Then the frolic music sank and changed, and sweeter and clearer than all came a strain of so plaintive a sadness that the old man paused on his way, and a poor needlewoman in an upper room nearby bent her head on her work and wept. This melody the old man knew also, and though he could not have told when last he heard it, the fiddle sang clear as words:
O the trees are growing high, and the leaves are long and green,
The time is past and gone, my dear, that you and I have seen!
He came forward to the gate with his eyes on the strange fiddler, who let his bow sink and draw off the strings till you could not guess when the music ceased. And the fiddler looked down on the old man with so odd a regard that he might have been a father indulgent of his child’s whims, or a kind friend healing another’s infirmities, or merely an elf at a prank.
“Surely,” said the old man, “surely it was you who played the fiddle at my wedding.”
“Do you remember me, then?” The fiddler’s voice was clear as a note of his fiddle, but low and far, like a bell in the distance.
“Remember?” the old man replied. “When I hear your fiddle I can remember more than ever I knew. That was many years ago; you must be a very old man.”
“I am old — much older than you think. But do I seem to grow older?”
“Not a day — not a day; and that was more than fifty years ago. It is hard to believe my senses; when I first heard you I thought I was dreaming.”
“And when are you dreaming?” asked the strange fiddler. “And when not? Do you know? What have you been dreaming all these years? What are you dreaming now?”
“I don’t think I am dreaming now,” said the old man.
“No — and why should you? More than two thousand vears ago a man in China dreamed he was a butterfly. He fluttered from flower to flower, intent only on the concerns of a butterfly, lost to all sense of the concerns of a man. Suddenly he awoke, and found himself a man. But he said: ‘Am I a man who dreamed himself a butterfly, or am I a butterfly who is now dreaming itself a man?’ He was very wise, but he could not answer that question.”
“Bless me,” said the old man, “you say strange things. But I should like to hear your fiddle again.”
“And so you shall,” the fiddler replied. “You shall hear it, but not now. I do not like these streets, and I hardly know why I came. You shall hear my fiddle in your dream — your other dream.”
“I cannot understand you,” said the old man, looking very earnestly into the fiddler’s face; “and yet I cannot believe you would laugh at me. Who are you? Did I ever know your name?”
“No, you never knew my name, and if I told you it would only puzzle you more. I am a butterfly — or a man — blown in from the fields and lost in these streets. I am going back to the lanes and the meadows; but you shall hear my fiddle again, in the other dream — the dream that is coming!”
He turned and was gone; and the old man, full of wonder and strange new hopes, went back to the cottage. For nothing on earth now seemed more desirable than to hear that fiddle again. He remained restless and longing, and found himself listening intently to every sound from without. More than once he looked out of the window through which he had first seen the fiddler; but there stood the mere white gate, and beyond it, across the street, nothing but the poor little grimy houses that were all alike.
And so the night fell, but brought him little rest. Unlike his habit, he lay wakeful, listening. He strove to put aside the fancy and compose himself to sleep; but the longing was beyond his command, and still he listened. The hours were long, and soon, he judged, it must be morning. Presently, indeed, it grew lighter about him; and with that he had his wish, for in the distance he could hear the fiddle.
Instantly he rose, and dressed with such speed that he was at the latch of the door ere the fiddler had reached the garden gate. The morning was gay and sunny, and as he came into the garden Golden Lea saw that the lavender was alive, and opening its little buds to scent the early air. The nests were awake, thrushes sang loud and clear, and the old man was at the garden gate in time to meet the fiddler in Bell Brook Lane. For the dream of drab streets was gone, and Bell Brook Lane was green and winding, and a hundred thousand dewdrops gemmed the hedges and the gardens.
The fiddler seemed to carry a touch more of the fantastic in his guise, though it was hard to say wherein it lay; and he regarded the old man with that same kindly but inscrutable eye. He played now an air that had no name in the old man’s mind, but had all the joy of all the merry music he had ever heard, and more. Sometimes he caught an echo of a tune he had known as a boy, now one, and now another; and it was always as though this was the true tune, the real tune, and all those tunes of old days had been mere uncouth efforts to recall some part of it.
