"But I thought he was going to stay until tomorrow."
"So did I," said Helen, "but he changed his mind and decided that he"d better not."
"Why, I am really disappointed," said Mr. Davis. "I thought we should have a little family party; I haven"t seen Arthur for a month."
"There is some important reason," said Helen--"that"s what he told me, anyway." She did not want her father to have any idea of the true reason, or to ask any inconvenient questions.
Mr. Davis would perhaps have done so, had he not something else on his mind. "By the way, Helen," he said, "I must ask you, what in the world was that fearful noise you were making?"
"Noise?" asked Helen, puzzled for a moment.
"Why, yes; I met old Mr. Nelson coming down the street, and he said that you were making a most dreadful racket upon the piano, and shouting, too, and that there were a dozen people standing in the street, staring!"
A sudden wild thought occurred to Helen, and she whirled about. Sure enough, she found the two windows of the room wide open; and that was too much for her gravity; she flung herself upon the sofa and gave vent to peal after peal of laughter.
"Oh, Daddy!" she gasped. "Oh, Daddy!"
Mr. Davis did not understand the joke, but he waited patiently, taking off his gloves in the meantime. "What it is, Helen?" he enquired.
"Oh, Daddy!" exclaimed the girl again, and lifted herself up and turned her laughing eyes upon him. "And now I understand why inspired people have to live in the country!"
"What was it, Helen?"
"It--it wasn"t anything, Daddy, except that I was playing and singing for Arthur, and I forgot to close the windows."
"You must remember, my love, that you live in a clergyman"s house,"
said Mr. Davis. "I have no objection to merriment, but it must be within bounds. Mr. Nelson said that he did not know what to think was the matter."
Helen made a wry face at the name; the Nelsons were a family of Methodists who lived across the way. Methodists are people who take life seriously as a rule, and Helen thought the Nelsons were very queer indeed.
"I"ll bet he did know what to think," she chuckled, "even if he didn"t say it; he thought that was just what to expect from a clergyman who had a decanter of wine on his dinner table."
Mr. Davis could not help smiling. And as for Helen, she was herself all over again; for when her father had come in, she had about reached a point where she could no longer bear to be serious and unhappy. As he went on to ask her to be a little less reckless, Helen put her arms around him and said, with the solemnity that she always wore when she was gayest: "But, Daddy, I don"t know what I"m to do; you sent me to Germany to study music, and if I"m never to play it--"
"Yes, but Helen; such frantic, dreadful noise!"
"But, Daddy, the Germans are emotional people, you know; no one would have been in the least surprised at that in Germany; it was a hymn, Daddy!"
"A hymn!" gasped Mr. Davis.
"Yes, honestly," said Helen. "It is a wonderful hymn. Every German knows it nearly by heart."
Mr. Davis had as much knowledge of German music as might be expected of one who had lived twenty years in the country and heard three hymns and an anthem sung every Sunday by a volunteer choir. Helen"s musical education, as all her other education, had been superintended by Aunt Polly, and the only idea that came to Mr.
Davis" mind was of Wagner, whose name he had heard people talk about in connection with noise and incoherency.
"Helen," he said, "I trust that is not the kind of hymn you are going to sing to-morrow."
"I don"t know," was the puzzled reply. "I"ll see what I can do, Daddy. It"s dreadfully hard to find anything in German music like the slow-going, practical lives that we dull Yankees lead." Then a sudden idea occurred to the girl, and she ran to the piano with a gleeful laugh: "Just see, for instance," she said, fumbling hurriedly amongst her music, "I was playing the Moonlight Sonata this morning, and that"s a good instance."
"This is the kind of moonlight they have in Germany," she laughed when she found it. After hammering out a few discords of her own she started recklessly into the incomprehensible "presto," thundering away at every crescendo as if to break her fingers. "Isn"t it fine, Daddy?" she cried, gazing over her shoulder.
"I don"t see what it has to do with the moon," said the clergyman, gazing helplessly at the open window, and wondering if another crowd was gathering.
"That"s what everybody"s been trying to find out!" said Helen; then, as she heard the dinner bell out in the hall, she ended with half a dozen frantic runs, and jumping up with the last of them, took her father"s arm and danced out of the room with him.
"Perhaps when we come to see the other side of the moon," she said, "we may discover all about it. Or else it"s because the moon is supposed to set people crazy." So they pa.s.sed in to dinner, where Helen was as animated as ever, poor Arthur and his troubles seeming to have vanished completely from her thoughts.
In fact, it was not until the meal was nearly over that she spoke of them again; she noticed that it was growing dark outside, and she stepped to the window just as a distant rumble of thunder was heard.
"Dear me!" she exclaimed. "There"s a fearful storm coming, and poor Arthur is out in it; he must be a long way from town by this time, and there is no house where he can go." From the window where she stood she had a view across the hills in back of the town, and could see the black clouds coming swiftly on. "It is like we were imagining this morning," she mused; "I wonder if he will think of it."
