand in one of his, and with the other pointed mutely to
the open window. The physician, giving vent to his tears, leaned
himself upon his shoulder.
“’Twas thy music,” he said, “broke his prison and freed his soul.”
“’Twas thy unselfish love,” said Bannister, “freed the music.”
The woman, her stern face all softened and agitated, went to close the
casement.
“Nay, dame,” said the father--“let be; he cannot take cold now. To
think he is seeing the blue sky and the white clouds for the first
time!”
And at that she cast herself upon the floor and hid her face. Only the
convulsive heaving of her body witnessed to the breaking of the storm
which had been so long pent up within her. Alas! what unsuspected
woman was revealed here, what passion undercrushed, and what
desolation!
It was remarked that night in Spring Garden that never yet had the
famous harpist so divinely justified his reputation. He played like
one transported, lost to earth. Many of his ravished audience were in
tears, while the very pigeons, petted and fearless, seemed to gather
about his feet. Nay, there was one, it was said, a tender white dove,
that flew to his shoulder and settled there for a while, making love
at his ear. But that may pass for a legend.