Side by side they walked up the lane, the fiddler playing unceasingly, his head aside and his eyes watching the old man with that intent look that was very kuid, but seemed only half serious. The old man had no choice but to walk with him, because of his eyes and because of his music; though he would joyfully have walked in any case, for the trees stirred and whispered in the day’s first breeze, and there had been no such morning since he was a boy, and scarcely then. The wild roses scented the hedges, and daisies peeped in the grass, and bluebells overhung them. Larks sang aloft, and the Bell Brook ran merrily by the lane-side, and plashed over at the bank and across the path where the stepping-stones were. And the song of the lark in the sky, and of the thrush on the bough, the sound of the brook and the stir of the trees, were all so strangely a part of the fiddler’s music that it seemed that he touched the chords of all the wo!Id.
They came out on the great white road that led abroad to so manv other fields and lanes, and streams and towns, and in the end to the sea. But thev turned neither right nor left, but crossed to a rising meadow. Well the old man knew it, for this was the way to the mill. Up the slope they went together, and the country opened out about them as they rose, gay with many-coloured fields, and set with a score of hamlets, and bounded beyond all by the silver of the wide river. As they neared the top the prospect broadened, and the wind was all the sweeter for the height, as it swept up from all Essex, green with meadows and bushed with trees that were pierced with here and there a steeple.
And now they reached the mill, busy thus early, with its sails lifting and lifting; and the old man looked up at it as he would have looked in the face of some old and steadfast friend. But it was on the miller’s house that he turned his eyes with the more eager gaze. There was the window, with the climbing rose about it, and the casement ajar. He lifted his arms toward it, and his soul rose in rapture within him at the hope of what he might see there. “Jenny!” he cried; and again he cried “ Jenny!”
But now the fiddler spoke at last, in the voice that was like a distant bell.
“Not yet,” he said. “You shall sec — you shall see; but not yet.”
The music fell very soft, and the fiddler spoke again :
“Rest,” he said; “ you must rest. Sleep now. Soon I will wake you again.’*
He let his bow sink and sink and draw off from the strings till there was no telling when the music ceased. But as it died away, so the sunlight died with it, and the birds sang no more. The old man turned from the fiddler, but could see nothing.
The blue sky was gone, and it was very dark. Surely he was in his bed. He rose, opened the window, and looked out. The night was dark and windy, and whether they were trees or houses about him he could not be sure. But in the sound of the wind about and above the cottage, he caught some echo of the fiddlers music.
III.
AND so in his dreams the old man touched his boyhood again, with all the memories of age; and the fiddler who plays to the chosen played by his side. The people of the street saw him no more, for his face was turned inward, and he grudged the time given to the dream of lonely old age. It grew to be his habit to draw his chair so that he might sit and look through the window where you sa
w the old church, as his wife had done. And here he slept and waked, but as the days went by he slept more and more, and more and more he walked with the fiddler and heard the music in Bell Brook Lane.
The charwoman who came daily regarded him with great doubt, and shook her head much among the neighbours. For he would wake and ask anxiously :
“Mrs. Finch, did you hear a fiddle?”
“Why, no,” she would say. “I’ve heard no fiddle.”
“Are you sure?” he would reply with earnestness. “See if there is a fiddler at the gate.”
“Why, no,” she would repeat; “ nothing of the sort. There’s nobody at the gate.”
“Ah well,” he would say, after a pause, “be sure to tell me if you hear a fiddle.”
But one day the poor needlewoman who lived in an upper room nearby, heard again the fiddle that she had heard once before. The tune ran and trilled and turned merrily, and at first it seemed like The wind that shakes the barley, and then like Over the kills and far away. She ran to the window, though she could see nothing. But the music drew nearer, and sometimes it was like one joyful tune and sometimes like another, but always finer than them all. And then it was The trees are growing high; but with no sadness now, and full of glad solace, so that the poor needlewoman smiled to hear it. For the music was so gay that it gave sweet promise and a new meaning to the words it carried to her heart:
“O the trees are growing high, and the leaves are long and green,
The time is past and gone, my dear, that you and I have seen!”
