Charles Auchester Volume I Part 28

"Darling little Star! I beg your pardon; but then, why don't you learn the piano?"

"But Charles, I cannot. I was sent here to learn the violin, and I _must_ study it. Aronach does not let any one study the pianoforte under him now."

"He did then?"

"Yes, a long time ago, when he lived in another place, about thirty miles off. Have you heard Aronach play the organ?"

"No; have you?"

"Oh! every Sunday."

"You don't say so, Star! is it not delicious?"

"Charles, I like it best of all the days in the week, because he plays. Such different playing from what they have at church in England!"

"I shall go up to the organ and see him play."

"Charles, Charles, don't; please don't,--we never do!"

"Then I shall be the first, for go I must. There is precious Aronach himself. I will run after him wherever he goes."

I did so most rudely--forsaking Starwood, who did not dare to follow me; but I would not miss the opportunity. I spun after Aronach so noiselessly as that he had no notion I was following, though in general he had eyes behind; and he did not perceive me until the service had absolutely begun. Then I made myself visible, and caught a frown, which was accompanied by a helpless condition truly edifying; for his arms and hands and eyes and feet were all equally on service.

I therefore remained, and made out more about the instrument than I had made out my whole life before. His was a genuine organ-hand, that could stretch itself indefinitely, and yet double up so crawlingly that the fingers, as they lay, were like stems of corrugated ivory; and I watched only less than I listened. The choir--so full and perfect, trained to every individual--mounted its effects, as it were, upon those of the controlling harmonies. There was a depth in these that supported their air-waving tones, as pillars solid and polished a vaulted roof, where shadows waver and nestle. I found a book, and sang at intervals, but generally preferred to receive the actual impression. I think my first mother-feeling for Germany was born that Sunday in pleasurable pain.

None can know who has not felt--none feel who has not heard--the spell of those haunting services in the land of Luther! The chorale so grave and powerful, with its interpieces so light and florid, like slender fretworks on a marble shrine,--the unisonous pause, the antiphonal repose, the deep sense of worship stirred by the sense of sound. From that Sunday I always went with Aronach, unbidden, but unforbidden; and as I learned to be very expert in stopping, I subst.i.tuted very speedily the functionary who had performed the office before my advent.

FOOTNOTE:

[14] There is no question but that Starwood Burney is intended for a portrait of Sterndale Bennett. Mendelssohn was his friend from boyhood, and aided him greatly with his suggestions, though it is doubtful whether Bennett ever studied with him. It was through Mendelssohn's influence that he brought out Bach's music in London. He was also a pupil of the Leipsic Conservatory.

CHAPTER XXVII.

It cannot be supposed that I forgot my home, or that I failed to inst.i.tute an immediate correspondence, which was thus checked in the bud. Aronach, finding me one night, after we had all retired, with my little ink-bottle on the floor and myself outsprawled writing upon my knees close into my lamp, very coolly carried my sheet, pen, and ink away, and informed me that he never permitted his pupils to write home at all, or to write anything except what he set them to do.

I should have revolted outright against this restriction but for a saving discovery I made on the morrow,--that our master himself dismissed from his own hand a bulletin of our health and record of our progress once a month. Precious specimens, no doubt, they were, these, of hard-hearted fact! Neither were we allowed to receive letters ourselves from home. Only simple communications were permitted to himself; and the effect of this rule, so autocratic, was desperately painful upon me at first. I hungered for some sweet morsel of English, served up in English character; I wanted to hear more than that all were well; and as for Lenhart Davy, had not my love informed my memory, I should have forgotten him altogether. But it was very soon I began to realize that this judicious interdiction lent a tonic bitterness to my life. I was completely abstracted, and upon that pa.s.sage of my inwardly eventful history I can never glance back without a quiet tear or two; it was heavenly in its unabsolved and absolute serenity. It was the one mood that befitted a growing heart too apt to burn,--a busy brain too apt to vision,--if that head and heart were ever to be raised from the valley of material life into the mountain heights of art.

