CHAPTER IX.
All the way across to St Thomas, endless speculations as to the meaning of the two mysterious telegrams afforded the three passengers chiefly concerned an unusual fund of conversation and plot-interest for an entire voyage. Still, after a while the subject palled a little; and on the second evening out, in calm and beautiful summer twilight weather, they were all sitting in their own folding-chairs on the after-deck, positively free from any doubts or guesses upon the important question, and solely engaged in making the acquaintance of their fellow-passengers. By-and-by, as the shades began to close in, there was a little sound of persuasive language—as when one asks a young lady to sing—at the stern end of the swiftly moving vessel; and then, in a few minutes, somebody in the dusk took a small violin out of a wooden case and began to play a piece of Spohr’s. The ladies turned around their chairs to face the musician, and listened carelessly as he went through the preliminary scraping and twanging which seems to be inseparable from the very nature of the violin as an instrument. Presently, having tightened the pegs to his own perfect satisfaction, the player began to draw his bow rapidly and surely across the strings with the unerring confidence of a practised performer. In two minutes, the hum of conversation had ceased on deck, and all the little world of the Severn was bending forward its head eagerly to catch the liquid notes that floated with such delicious clearness upon the quiet breathless evening air. Instinctively everybody recognised at once the obvious fact that the man in the stern to whom they were all listening was an accomplished and admirable violin-player.
Just at first, the thing that Marian and Nora noticed most in the stranger’s playing was his extraordinary brilliancy and certainty of execution. He was a perfect master of the technique of his instrument, that was evident. But after a few minutes more, they began to perceive that he was something much more than merely that; he played not only with consummate skill, but also with infinite grace, insight, and tenderness. As they listened, they could feel the man outpouring his whole soul in the exquisite modulations of his passionate music: it was not any cold, well-drilled, mechanical accuracy of touch alone; it was the loving hand of a born musician, wholly in harmony with the master he interpreted, the work he realised, and the strings on which he gave it vocal utterance. As he finished the piece, Edward whispered in a hushed voice to Nora: ‘He plays beautifully.’ And Nora answered, with a sudden burst of womanly enthusiasm: ‘More than beautifully—exquisitely, divinely.’
‘You’ll sing us something, won’t you?’—‘Oh, do sing us something!’—‘Monsieur will not refuse us!’—‘Ah, señor, it is such a great pleasure.’ So a little babel of two or three languages urged at once upon the unknown figure silhouetted dark at the stern of the steamer against the paling sunset; and after a short pause, the unknown figure complied graciously, bowing its acknowledgments to the surrounding company, and burst out into a song in a glorious rich tenor voice, almost the finest Nora and Marian had ever listened to.
‘English!’ Nora whispered in a soft tone, as the first few words fell upon their ears distinctly, uttered without any mouthing in a plain unmistakable native tone. ‘I’m quite surprised at it! I made up my mind, from the intense sort of way he played the violin, that he must be a Spaniard or an Italian, or at least a South American. English people seldom play with all that depth and earnestness and fervour.’
‘Hush, hush!’ Marian answered under her breath. ‘Don’t talk while he’s singing, please, Nora—it’s too delicious.’
They listened till the song was quite finished, and the last echo of that magnificent voice had died away upon the surface of the still, moonlit waters; and then Nora said eagerly to Edward: ‘Oh, do find out who he is, Mr Hawthorn! Do go and get to know him! I want so to be introduced to him! What a glorious singer! and what a splendid violinist! I never in my life heard anything lovelier, even at the opera.’
Edward smiled, and dived at once into the little crowd at the end of the quarter-deck, in search of the unknown and nameless musician. Nora waited impatiently in her seat to see who the mysterious personage could be. In a few seconds, Edward came back again, bringing with him the admired performer. ‘Miss Dupuy was so very anxious to make your acquaintance,’ he said, as he drew the supposed stranger forward, ‘on the strength of your beautiful playing and singing.—You see, Miss Dupuy, it’s a fellow-passenger to whom we’ve already introduced ourselves—Dr Whitaker!’
Nora drew back almost imperceptibly at this sudden revelation. In the dusk and from a little distance, she had not recognised their acquaintance of yesterday. But it was indeed the mulatto doctor. However, now she was fairly trapped; and having thus let herself in for the young man’s society for that particular evening, she had good sense and good feeling enough not to let him see, at least too obtrusively, that she did not desire the pleasure of his further acquaintance. To be sure, she spoke as little and as coldly as she could to him, in such ordinary phrases of polite admiration as she felt were called for under these painful circumstances; but she tried to temper her enthusiasm down to the proper point of chilliness for a clever and well-taught mulatto fiddler.—He had been a ‘marvellous violinist’ in her own mind five minutes before; but as he turned out to be of brown blood, she felt now that ‘clever fiddler’ was quite good enough for the altered occasion.
