[FAUNTLEROY VERRIAN'S FATE.]

BY HARRIET E. PRESCOTT.

I.

"Sweet music has been heard
In many places; some has been upstirred
From out its crystal dwelling in a lake,
By a swan's ebon bill; from a thick brake,
Nested and quiet in a valley mild,
Bubbles a pipe; fine sounds are floating wild
About the earth."

In an old sea-board town, once famous from its commerce and fisheries, lived a boy, who, as his mother told her gossip, had a good talent for music. Over his adopted place the salt winds blew; beside it, a river rolled its murmurous, mountain-born waters; behind it, green woods forever rustled. A poet still blows his bugle-notes across the three streams that braid its garment in silver; a painter has left there the shadow of cherubs cleaving the clouds; but till Fauntleroy Verrian came, music had owned there no apostle.

The name that he wore had been his father's, and seemed sufficient, in itself, to prove him of gentle blood—the father, of whom no one knew much, who had married his mother against the wish of her friends, and who one day went out, having kissed his young wife, and never returned. She hoped, at last, that he was dead; but something in her heart assured her that he would one day meet the son whom he had never seen. And later, as that son matured, she remembered strange stories once read by her, where demon or Afrite, in the guise and mask of most dark and fascinating manhood, has espoused such lady as he chose; and she trembled with half a fear lest the father of Fauntleroy might be such an one, and traced with terror the growing likeness there, remembering her brief period of passion and delight. But name and face were not the only gifts that the child inherited from his father.

For a time the mother remained in the town where her husband had left her, lest some day he might come to find her, and fail; but the impression of the past, instead of wearing off, daily cut deeper into her soul, and at length the perpetual remembrance grew too painful. Thus, although in this place she procured sufficiently genial occupation in teaching, exertion being necessary, since part of her little store had been deposited in some unknown quarter, she nevertheless chose to remove to another spot; and now all alone in the world, but for her child, she labored fitfully at her needle. So she lived in the small house by the water-side, owning it herself, and renting the larger half.

All things were auspicious to the youth of this boy, though nothing seemed so. His mother was, it appeared, a widow, and therefore he encountered few but the gentle influences of feminine culture. She was poor, and poverty is a discipline. She had received, of course, an education beyond her present station, and poured it lavishly into his thirsty mind. When he numbered fourteen years, she died, and a loneliness befell him which is the crown of genius, and out of which marvellous jewels may be plucked.—Very early in his life, he had manifested an ardent love of the art to which subsequently he devoted himself. Before he spoke, he sang his own lullabies; when he first went alone, his mother lost him all one summer's day, and he was found only at moon-rise, fast asleep beside a fence, whither, bare-footed, bare-headed, and all day without food, he had followed the band of a street company, still repeating in his pretty sleep parts of the tunes they had lent him. He was scarcely older, when two tickets for a rare concert (in a day when concerts were like rain in the desert) were given to his mother, and the poor seamstress, who could neither leave her child nor resign the pleasure, took him with her as a protector. The gay lights, the brilliant toilettes and bouquets, the chandelier swinging all its waxen flames in the glitter of ormulu and prismatic pendents, the laughing and commotion previous to the opening, these filled the child with strange exhilaration, so that he danced upon the seat, repeatedly embraced his mother, and sung to her once or twice, in a low caressing voice, a few notes of his choicest remembrance. But when the musicians had spread their magical pages before them, and, out of a wilderness of sweet sounds, his childish ear drew the measure and melody of one air, his transport knew no bounds. The music was not of a difficult order, nor did it require a great effort of comprehension; yet, while one child, who had been taken that the effect upon him might be observed, whispered dismally, 'What a yacket!' Fauntleroy stood with his clasped hands hanging before him, his head bent forward, and his little face bathed in tears. The last piece was a fantasia upon several of the exquisite waltzes of Beethoven: during the performance one of the sheets fluttered from the stage to the floor, and lay there unnoticed; at the conclusion, as they stepped into the aisle, it caught the child's eye, and, springing forward, he seized it. The strange characters enchanted him, he followed them along with his finger; of their meaning he was, of course, ignorant; but they had some connection with the passing splendor, they were akin to the music that had brimmed his childish soul, they were precious to those gods upon the stage, and so he made a theft of them; or rather, one should say, bore them off calmly, as if by his own right and possession.

His letters he found it difficult to conquer, but day after day he sat in the sun, poring over the stolen sheet, singing the air as he recalled it, dividing it first into parts, and then into distinct sounds, until, if he had been conscious of the fact, he had almost literally deciphered the meaning of those quaint emblems. Hornbook and catechism retired before them, for to those worthies he had given but an inconsiderable portion of his acquaintance.