The Complete Works of L M Montgomery

by L. M. Montgomery

  Felix Moore was standing opposite to him, before an untidy stove, where the noon fire had died down into pallid, scattered ashes. Under his chin he held old Abel’s brown, battered fiddle; his eyes, too, were fixed on the ceiling; and he, too, saw things not lawful to be uttered in any language save that of music; and of all music, only that given forth by the anguished, enraptured spirit of the violin. And yet this Felix was little more than twelve years old, and his face was still the face of a child who knows nothing of either sorrow or sin or failure or remorse. Only in his large, gray-black eyes was there something not of the child — something that spoke of an inheritance from many hearts, now ashes, which had aforetime grieved and joyed, and struggled and failed, and succeeded and grovelled. The inarticulate cries of their longings had passed into this child’s soul, and transmuted themselves into the expression of his music.

  Felix was a beautiful child. Carmody people, who stayed at home, thought so; and old Abel Blair, who had roamed afar in many lands, thought so; and even the Rev. Stephen Leonard, who taught, and tried to believe, that favour is deceitful and beauty is vain, thought so.

  He was a slight lad, with sloping shoulders, a slim brown neck, and a head set on it with stag-like grace and uplift. His hair, cut straight across his brow and falling over his ears, after some caprice of Janet Andrews, the minister’s housekeeper, was a glossy blue-black. The skin of his face and hands was like ivory; his eyes were large and beautifully tinted — gray, with dilating pupils; his features had the outlines of a cameo. Carmody mothers considered him delicate, and had long foretold that the minister would never bring him up; but old Abel pulled his grizzled moustache when he heard such forebodings and smiled.

  “Felix Moore will live,” he said positively. “You can’t kill that kind until their work is done. He’s got a work to do — if the minister’ll let him do it. And if the minister don’t let him do it, then I wouldn’t be in that minister’s shoes when he comes to the judgment — no, I’d rather be in my own. It’s an awful thing to cross the purposes of the Almighty, either in your own life or anybody else’s. Sometimes I think it’s what’s meant by the unpardonable sin — ay, that I do!”

  Carmody people never asked what old Abel meant. They had long ago given up such vain questioning. When a man had lived as old Abel had lived for the greater part of his life, was it any wonder he said crazy things? And as for hinting that Mr. Leonard, a man who was really almost too good to live, was guilty of any sin, much less an unpardonable one — well, there now! what use was it to be taking any account of old Abel’s queer speeches? Though, to be sure, there was no great harm in a fiddle, and maybe Mr. Leonard was a mite too strict that way with the child. But then, could you wonder at it? There was his father, you see.

  Felix finally lowered the violin, and came back to old Abel’s kitchen with a long sigh. Old Abel smiled drearily at him — the smile of a man who has been in the hands of the tormentors.

  “It’s awful the way you play — it’s awful,” he said with a shudder. “I never heard anything like it — and you that never had any teaching since you were nine years old, and not much practice, except what you could get here now and then on my old, battered fiddle. And to think you make it up yourself as you go along! I suppose your grandfather would never hear to your studying music — would he now?”

  Felix shook his head.

  “I know he wouldn’t, Abel. He wants me to be a minister. Ministers are good things to be, but I’m afraid I can’t be a minister.”

  “Not a pulpit minister. There’s different kinds of ministers, and each must talk to men in his own tongue if he’s going to do ’em any real good,” said old Abel meditatively. “YOUR tongue is music. Strange that your grandfather can’t see that for himself, and him such a broad-minded man! He’s the only minister I ever had much use for. He’s God’s own if ever a man was. And he loves you — yes, sir, he loves you like the apple of his eye.”

  “And I love him,” said Felix warmly. “I love him so much that I’ll even try to be a minister for his sake, though I don’t want to be.”

  “What do you want to be?”

  “A great violinist,” answered the child, his ivory-hued face suddenly warming into living rose. “I want to play to thousands — and see their eyes look as yours do when I play. Sometimes your eyes frighten me, but oh, it’s a splendid fright! If I had father’s violin I could do better. I remember that he once said it had a soul that was doing purgatory for its sins when it had lived on earth. I don’t know what he meant, but it did seem to me that HIS violin was alive. He taught me to play on it as soon as I was big enough to hold it.”

  “Did you love your father?” asked old Abel, with a keen look.

  Again Felix crimsoned; but he looked straightly and steadily into his old friend’s face.