And now it reached even the ears of Mrs. Finch; and she ran to the old man’s room, where he sat before the window that looked on to the old church.
“Mr. Lea!” she cried. “There’s a fiddle!”
But she got no answer.
A PROFESSIONAL EPISODE
THE man of middle age is stricken with a sense of odd surprise when he hears the sixties of the nineteenth century spoken of as years of a picturesque and romantic past; when he sees the costumes of those days worn at fancy-dress balls, and the brocades sought as examples of bygone art. But the error is his own. Let him consider the days of even a decade later in contrast with the present time, and he will perceive that in daily habit and environment the seventies of that century are as far from us as the beginning of any earlier century from its end.
If you care to rake the newspaper files of the early half of those seventies, you will come on the report of the trial, at the Old Bailey, of James Renton for the murder of Solomon Creech, a tallyman; but it is a dull and commonplace report, not worth the dust of the hunt. The tallyman had wound Renton’s wife into his net of debt, where a hundred more were tied already, behind her husband’s back; and, confronted at last with the news in the shape of a hopeless judgment summons, the infuriated Renton had turned on the tallyman with what chanced to be in his hand — a shovel — and beat him about the head with it. The verdict was “Guilty,” and the sentence that which the law provides.
So there came a certain Monday morning when a little crowd gathered on the pavement opposite Newgate jail to watch for the rise of the black flag. Another crowd, rather larger, stood by the rails of St. Sepulchre’s churchyard, with a backing of boys clinging to the rails themselves; for it was not so long since the last of the public executions, and popular interest in the hangman and his doings persisted. Still, it was not a murder of great popular repute, or the numbers would have been greater.
A tallyman could expect little tenderness from such as stood in this crowd; and such languid sympathy as was going was on the side of the murderer. “Sarve ‘im right — comin’ carneyin’ round a man’s wife an’ gettin’ ‘im in debt,” was the average sentiment, expressed in slight variants of that formula. But a pieman and a hot-pea dealer from Smithfield market, being in trade themselves, maintained that he — the murderer being now understood — had no right to kill the man, all the same: and it was generally admitted, on reflection, that there was something in that, too; and, this equilibrium of opinion being established, the bell of St. Sepulchre’s broke in with its ominous toll.
People began to watch the church clock, and the few who had watches pulled them out. James Renton’s life was counted out in minutes: fifteen, ten, five, four; then three, two, and one. The crowd was very quiet, and looked no longer at the clock, but at the flagstaff opposite. The halyard was seen to shake clear, and one or two of the older men, with the habit of public executions — one was the pieman — took off their hats; and with that the black flag broke out and rose, and James Renton’s last debt was paid. A curious sound, something of a loud murmur, but not unlike a cough, broke the silence, and a few boys shouted; and then parts of the crowd scattered, but slowly at first. A knot of women, voluble, with willing shudders, straggled into the nearest public-house to remedy the “turn” they had endured; the idle stood and stared at the black flag till the bell had ceased tolling, and afterward; and the rest drifted off a few at a time.
Small trace of James Renton was left on the face of London, save in a little house of a row in a suburb; a row with little yards behind and long gardens in front, bright with hollyhocks and scarlet runners. One garden only looked neglected, as in fact it was; for it had lain untouched since James Renton was taken away from it; and the curtains of the little house were drawn close.
In a grimy printer’s shop in Seven Dials a ragged chanter-cove, who reminded the shopman that a man was being hanged that morning, was told that no more last dying confessions would be printed, except possibly in some case of unusual popular excitement. “No good now,” said the shopman. “Look at all them left-overs from the last — dead loss they are. You can ‘ave’em at yer own price, an’ cut off the tops if you like.”
