Her husband had risen, the glow of his pipe fading in his unheeding hand, his excited eyes fixed upon her. "Laurely," he exclaimed, "ye ain't meanin' ez that thar leetle critter could play a chune fust off on a fiddle 'thout no larnin'!"
She nodded her head in reluctant admission.
He opened his mouth once or twice, emitting no sound. She saw how his elation, his spirit of commendation, his pride, set at naught her displeasure, albeit in self-defence, perchance, he dared not say a word. With an eye alight and an absorbed face, he laid his pipe on the mantel-piece, and silently took his way out of the house in search of the youthful musician.
Easily found! The racked and tortured echoes were all aquake within half a mile of the spot where, bareheaded, heedless of the threatened ignominy alike of sun-bonnet or nightcap, Leander sat in the flickering sunshine and shadow upon a rock beside the spring, and blissfully experimented with all the capacities of catgut to produce sound.
"Listen, Neighbor!" he cried out, descrying Tyler Sudley, who, indeed, could do naught else—"listen! Ye won't hear much better fiddlin' this side o' kingdom come!" And with glad assurance he capered up and down, the bow elongating the sound to a cadence of frenzied glee, as his arms sought to accommodate the nimbler motions of his legs.
Thus it was the mountaineers later said that Leander fell into bad company. For, the fiddle being forbidden in the sober Laurelia's house, he must needs go elsewhere to show his gift and his growing skill, and he found a welcome fast enough. Before he had advanced beyond his stripling youth, his untutored facility had gained a rude mastery over the instrument; he played with a sort of fascination and spontaneity that endeared his art to his uncritical audiences, and his endowment was held as something wonderful. And now it was that Laurelia, hearing him, far away in the open air, play once a plaintive, melodic strain, fugue-like with the elfin echoes, felt a strange soothing in the sound, found tears in her eyes, not all of pain but of sad pleasure, and assumed thenceforth something of the port of a connoisseur. She said she "couldn't abide a fiddle jes sawed helter-skelter by them ez hedn't larned, but ter play saaft an' slow an' solemn, and no dancin' chune, no frolic song—she warn't set agin that at all." And she desired of Leander a repetition of this sunset motive that evening when he had come home late, and she discovered him hiding the obnoxious instrument under the porch. But in vain. He did not remember it. It was some vague impulse, as unconsciously voiced as the dreaming bird's song in the sudden half-awake intervals of the night. Over and again, as he stood by the porch, the violin in his arms, he touched the strings tentatively, as if, perchance, being so alive, they might of their own motion recall the strain that had so lately thrilled along them.
He had grown tall and slender. He wore boots to his knees now, and pridefully carried a "shootin'-iron" in one of the long legs—to his great discomfort. The freckles of his early days were merged into the warm uniform tint of his tanned complexion. His brown hair still curled; his shirt-collar fell away from his throat, round and full and white—the singer's throat—as he threw his head backward and cast his large roving eyes searchingly along the sky, as if the missing strain had wings.
The inspiration returned no more, and Laurelia experienced a sense of loss. "Some time, Lee-yander, ef ye war ter kem acrost that chune agin, try ter set it in yer remembrance, an' play it whenst ye kem home," she said, wistfully, at last, as if this errant melody were afloat somewhere in the vague realms of sound, where one native to those haunts might hope to encounter it anew.
"Yes, ma'am, cap'n, I will," he said, with his facile assent. But his tone expressed slight intention, and his indifference bespoke a too great wealth of "chunes"; he could feel no lack in some unremembered combination, sport of the moment, when another strain would come at will, as sweet perchance, and new.
She winced as from undeserved reproach when presently Leander's proclivities for the society of the gay young blades about the countryside, sometimes reputed "evil men," were attributed to this exile of the violin from the hearth-stone. She roused herself to disputation, to indignant repudiation.