Dr Whitaker, however, remained in happy unconsciousness of Nora’s sudden change of attitude. He drew over a camp-stool from near the gunwale and seated himself upon it just in front of the little group in their folding ship-chairs. ‘I’m so glad you liked my playing, Miss Dupuy,’ he said quietly, turning towards Nora. ‘Music always sounds at its best on the water in the evening. And that’s such a lovely piece—my pet piece—so much feeling and pathos and delicate melody in it. Not like most of Spohr: a very unusual work for him; he’s so often wanting, you know, in the sense of melody.’
‘You play charmingly,’ Nora answered, in a languid chilly voice. ‘Your song and your playing have given us a great treat, I’m sure, Dr Whitaker.’
‘Where have you studied?’ Marian asked hastily, feeling that Nora was not showing so deep an interest in the subject as was naturally expected of her. ‘Have you taken lessons in Germany or Italy?’
‘A few,’ the mulatto doctor replied with a little sigh, ‘though not so many as I could have wished. My great ambition would have been to study regularly at the Conservatoire. But I never could gratify my wish in that respect, and I learned most of my fiddling by myself at Edinburgh.’
‘You’re an Edinburgh University man, I suppose?’ Edward put in.
‘Yes, an Edinburgh University man. The medical course there, you know, attracts so many men who would like better, in other respects, to go to one of the English universities.—You’re Cambridge yourself, I think, Mr Hawthorn, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, Cambridge.’
The mulatto sighed again. ‘A lovely place!’ he said—‘a most delicious place, Cambridge. I spent a charming week there once myself. The calm repose of those grand old avenues behind John’s and Trinity delighted me immensely.—A place to sit in and compose symphonies, Mrs Hawthorn. Nothing that I’ve seen in England so greatly impressed me with the idea of the grand antiquity of the country—the vast historical background of civilisation, century behind century, and generation behind generation—as that beautiful mingled picture of venerable elms, and mouldering architecture, and close-cropped greensward at the backs of the colleges. The very grass had a wonderful look of antique culture. I asked the gardener in one of the courts of Trinity how they ever got such velvety carpets for their smooth quadrangles, and the answer the fellow gave me was itself redolent of the traditions of the place. “We rolls ’em and mows ’em, sir,” he said, “and we mows ’em and rolls ’em, for a thousand years.”’
‘What a pity you couldn’t have stopped there and composed symphonies, as you liked it so much,’ Nora remarked, with hardly concealed sarcasm—‘only then, of course, we shouldn’t have had the pleasure of hearing you play your violin so beautifully on the Severn this evening.’
Dr Whitaker looked up at her quickly with a piercing look. ‘Yes,’ he replied; ‘it is a pity, for I should have dearly loved it. I’m bound up in music, almost; it’s one of my two great passions. But I had more than one reason for feeling that I ought, if possible, to go back to Trinidad. The first is, that I think every West Indian, and especially every man of my colour’—he said it out quite naturally, simply, and unaffectedly, without pausing or hesitating—‘who has been to Europe for his education, owes it to his country to come back again, and do his best in raising its social, intellectual, and artistic level.’
‘I’m very glad to hear you say so,’ Edward replied. ‘I think so myself too, and I’m pleased to find you agree with me in the matter.—And your second reason?’
‘Well, I thought my colour might stand in my way in practice in England—very naturally, I’m not surprised at it; while in Trinidad I might be able to do a great deal of good and find a great many patients amongst my own people.’
‘But I’m afraid they won’t be able to pay you, you know,’ Nora interposed. ‘The poor black people always expect to be doctored for nothing.’
Dr Whitaker turned upon her a puzzled pair of simple, honest, open eyes, whose curious glance of mute inquiry could be easily observed even in the dim moonlight. ‘I don’t think of practising for money,’ he said simply, as if it were the most ordinary statement in the world. ‘My father has happily means enough to enable me to live without the necessity for earning a livelihood. I want to be of some use in my generation, and to help my own people, if possible, to rise a little in the scale of humanity. I shall practise gratuitously among the poorest negroes, and do what I can to raise and better their unhappy condition.’