“I know he wouldn’t, Abel. He wants me to be a minister. Ministers are good things to be, but I’m afraid I can’t be a minister.”
“Not a pulpit minister. There’s different kinds of ministers, and each must talk to men in his own tongue if he’s going to do ‘em any real good,” said old Abel meditatively. “YOUR tongue is music. Strange that your grandfather can’t see that for himself, and him such a broad-minded man! He’s the only minister I ever had much use for. He’s God’s own if ever a man was. And he loves you—yes, sir, he loves you like the apple of his eye.”
“And I love him,” said Felix warmly. “I love him so much that I’ll even try to be a minister for his sake, though I don’t want to be.”
“What do you want to be?”
“A great violinist,” answered the child, his ivory-hued face suddenly warming into living rose. “I want to play to thousands—and see their eyes look as yours do when I play. Sometimes your eyes frighten me, but oh, it’s a splendid fright! If I had father’s violin I could do better. I remember that he once said it had a soul that was doing purgatory for its sins when it had lived on earth. I don’t know what he meant, but it did seem to me that HIS violin was alive. He taught me to play on it as soon as I was big enough to hold it.”
“Did you love your father?” asked old Abel, with a keen look.
Again Felix crimsoned; but he looked straightly and steadily into his old friend’s face.
“No,” he said, “I didn’t; but,” he added, gravely and deliberately, “I don’t think you should have asked me such a question.”
It was old Abel’s turn to blush. Carmody people would not have believed he could blush; and perhaps no living being could have called that deepening hue into his weather-beaten cheek save only this gray-eyed child of the rebuking face.
“No, I guess I shouldn’t,” he said. “But I’m always making mistakes. I’ve never made anything else. That’s why I’m nothing more than ‘Old Abel’ to the Carmody people. Nobody but you and your grandfather ever calls me ‘Mr. Blair.’ Yet William Blair at the store up there, rich and respected as he is, wasn’t half as clever a man as I was when we started in life: you mayn’t believe that, but it’s true. And the worst of it is, young Felix, that most of the time I don’t care whether I’m Mr. Blair or old Abel. Only when you play I care. It makes me feel just as a look I saw in a little girl’s eyes some years ago made me feel. Her name was Anne Shirley and she lived with the Cuthberts down at Avonlea. We got into a conversation at Blair’s store. She could talk a blue streak to anyone, that girl could. I happened to say about something that it didn’t matter to a battered old hulk of sixty odd like me. She looked at me with her big, innocent eyes, a little reproachful like, as if I’d said something awful heretical. ‘Don’t you think, Mr. Blair,’ she says, ‘that the older we get the more things ought to matter to us?’—as grave as if she’d been a hundred instead of eleven. ‘Things matter SO much to me now,’ she says, clasping her hands thisaway, ‘and I’m sure that when I’m sixty they’ll matter just five times as much to me.’ Well, the way she looked and the way she spoke made me feel downright ashamed of myself because things had stopped mattering with me. But never mind all that. My miserable old feelings don’t count for much. What come of your father’s fiddle?”