It was only when a slender, dark, elderly man stepped down to the footlights with a violin in his long, thin hands that Archie sat bolt upright, his eyes blazing with excitement, his breath catching in his throat.
The great man"s face was fine as an engraving, with a melancholy mouth, and eyes that burned like black fires. He stood a brief second, gave his head, crowned with long, grey hair, a quick, nervous toss, and drew his bow across the strings softly, sweetly, with a heart-breaking sound that fell on his listeners like the sob of a thousand winds. For five minutes he held them spellbound. It was only when he half smiled and stepped into the stage wings that they realized that it was over. Then with one accord the entire audience broke into a storm of applause--all but Archie, who sat with locked fingers and tense face; for the life of him he could not move a single muscle--he was simply paralyzed with pleasure; at last he had listened to _music_!
It was nearing the end of the programme, and Ventnor had stepped forth to play his last number. It was a wild, eerie Hungarian air, that wailed and whispered like a lost child, then mounted up, up, louder, louder, a perfect hurricane of melody, when--suddenly a sharp crack like a pistol shot cut the air. The music ceased--one of the violin strings had snapped. At another time the great man would have finished the number on the three remaining strings, but the heat, the lax practice of a holiday season--something, or perhaps everything combined, for the instant overcame him. He stood like an awkward child, gazing down at the trailing, useless string.
Instantly, Archie"s sensitive brain grasped the whole situation.
Ventnor"s business manager was not with him; he had not brought a second violin. Like a flash Archie whipped his own out of its case. He had just come from his lesson; it was in perfect tune. Before the shy, frail boy knew what he was actually doing he was beside the footlights, handing his own violin up to the great master, whose wonderful eyes gazed down into the small, pale face, and whose hand immediately reached out, grasping the poor, cheap little fiddle that Archie had learned his scales on. The audience broke into applause, but with a single glance Ventnor stilled them, and dashed straight into the melody precisely where he had left off.
Archie could hardly believe his ears. Was _that_ his old thirty-dollar fiddle? That marvellous thing that murmured, and wept, and laughed under the master hand! Oh! the voice of it! The voice of it!
They would not let Ventnor go when he smiled himself off the stage.
They called and shouted, "Encore!" "Encore!" until he returned to respond--respond, not with his own priceless instrument, but with Archie"s, and with a grace and kindliness that only a great man possesses. He played a good-night lullaby on the boy"s cheap little violin, and, moreover, played it as he never had before. Archie remembered afterwards that he had presence of mind enough to get on his feet when they all sang "G.o.d Save the King," but it really seemed a dream that Ventnor was shaking hands with him and saying, "I t"ank you, me; I t"ank you. You save me great awkwardness." And then, before he knew it, he had promised to go to the hotel the next day and play for Ventnor.
All the way home he was thinking, "Fancy it!--I, Archie Anderson, asked to play before Ventnor!" Then came the fuss and the delight of the people at home over his good fortune, but he soon slipped away to bed, exhausted with the evening"s events. His mother, coming into the room later to say good-night, saw that close to his bed, on a table where he could reach out and touch it during the night, lay his violin.
"Motherette," he smiled happily, "I feel that it is consecrated."
"Keep it so, little lad of mine. Keep both your music and your violin consecrated."
Never had Archie played so well, for all his shyness and nervousness. He seemed to gather something of the great man"s soul as he played before him at the hotel the following day.
Ventnor became greatly excited. "Boy, boy!" he cried, "you have a great music in you! You must have study and work, like what is it you Canadians say?--like Sam Hill!"
"Yes," said Archie, quietly; "rainy days and east wind days, when I coughed and could not go to school, I worked, and--well, I just worked."
"Me, I should t"ink you did! Why, boy, I will make you great. I will teach you all this summer."
"I"m afraid father can"t afford that," faltered Archie.
"Me, I tell you I holiday now. I take no money in my holiday. I teach you because I like you, me," replied the master, irritably.
"But I can never repay you," answered Archie.
