"Oh, that was Miss Benette's mamma?"
"Yes, her lovely mamma."
"Of course she was lovely. If you please, sir, tell me about her too." But Davy reserved his tale until we were at home.
My mother fully expected him, it was evident; for upon the table, besides the plain but perfectly ordered meal we always enjoyed at about nine o'clock, stood the supernumerary illustrations—in honor of a guest—of boiled custards, puff pastry, and our choicest preserves. My mother, too, was sitting by the fire in a species of state, having her hands void of occupation and her pocket-handkerchief outspread. Millicent and Lydia wore their dahlia-colored poplin frocks,—quite a Sunday costume,—and Clo revealed herself in purple silk, singularly adapted for evening wear, as it looked black by candle-light!
I never sat up to supper except on very select occasions. I knew this would be one, without being told so, and secured the next chair to my darling friend's.
I would that I could recall, in his own expressive language, his exact relation of his own history as told to us that night. It struck us that he should so earnestly acquaint us with every incident,—at least, it surprised us then, but his after connection with ourselves explained it in that future.
No fiction could be more fraught with fascinating personality than his actual life. I pass over his birth in England (and in London), in a dark room over a dull book-shop, in his father's house. That father, from pure breeding and constitutional exclusiveness, had avoided all intercourse with his class, and conserved his social caste by his marriage only. I linger not upon his remembrance of his mother, Sybilla Lenhart,—herself a Jewess, with the most exquisite musical ability,—nor upon her death in her only son's tenth year.
His father's pining melancholy meantime deepened into an abstraction of misery on her loss. The world and its claims lost their hold, and he died insolvent when Lenhart was scarcely twelve.
Then came his relation of romantic wanderings in Southern France and Germany, like a troubadour, or minnesinger, with guitar and song; of his accidental friendships and fancy fraternities, till he became choir-alto at a Lutheran church in the heart of the Eichen-Land. Then came the story of his attachment to the young, sage organist of that very church, who, in a fairy-like adventure, had married a count's youngest daughter, and never dared to disclose his alliance; of her secret existence with him in the topmost room of an old house, where she never dared to look out of the window to the street for fear she should be discovered and carried back,—the etiquette requisite to cover such an abduction being quite alien from my comprehension, by the way, but so Davy assured us she found it necessary to abide; of their one beautiful infant born in the old house, and the curious saintly carving about its wooden cradle; of the young mother, too hastily weaned from luxurious calm to the struggling dream of poverty, or at least uncertain thrift; of her fading, falling into a stealthy sickness, and of the night she lay (a Sunday night) and heard the organ strains swell up and melt into the moonlight from her husband's hand; of Lenhart Davy's presence with her alone that night, unknowing, until the music-peal was over, that her soul had passed to heaven, as it were, in that cloud of music.
But I must just observe that Davy made as light as possible of his own pure and characteristic decision, developed even in boyhood. He passed over, almost without comment, the more than elder brotherly care he must have bestowed on the beautiful infant, and dwelt, as if to divert us from that point, upon the woful cares that had pressed upon his poor friend,—upon his own trouble when the young organist himself, displaced by weakness from his position, made his own end, even as Lenhart's father, an end of sorrow and of love.