CHAPTER IX
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.