and I have left pride and resentment behind me for ever, I hope. I no longer feel as I felt towards Andrew. I can even accept a personal favour from him now. At last I can forgive him for the wrong he did me and mine. Sylvia, I find that I have been letting no ends of cats out of bags in my illness. Everybody knows now how poor I am — but I don’t seem to mind it a bit. I’m only sorry that I ever shut my neighbours out of my life because of my foolish pride. Everyone has been so kind to me, Sylvia. In the future, if my life is spared, it is going to be a very different sort of life. I’m going to open it to all the kindness and companionship I can find in young and old. I’m going to help them all I can and let them help me. I CAN help people — I’ve learned that money isn’t the only power for helping people. Anyone who has sympathy and understanding to give has a treasure that is without money and without price. And oh, Sylvia, you’ve found out what I never meant you to know. But I don’t mind that now, either.”
Sylvia took the Old Lady’s thin white hand and kissed it.
“I can never thank you enough for what you have done for me, dearest Miss Lloyd,” she said earnestly. “And I am so glad that all mystery is done away with between us, and I can love you as much and as openly as I have longed to do. I am so glad and so thankful that you love me, dear fairy godmother.”
“Do you know WHY I love you so?” said the Old Lady wistfully. “Did I let THAT out in my raving, too?”
“No, but I think I know. It is because I am Leslie Gray’s daughter, isn’t it? I know that father loved you — his brother, Uncle Willis, told me all about it.”
“I spoiled my own life because of my wicked pride,” said the Old Lady sadly. “But you will love me in spite of it all, won’t you, Sylvia? And you will come to see me sometimes? And write me after you go away?”
“I am coming to see you every day,” said Sylvia. “I am going to stay in Spencervale for a whole year yet, just to be near you. And next year when I go to Europe — thanks to you, fairy godmother — I’ll write you every day. We are going to be the best of chums, and we are going to have a most beautiful year of comradeship!”
The Old Lady smiled contentedly. Out in the kitchen, the minister’s wife, who had brought up a dish of jelly, was talking to Mrs. Spencer about the Sewing Circle. Through the open window, where the red vines hung, came the pungent, sunwarm October air. The sunshine fell over Sylvia’s chestnut hair like a crown of glory and youth.
“I do feel so perfectly happy,” said the Old Lady, with a long, rapturous breath.
Each In His Own Tongue
The honey-tinted autumn sunshine was falling thickly over the crimson and amber maples around old Abel Blair’s door. There was only one outer door in old Abel’s house, and it almost always stood wide open. A little black dog, with one ear missing and a lame forepaw, almost always slept on the worn red sandstone slab which served old Abel for a doorstep; and on the still more worn sill above it a large gray cat almost always slept. Just inside the door, on a bandy-legged chair of elder days, old Abel almost always sat.
He was sitting there this afternoon — a little old man, sadly twisted with rheumatism; his head was abnormally large, thatched with long, wiry black hair; his face was heavily lined and swarthily sunburned; his eyes were deep-set and black, with occasional peculiar golden flashes in them. A strange looking man was old Abel Blair; and as strange was he as he looked. Lower Carmody people would have told you.
Old Abel was almost always sober in these, his later years. He was sober to-day. He liked to bask in that ripe sunlight as well as his dog and cat did; and in such baskings he almost always looked out of his doorway at the far, fine blue sky over the tops of the crowding maples. But to-day he was not looking at the sky, instead, he was staring at the black, dusty rafters of his kitchen, where hung dried meats and strings of onions and bunches of herbs and fishing tackle and guns and skins.
But old Abel saw not these things; his face was the face of a man who beholds visions, compact of heavenly pleasure and hellish pain, for old Abel was seeing what he might have been — and what he was; as he always saw when Felix Moore played to him on the violin. And the awful joy of dreaming that he was young again, with unspoiled life before him, was so great and compelling that it counterbalanced the agony in the realization of a dishonoured old age, following years in which he had squandered the wealth of his soul in ways where Wisdom lifted not her voice.
Felix Moore was standing opposite to him, before an untidy stove, where the noon fire had died down into pallid, scattered ashes. Under his chin he held old Abel’s brown, battered fiddle; his eyes, too, were fixed on the ceiling; and he, too, saw things not lawful to be uttered in any language save that of music; and of all music, only that given forth by the anguished, enraptured spirit of the violin. And yet this Felix was little more than twelve years old, and his face was still the face of a child who knows nothing of either sorrow or sin or failure or remorse. Only in his large, gray-black eyes was there something not of the child — something that spoke of an inheritance from many hearts, now ashes, which had aforetime grieved and joyed, and struggled and failed, and succeeded and grovelled. The inarticulate cries of their longings had passed into this child’s soul, and transmuted themselves into the expression of his music.
Felix was a beautiful child. Carmody people, who stayed at home, thought so; and old Abel Blair, who had roamed afar in many lands, thought so; and even the Rev. Stephen Leonard, who taught, and tried to believe, that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain, thought so.
He was a slight lad, with sloping shoulders, a slim brown neck, and a head set on it with stag-like grace and uplift. His hair, cut straight across his brow and falling over his ears, after some caprice of Janet Andrews, the minister’s housekeeper, was a glossy blue-black. The skin of his face and hands was like ivory; his eyes were large and beautifully tinted — gray, with dilating pupils; his features had the outlines of a cameo. Carmody mothers considered him delicate, and had long foretold that the minister would never bring him up; but old Abel pulled his grizzled moustache when he heard such forebodings and smiled.
“Felix Moore will live,” he said positively. “You can’t kill that kind until their work is done. He’s got a work to do — if the minister’ll let him do it. And if the minister don’t let him do it, then I wouldn’t be in that minister’s shoes when he comes to the judgment — no, I’d rather be in my own. It’s an awful thing to cross the purposes of the Almighty, either in your own life or anybody else’s. Sometimes I think it’s what’s meant by the unpardonable sin — ay, that I do!”
Carmody people never asked what old Abel meant. They had long ago given up such vain questioning. When a man had lived as old Abel had lived for the greater part of his life, was it any wonder he said crazy things? And as for hinting that Mr. Leonard, a man who was really almost too good to live, was guilty of any sin, much less an unpardonable one — well, there now! what use was it to be taking any account of old Abel’s queer speeches? Though, to be sure, there was no great harm in a fiddle, and maybe Mr. Leonard was a mite too strict that way with the child. But then, could you wonder at it? There was his father, you see.
Felix finally lowered the violin, and came back to old Abel’s kitchen with a long sigh. Old Abel smiled drearily at him — the smile of a man who has been in the hands of the tormentors.
“It’s awful the way you play — it’s awful,” he said with a shudder. “I never heard anything like it — and you that never had any teaching since you were nine years old, and not much practice, except what you could get here now and then on my old, battered fiddle. And to think you make it up yourself as you go along! I suppose your grandfather would never hear to your studying music — would he now?”
Felix shook his head.
“I know he wouldn’t, Abel. He wants me to be a minister. Ministers are good things to be, but I’m afraid I can’t be a minister.”