He turned to the other cousin—Dick. This fellow, like unto Humphrey, was yet so much unlike him that, to begin with, his face was as undistinguished as was his cousin's mind. Yet a clever face, capable of many emotions. He was full of life and talk, he was interested in everything, he could listen as well as talk—a young man of sympathy. The artistic side of him came from his father, as did also the nomad side of him; the sympathy and kindliness and honesty came to him from his unknown mother—one supposed.
As for John Haveril, he was chiefly engaged in considering the girl who had thus unexpectedly come into his life to cheer it with her brightness and her grace. I have never found any man so old or so self-made as to be insensible to the charms of sprightly maidenhood and youthful beauty. John Haveril was quite a homely person; he had not been brought up to think of beauty, and lovely dress, and charming airs and graces as belonging to himself in any way. It is this sense of being outside the circle which makes working men apparently deaf and blind to beauty adorned and cultivated. Why admire or think upon the unattainable? They might as well yearn after the possession of an ancient castle and noble name as after beauty decorated and set off. And now this girl belonged to them. He himself and his wife were only happy when this girl was with them; she came every day to see them; she drove out with them, took them to see things, taught them what to admire and what to buy, dined with them, consented graciously to accept their gifts, but refused their money.
At all events, she refused to take any. Yet she liked the things that money can buy—lovely frocks, gloves, hats, ribbons, laces, gold chains, and bracelets, and necklaces. To him contempt for money, combined with love of what only money can buy, seemed incongruous. The contempt was only a phrase. Molly had been taught that Art ought to despise wealth; she had not been taught to despise the things artistic that money can buy. The rich man chuckled to think how much money can be spent upon a girl who despises it. He was pleased to make the girl happy by heaping unaccustomed treasures on her gratified shoulders. It was pleasant to be generous to a bright, happy, smiling girl, who kept him alive, and made him forget the burden of his riches. And as he thought of these things he fell into his third manner—that of the gardener—and his eyes went off into space.
After dinner Molly sat down to the piano and began to sing, in a full, flexible contralto, an old ditty about love and flowers, taught her by Dick himself, who possessed a treasure-house full of such songs, new and old, and of all countries, and in all languages. There is but one theme fit for a song—the theme of youth and love, and the sweet season of roses.
Humphrey stood listening. To this young man, perhaps to others, the effect of Molly's singing, as of her presence and of her voice and of her eyes, was to fill his mind with visions. They came to him in the shape of dancing-girls with tambourines and castanets. When a girl is endowed with the real faculty of singing, she may create in the minds of those who hear, those visions which best fit their inclinations and their natures. To this young man came the troop of dancing-girls, because his disposition inclined him that way: they sang as they danced, and they threw up white arms to a music of wild and reckless joy; they filled him with the longing, the yearning, for the delirium of youth and rapture which seizes every young man from time to time, and sometimes possesses him all the days of his youth, and casts him out long before his youth is over to the husks among the swine. Others, more fortunate, feel the yearning, too, but they make of it a stimulus and an incentive. There is no such rapture beneath the sky as young men dream of; yet the vision may make them poets, and may strengthen them for endeavour; and it may fill them with the worship of woman, which is the one thing needful for a man. Humphrey, wholly filled and possessed by this rapture, would not be cast forth to the husks, because—oh! sordid reason—his mother would pay his debts. Alas! poor Molly! and she so ignorant. She had no such vision—girls never do. When young men reel and tremble with the vision of rapture inconceivable, girls have to be contented with a mild happiness. To them there comes no dream of gleaming arms—no imagined magic of voice and eyes and face. There is no such thing as a Prodigal daughter; the humble rôle of the Prodigal Girl is to minister, as with the white arms and the castanets, to the service of the Prodigal Son; for which she, too, has to go out presently to sit with the swine, and to maintain a precarious existence on the husks.
Molly had no such vision: yet by the mere power of her voice she could awaken this vision in the mind of a listener. It is a power which makes an actress; makes a queen; makes a lady of authority; whom all obey to whom that power appeals.
Molly, I say, had no respect at all for the flowery way; she could not understand, nor did she ask, why young men should want to dance hand-in-hand with the girls; nor why they like to crown their heads with roses; nor why they drink huge draughts of the wine that fizzeth in the cup, to make their heads as light as their feet.
She created, however, quite a different vision in the mind of the other young man. Dick knew all about the flowery way, and, in fact, despised it. You see, he belonged to the "service;" he played the fiddle for the dancers; like those who gather the roses, polish the floor, lay the cloth, open the champagne, cook the dishes, decorate the rooms, and write the songs; he belonged to the Show. The flowery way was nothing to him but a Show; the white arms amused him not; the soft cheeks he knew were painted; the smiles and the laughing looks were practised at rehearsals. As for Molly, she was his companion and a helpmeet; one to whom he would impart and give with all that he had, and who would in return love and cherish him. What is the Flowery way compared with the way of Love? This, and nothing else, is the real reason why the Show folk are so different from the other folk; there is no illusion to them; they are the paid dancers, makers of rosy wreaths, musicians and singers of the Flowery way.
Molly's song, therefore, opened another kind of vision to Master Richard. All he saw was a long road shaded with hills, and Molly in the middle of it marching along with him, singing as she went, and carrying the fiddle.
When the song was finished, Molly got up.