When supper was over and the conversation began to lag, some one suggested that Miss Vane should sing. The proposal was received with applause.
“If it will give you any pleasure,” said the young lady. Miss Green resumed her seat at the piano, and in a few moments human tones such as never before had been heard in Plainville district filled the sturdy house from kitchen to attic. Deep, melting, melodious tones—the cultured expression of the greatest musical instrument God Himself could devise—the human voice! To what degrading uses it is so often put! She sang, not the popular airs of the day, nor classical selections beyond the ken of her audience, however dear to herself, but the old Scotch songs which are strong enough to force a way to the roughest intellect, yet fine enough to stir the slightest chord in the galaxy of human accomplishment; deep enough to send men raging to battle and gentle enough to croon little children to sleep. As she wandered on and on, through the heroic, the pathetic, the tenderly sentimental, the dancers sat in the rapture of a spell as new to them as the angel chorus to the shepherds of Palestine, and when at last the low voice poured forth the sanctified lament of “The Land o’ the Leal,” Big Jack’s wife went sobbing to the kitchen, and Mrs. Grant slipped a motherly arm around little Mrs. Dale, whose misty eyes were seeing a year-old mound and a little white slab that stared stolidly through the snow:
“Our bonnie bairn’s there, Jean,
She was baith gude and fair, Jean,
And oh, we grudged her sair,
Tae the Land o’ the Leal.”
Even London forgot to dangle his watch-chain, and his employer, Riles, who had sold his soul to Mammon twenty years ago, laughed quietly at the tear on the boy’s cheek.
When the singer had finished, and the spell was broken by the commonplace talk which someone always finds necessary to introduce on such occasions, Dick Matheson got up and said, “We have all listened to Miss Vane with great delight, and feel that she is no longer a stranger among us. But we have another stranger here to-night, and it is but fair that we should hear him too. Burton, let’s hear from you. Your father could sing ‘The Death of Jimmie Whalen’ with any man in the shanties. I knew his father on the Muddywaski,” he explained.
Burton blushed and made excuses, but a popular suggestion in such a company is tantamount to a command. Surrendering to the inevitable, he arose, saying, “I do not sing at all, but I will repeat some verses, if you insist.”
“We insist,” came the chorus, and, when silence was secured, he began in a strong, human voice, lacking the finish of culture, but vibrant with sympathy with the spirit of the poem:
“This is the ship of pearl, which, poets feign,
Sails the unshadowed main—
The venturous bark that flings
On the sweet summer wind its purpled wings
In gulfs enchanted, where the siren sings——”
He had not repeated four lines until he discovered that he had made a mistake. The soul may respond to music it cannot comprehend, as a rusty wire may thrill with vibrations from the throat of a Melba, but the mind of man makes no answer to poetry beyond its grasp. Burton was forcing himself against an immovable resistance; projecting a thought, live, warm, charged with the germs of a million inspirations, against a stone wall of mental vacuity. And yet he was sustained, as in an electric coil a single wire thinner than a human hair may support the current that flashes on two oceans at once, and he proceeded. In the second stanza his eyes met Miss Vane’s, and heaven was opened before him. She understood! Her mind was pacing the “caves of thought” with his; her mentality was producing the current that he transformed into speech. He remembered the advice of a great orator—“Speak to one soul in your audience, and forget all others,” and he obeyed. Not again did he look at Miss Vane; he dared not double-circuit the delicate current that carried him on, but he poured forth the solemn cadences of Holmes’ great poem with a fire and enthusiasm that commanded the attention of the company until, focusing his energy in the last stanza, the walls trembled with the vibrations of his intensity:
“Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll;
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea.”