“Ah ha, my fine first tenor!” the juggler said to himself in prideful triumph at the praise of print. “And how about that final phrase of each refrain that you persisted ought to resolve itself into the major, and not the minor chord? Oh, oh! Mightily pleased to stand up before a big crowd and sing it now, for all its faulty harmony!”
But if he had already been gratified, he was shortly delighted. The account digressed to the personal qualities of the deceased, his exceptional popularity, the high esteem in which he was held by his business associates, the great affection which his personal friends entertained for him, the extraordinary versatility of his talents. He was a wonderful athlete for an amateur. (The juggler listened with a critical jealous ear to the detail of certain feats of lifting, walking, and swimming. “I can break that record now,” he muttered.) He was a very acceptable amateur actor. He sang delightfully, and composed charming songs with words of considerable merit; in fact, he had a gift of light, easy versification. He was hospitable and joyous, and fond of entertaining his friends, to whom he was much attached,—the more as he was so alone in the world, having no near kindred since the death of his father. There was no bitterness in his mirth; he laughed with you rather than at you. (“Don’t be too sure of that,” said the juggler, in his sleeve.) He was wonderfully quick in learning, even quick in acquiring any mechanical art that struck his attention. He had really become a skillful prestidigitator (how the juggler blessed the six-pronged unpronounceable word as Euphemia struggled to take hold of it, and finally left it as incomprehensible!): and this came about partly through his extraordinary quickness, and partly because no one could resist his fascinating bonhomie, and many a traveling artist in legerdemain had imparted his professional secrets to him from sheer good will and liking. He was the same to all classes; he had an easy capacity for adapting himself to the company he was in for the time being, as if it were his choice. Many a pleasant haunt of his friends would lack its relish after this, and it would be long before the name or face of Lucien Royce would be forgotten in St. Louis city.
“Well,” mused the juggler, with a sigh, as the reading concluded, “it’s worth dying once in a while, to get a send-off like that.”
“Pore young man!” ejaculated Mrs. Sims, looking up with a sigh too, the relief from the long tension, her big creased solemn face bereft of every dimple.
The juggler caught himself hastily. “The paper doesn’t say what Sabbath-school he was a member of,” he observed, with mock seriousness.
“That’s a fac’,” returned Euphemia, unfolding the upper part of the journal to reperuse with a searching eye the portion relating to biographical detail. After an interval of vain scrutiny she remarked, “Nor it don’t say nuther whether he war a member o’ the Hard-Shell Baptis’ or Missionary or Methody.”
“He mought be a sinner, an’ the paper don’t like ter say it, him bein’ dead,” wheezed Mrs. Sims lugubriously, intuitively seizing upon a salient point of polite modern journalism. The anxious speculation in her fat overclouded countenance was painful to see, for Mrs. Sims believed in a material hell with a plenitude of brimstone and blue blazes.
“I dare say he was a sinner!” exclaimed the juggler, with his manner of half-mocking banter. “Poor Lucien Royce!”
Only late that night, when all the house was still, and darkness was among the sombre mountains, and the absolute negation of vision seemed to nullify all the world, did his mood change. He lay staring with unseeing eyes into the void gloom about him, yet beholding with a faculty more potent than sight the decorated chancel, the clergyman in his surplice, the crowds of sympathetic faces, the casket with the funeral wreaths covering it,—the hideous mockery that it all was, the terrible hoax!