Original.
Verheyden's Right Hand.
If there were no music, I think there would have been no Verheyden. He was an obligato.
The child of a violin-player and a singer, both professional, he had been born into an atmosphere of sweet sounds. His baby eyelids had drooped in slumber to a flute-voice lullaby, or some ethereal strain from his father's precious little Cremona. Every breeze that swept over the rippling Neckar or down the wooded mountain-sides, playing mournfully through the wind-harp in the window, caught the child at his play, hushing him. As soon as he could reach them, his fingers sought the keys of the piano; and from that thrilling moment when first a musical sound woke at his touch, Verheyden had found his occupation. It became his life. Every feeling found expression at the tips of his fingers, and his fiercest passions culminated in a discord.
It is said that a violin long played upon will show in the wood flutings worn by the "continual dropping" of musical sounds from the strings. So Verheyden seemed wrought upon by his art. He looked like a man who might have stepped from some wild German tale; of Walpurgis, or other. He was called tall, being slight, and appeared to be made of nerves and as little as possible besides. His dark hair rose like the hair in Sir Godfrey Kneller's portraits, and streamed back from his forehead as if blown. His thin face was alive with restless gray eyes—the eyes of a listener, not a seer—with fiery nostrils to the slightly aquiline nose, and with an unsteady mouth. He had frequent flitting motions, apparently inconsequent, really timed to some tune in his mind. He was moody, absent, abrupt; he was too much in earnest about everything. He had little perception of wit or humor, and he never laughed except with delight. He could be bold, yet he was simple and ingenuous as a child. An enthusiast, with room in his narrow, intense brain for but one idea at a time; a man who would take life by the blade rather than the handle; a man in alto relievo.
On the breath of some unaccountable impulse, he would have said—fulfilling his destiny, say we—Verheyden came to the New World, wandered about a little, dazed and homesick, at length engaged to take the place of Laurie, the organist, who was about going to Europe for further instruction.
He went into the church one afternoon with Laurie to try the organ. A sultry afternoon it was, the eve of the Assumption; but inside the church all was coolness and silence and shadow, most home-like to the stranger of any place he had seen this side the ocean. While the organist played, be leaned from the choir and looked down into the nave. Laurie played with great sweetness and delicacy, and chose first one of those yearning things that touch, but do not rouse; and Verheyden leaned and listened, dreaming himself at home.
Ah! the green, cool Neckar flowing downward to the Rhine; all the rafts and all the barges, all the wet and mossy rock; the overlooking mountains dense with forests to their summits; the gray outstanding castle crumbling lothly from its post; the red roofs of the houses, the churches fair and many; all the quiet and the color of that home in fatherland.