But the speculation did not attract the chanter, so that even his commemoration was denied to James Renton; and the chanter’s voice was presently to be heard singing “Sweet Belle Mahone” in Castle Street.
Over Newgate prison the black flag fluttered its hour, and came down almost unnoticed. The traffic in the Old Bailey grew thicker, and wagons clustered about the carriers’ yards. The streets were filled with the day’s business, and the thought that a man had been hanged that morning was wiped from the passer’s mind. A person familiar with the routine might have noticed the coroner’s jury as it filtered in, and, later straggled away; but, as a fact, nobody did notice, except perchance a loafing errand-boy.
The jury had been gone an hour or nearly when a solitary man slipped quietly away from the same door — more quietly and unobtrusively than the jury’s meekest member. Small, mild, and insignificant in the scurry of the roaring street clad in rusty black, with an ill-kept tall hat on his head and a carpet bag in his hand, he passed on his way, the unnoticed picture of dismal commonplace. Yet here was the angel of death as it had met the bodily eye of many men; and James Renton not four hours ago.
A small mongrel dog that had been running about uneasily among the legs of the people at the court-house and in the street came after the man at a bolt, caught him short of the corner of Ludgate Hill, and pawed joyfully at his legs and his carpet bag. The man stopped, surprised, and glanced furtively up the street behind him. Then he gave the dog a word and a rub of the head and went on, with the dog now trotting at his heels.
Across Ludgate Hill, down to the Circus and up Fleet Street, the hangman went unobserved and unobservant, till, a little way beyond Bonverie Street, he turned through the doorway of a public-house and made for the innermost snuggery at the back. He carefully held the door to admit the dog, and was greeted by three customers already seated near the bar.
These three presented a great contrast in appearance and manner with the hangman. They were well dressed in their different ways, and clearly were of a class little to be suspected of personal acquaintance with him. But they had their own contrasts, also, though all three were young men. One, quiet in dress and manner, with a keen and inquiring eye, would have seemed well in place in any chambers of the adjoini
ng Temple or in one of the larger number of clubs in Pall Mall. The second, of about the same age, might also have been seen in the Temple, but would have been less conspicuous in a rat-pit. He wore a short drab overcoat, bound in very wide and shiny braid, a plaid tie, and a horse-shoe pin a little short of natural size, and a harassing check suit was visible beneath the coat. The third was a very young man, obviously under the tutelage of him of the plaid tie, and anxious to see life in a modest copy of his mentor’s apparel.
“Ha! Old cockalorum at last,” said the man of the plaid tie. “We’d begun to think the jury ‘d done the right thing after all and made it ‘Wilful Murder’ against you, and you’d gone and tied yourself up, as was right and proper. What’s the gargle? The usual, or something short this time?”
The hangman stopped, looked thoughtfully at the bar and then quickly back to the speaker. “Thankee, Mr. Crick,” he said, “I think I will ‘ave somethin’ short this time. Mild an’ bitter’s my ‘abit, as you know, but this time — rum cold.”
“Done with you.” said Mr. Crick, lugging out a large cigar-case; “and a smoke? No? Rather have your pipe? Very well. Warren?” The quiet young man lifted the cigar already in his hand. “No? Then you, Mellor. Don’t all insult ‘em.”
The callow youth, smiling rather uneasily, took a very black and deadly cigar, and lit, it resolutely.
“This is my friend Mellor,” proceeded the loquacious Crick, with a wave of his hand between the two. “Take a good look and tell us how much rope you’d give him. He’s got the measure of all his friends, you know,” he went on, with a wink and a jerk of the band toward the hangman, “and I was quite flattered when I knew I should get a foot more drop than Warren. Hullo, whose dog? Yours?”
“Why, no, sir,” answered the man in black patting the dog, “not my own; b’longs to a friend. ‘E followed me— ‘e ‘a done it afore, though not as far from ‘ome as this. Animals takes to me, in a way; cats do. The cat in Newgate’s a great pal o’ mine.”
Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison Page 268