and him such a broadminded man! He’s the only minister I ever had much use for. He’s God’s own if ever a man was. And he loves you — yes, sir, he loves you like the apple of his eye.”
“And I love him,” said Felix warmly. “I love him so much that I’ll even try to be a minister for his sake, though I don’t want to be.”
“What do you want to be?”
“A great violinist,” answered the child, his ivory-hued face suddenly warming into living rose. “I want to play to thousands — and see their eyes look as yours do when I play. Sometimes your eyes frighten me, but oh, it’s a splendid fright! If I had father’s violin I could do better. I remember that he once said it had a soul that was doing purgatory for its sins when it had lived on earth. I don’t know what he meant, but it did seem to me that HIS violin was alive. He taught me to play on it as soon as I was big enough to hold it.”
“Did you love your father?” asked old Abel, with a keen look.
Again Felix crimsoned; but he looked straightly and steadily into his old friend’s face.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t; but,” he added, gravely and deliberately, “I don’t think you should have asked me such a question.”
It was old Abel’s turn to blush. Carmody people would not have believed he could blush; and perhaps no living being could have called that deepening hue into his weather-beaten cheek save only this grayeyed child of the rebuking face.
“No, I guess I shouldn’t,” he said. “But I’m always making mistakes. I’ve never made anything else. That’s why I’m nothing more than ‘Old Abel’ to the Carmody people. Nobody but you and your grandfather ever calls me ‘Mr. Blair.’ Yet William Blair at the store up there, rich and respected as he is, wasn’t half as clever a man as I was when we started in life: you mayn’t believe that, but it’s true. And the worst of it is, young Felix, that most of the time I don’t care whether I’m Mr. Blair of old Abel. Only when you play I care. It makes me feel just as a look I saw in a little girl’s eyes some years ago made me feel. Her name was Anne Shirley and she lived with the Cuthberts down at Avonlea. We got into a conversation at Blair’s store. She could talk a blue streak to anyone, that girl could. I happened to say about something that it didn’t matter to a battered old hulk of sixty odd like me. She looked at me with her big, innocent eyes, a little reproachful like, as if I’d said something awful heretical. ‘Don’t you think, Mr. Blair,’ she says, ‘that the older we get the more things ought to matter to us?’ — as grave as if she’d been a hundred instead of eleven. ‘Things matter SO much to me now,’ she says, clasping her hands thisaway, ‘and I’m sure that when I’m sixty they’ll matter just five times as much to me.’ Well, the way she looked and the way she spoke made me feel downright ashamed of myself because things had stopped mattering with me. But never mind all that. My miserable old feelings don’t count for much. What come of your father’s fiddle?”
“Grandfather took it away when I came here. I think he burned it. And I long for it so often.”
“Well, you’ve always got my old brown fiddle to come to when you must.”
“Yes, I know. And I’m glad for that. But I’m hungry for a violin all the time. And I only come here when the hunger gets too much to bear. I feel as if I oughtn’t to come even then — I’m always saying I won’t do it again, because I know grandfather wouldn’t like it, if he knew.”
“He has never forbidden it, has he?”
“No, but that is because he doesn’t know I come here for that. He never thinks of such a thing. I feel sure he WOULD forbid it, if he knew. And that makes me very wretched. And yet I HAVE to come. Mr. Blair, do you know why grandfather can’t bear to have me play on the violin? He loves music, and he doesn’t mind my playing on the organ, if I don’t neglect other things. I can’t understand it, can you?”
“I have a pretty good idea, but I can’t tell you. It isn’t my secret. Maybe he’ll tell you himself some day. But, mark you, young Felix, he has got good reasons for it all. Knowing what I know, I can’t blame him over much, though I think he’s mistaken. Come now, play something more for me before you go — something that’s bright and happy this time, so as to leave me with a good taste in my mouth. That last thing you played took me straight to heaven, — but heaven’s awful near to hell, and at the last you tipped me in.”
“I don’t understand you,” said Felix, drawing his fine, narrow black brows together in a perplexed frown.
“No — and I wouldn’t want you to. You couldn’t understand unless you was an old man who had it in him once to do something and be a MAN, and just went and made himself a devilish fool. But there must be something in you that understands things — all kinds of things — or you couldn’t put it all into music the way you do. How do you do it? How in — how DO you do it, young Felix?”
“I don’t know. But I play differently to different people. I don’t know how that is. When I’m alone with you I have to play one way; and when Janet comes over here to listen I feel quite another way — not so thrilling, but happier and lonelier. And that day when Jessie Blair was here listening I felt as if I wanted to laugh and sing — as if the violin wanted to laugh and sing all the time.”
The strange, golden gleam flashed through old Abel’s sunken eyes.
“God,” he muttered under his breath, “I believe the boy can get into other folk’s souls somehow, and play out what HIS soul sees there.”
“What’s that you say?” inquired Felix, petting his fiddle.
“Nothing — never mind — go on. Something lively now, young Felix. Stop probing into my soul, where you haven’t no business to be, you infant, and play me something out of your own — something sweet and happy and pure.”
“I’ll play the way I feel on sunshiny mornings, when the birds are singing and I forget I have to be a minister,” said Felix simply.
A witching, gurgling, mirthful strain, like mingled bird and brook song, floated out on the still air, along the path where the red and golden maple leaves were falling very softly, one by one. The Reverend Stephen Leonard heard it, as he came along the way, and the Reverend Stephen Leonard smiled. Now, when Stephen Leonard smiled, children ran to him, and grown people felt as if they looked from Pisgah over to some fair land of promise beyond the fret and worry of their care-dimmed earthly lives.
Mr. Leonard loved music, as he loved all things beautiful, whether in the material or the spiritual world, though he did not realize how much he loved them for their beauty alone, or he would have been shocked and remorseful. He himself was beautiful. His figure was erect and youthful, despite seventy years. His face was as mobile and charming as a woman’s, yet with all a man’s tried strength and firmness in it, and his dark blue eyes flashed with the brilliance of one and twenty; even his silken silvery hair could not make an old man of him. He was worshipped by everyone who knew him, and he was, in so far as mortal man may be, worthy of that worship.
“Old Abel is amusing himself with his violin again,” he thought. “What a delicious thing he is playing! He has quite a gift for the violin. But how can he play such a thing as that, — a battered old hulk of a man who has, at one time or another, wallowed in almost every sin to which human nature can sink? He was on one of his sprees three days ago — the first one for over a year — lying dead-drunk in the market square in Charlottetown among the dogs; and now he is playing something that only a young archangel on the hills of heaven ought to be able to play. Well, it will make my task all the easier. Abel is always repentant by the time he is able to play on his fiddle.”
Mr. Leonard was on the doorstone. The little black dog had frisked down to meet him, and the gray cat rubbed her head against his leg. Old Abel did not notice him; he was beating time with uplifted hand and smiling face to Felix’s music, and his eyes were young again, glowing with laughter and sheer happiness.
“Felix!