“I was listening, I was watching!” he whispered hoarsely. “Shall I curse you or love you!” And then he fell upon his knees, pawing and mumbling the sensitive hands. “No, no,” he gasped in a broken voice; “be you his true physician—not like this empty charlatan, who, for all his pretended knowledge, hath never learned the magic that one touch of thy hands can dispense.”
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!”