She knotted white fringes for the table covers and curtains, painted the inside of the fireplace red, put some pots, of scarlet geraniums on the window-sills, filled newspaper rack with ferns and tacked it over an ugly spot in the wall, edged her work-basket with a tufted trimming of scarlet worsted, and made an elaborate photograph case of white crash and red cotton that stretched the entire length of the old-fashioned mantelshelf, and held pictures of Mr. Reynolds, Miss Elvira Reynolds, George, Susy, Anna, John, Hazel, Ella, and Rufus Reynolds, her former charges. When all this was done, she lighted a little blaze on the hearth, took the red curtains from their hands, let them fall gracefully to the floor, and sat down in her rocking-chair, reconciled to her existence for absolutely the first time in her forty years.
I hope Mrs. Butterfield was happy enough in Paradise to appreciate and feel Lyddy's joy. I can even believe she was glad to have died, since her dying could bring such content to any wretched living human soul.
As Lydia sat in the firelight, the left side of her poor face in shadow, you saw that she was distinctly harmonious. Her figure, clad in plain black-and-white calico dress, was a graceful, womanly one.
She had beautifully sloping shoulders and a sweet wrist. Her hair was soft and plentiful, and her hands were fine, strong, and sensitive.
This possibility of rare beauty made her scars and burns more pitiful, for if a cheap chrome has smirch across its face, we think it a matter of no moment, but we deplore the smallest scratch or blur on any work of real art.
Lydia felt a little less bitter and hopeless about life when she sat in front of her own open fire, after her usual twilight walk.
It was her habit to wander down the wooded road after her simple five-o'clock supper, gatherings ferns or goldenrod or frost flowers for her vases; and one night she heard, above the rippling of the river, the strange, sweet, piercing sound of Anthony Croft's violin.
She drew nearer, and saw a, middle-aged man sitting in the kitchen doorway, with a lad of ten or twelve years leaning against his knees.
She could tell little of his appearance, save that he had a high forehead, and hair that waved well back from it in rather an unusual fashion.
He was in his shirt-sleeves, but the gingham was scrupulously clean, and he had the uncommon refinement of a collar and necktie.
Out of sight herself, Lyddy drew near enough to hear; and this she did every night without recognizing that the musician was blind.
The music had a curious effect upon her. It was a hitherto unknown influence in her life, and it interpreted her, so to speak, to herself.
As she sat on the bed of brown pine needles, under a friendly tree, her head resting against its trunk, her eyes half closed, the tone of Anthony's violin came like a heavenly message to a tired, despairing soul.
Remember that in her secluded life she had heard only such harmony as Elvira Reynolds evoked from her piano or George Reynolds from his flute, and the Reynolds temperament was distinctly inartistic.
Lyddy lived through a lifetime of emotion in these twilight concerts.
Sometimes she was filled with an exquisite melancholy from which there was no escape; at others, the ethereal purity of the strain stirred her heart with a strange, sweet vision of mysterious joy; joy that she had never possessed, would never possess; joy whose bare existence she never before realized.
When the low notes sank lower and lower with their soft wail of delicious woe, she bent forward into the dark, dreading that something would be lost in the very struggle of listening; then, after a, pause, a pure human tone would break the stillness, and soaring, bird-like, higher and higher, seem to mount to heaven itself, and, "piercing its starry floors," lift poor scarred Lydia's soul to the very grates of infinite bliss.
In the gentle moods that stole upon her in those summer twilights she became a different woman, softer in her prosperity than she had ever been in her adversity; for some plants only blossom in sunshine.
What wonder if to her the music and the musician became one?
It is sometimes a dangerous thing to fuse the man and his talents in this way; but it did no harm here, for Anthony Croft was his music, and the music was Anthony Croft. When he played on his violin, it was as if the miracle of its fashioning were again enacted; as if the bird on the quivering bough, the mellow sunshine streaming through the lattice of green leaves, the tinkle of the woodland stream, spoke in every tone; and more than this, the hearth-glow in whose light the patient hands had worked, the breath of the soul bending itself in passionate prayer for perfection, these, too, seemed to have wrought their blessed influence on the willing strings until the tone was laden with spiritual harmony.
One might indeed have sung of this little red violin--that looked to Lyddy, in the sunset glow, as if it were veneered with rubies--all that Shelley sang of another perfect instrument:--"The artist who this viol wrought To echo all harmonious thought, Fell'd a tree, while on the steep The woods were in their winter sleep, Rock'd in that repose divine Of the wind-swept Apennine;
And dreaming, some of Autumn past, And some of Spring approaching fast, And some of April buds and showers, And some of songs in July bowers, And all of love; and so this tree--O that such our death may be!--Died in sleep, and felt no pain, To live in happier form again."
The viol "whispers in enamoured tone:"--"Sweet oracles of woods and dells, And summer windy ill sylvan cells; . .
The clearest echoes of the hills, The softest notes of falling rills, The melodies of birds and bees, The murmuring of summer seas, And pattering rain, and breathing dew, And airs of evening; all it knew....
--All this it knows, but will not tell To those who cannot question well The spirit that inhabits it; ...