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t; but,” he added, gravely and deliberately, “I don’t think you should have asked me such a question.”

  It was old Abel’s turn to blush. Carmody people would not have believed he could blush; and perhaps no living being could have called that deepening hue into his weather-beaten cheek save only this gray-eyed child of the rebuking face.

  “No, I guess I shouldn’t,” he said. “But I’m always making mistakes. I’ve never made anything else. That’s why I’m nothing more than ‘Old Abel’ to the Carmody people. Nobody but you and your grandfather ever calls me ‘Mr. Blair.’ Yet William Blair at the store up there, rich and respected as he is, wasn’t half as clever a man as I was when we started in life: you mayn’t believe that, but it’s true. And the worst of it is, young Felix, that most of the time I don’t care whether I’m Mr. Blair of old Abel. Only when you play I care. It makes me feel just as a look I saw in a little girl’s eyes some years ago made me feel. Her name was Anne Shirley and she lived with the Cuthberts down at Avonlea. We got into a conversation at Blair’s store. She could talk a blue streak to anyone, that girl could. I happened to say about something that it didn’t matter to a battered old hulk of sixty odd like me. She looked at me with her big, innocent eyes, a little reproachful like, as if I’d said something awful heretical. ‘Don’t you think, Mr. Blair,’ she says, ‘that the older we get the more things ought to matter to us?’ — as grave as if she’d been a hundred instead of eleven. ‘Things matter SO much to me now,’ she says, clasping her hands thisaway, ‘and I’m sure that when I’m sixty they’ll matter just five times as much to me.’ Well, the way she looked and the way she spoke made me feel downright ashamed of myself because things had stopped mattering with me. But never mind all that. My miserable old feelings don’t count for much. What come of your father’s fiddle?”

  “Grandfather took it away when I came here. I think he burned it. And I long for it so often.”

  “Well, you’ve always got my old brown fiddle to come to when you must.”

  “Yes, I know. And I’m glad for that. But I’m hungry for a violin all the time. And I only come here when the hunger gets too much to bear. I feel as if I oughtn’t to come even then — I’m always saying I won’t do it again, because I know grandfather wouldn’t like it, if he knew.”

  “He has never forbidden it, has he?”

  “No, but that is because he doesn’t know I come here for that. He never thinks of such a thing. I feel sure he WOULD forbid it, if he knew. And that makes me very wretched. And yet I HAVE to come. Mr. Blair, do you know why grandfather can’t bear to have me play on the violin? He loves music, and he doesn’t mind my playing on the organ, if I don’t neglect other things. I can’t understand it, can you?”

  “I have a pretty good idea, but I can’t tell you. It isn’t my secret. Maybe he’ll tell you himself some day. But, mark you, young Felix, he has got good reasons for it all. Knowing what I know, I can’t blame him over much, though I think he’s mistaken. Come now, play something more for me before you go — something that’s bright and happy this time, so as to leave me with a good taste in my mouth. That last thing you played
took me straight to heaven, — but heaven’s awful near to hell, and at the last you tipped me in.”

  “I don’t understand you,” said Felix, drawing his fine, narrow black brows together in a perplexed frown.

  “No — and I wouldn’t want you to. You couldn’t understand unless you was an old man who had it in him once to do something and be a MAN, and just went and made himself a devilish fool. But there must be something in you that understands things — all kinds of things — or you couldn’t put it all into music the way you do. How do you do it? How in — how DO you do it, young Felix?”

  “I don’t know. But I play differently to different people. I don’t know how that is. When I’m alone with you I have to play one way; and when Janet comes over here to listen I feel quite another way — not so thrilling, but happier and lonelier. And that day when Jessie Blair was here listening I felt as if I wanted to laugh and sing — as if the violin wanted to laugh and sing all the time.”

  The strange, golden gleam flashed through old Abel’s sunken eyes.

  “God,” he muttered under his breath, “I believe the boy can get into other folk’s souls somehow, and play out what HIS soul sees there.”

  “What’s that you say?” inquired Felix, petting his fiddle.

  “Nothing — never mind — go on. Something lively now, young Felix. Stop probing into my soul, where you haven’t no business to be, you infant, and play me something out of your own — something sweet and happy and pure.”

  “I’ll play the way I feel on sunshiny mornings, when the birds are singing and I forget I have to be a minister,” said Felix simply.

