“You asked David to bring his fiddle,” said she, sharply, “but I suppose now—”
“Has he brought it?” asked Mr. Fountain, eagerly.
“Yes, he has; I made him” (with a glance of defiance at Talboys).
Mr. Fountain rang the bell directly and sent for the fiddle. It came. David took it and tuned it, and made it discourse. Lucy leaned a little back in her chair, wore her “tout m'est egal face,” and Eve watched her like a cat. First her eyes opened with a mild astonishment, then her lips parted in a smile; after a while a faint color came and went, and her eyes deepened and deepened in color, and glistened with the dewy light of sensibility.
A fiddle wrought this, or rather genius, in whose hand a jews-harp is the lyre of Orpheus, a fiddle the harp of David, a chisel a hewer of heroic forms, a brush or a pen the scepter of souls, and, alas! a nail a picklock.
Inside every fiddle is a soul, but a coy one. The nine hundred and ninety-nine never win it. They play rapid tunes, but the soul of beautiful gayety is not there; slow tunes, very slow ones, wherein the spirit of whining is mighty, but the sweet soul of pathos is absent; doleful, not nice and tearful. Then comes the Heaven-born fiddler,* who can make himself cry with his own fiddle. David had a touch of this witchcraft. Though a sound musician and reasonably master of his instrument, he could not fly in a second up and down it, tickling the fingerboard and scratching the strings without an atom of tone, as the mechanical monkeys do that boobies call fine players.
* This is a definition of the Heaven-born fiddler by Pate
Bailey, a gypsy tinker and celestial violinist. Being asked
for a test of proficiency on that instrument, he replied
that no man is a fiddler “till he can gar himsel greet wi a
feddle.”
“Great Orpheus played so well he moved Old Nick,
But these move nothing but their fiddlestick.” *
* See how unjust satire is! Don't they move their finger-
nails?
But he could make you laugh and crow with his fiddle, and could make you jump up, aetat. 60, and snap your fingers at old age and propriety, and propose a jig to two bishops and one master of the rolls, and, they declining, pity them without a shade of anger, and substitute three chairs; then sit unabashed and smiling at the past; and the next minute he could make you cry, or near it. In a word he could evoke the soul of that wonderful wooden shell, and bid it discourse with the souls and hearts of his hearers.
Meantime Lucy Fountain's face would have interested a subtle student of her sex.
Her sensibility to music was great, and the feeling strains stole into her nature, and stirred the treasures of the deep to the surface. Eve, a keen if not a profound observer, was struck by the rising beauty of this countenance, over which so many moods chased one another. She said to herself: “Well, David is right, after all; she is a lovely girl. Her features are nothing out of the way. Her nose is neither one thing nor the other, but her expression is beautiful. None of your wooden faces for me. And, dear heart, how her neck rises! La! how her color comes and goes! Well, I do love the fiddle myself dearly; and now, if her eyes are not brimming; I could kiss her! La! David,” cried she, bursting the bounds of silence, “that is enough of the tune the old cow died of; take and play something to keep our hearts up—do.”