The Mystery of the Locks

by E. W. Howe

They were standing close together on the little platform in front of the organ, and the girl leaned against him in such a manner that he put his left arm around her shoulders to support her. Her head rested on his arm, and she was looking full into his face. The excitement under which she seemed to labor lent such a charm to her face that Allan Dorris thought that surely it must be the handsomest in the world.

"Kiss me," she said suddenly.

The suggestion frightened the great brawny fellow, who might have picked up his companion and ran away with her without the slightest inconvenience; for he looked around the room in alarm.

"I don't know whether I will or not," he replied, looking steadily at her. "Were you ever kissed before?"

"By my father; by no one else."

"Then I think I will refuse," he said, "though I would give twenty years of my life to grant your request. What a request it is! It appeals to me with such force that I feel a weakness in my eyes because of the warmth in my heart, and the hot blood never ran races through my veins before as it is doing now. You have complete possession of my heart, and I am a better man than I was before, for you are pure and good; if I have a soul, it has forgotten its immortality in loving this earthy being in my arms. But it is the proudest boast of a loyal wife that no lips save those of her husband ever touched hers, and my regard for you is such that I do not wish to detract from the peace of your future. If I have made an idol of you, let me go away without discovering my mistake; grant me the privilege of remembering you as the realization of all my dreaming. In a year from now you will only remember me to thank me for this refusal of your request."

"In a year from now I will feel just as I do now. I will never change. I will have only this to remember you by, and my acquaintance with you has been the only event in my life worth remembering. Please kiss me."

He hurriedly pressed her lips to his own, and looked around as though he half expected to be struck dead for the sacrilege, but nothing serious resulted, and the girl continued to talk without changing her position.

"I have never regretted the restraint which is expected of women until I knew you, for why should I not express my preferences as well as you? In my lonely, dreamy childhood, I had few acquaintances and fewer friends, and you have supplied a want which I hardly knew existed before. Ever since I can remember, I have longed so much to know the people in the great world from which you came that I accepted you as a messenger from them, and you interested and pleased me even more than I expected. My life has always been lonely, though not unhappy, and the people I read of in books I accepted as the people who lived outside of Davy's Bend, in the cities by the lakes and seas, where there is culture as well as plenty. I have been familiar with their songs, and played them on the organ when I should have been practising; everything I have read of them I have put to music, and played it over and over. Once I read of a great man who died, and who was buried from a church filled with distinguished mourners. The paper said that when the people were all in their seats, the voice of a great singer broke the stillness, in a song of hope, and I have imitated the voice on the organ, and imagined that I was playing a requiem over distinguished dust; but in future I shall think only of you when I play the funeral march. Since I have known you, I have thought of little else, and I shall mourn your departure as though you had always been a part of me. If I dared, I would ask you on my knees to remain."

"I have heard you play the songs to which you refer," Dorris replied musingly, "and I have thought that you played them with so much expression that, could their authors have listened to the performance, they would have discovered new beauties in them. I never knew a player before who could render the words of a song as well as the music. You do it, and with so much genius that I wonder that you have nothing but the cold, passionless notes to guide you. One dark afternoon you played 'I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls,' and a savage could have told what the words were. The entire strength of the organ seemed to be united in the mournful air, and the timid accompaniment was peopled with the other characters in the play from which the song is taken. That represented you; but you have had me before the organ, telling all I knew, a hundred times. Although you have refused to hear my story, you seem to know it; for you have told it on the organ as many times as I have thought of it."