“Oh, oh! do you know any music?”
“I can fiddle a little,” answered Freke, smiling.
He settled himself, and, in the midst of the deep silence of twilight in the country, began a concerto of Brahms. The first movement, an allegro, he played with a dainty, soft trippingness that was fit for fairies dancing by moonlight. The next, a scherzo, was full of tender suggestiveness—a dream told in music. The third movement was deeper, more tragic, full of sorrow and wailing. As Freke drew the bow across the G-string, he would bring out tones as deep as the ’cello, while suddenly the sharp cry of the treble would cut into the somber depths of the basso like the shriek of a soul in torment. A melody like a wandering spirit appeared out of the deep harmonies, and lost, yet ever found, would make itself heard with a sweet insistence, only to be swallowed up in a tempest of sound, like a bird lost in a storm. And presently there was an abatement, then a calm, and the music died, literally, amid the twilight dusk and gloom.
As Freke, with strange eyes, and his bow suspended, tremblingly, as if waiting for the spirit to return, ceased, there was a perfect silence. Jacqueline, who had never heard anything like it in her life, and who, all unknown to herself, was singularly susceptible to music, gazed at Freke as the magician who had made her dream dreams, and after a while cried out:
“Why do you play like that? I never heard anybody play so before.”
In answer, Freke again smiled, and played a wild Hungarian dance, fit for the dancing of bacchantes, so full of barbaric clash and rhythm, that Jacqueline suddenly sprang up and began to dance around the chairs and tables. Freke half turned to glance at her; he retarded the time, and softened the tones, when Jacqueline, too, danced slowly and dreamily—until presently, with a storm and a rush of music, fortissimo and prestissimo, and a resounding blare of chords that sounded like the shouts of a victorious army, he stopped and lay back in his chair, still smiling.
But, although Judith had twice Jacqueline’s knowledge of music, with all her feeling for it, Freke was piqued to see that she did not for a moment confound his music with his personality. She seemed to take a malicious pleasure in complimenting him glibly, which is the last snub to an artist. Freke was so vexed by her indifference, that he began to play cats mewing and dogs barking, on his fiddle, to frighten little Beverley, who looked at him with wide, scared eyes.
“Never mind, my darling,” cried Judith, laughing. “Be a brave little boy—only girls are scared at such things.”
Beverley, thus exhorted, summoned up his courage and proposed to get grandfather’s sword to defend himself. Judith’s laughter, the defiant light in her eyes, the passionate kiss she gave the boy as a reward for his bravery, annoyed Freke. His vanity as an artist, however, was consoled by hearing Simon Peter’s voice, in an awed and solemn whisper from the door, through which his woolly head was just visible in the surrounding darkness:
“I ’clar’ ter God, dat fiddle is got evils in it. I hear some on ’em hollerin’ an’ cryin’ fur ter git out, an’ some on ’em larfin’ an’ jumpin’. Marse Temple, dem is spirits in dat fiddle. I knows it.”