"Me, I will give to the world a great musician; it is you! That"s repay enough for me--the satisfaction of making one great violinist. That"s repay."
And so it all came about. Day after day Ventnor taught, trained and encouraged Archie Anderson. Day after day the boy drew greater music from the heart of his fiddle. He seemed to stride ahead under the power of the master; and as for Ventnor, he seemed beside himself with joy at what he called his "find." They grew to be friends. Archie confided his great discouragement of ill-health, his inability to attend school.
"Me, I fix all that," answered Ventnor. "Me, I go see to-night your parents. I talk to them." And he did, but his "talk" amazed even the boy. He wanted Archie to go with him to California, where his autumn season began. He wanted to adopt him, to take him away for two years. He gesticulated, and raised his eyebrows, and talked down every objection they had.
"I tell you I want him. I make a virtuoso of him. He is _my_ boy. I discover him. He"s good boy; he work, work, work. Never do I see a boy work like dat. He is in earnest. Dat is de greatest t"ing a boy can have, to be earnest. It make him a great, good man. He"s not selfish either. He not t"ink of himself, only other beeple. I meet with misfortune. I break my string. He lend me his violin. Me, I"m selfish. I don"t lend my violin to not a person. No, not even the King of England.
Den, too, Archie, his throat and lungs, and his physique, it is not strong, not robust. I take him hot country, warm California. He get strong."
This last argument was too much for Archie"s family. They yielded, and when Ventnor left for the West the boy went with him. He never missed a week writing home or to "Hock," and at the end of two years he returned.
In his pocket was a signed contract as "first violin" in the finest orchestra of a great Southern city. He had left his cough with his short trousers in California, and had outgrown as much of his frailness as a boy of his temperament ever can. The day he left to fill his engagements the lady called who used to speak of him as "poor Archie, he"s such an expense to his parents," and sat talking to Mrs. Anderson in the little parlor. Trig had just secured a "situation," and the caller was asking about it.
"Yes," replied Mrs. Anderson, "Trig has done very well. He gets six dollars a week now, and Dudley, you know, gets ten." Then with pardonable asperity she added:
"Archie is doing a little better, however; he"s getting seventy-five dollars a week to start on. He has already paid his father back every copper spent on his tuition."
"_Archie! Seventy-five dollars a week_! Why, he is hardly seventeen! How ever did he do it?" exclaimed the visitor.
"Hock, dear loyal old Hock, says it"s because Archie is the very best boy in the world," replied Mrs. Anderson, laughingly, "but I say it was the result of a broken string."
Maurice of His Majesty"s Mails
Old Maurice Delorme boasted the blood of many nations; his "bulldog"
grit came to him from an English sea-captain, a bluff, genial old tar whom he could recall as being his "grand-daddy" sixty years ago; his gay, rollicking love of laughter and song came to him through his half French father; his love of wood and water lore, his endurance, his gift of strategy, were his birthright directly from his Red Indian mother; consequently there was but one place in the world where such a trinity of nationalities could be fostered in one man, but one place where that man could breathe and be happy, and that place was amid the struggling heights and the yawning canyons of the Rocky Mountains.
Years before Canada had constructed her world-famous transcontinental railroad, which now stretches its belt of steel from Atlantic to Pacific, Maurice Delorme set out for the golden West, working his way across the vast Canadian half of the American continent. He had done everything for a living--that is, everything that was honorable, for his British-French-Indian blood was the blood of honest forefathers, and he prided himself that he could directly and bravely look into the eyes of any man living; for, after all, does not dishonesty make the eyes shift and the heart cowardly?
He had trapped for fur-bearing animals on the North Sh.o.r.es; he had twice fought the rebels at the Red River; he had freighted many and many a "prairie schooner" from the a.s.siniboine to the Saskatchewan; and then, one glorious morning in July, when the hot yellow sun poured its wealth of heat and light into the velvety plains of Alberta, Maurice descried at the very edge of the western horizon a far-off speck of shining white, apparently not larger than a single lump of sugar. As day followed day, and he traversed mile upon mile, more sugar lumps were visible; and, below their whiteness, the grayish distances grew into mountain shapes. Then he realized that at last he beheld the inimitable glory of the Rockies that swept in snow-tipped grandeur from south to north.
