"It was not far from where we are now," the Tenor continued, "that I first heard the chime—oh, ever so many years ago!" and he brushed his hand back over his hair.
"You were a boy then?"
"Yes, a lad like you—perhaps younger: I had been working in a colliery. The work was too hard for me, and I was coming up the Morne on a barge, to try and get something lighter to do in one of the towns. We came up very slowly, and it was a hot day, and I idled about for hours, looking at the water over the side, and at the banks of the river as we passed, but without thinking of anything. What I saw made me feel. I was conscious of various sensations—pleasure, wonder, amusement, and, above all, of a dreamful ease; but I could not translate sensations into words at that time; they suggested no ideas. There had been nothing in my life so far to rouse my mental faculties, and I was conscious without being intelligent, as I suppose the beasts of the field are. I must have been happy then, but I did not know it. As we approached Morningquest I heard the chime. It was very faint at first, for we were still a long way off; but the next time it sounded we were nearer; and the next it was quite distinct. And it seemed to me to mean something, so I asked the old bargee who was steering, and he told me. I could neither read nor write at that time, and I had never heard of Christ, but I loved music, and the idea of a great beneficent being who slumbered not nor slept, but watched over us all forever, took possession of my imagination, and I caught up the notes and words and sang them with all my heart. And when we got to the outskirts of the city, a gentleman who had been sitting on the towing-path, sketching the old houses on the opposite side of the river, heard me, and hailed the barge, and came on board. 'Which is your sweet singer?' he asked, and the old fellow who was steering nodded toward me, and answered: 'The lad there.' And the gentleman said if I would go away with him he would have me taught music and make a great singer of me."
"And you went?"
"Yes," said the Tenor, with his habitual gesture.
"The gentleman was a bachelor," he resumed, "with few near relations. He was very rich, very liberal, and passionately fond of art in all its branches. That was why he took me at first, but by and by he began to like me for myself. He had me educated as his own son might have been, and I loved him as if he had been my father. Oh, Boy, he was a good man! You never would have scoffed at religion and truth had you been brought up by him. I rested on his affection as securely as you rely on the obligation of your nearest of kin. I knew that, even if I had lost my voice or otherwise disappointed him, it would have made no difference. Once my friend he would always have been my friend. But I did not lose my voice, nor did I otherwise disappoint him, I trust." The Tenor paused a moment. "He was always sure that I was gentle by birth," he resumed, "and all my tutors said I must have come of an educated race because I was so teachable. Everything in the new life came to me naturally. I never had any trouble. My friend tried hard to find my parents, but all that was known of me in the place I came from was that a collier, who lived alone in a little cottage, went home late one night and found me asleep on his bed. They thought I was only a few days old then, and had kept my clothes, which were such as a gentleman's child would have worn, but there was no mark on any of them, nor any clue by which I could be identified, except the name, David Julian Vanetemple, scrawled on a scrap of paper in a woman's hand, an educated hand. The collier brought me up somehow, though Heaven alone knows how, considering my age and his own occupation. Do you know, Boy, one of the most weary things in life is the sense of an obligation you can never repay. If I could only have done something to prove my gratitude to my first foster father! But there! I must not think of it. It is better to hope that all he did for me was a pleasure to himself at the time, though there must have been much more trouble than pleasure at first. But he was very kind, and I was very happy with him." Here the Tenor, paused again for a while, and then resumed. "When I was old enough he took me down to the pit occasionally, but he would not let me work until I was much past the age at which the other boys began. He said I was not one of them; my build was different, and I was quite unfit for such rough labour; and so it proved, but I persevered as long as he lived. It was not very long, however, for he was killed one day by an explosion of gas down in the mine while trying to rescue some other poor fellows who had been blocked up in a gallery for days by a fall. His dog was killed at the same time. He liked to have his family with him, he said, and we were generally both beside him when he was at work. But he sent me off on an impossible errand to a neighbouring town that day. I did not suspect it at the time, but I know now that it was to keep me out of harm's way. And so I was left quite alone in the world, and I thought the place where I had had a friend was more desolate than strange places with which I had no such tender associations would be; and so I wandered away, and wandered about until I was found by my next friend on the barge, and the new life began for me."
"Then he never found out who you were?" the Boy exclaimed.
"No, never."
"And why did you leave him?"
The Tenor shipped his oars. "He had a place in Scotland to which we went every autumn for shooting," he began to answer indirectly, and then stopped.