Fanny's First Novel

by Frank Frankfort Moore

“I wonder that a man of so sensitive a mind as his did not so brood over his crime as to cause suspicion to fall on him earlier than it did.”

“Only upon one occasion it seemed that he was affected by an incident which might possibly have awakened some suspicion in the mind of a person given to suspicion,” said Dr. Burney.

“James had been presented with a copy of the translation of Gessner's 'Death of Abel'—everyone was going mad about the book that year—more copies were sold of it than of any translation since Pope's 'Homer,' but I fancy James found it dull enough reading. He had it on his knee trying to get through a page or two in case the kind donor might question him upon it, when the usher came up. He took the volume in his hand and glanced at the title. Down the book fell from his grasp and he hurried away without a word—'as if he had been stung,' James said, in telling us about it, to excuse the broken cover. Of course, I never gave a thought to the matter at the time; but when I heard of the arrest of Eugene Aram the following year, I recalled the incident.”

“I should like to make a picture of the scene, and name it 'Remorse,'” said Reynolds.

(He never did make such a picture; many years had passed, and Lieutenant Burney had become an Admiral before his narration of the incident touched the imagination of a poet who dealt with it in verse that has thrilled a good many readers.)

Thomas Barlowe was not greatly thrilled by the story as told by Dr. Burney. He seemed rather shocked to find himself at the table with someone who had been taught by a murderer. He glanced furtively at James Burney, who had remained silent since the contretemps that had prevented him from perfecting his fooling of Thomas; and the result of Thomas's scrutiny at that moment was to cause Thomas a tremor; for who could say what fearful knowledge Lieutenant Burney might have acquired during his intercourse with the murderer—knowledge which might jeopardize the safety of a simple visitor like himself? Thomas felt that no ordinary person could be accounted absolutely safe in a company that included a tall, able-bodied young naval man who had begun his education under a murderer and had gone to complete it among the cannibals of the South Seas; and, in addition, an elderly gentleman who fancied that he could bring any sound out of a trumpet by pressing it to his ear instead of his lips, and had shown himself ready to extol the scholarship of any man who had been hanged.

But then Thomas looked at Fanny, and she pleased him more than ever. She was so demure, so modest, so shy. She had a very pretty blush, and she did not play on the piano. It was a thousand pities, he felt, that such a girl should be compelled to remain in such uncongenial companionship. All the time that Dr. Burney and his other daughter were playing a second duet, and the silly gentleman holding the bell of his trumpet to the case of the piano, still fondly believing that he was also a performer with the mouth-piece in his ear, Thomas Barlowe was feeling wave after wave of pity passing over him for the unhappy position of the shy girl in the midst of so doubtful a household. Before long his compassion for her so stimulated his imagination that he began to think of the possibility of his rescuing her—he began to think of himself in the character of a hero—he did not remember the name of any particular hero who had carried off a young woman who was placed in a similar situation to that occupied by Miss Burney; but he had no doubt that more than one romance was founded upon the doings of such a man as he felt himself fully qualified to be, if he made up his mind to assume such a rôle.

As the music continued—it was an arrangement of Bach's Orfèo—Thomas Barlowe became more and more resolute. He would be the heroic person who should appear at the right moment and achieve the emancipation of that sweet and shy girl, who by no fault of hers was forced to live in that house and remain, if she could, on friendly terms with her father and sisters, who kept strumming on the piano, and with her brother, who was ready to boast of having received the rudiments of his education from a murderer. All that he needed was the opportunity to show his heroism, and he did not doubt that when he set his mind to work on the matter, he would have such an opportunity.

If anyone had whispered in his ear that his inward consciousness of being equal to the doing of great deeds was solely due to the music which was being played, and to which he was unwillingly listening, he would have been indignant. He would have thought it preposterous had it been suggested to him that the effect of that strumming was to make him feel more like a god than a man—to be ready to face hell for the love of a woman, as Jean Sebastian Bach imagined Orpheus doing for Eurydice. But Jean Sebastian Bach knew what he was about when he had composed his Orfèo, and Dr. Burney was quite equal to the business of interpreting his aims, and of urging his daughter Susan to join with him in impressing them upon even so unimpressionable a nature as that of Thomas Barlowe; so that while Thomas Barlowe believed that this music was one of the most petty of all human interests, it was making him think such thoughts as had never before entered his mind—it was giving him aspirations from which in ordinary circumstances he would have shrunk.

The master musician and his interpreters were making sport of him, leading him if not quite into the region of the heroic, at least to the boundary of that region, and supplying him with a perspective glass, as the Interpreter did to the Pilgrims, by the aid of which he might see the wonderful things that had been beyond his natural scope.