He felt the danger coming nearer every day, for Rose-Jewel was now able to sing little songs with words and music, and the more he felt the keen delight her delicious little voice gave him, the more he trembled at the thought of discovery. It was wonderful how the child seemed to feel the necessity of secrecy, and how, baby as she was, she never gave any evidence of her musical gifts, except when with her father. Her childlike recollection of his warnings surprised him.
One day the two were down in the old dairy together. Eastin, with his violin was playing the air of “Comin’ through the Rye,” and Rose-Jewel was following him, with her lisping utterance, and clear, delicious voice, as she stood before him, her eyes answering the look of his, as definitely and truly as her voice answered his instrument. When he played the music to her baby pronunciation of the words:
“Every lathie hath her laddie,
None they thay have I—”
and her thrilling little voice rose to the last high note, and took it with ease and held it, the man’s hand shook so that the bow dropped from it. For a few seconds, the only sound was that almost inhuman little treble voice, fine and thin as a hair, but so thrillingly sweet that it sent a long tremor all through Eastin’s limbs. Hurriedly putting down his violin, he held out his arms. The child flew into them, and as he swooped her from the ground to his heart, she finished, without accompaniment, the lines:
“Yet all the ladth they thmile at me,
When comin’ thro’ the Rye.”
He hugged her close and hard against his heart. He had in her all that he cared for, all that he had ever sought or desired, his compensation for the bitter past, his sufficiency for the uncertain future. His heart was full of bliss.
A sound from behind aroused him. The door was suddenly thrown open. He turned, still clasping the child, and met the infuriated eyes of the wife and mother.
The scene that followed was one that roused him to a point of excitement he had never known before. It was very brief, but in those moments, in which Rose-Jewel clung about his neck, while her mother tried in vain to get possession of her, while she seemed to appeal to him for protection, and the very appeal seemed to give him the power of response, he felt himself, for the first time since his marriage, a strong, self-reliant man, and a sense of exultation swelled upward with the surgings of his excited blood, until he felt able to do and dare everything for the sake of defending this child. His wife, scarcely recognizing him in this unfamiliar aspect, was for a moment surprised into silence, but the reaction after this made her more angry yet, and the long restrained indignation of years broke loose. She gave it full vent, and he heard his beloved art defamed and derided, and a possession of the musical gift called a misfortune, a nuisance and a curse. It was enough, she said, to have borne with it in him, and to have had calamity brought through him into her life; but to go through it again, with her own child—was more than she could stand! She declared that her confidence had been abused—that Rose-Jewel should never be left one moment alone with him again—that it should be the object of her life, henceforth, to suppress every sign of musical talent the child might manifest—that she was resolved to do this, if she had to whip her, tie her, starve her, lock her up, a dozen times a day. She looked into his eyes defiantly, and warned him that the child should not be spared! As he heard these words come from her lips, he felt a tightening of the little arms around his neck. The fire of his passionate love for his baby was kindled into a keener flame, and he wished it were possible never to loose her from his arms. Her every second’s absence from his sight would be torturing anxiety to his heart.