“How very stupid he must be!” remarked Rose, with an air of superior knowledge. “I shall not play with him.”
“But mamma said we must be kind to him,” said Lillie, “and love him.”
“I shall be kind to him of course,” said Marion; “but I can never love him, because I consider him a disgrace to the family. I am so thankful that he is to live here instead of with us, as mamma thought at first that he might do. I wouldn’t have people in town know that we had such a relative for the whole world.”
Rose was much impressed by Marion’s sentiments, but Lillie looked troubled. Her mother had told them that the little orphan was sick and sad, and her tender heart ached for him. He had been carried into the house and straight to the little room which Aunt Delia had prepared for him next her own; but Dr. Norton did not think him well enough to see his young cousins yet; so Lillie begged a little nosegay from the gardener, and, arranging it herself with the greatest care, sent it to him by Peter, charging him to say that one of his little cousins sent it with her love. For several days the graceful act was repeated, and Philip, lying on the lounge in his pretty little room, learned to watch and wait eagerly for the daily token of this unknown cousin’s thoughtfulness. He endured no pain, but suffered greatly from nervous prostration caused by the great shock he had undergone. For hours he would lie with his eyes closed, and so still that Aunt Delia thought him sleeping; but his brain was active, and at such times he was thinking of his past life, and of the strange, hardly to be understood change in his circumstances.
He had been provided with clothes befitting his new condition in life, and when, after a few days’ confinement to his bed, he was able to put them on and lie on the lounge, Aunt Delia wanted to bring the little girls in to make his acquaintance; but the proposal threw him into an agony of shy terror. He was full of curiosity to see them, but the idea of facing strangers was insupportable; so his elder relatives decided that it would be best to let him have his own way for the present, hoping that, as he grew stronger, his desire for solitude would disappear.
One day when Mrs. Norton, who had been sitting by him, was called away, he fell, according to his custom, into one of his dreamy reveries, from which he was startled by a sound so wonderfully strange and sweet that in his ecstatic surprise he thought he must have died and gone to heaven. Forgetting his shyness and weakness, he rose from the sofa, and, following the sound that attracted him, went through several rooms to the drawing-room, where Marion sat playing a plaintive Scotch air upon the piano.
It was an old instrument and rather out of tune, and Marion was not a skilful performer; but to Philip’s ears the music was heavenly. He had never even heard of a piano, and the only instrument besides his flute which he had ever listened to was a violin cruelly ill-used in the hands of one of the miners. The genius which in his father had developed into a talent for painting had in Philip taken the form of a passion for music, and now as the girl, unconscious of a listener, played fragments of waltzes and snatches of airs for her own amusement, he sank upon his knees and buried his face in the cushions of an easy-chair, unable to stand, and scarce knowing whether it was pain or pleasure that thrilled through him and shook his frame with convulsive sobs.
It was Aunt Delia’s voice that roused him from his trance of emotion, and startled Marion into the knowledge that he was in the room. The dear old lady had come in to see if it was by her father’s permission that Marion was playing, as hitherto the house had been kept perfectly quiet on the invalid’s account.
“Oh, Marion dear,” she said, “are you sure the playing won’t disturb your little cousin? But, dear, dear, what’s this?” she exclaimed, almost falling over Philip in the half-light of the room.
“Oh, please,” said the boy, lifting a tearful face, “don’t stop her, and do please let me stay and hearken to her.”