  A witching, gurgling, mirthful strain, like mingled bird and brook song, floated out on the still air, along the path where the red and golden maple leaves were falling very softly, one by one. The Reverend Stephen Leonard heard it, as he came along the way, and the Reverend Stephen Leonard smiled. Now, when Stephen Leonard smiled, children ran to him, and grown people felt as if they looked from Pisgah over to some fair land of promise beyond the fret and worry of their care-dimmed earthly lives.

  Mr. Leonard loved music, as he loved all things beautiful, whether in the material or the spiritual world, though he did not realize how much he loved them for their beauty alone, or he would have been shocked and remorseful. He himself was beautiful. His figure was erect and youthful, despite seventy years. His face was as mobile and charming as a woman’s, yet with all a man’s tried strength and firmness in it, and his dark blue eyes flashed with the brilliance of one and twenty; even his silken silvery hair could not make an old man of him. He was worshipped by everyone who knew him, and he was, in so far as mortal man may be, worthy of that worship.

  “Old Abel is amusing himself with his violin again,” he thought. “What a delicious thing he is playing! He has quite a gift for the violin. But how can he play such a thing as that, — a battered old hulk of a man who has, at one time or another, wallowed in almost every sin to which human nature can sink? He was on one of his sprees three days ago — the first one for over a year — lying dead-drunk in the market square in Charlottetown among the dogs; and now he is playing something that only a young archangel on the hills of heaven ought to be able to play. Well, it will make my task all the easier. Abel is always repentant by the time he is able to play on his fiddle.”

  Mr. Leonard was on the door-stone. The little black dog had frisked down to meet him, and the gray cat rubbed her head against his leg. Old Abel did not notice him; he was beating time with uplifted hand and smiling face to Felix’s music, and his eyes were young again, glowing with laughter and sheer happiness.

  “Felix! what does this mean?”

  The violin bow clattered from Felix’s hand upon the floor; he swung around and faced his grandfather. As he met the passion of grief and hurt in the old man’s eyes, his own clouded with an agony of repentance.

  “Grandfather — I’m sorry,” he cried brokenly.

  “Now, now!” Old Abel had risen deprecatingly. “It’s all my fault, Mr. Leonard. Don’t you blame the boy. I coaxed him to play a bit for me. I didn’t feel fit to touch the fiddle yet myself — too soon after Friday, you see. So I coaxed him on — wouldn’t give him no peace till he played. It’s all my fault.”

  “No,” said Felix, throwing back his head. His face was as white as marble, yet it seemed ablaze with desperate truth and scorn of old Abel’s shielding lie. “No, grandfather, it isn’t Abel’s fault. I came over here on purpose to play, because I thought you had gone to the harbour. I have come here often, ever since I have lived with you.”

  “Ever since you have lived with me you have been deceiving me like this, Felix?”

  There was no anger in Mr. Leonard’s tone — only measureless sorrow. The boy’s sensitive lips quivered.

  “Forgive me, grandfather,” he whispered beseechingly.

  “You never forbid him to come,” old Abel broke in angrily. “Be just, Mr. Leonard — be just.”

  “I AM just. Felix knows that he has disobeyed me, in the spirit if not in the letter. Do you not know it, Felix?”

  “Yes, grandfather, I have done wrong — I’ve known that I was doing wrong every time I came. Forgive me, grandfather.”

  “Felix, I forgive you, but I ask you to promise me, here and now, that you will never again, as long as you live, touch a violin.” Dusky crimson rushed madly over the boy’s face. He gave a cry as if he had been lashed with a whip. Old Abel sprang to his feet.

  “Don’t you ask such a promise of him, Mr. Leonard,” he cried furiously. “It’s a sin, that’s what it is. Man, man, what blinds you? You ARE blind. Can’t you see what is in the boy? His soul is full of music. It’ll torture him to death — or to worse — if you don’t let it have way.”

  “There is a devil in such music,” said Mr. Leonard hotly.

  “Ay, there may be, but don’t forget that there’s a Christ in it, too,” retorted old Abel in a low tense tone.

  Mr. Leonard looked shocked; he considered that old Abel had uttered blasphemy. He turned away from him rebukingly.

  “Felix, promise me.”

  There was no relenting in his face or tone. He was merciless in the use of the power he possessed over that young, loving spirit. Felix understood that there was no escape; but his lips were very white as he said,

  “I promise, grandfather.”

