“No apologies, no apologies,” replied Billy. “Mr. Charles Frobisher set that snare for my unwary feet.”
“Not at all,” rejoined Charley. “I kept my wary feet out of it, that was all.”
“But wasn’t it capital!” cried Jones; and showing all his massive white teeth, he made the hall resound with a laugh that echoed contagiously from group to group.
But there was one person in the room who did not share in the general joyousness,—our friend Mary. She had taken her stand apart, by a window that commanded the western horizon; and turning with a half-startled air, at the sound of the laughter, responded to it with a faint and preoccupied smile. In truth, the poor child was ill at ease; though what it was that troubled that young heart none of my readers, I feel assured, would ever guess. Yet, while to most of them the cause of her annoyance will appear whimsical in the extreme, as it was characteristic of her to suffer from such a cause, I must state it, and towards this end a few prefatory words will be necessary.
Neither the Virginians nor the American people, nor any branch of the great race from which they spring, are lovers of music. Our boys, it is true, will troop up and down the streets of village or city, following the band-wagon of a circus. We manufacture an enormous number of the very best pianos in the world, and thousands of our girls labor for years learning to play a few tunes on them. Mothers without number pinch themselves that their daughters may have the desired instruction. It is the correct thing. Yet, her graduating concert over, her piano soon ceases to constitute any more considerable element of a girl’s happiness, or that of her family, than her copy of Euclid.
Yet, although English of the purest breed, there are Virginians who really love music; just as you shall find Spaniards with red hair, bashful Irishmen, women with beards, hens that crow, bullies with courage, mules without guile, and short sermons and true happiness. I do not allude to our charming girls who flock to the occasional opera that visits Richmond,—for in Richmond, as elsewhere, there are dozens of reasons for flocking to the opera.
No; I had in my mind the far-famed Virginia fidddler—mock him not, ye profane—who, though frowned upon by the moralist, viewed askance from the pulpit, without honor as without profit in his own country, still scrapes away as merrily as he can under the load of obloquy that weighs him down. But his devotion, if heroic, wins him no glory; for the people of Virginia, forgetting, with the usual ingratitude of republics, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, regard the worthlessness of the whole fiddling tribe as axiomatic. Nay, worse, there is a vague feeling that the thing is vulgar.
Now, in that word lies the key to Mary Rolfe’s distress of mind. Born and bred in the midst of that singularly pure, and simple, and refined society of Richmond in the ante-bellum days, inheriting from her father a love of all that was most beautiful in English prose and verse, as well as led by his hand to the nooks where were to be culled its choicest flowers; her manners formed and her instincts moulded by her mother upon the classic types of Virginia patrician life of the olden time, she was more than a representative of her class. The refined delicacy of her nature amounted, if not to a fault, at least to a misfortune. In the society of those like herself she was easy, affable, winning; but the slightest deviation from high breeding chilled her into silence and unconquerable reserve. The most trivial social solecism shocked, vulgarity stunned her.
And fiddling!
According to her high-wrought soul the thing was unworthy of a gentleman. Nor is this so much to be wondered at, for, although distinguished violinists had visited Richmond, it so happened that she had never heard one. Her knowledge of violin music was confined to fiddling pure and simple,—the compositions, jigs and reels; the performers, as a rule, negroes.