Part 13

Sitting one night till late,--so late that the fashionable young wives with their husbands had retired from the strips of stair carpeting,--and raging at the loneliness which ate at his heart like a cancer, he heard, softly creeping through the windows of the house adjoining his own, the sound of comfortable melody.

It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speaking of peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, of aspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to find attainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper these things, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon the spirit--that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listened as one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the hot road, hears, far in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a spring.

Then came harmonies more intricate: fair fabrics of woven sound, in the midst of which gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of sound, multi-tinted, gallant with story and achievement, and beautiful things. Boyce, sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees jambed against the balustrade, and his chair back against the dun-colored wall of his house, seemed to be walking in the cathedral of the redwood forest, with blue above him, a vast hymn in his ears, pungent perfume in his nostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting themselves to heaven, proud and erect as pure men before their Judge. He stood on a mountain at sunrise, and saw the marvels of the amethystine clouds below his feet, heard an eternal and white silence, such as broods among the everlasting snows, and saw an eagle winging for the sun. He was in a city, and away from him, diverging like the spokes of a wheel, ran thronging streets, and to his sense came the beat, beat, beat of the city's heart. He saw the golden alchemy of a chosen race; saw greed transmitted to progress; saw that which had enslaved men, work at last to their liberation; heard the roar of mighty mills, and on the streets all the peoples of earth walking with common purpose, in fealty and understanding. And then, from the swelling of this concourse of great sounds, came a diminuendo, calm as philosophy, and from that, nothingness.

Boyce sat still for a long time, listening to the echoes which this music had awakened in his soul. He retired, at length, content, but determined that upon the morrow he would watch--the day being Sunday--for the musician who had so moved and taught him.

He arose early, therefore, and having prepared his own simple breakfast of fruit and coffee, took his station by the window to watch for the man. For he felt convinced that the exposition he had heard was that of a masculine mind. The long, hot hours of the morning went by, but the front door of the house next to his did not open.

“These artists sleep late,” he complained. Still he watched. He was too much afraid of losing him to go out for dinner. By three in the afternoon he had grown impatient. He went to the house next door and rang the bell. There was no response. He thundered another appeal. An old woman with a cloth about her head answered the door. She was very deaf, and Boyce had difficulty in making himself understood.

“The family is in the country,” was all she would say. “The family will not be home till September.”

“But there is some one living here?” shouted Boyce.

“I live here,” she said with dignity, putting back a wisp of dirty gray hair behind her ear. “It is my house. I sublet to the family.”

“What family?”

But the old creature was not communicative.

“The family that lives here,” she said.

“Then who plays the piano in this house?” roared Boyce. “Do you?”

He thought a shade of pallor showed itself on her ash-colored cheeks. Yet she smiled a little at the idea of her playing.

“There is no piano,” she said, and she put an enigmatical emphasis to the words.

“Nonsense,” cried Boyce, indignantly. “I heard a piano being played in this very house for hours last night!”

“You may enter,” said the old woman, with an accent more vicious than hospitable.

Boyce almost burst into the drawing-room. It was a dusty and forbidding place, with ugly furniture and gaudy walls. No piano nor any other musical instrument stood in it. The intruder turned an angry and baffled face to the old woman, who was smiling with ill-concealed exultation.

“I shall see the other rooms,” he announced. The old woman did not appear to be surprised at his impertinence.

“As you please,” she said.

So, with the hobbling creature, with her bandaged head, for a guide, he explored every room of the house, which being identical with his own, he could do without fear of leaving any apartment unentered. But no piano did he find!

“Explain,” roared Boyce at length, turning upon the leering old hag beside him. “Explain! For surely I heard music more beautiful than I can tell.”

“I know nothing,” she said. “But it is true I once had a lodger who rented the front room, and that he played upon the piano. I am poor at hearing, but he must have played well, for all the neighbors used to come in front of the house to listen, and sometimes they applauded him, and sometimes they were still. I could tell by watching their hands. Sometimes little children came and danced. Other times young men and women came and listened. But the young man died. The neighbors were angry. They came to look at him and said he had starved to death. It was no fault of mine. I sold his piano to pay his funeral expenses--and it took every cent to pay for them too, I'd have you know. But since then, sometimes--still, it must be nonsense, for I never heard it--folks say that he plays the piano in my room. It has kept me out of the letting of it more than once. But the family doesn't seem to mind--the family that lives here, you know. They will be back in September. Yes.”

Boyce left her nodding her thanks at what he had placed in her hand, and went home to write it all to Babette--Babette who would laugh so merrily when she read it!

AN ASTRAL ONION

WHEN Tig Braddock came to Nora Finnegan he was red-headed and freckled, and, truth to tell, he remained with these features to the end of his life--a life prolonged by a lucky, if somewhat improbable, incident, as you shall hear.

Tig had shuffled off his parents as saurians, of some sorts, do their skins. During the temporary absence from home of his mother, who was at the bridewell, and the more extended vacation of his father, who, like Villon, loved the open road and the life of it, Tig, who was not a well-domesticated animal, wandered away. The humane society never heard of him, the neighbors did not miss him, and the law took no cognizance of this detached citizen--this lost pleiad. Tig would have sunk into that melancholy which is attendant upon hunger,--the only form of despair which babyhood knows,--if he had not wandered across the path of Nora Finnegan. Now Nora shone with steady brightness in her orbit, and no sooner had Tig entered her atmosphere, than he was warmed and comforted. Hunger could not live where Nora was. The basement room where she kept house was redolent with savory smells; and in the stove in her front room--which was also her bedroom--there was a bright fire glowing when fire was needed.

Nora went out washing for a living. But she was not a poor washerwoman. Not at all. She was a washerwoman triumphant. She had perfect health, an enormous frame, an abounding enthusiasm for life, and a rich abundance of professional pride. She believed herself to be the best washer of white clothes she had ever had the pleasure of knowing, and the value placed upon her services, and her long connection with certain families with large weekly washings, bore out this estimate of herself--an estimate which she never endeavored to conceal.