I fear my remembrances are dull just here, for the glory that touched them was of the moment, and too subtle to be retrieved; but it is impossible not just to remind myself of them before returning to my adventure-maze.

For six months, that pa.s.sed as swiftly as six weeks of a certain existence, we went on together--I should have said--hand-in-hand, but that my Starwood's diffident melancholy and Iskar's travestied hauteur would have held me back, and I was ardent to impel myself forward. So, though at first I had to work almost to desperation in order to join the evening contrapuntal cla.s.s, I soon left the other two behind, and Aronach taught me alone,--which was an advantage it would be impossible to overrate. Not that he ever commended,--it was not in him; he was too exigent, too stern; his powers never condescended; he was never known to qualify; he was never personally made acquaintance with. Something of the hermit blended mystically with his ac.u.men, so that the primary advantage of our position was his supreme standard, insensibly our own also,--the secondary, our undisturbed seclusion.

As I said, we walked the same distance day by day. Nothing is uniform to a soul really set on the idealities of art. Everything, though it changes not, suggests to the mind of the musician. Though not a full-grown mind, I had all joy in that unchanging route; for as the year grew and rounded, all, as it were, aspired without changing.

Meditation mellowed every circ.u.mstance till it ripened to an unalterable charm. I always walked with Starwood, who still made me very anxious; suddenly and increasingly so pale and frail he became that I fully expected him to die that spring. Indeed, he hardly cleared it; and I should have mentioned my fears to Aronach but that he seemed fully aware of all I feared. But instead of getting rid of the weakling, as I dreaded he might choose to do, he physicked him and kept him in his bed-box twice or thrice a week, and taciturnly indulged him; giving him hot possets at night, and cooling drinks by day. The poor little fellow was very grateful, but still sad; and I was astonished that Aronach still expected him to practise, unless he was in bed, and to write, except his head ached. The indefinite disorder very seldom reached that climax though, and chiefly a.s.serted itself in baby-yawns and occasional whimpers, constant weariness, and entire loss of appet.i.te. I at length discovered his age, and Iskar's also. The latter had pa.s.sed eleven, but was not so nearly twelve as I; the first was scarcely nine, and so small he might have been only six.

It struck me he would not be much older, and I had learned to love him too well in his infantine and affecting weakness. I ventured, one day, to ask Aronach whether his father knew he was ill. I was answered,--

"He is not ill."

"But, sir, he is low and weak!"

"He will always be weak while thou art petting him. Who can take more care of him than I? His father?"

"Oh, master! I know you are good; but what if he dies?"

"His work will not have killed him, nor his weakness. If people are to die, they die; if they are to live, they live."

I was silenced, not convinced; but from that hour I did not think he would die; nor did he.

Aronach was strict, he never departed from a rule; it was his chief and salient characteristic. He never held what one may call conversation with us on any subject except our studies, and then it was in exemplification, not suggestively. It was a beneficial reserve, perhaps, but I could not have endured it forever, and might have become impatient but for the auspices of the season; it was the very beginning of May. Though shut up to a great extent, as we were, the weather made itself an entrance, blue sky swelled, and the glow of morning woke me before dawn. The lindens near the fountain began to blossom, and in the garden of the church the oak-leaves cl.u.s.tered. I saw nothing of the country yet, and could only dream of unknown beauty in untraversed paths. The Cecilia examinations approached. Aronach attended almost every day at the school. I knew just so much and no more, and as much expected to a.s.sist thereat as I should have hoped to come of age on my twelfth birthday. My birthday was in that month of May, in the third week; and though I was innocent of the fact, it was a fact that it was one of Cecilia's feast-days as well as my own. It was, however, such a delicious morning that it nearly sent me mad up in my little room to be mewed there, when such thousands upon thousands roamed wheresoever they would; for I never took it into account how many of those wanderers would rejoice to be so shut up as I was, could they only rest. And it struck me that at least one day in the year one ought to be permitted to do exactly as one desired, even were the desire to drown one's self the prevalent aspiration. There are times when it is not only natural, but necessary, to rebel against authority; so that had I not been locked in, I would have certainly escaped and made a ramble on my own responsibility; for I should have acted upon as pure impulse as when--usually industrious enough as I was--I laid down my fiddle and wasted my time.

