For two or three days the money lay untouched, the music unrolled, the piano unopened. At their close his mother extracted the confession, that if he had been dishonest he was 'making up for it,' and that he would show her how well he could deny himself.
At the end of another week, during which the donor had settled his affairs and departed, as she heard, she engaged a music-teacher, herself displayed the crabbed manuscript, opened the piano, and placed him before it.
'You have my leave, dear,' she said, and with a sigh perhaps, resigned the laudable intention which all American mothers are supposed to entertain, of making him on one day President of the Republic; for the fine arts, as we all know, are not the road to that distinction.
'Mother,' said Fauntleroy, a few days afterward, 'I never shall enjoy my music the way I did when it was, as you say, stolen.'
There was little for his teacher to correct in what he had previously gained, and at every lesson he astonished and outstripped her. Finally she buried him in the intricacies of the science till it became clear and glorious as the firmament, and reflected back to him the features of his own mind like the brazen sea of the Temple crowned at the brim with flowers of lilies. The gradual opening of the child's genius gave his mother a great awe; with that she dared no longer interfere, but in the moral part of his character he was, she saw, fearfully deficient. He met all her arguments with an unconscious sophistry, and was almost incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. The creature of impulse, she declared it providential that all his impulses were good.
As time passed, Fauntleroy's supple fingers gathered strength, and he was pronounced equal to the anticipation of his life. To be a great performer on any instrument, or to create fresh forms for any or all instruments to unfold, did not at that time belong to his visions; he only desired to live for and in music, however humbly, and to serve it entirely. It was not, meantime, so easy a task to obtain an opportunity for this exercise. Wealthy committees of wealthy churches declined affording his genius the assistance; had they willed it, they might have ministered to the heavenly visitant, but unwilling, he was nevertheless not to lose his service. At last the organ of a poorer church, fine and powerful for its size, was placed at his disposal, and he entered with the years of childhood upon the career of a man. Frequently, after becoming accustomed, he played for the usual organist of his place: his performances being so excellent that ungodly crowds flocked to hear them; and on the departure of his first friend from the church which his mother attended, he was invited to fill his place, at a salary which, far too small as it was, was a fabulous amount to the boy and his mother.
Thus he grew. His teacher had no more to impart; if it were possible, he had exhausted the MSS. with which he had been so unexpectedly enriched: he had finished fourteen years, and his mother died. Slowly and imperceptibly, yet with the sureness of fate, she had drooped and wearied from the day, eight years since, in which she had abandoned her son to his determination; and without ever knowing that it was so, Fauntleroy watched his mother fade away before his eyes. Had he been an ordinary person, the reäction would now inevitably have come. But the grief that so suddenly overwhelmed him only goaded to farther effort, and in almost unbroken seclusion he turned himself partially to a more general study, pursued with no less ardor or success. Nothing that he attempted seemed to require an effort, or rather the effort he saw fit to put forth always covered the attempt, and thus in time his learning became more than liberal. Again then he returned to his chosen pursuit, and day after day he sat in the old church alone, except for his single attendant, pouring forth melodies, and teaching the echoes of the place such resonances as they had never breathed before.
There was at no great distance from the church a school, the tumult of whose greetings and recesses reached the young organist in a murmur, as he sat studying black tomes in the sheltered choir. Often through the blush of sunrise he passed its neat grounds, and its bells broke in upon his sweetest reveries. The boy grows as he dreams, and Fauntleroy was already gathering a look into his face that did not belong to the child. Up the gallery-stairs now, unperceived by him, stole every day a little girl—pale, though not from lack of health, and elegantly clad—who sat upon the upper step and listened to his music. When the bell struck she would hasten down, as frequently taking the balustrade for her method of conveyance as any other. Time increasing, she became more daring, and stole on tip-toe round the organ, though never obtaining a view of the performer's face, and never caring to do so. Sometimes now the stroke of the bell was disregarded by her, and until some motion of the organist surprised her, she sat listening through the warm noons to his necromancy; the long roll of the sound made her tremble with a delicious pain, and her face grew paler as the childish soul fed upon such ecstatic sweetness. Pinafore and pantalette vanished by degrees, while a maturer maidenly attire assumed predominance; and the flying hair, swept away in a long satin gloss, was secured in twisted coils. Once she had brought a cluster of the school-girls to partake her feast, but each borrowing courage from the other, their congregated boldness frightened her, and she did not repeat the experiment.
One noon she had stood sheltered by the wing of the organ; so entranced through the music, and so lost in the mazes whither it had led her, that when its last throb died away she was first startled from her abstraction by the clang of the church-door. She ran down, but the organist and his attendant had gone, and she was locked in. Knowing he would return, she entered the body of the church, and, having wandered at her pleasure over the forbidden precincts, ensconced herself finally among the piled hassocks of a square pew, and opened the school-book which to save her conscience she had brought in her hand. Never a very courageous student, the book ere long wearied her, letter chased letter over the page, and the head sinking among the crimson cushions, she was soon fast asleep. In a short time the young organist returned, quietly ascended, and busied himself in fresh problems, combinations and intervals, over the old cabalistic volumes. Rising at length, he leaned over the rail of the gallery, and looked down into the church: his mind full of pleasant dreaming. Thus the girl slumbering in the warm coloring of the old pew below, with a broad pencil of light guarding her presence as it slanted through the chancel window and swum in gorgeous motes, seemed to him like a fay curled in the cups of ruby cacti, or the visible spirit and creation of his music, and so passed along his dream without exciting other emotions than its thousand fantasies and gay processions were wont to do. Turning again to the keys, he was soon lost in the more beautiful ideas of men older and greater than he. Soon there stole through the girl's half-waking mind a gentle murmuring, swelling till all the air about her pulsed with long waves of melody, and she awoke to hear the golden pipes pealing as she had never dreamed they could, while every atom throbbed with conscious sound.