"Well, not exactly fleeced me, but scorched me; he has heaped coals of fire on my head. I want to take back all I have said against him, and everything I said against slumming."
He then related what the reader knows. Having worked off the steam of his extra emotion, he accompanied the doctor to the study. Here Vox gave a description of his new friend: "a well-educated man, a splendid all-round musician, a fine business man; has a wife who won't live with him, nor even let him see her—he has treated her so outrageously; but he loves her tenderly. He was once employed by Silver & Co., who thought so much of him that they were making proposals for his entering the firm when they began to suspect his rum habit. His name is Downs."
"Downs? With Silver & Co.?" The names set the doctor thinking. At length, coming out of his reverie, he picked up from the study-table a piece of marble, a bit of a fluted column he had found amid the ruins of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. He traced on it with the pen the word D-o-w-n-s. Then he rubbed the word out with his finger; but a black spot was left that he could not get off the marble.
"There! that's the way I would spoil the job if I should try to restore the ruins of Downs. Phil, stick to that man. I'll leave him to you. He's your parish. With your voice and his love of music, you ought to make him follow you as the rocks followed Orpheus. That's the meaning of the old legend—you can sing the hardest wretch into heaven. Try it, Phil."
The doctor spent a half-hour next day in Silver & Co.'s office. Just what he and Silver talked about we cannot say; but Silver was overheard to remark, as the doctor was leaving, "My wife thinks the world of the little woman, and when those two women are satisfied with his reformation, all right."
There never was a finer program for a musicale than that which, some six months later, packed the upper Carnegie Hall with the elite of the music-lovers of New York. Vox was the drawing card, for he had become, if not the celebrity, at least the fad, of the season. "Oh, Vox! he's just splendid!" was as familiarly heard as the clicking of afternoon tea-cups everywhere between Flushing and Orange Mountain. On the occasion referred to he had achieved a sevenfold encore for one performance. To the surprise of everybody, however, when he appeared to acknowledge the ovation, he led another man with him to the footlights; one who might have been his twin brother, for there was just that sort of difference between them that ought to exist between a tenor and a baritone—the former a little slighter in form and features. Curiosity was not allowed to get to the whispering-point when they rendered the Graben-Hoffman duet, "I feel thy angel spirit."
The applause was furious. Nothing like it had been heard for six months outside of Brady's Harbor. Vox gracefully stepped a little to the rear. The audience caught his meaning, and the room rang with the cry of "Tenor! tenor!"
Vox slipped to the piano, and played the chords of "Salva di Mora" from Gounod's "Faust." And how grandly Downs sang it! If Deacon Brisk had been there, even he, with his "star-twinkling" and "roof-splitting" metaphors, could not have described it.
"If Faust sang like that," said an elderly gentleman in the audience to his wife, "no wonder he won the heart of Marguerite." And he pressed his wife's hand, which somehow had got into his.
"Hush, John," replied the woman. Then she put a handkerchief to her eyes instead of her lorgnette.