As I gazed upon the window and smelt the utter sweetness of the atmosphere, hardly so much air as flower spirit, the voice of perfume, I was wishful of the wings of all the flies, and envious of the b.u.t.terflies that blundered in and floated out. I am sure I had been idle at least an hour, and had no prospect of taking heed to my ways, so long as the sky was blue as that sky, and the breeze blew in, when I felt, rather than heard, a soft little knock at the door. I fancied it was the servant dashing her broomstick upon the landing; but in a moment it was repeated, and I was very shy to take any notice, feeling that a goblin could let itself in, and had better do so than be admitted. Then I was roused indeed, and my own inaction scared me, for I recognized Starwood's voice.

"Charles, I want to come in,--mayn't I a minute, please?"

"Really, Star, it is too bad of you to give me such a turn! How can I open the door? Pray come in directly, and tell me what is the matter."

He boggled at the lock for a minute or two, but at last admitted himself.

"Why, Star, how frightened you look! Have you been flogged at last?

and is the master home already?"

"No, no, Charles! Something most extraordinary."

I really could but laugh, the child repeated the words with such an awe.

"A gentleman, Charles, has come. He opened my door while I was practising. I should have been dreadfully frightened, but he was so kind, and came in so gently. He thought you were here, Charles, and asked for you; he says he does not know your name, but that he could tell me whether you were here if I would describe you. I said how pale you were, with such dark eyes, and about your playing, and he said,--

"'All right, go and fetch him, or send him to me: will you be so kind?'"

"How could you be quite sure? It may be some one for Iskar, who is pale, and has dark eyes."

"He said it was the violin that came at Christmas, I was to send; and you came at Christmas. Besides, he looks very like a friend you would have; he is not like anybody else."

"What is he like, Star?"

"His face is so very bright and clever that I could not look at it; but I saw his beautiful curling hair. I never saw such curling hair."

"Come in with me, then, Star."

"No, he said I was not to come too, that I might go on with my music.

He calls it 'music,' but I don't think it is much like it."

Now, I knew who was there as well as if an angel had spoken to me and said, "It is he for whom you waited." Had I not known in very a.s.surance, I should have forced my little friend to go back with me, that I might not meet alone a stranger; as it was, I only longed to fly, and to fly alone into that presence, for which I then felt I had been waiting, though I had known it not.

I rushed from my little prison enfranchised, ecstatic; but I misapprehended my own sensations. The magnetic power was so appalling that as I reached the threshold of that other room a dark shock came over my eyes, and partly from my haste, in part from that dazzling blindness, I staggered and fell across the doorway, and could not try to rise.

But his arm was round me,--before I fell, I felt it; and as I lay I was crushed, abandoned in very worship. None worship as the child-enthusiast save the enthusiast who worshipped even as a child. I scarcely tried to rise; but he lifted me with that strong and slender arm, and set me upon my feet. Before he spoke I spoke, but I gasped so wildly that my words are not in my power to recall. I only remember that I named him "our Conductor--the Conductor!" and that still, with his light touch on my shoulder, he turned his head aside. I looked up freely then; and the glance I then caught of that brow, those eyes half averted, half bent upon me with the old pitying sweetness, partly shaded by earthly sympathy, but for the most part lifted into light beyond my knowledge,--the one glimpse forewarned me not to yield to the emotions he raised within me, lest I should trouble him more than needed. It was not a minute, I am sure, before I mastered myself and stood before him firmly.