CHAPTER VIII
The music of a spirited and tireless band of robins helped Christian to wake next morning. The character of their cheerful racket defined itself very slowly to his drowsy consciousness. He lay for a long time with closed eyes, listening to it, and letting his mind drift quite at random among the thoughts which it suggested. He knew they were robins because his hostess had said he would hear them; he lazily pictured to himself the tiny red-breasts gathered in the shrubbery outside, in obedience to some mysterious signal of hers, and singing to order thus briskly and unwearyingly to make good her promise.
In what gay, high spirits the little fellow sang! The sun must be shining, to account for so much happiness. He accepted the idea with a sense of profound pleasure, and appropriated it to his own wonderful case.
For him, it was as if happiness had never existed before.
“‘Wilt thou have music? Hark! Apollo plays,
And twenty cagéd nightingales do sing.’”
He murmured the lines in indolent reverie, then opened his eyes, and smiled to think where he was, and what he had become a part of. Lifting himself on his elbow, he looked about him. The beauties of the apartment had not been lost upon him the previous evening. He had carried them with him in vague processional magnificence on his devious march through dreamland; he surveyed them again now in the morning light, rising after a while to pull aside the curtains, and bring in the full sunshine.
The room was, he said over and over to himself, ‘the most exquisite thing he had ever seen. The ruling color was of some blue which could almost be thought a green, and which, embraced as complementary decoration many shades of ocher and soft yellowish browns in woodwork, and in the thick, fleecy rugs underfoot. Around the four sides, at the level of his eyes, ran a continuous band of portraits—the English drawings of Holbein reproduced in the dominant tint of the room, set solidly into the wall, and separated from one another only by thin strips of the same tawny oak which framed them at top and bottom. The hooded, high-bosomed ladies, the cavaliers in hats and plumes and pointed beards, the smoothfaced, shrewd-eyed prelates and statesmen in their caps and fur, all knew him this morning for one of their own, as he went along, still in his nightshirt, and inspected them afresh. They appeared to greet him, and he beamed at them in response.
A dim impression of the earlier morning, which had seemed a shadowy passing phase of his dreams, revealed itself now to him as a substantial fact. Some one had been in the room, moving noiselessly about, and had spread forth for his use a great variety of articles of clothing and of the toilet, most of which he beheld for the first time. Overnight, his cousin Emanuel’s insistence upon his regarding everything in the house as his own for the time being, had had no definite significance to his mind. He looked now through the array of silks and fine cloths, of trinkets in ivory and silver and polished metals, and began dressing himself with a long sigh of delight.