The dinner was over soon after that, and she looked out again, just as the first drops of rain were falling; the thunder was rolling louder, bringing to Helen a faint echo of her morning music. She went in and sat down at the piano, her fingers roaming over the keys hesitatingly. "I wish I could get it again," she mused. "It seems like a dream when I think of it, it was so wild and so wonderful.
Oh, if I could only remember that march!"
There came a crash of thunder near by, as if to help her, but Helen found that all efforts were in vain. Neither the storm music nor the march came back to her, and even when she played a few chords of the great chorus she had sung, it sounded tame and commonplace. Helen knew that the glory of that morning was gone where goes the best inspiration of all humanity, back into nothingness and night.
"It was a shame," she thought, as she rose discontentedly from the piano. "I never was so carried away by music in my life, and the memory of it would have kept me happy for weeks, if Arthur hadn"t been here to trouble me!"
Then, however, as she went to the window again to watch the storm which was now raging in all its majesty, she added more unselfishly: "Poor boy! It is dreadful to think of him being out in it." She saw a bolt of lightning strike in the distance, and she waited breathlessly for the thunder. It was a fearful crash, and it made her blood run faster, and her eyes sparkle. "My!" she exclaimed.
"But it"s fine!" And then she added with a laugh, "He can correct his poem by it, if he wants to!"
She turned to go upstairs. On the way she stopped with a rather conscience-stricken look, and said to herself, "Poor fellow! It seems a shame to be happy!" She stood for a moment thinking, but then she added, "Yet I declare, I don"t know what to do for him; it surely isn"t my fault if I am not in love with him in that mad fashion, and I don"t see why I should make myself wretched about it!" Having thus silenced her conscience, she went up to unpack her trunks, humming to herself on the way:
"Sir Knight, a faithful sister"s love This heart devotes to thee; I pray thee ask no other love, For pain that causes me.
"Quiet would I see thee come, And quiet see thee go; The silent weeping of thine eyes I cannot bear to know."
While she was singing Arthur was in the midst of the tempest, staggering towards his home ten miles away. He was drenched by the cold rain, and shivering and almost fainting from exhaustion--for he had eaten nothing since early dawn; yet so wretched and sick at heart was he that he felt nothing, and scarcely heard the storm or realized where he was.
CHAPTER IV
"Dosn"t thou "ear my "erse"s legs, as they canters awaay?
Proputty, proputty, proputty--that"s what I "ears "em saay.
But I knawed a Quaaker feller as often "as towd ma this: "Doant thou marry for munny, but goa wheer munny is!""
Helen had much to do to keep her busy during the next few days. She had in the first place to receive visits from nearly everybody in Oakdale, for she was a general favorite in the town, and besides that everyone was curious to see what effect the trip had had upon her beauty and accomplishments. Then too, she had the unpacking of an incredible number of trunks; it was true that Helen, having been a favored boarder at an aristocratic seminary, was not in the habit of doing anything troublesome herself, but she considered it necessary to superintend the servant. Last of all there was a great event at the house of her aunt, Mrs. Roberts, to be antic.i.p.ated and prepared for.
It has been said that the marriage of Mr. Davis had been a second romance in that worthy man"s career, he having had the fortune to win the love of a daughter of a very wealthy family which lived near Oakdale. The parents had of course been bitterly opposed to the match, but the girl had had her way. Unfortunately, however, the lovers, or at any rate the bride, having been without any real idea of duty or sacrifice, the match had proved one of those that serve to justify the opinions of people who are "sensible;" the young wife, wearying of the lot she had chosen, had sunk into a state of peevish discontent from which death came to relieve her.
Of this prodigal daughter Aunt Polly was the elder, and wiser, sister. She had never ceased to urge upon the other, both before and after marriage, the folly of her conduct, and had lived herself to be a proof of her own more excellent sense, having married a wealthy stockbroker who proved a good investment, trebling his own capital and hers in a few years. Aunt Polly therefore had a fine home upon Madison Avenue in New York, and a most aristocratic country-seat a few miles from Oakdale, together with the privilege of frequenting the best society in New York, and of choosing her friends amongst the most wealthy in the neighborhood of the little town. This superiority to her erring sister had probably been one of the causes that had contributed to develop the most prominent trait in her character--which is perhaps the most prominent trait of high society in general--a complete satisfaction with the world she knew, and what she knew about it, and the part she played in it. For the rest, Aunt Polly was one of those bustling little women who rule the world in almost everything, because the world finds it is too much trouble to oppose them. She had a.s.sumed, and had generally succeeded in having recognized, a complete superiority to Mr. Davis in her knowledge about life, with the result that, as has been stated, the education of the one child of the unfortunate marriage had been managed by her.
When, therefore, Helen had come off the steamer, it had been Mrs.
Roberts who was there to meet her; and the arrangement announced was that the girl was to have three days to spend with her father, and was then to come for a week or two at her aunt"s, who was just opening her country home and who intended to invite a score of people whom she considered, for reasons of her own, proper persons for her niece to meet. Mrs. Roberts spoke very condescendingly indeed of the company which Helen met at her father"s, Mr. Davis having his own opinions about the duty of a clergyman toward the non-aristocratic members of his flock.