  Mr. Leonard drew a long breath of relief. He knew that promise would be kept. So did old Abel. The latter crossed the floor and sullenly took the violin from Felix’s relaxed hand. Without a word or look he went into the little bedroom off the kitchen and shut the door with a slam of righteous indignation. But from its window he stealthily watched his visitors go away. Just as they entered on the maple path Mr. Leonard laid his hand on Felix’s head and looked down at him. Instantly the boy flung his arm up over the old man’s shoulder and smiled at him. In the look they exchanged there was boundless love and trust — ay, and good-fellowship. Old Abel’s scornful eyes again held the golden flash.

  “How those two love each other!” he muttered enviously. “And how they torture each other!”

  Mr. Leonard went to his study to pray when he got home. He knew that Felix had run for comforting to Janet Andrews, the little, thin, sweet-faced, rigid-lipped woman who kept house for them. Mr. Leonard knew that Janet would disapprove of his action as deeply as old Abel had done. She would say nothing, she would only look at him with reproachful eyes over the teacups at suppertime. But Mr. Leonard believed he had done what was best and his conscience did not trouble him, though his heart did.

  Thirteen years before this, his daughter Margaret had almost broken that heart by marrying a man of whom he could not approve. Martin Moore was a professional violinist. He was a popular performer, though not in any sense a great one. He met the slim, golden-haired daughter of the manse at the house of a college friend she was visiting in Toronto, and fell straightway in love with her. Margaret had loved him with all her virginal heart in return, and marr
ied him, despite her father’s disapproval. It was not to Martin Moore’s profession that Mr. Leonard objected, but to the man himself. He knew that the violinist’s past life had not been such as became a suitor for Margaret Leonard; and his insight into character warned him that Martin Moore could never make any woman lastingly happy.

  Margaret Leonard did not believe this. She married Martin Moore and lived one year in paradise. Perhaps that atoned for the three bitter years which followed — that, and her child. At all events, she died as she had lived, loyal and uncomplaining. She died alone, for her husband was away on a concert tour, and her illness was so brief that her father had not time to reach her before the end. Her body was taken home to be buried beside her mother in the little Carmody churchyard. Mr. Leonard wished to take the child, but Martin Moore refused to give him up.

  Six years later Moore, too, died, and at last Mr. Leonard had his heart’s desire — the possession of Margaret’s son. The grandfather awaited the child’s coming with mingled feelings. His heart yearned for him, yet he dreaded to meet a second edition of Martin Moore. Suppose Margaret’s son resembled his handsome vagabond of a father! Or, worse still, suppose he were cursed with his father’s lack of principle, his instability, his Bohemian instincts. Thus Mr. Leonard tortured himself wretchedly before the coming of Felix.

  The child did not look like either father or mother. Instead, Mr. Leonard found himself looking into a face which he had put away under the grasses thirty years before — the face of his girl bride, who had died at Margaret’s birth. Here again were her lustrous gray-black eyes, her ivory outlines, her fine-traced arch of brow; and here, looking out of those eyes, seemed her very spirit again. From that moment the soul of the old man was knit to the soul of the child, and they loved each other with a love surpassing that of women.

  Felix’s only inheritance from his father was his love of music. But the child had genius, where his father had possessed only talent. To Martin Moore’s outward mastery of the violin was added the mystery and intensity of his mother’s nature, with some more subtle quality still, which had perhaps come to him from the grandmother he so strongly resembled. Moore had understood what a career was naturally before the child, and he had trained him in the technique of his art from the time the slight fingers could first grasp the bow. When nine-year-old Felix came to the Carmody manse, he had mastered as much of the science of the violin as nine out of ten musicians acquire in a lifetime; and he brought with him his father’s violin; it was all Martin Moore had to leave his son — but it was an Amati, the commercial value of which nobody in Carmody suspected. Mr. Leonard had taken possession of it and Felix had never seen it since. He cried himself to sleep many a night for the loss of it. Mr. Leonard did not know this, and if Janet Andrews suspected it she held her tongue — an art in which she excelled. She “saw no harm in a fiddle,” herself, and thought Mr. Leonard absurdly strict in the matter, though it would not have been well for the luckless outsider who might have ventured to say as much to her. She had connived at Felix’s visits to old Abel Blair, squaring the matter with her Presbyterian conscience by some peculiar process known only to herself.