II
Rouen lay below him, a violet haze obscuring all but the pinnacles of its churches. The sinking sun had no longer power to pierce this misty gulf, at the bottom of which hummed the busy city; but Ferval saw through rents in the twirling, heat-laden atmosphere the dim shapes of bridges mirrored by the water beneath him; and once the two islands apparently swept toward him, a blur of green; while at the end of the valley, framed by hills, he seemed to discern the odd-looking Transbordeur spanning the Seine.
For twenty-four hours he had not ceased thinking of the girl with the tambourine, of her savage, sullen grace, her magnificent poise and strange glance. He had learned at his hotel that she was called "Debora la folle," and that she was the daughter of the still crazier Baki. Was she some sort of a gypsy, or a Continental version of Salvation Army lass? No one knew. Each year, at the beginning of autumn, the pair wandered into Rouen, remained a few weeks, and disappeared. Where? Paris, perhaps, or Italy or—là bas! The shoulder-shrugging proved that Baki and his daughter were not highly regarded by reputable citizens of Rouen, though the street people followed their music and singing as long as it lasted. Singing? queried Ferval; does the woman sing?
He became more interested. His visits to the country where Pissarro painted and Flaubert wrote revealed other possibilities besides those purely artistic ones in which this amateur of fine shades and sensations delighted. He did not deny, on the esplanade where behind him stood Bonsecours and the monument of Jeanne d'Arc, that souvenirs of the girl had kept his eyelids from closing during the major portion of the night. To cool his brain after the midday breakfast he had climbed the white, dusty, and winding road leading to the Monumental Cemetery wherein, true Flaubertian, he had remained some moments uncovered at the tomb of the master. Now he rested, and the shade of the trees mellowed the slow dusk of a Rouen evening.
A deep contralto voice boomed in his ears. As he had seen but a scant half-dozen persons during the afternoon on the heights, Ferval was startled from his dreams. He turned. Sitting on a bank of green was the girl. Her hands were clasped and she spoke carelessly to her father, who, unharnessed from his orchestra, appeared another man. Rapidly Ferval observed his striking front, his massive head with the long, white curls, the head of an Elijah disillusioned of his mission. He, too, was sitting, but upright, and his arm was raised with a threatening gesture as if in his desolating anger he were about to pronounce a malediction upon the vanishing twilighted town. Ferval moved immediately, as he did not care to be caught spying upon his queer neighbours. He was halted by their speech. It was English. His surprise was so unaffected that he turned back and went up to the two and bade them good-day. At once he saw that the girl recognized him; the father dropped his air of grandeur and put on the beggar's mask. What an actor! thought Ferval, at the transformation. "Would the good gentleman please—?"
The girl plucked at her father's arm imploringly. With her grave, cold expression she answered the other's salutation and fixed him with her wonderful eyes so inquiringly that Ferval began a hasty explanation. "English was rarely spoken here ... and then the pleasure of the music!" The old man burst into scornful laughter.
"The music!" he exclaimed. "The music!" echoed his daughter. Ferval wished himself down in Rouen. But he held his position.
"Yes," he continued, "your music. It interested me. And now I find you speaking my own tongue. I must confess that I am curious, that my curiosity has warrant." Thus was he talking to beggars as if they were his social equals. Unconsciously the tone he adopted had been forced upon him by the bearing of his companions, above all by their accent, that of cultivated folk. Who and what were they? The musician no longer smiled.
"You are a music-lover, monsieur?" he asked in a marked French patois.
"I love music, and I am extremely engaged by your remarkable combination of instruments," answered Ferval. Baki regarded his wretched orchestra on the grass, then spoke to his daughter.
"Debora," he said in English, and his listener wondered if it were Celtic or Scotch in its unusual intonations, "Debora, you must sing something for the gentleman. He loves our art,"—there was indescribable pathos in this phrase,—"so sing something from Purcell, Brahms, or Richard Strauss."
These words were like the sting of hail; they seemed to drop from the sky, so out of key were they with the speaker's ragged clothes and the outlandish garb of his daughter. Purcell! Brahms! Strauss! What could these three composers mean to such outcasts? Believing that he was the victim of a mystification, Ferval waited, his pulses beating as if he had been running too hard. The girl slowly moved her glorious eyes in his direction; light as they were in hue, their heavy, dark lashes gave them a fantastic expression—bright flame seen through the shadow of smoke. He felt his own dilating as she opened her throat and poured out a broad, sonorous stream of sound that resolved into Von ewiger Liebe by Brahms. He had always loved deep-voiced women. Had he not read in the Talmud that Lilith, Adam's first wife, was low of voice? And this beggar-maid? Maybe a masquerading singer with a crazy father! What else could mean such art wasted on the roads, thrown in the faces of a rabble! Ferval kindled with emotion. Here was romance. Brahms and his dark song under the bowl of the troubled blue sky strongly affected him. He took the lean, brown hand of the singer and kissed it fervently. She drew back nervously, but her father struck her on the shoulder chidingly.
"A trifle too dreary," he rumbled in his heavy bass. "Now, Purcell for the gentleman, and may he open his heart and his purse for the poor."
"Father," she cried warningly, "we are not beggars, now!" She turned supplicatingly to the young man and made a gesture of dismissal. He gently shook his head and pretended that he was about to leave, though he felt that his feet were rooted in the earth, his power of willing gone.
"Ay, ay, my girl!" continued the musician, "you can sing as well as the best of them, only you love your sinful old father so much that you have laid aside your ambitions, to follow him in his pilgrimage of expiation about this wicked globe. Ah, sir, if you but knew—I will speak, Debora, for he is a gentleman and a lover of music! If you but knew our history, you would not be surprised at us. Have ye ever been in Wales?"
Ferval stumbled in his answer. It was overlooked; the old man continued: "If ye have, ye must have heard of the sin-eaters. I am one of them, I am an eater of sin—"
Again the girl exclaimed, this time piteously, "Oh, father, remember your vow!"
"Poor lass! Yes, I was a doer of evil, and I became an eater of sin. Some day my sins will be forgiven—this is my penance." He pointed to his instruments. Ferval kept silence. He feared a word would blow away the cobweb foundations of the narrative. The girl had turned and was watching a young tilted moon which with a single star made silvery dents low in the western horizon.
"I am an eater of sin. We still have a few such in Wales. They put a piece of bread and cheese on the breast of a dead man and when the sin-eater eats it, the sins of the dead are passed into the bread and cheese and the soul of the dead is shrived of them. Ay, ay, but it's a grave duty, my friend, to take upon your own soul the crime of another. If you are free from sin yourself, you may walk through life a brave creature; but ... I took his sins, sins, the sins of the wickedest composer of our century, God rest his soul. And for the wicked things he put into his symphonies I must march through life playing on this terrible collection of instruments the Tune of Time—" His daughter faced him.
"Father, we must go; you are only keeping the gentleman." Again she signalled Ferval, but he disregarded her warning. He would not stir. The story and the man who told it, a prophet shorn of his heaven-storming powers, fascinated him.
"I took his sins to myself and they were awful. Once every night I play the Tune of Time in which the wickedness of the dead man is spread out like dry rot in a green field. This man kept his genius so long stagnant that it decayed on his hands, and then into his pestilential music he poured his poison, and would have made the world sick. Oh, for delivery from the crushing transgressions of another! His name? Ah, but that is my secret! I ate his sin, and truth, my son, is stranger than theology! Listen!"
Before his daughter could check him he had hastily donned his armament of instruments and, tramping slowly the broad, smooth path, began playing. Ferval, much disappointed, was about to disappear, for he remembered the racking noises of the previous day. But this music, this Tune of Time!...