Then followed the years when he, his wife and a little Maurice lived in the fastnesses of those mighty ranges; when he learned to know and follow the trail of the mountain goat; when the rugged pa.s.ses grew familiar to him as the little village where he had been born in Quebec; when the countless forests of Douglas fir held no mysteries and no fears for him; and, because he had learned these things, because he was brave and courageous, because his life had been clean and honest, he was selected to carry His Majesty"s mails from a primitive "landing" on one of the Kootenay Lakes to the great gold mines, forty miles into the interior, and over one of the wildest, loneliest mountain trails in all British Columbia.
Then it was that, once a month, when the mail came in by the tiny steamer, Maurice Delorme would harness up his six tough little mountain-climbing horses, put on his cartridge belt, tuck a formidable revolver into his hip pocket and a good gun beneath the seat of the wagon, toss in the bags of mail and the express packages, say a laughing good-bye to Mrs. Delorme and little Maurice, and "hit the trail" for the gold mines. How he hated to leave those two helpless ones alone in the vast, uninhabited surroundings! But Mrs. Delorme had the fearless courage and self-reliance of the women of the North, and little Maurice was yearly growing, growing, growing. Now he was ten, now twelve, now fourteen--a st.u.r.dy young mountaineer, with the sinews of an athlete, and a store of learning, not from books, for he had never known a school, but from the simple teaching of his parents and the unlimited knowledge of woodcraft, of the habits of wild things, of mountain peaks, of plants, of animals, insects and birds, and of the incessant hunt for food that must always be when one lives beyond the pale of civilized markets.
And then one day, when little Maurice was about fifteen years old, his father staggered into their pretty log home, bleeding, crushed and dazed. The fate of the mountaineer had met him, for, during one of those sudden tempests that sweep through the canyons, a wind-riven tree had hurled its length down across the trail, its rotting heart and decaying branches falling--providentially with broken force--sparing the galloping horses and only injuring the driver--for how he escaped death was beyond human explanation.
Little Maurice was then the man of the house. He helped his brave mother dress the sufferer"s wounds, he cared for the horses, he provided wood and water, going about whistling softly to himself and trying to shut his eyes to the fact that the food was growing less and less daily, and that the mail day was drawing nearer and nearer. Of course the steamer would bring flour and bacon and tea but it would also bring the mail and express to be transported to the gold mines. His father would never be well enough to drive the mails up that jagged mountain trail; and, worse than that, his father must have fresh meat broth at once. Little Maurice went into the sick-room, and standing beside the bed looked carefully into the face of old Maurice. The eyes were feverish, the forehead puckered with pain, the hands hot and growing thin. Then he turned away, followed his mother outside, and, after a brief talk with her, he reached up for his father"s gun, took the stock of ammunition and dry biscuits, whistled for his dog, and, a moment later, was swallowed up in the forest.
The long day slipped by; hour after hour Mrs. Delorme would go to the door, shade her eyes with her hand, and look keenly up the mountain slopes, with their wilderness of pines. Once she saw a faint, blue puff of smoke, and her quick ear caught the sharp crack of a far-off rifle.
Then all was silent for hours. The warm September sun had dropped behind the western peaks, and the canyons were purpling with oncoming twilight, when two quick successive shots broke the evening stillness, and echoed like a salute of twenty-one guns far down the valley. Mrs. Delorme ran once again to the door. The shots could not have been five hundred yards distant, for down through the firs came Royal, the magnificent hound, whining and grinning and licking his mouth with delight, and, behind him, Maurice, shouting that he had killed a deer, and was hungry enough to eat half of it himself.
"And, mother," he cried, "I could have got the game at noon to-day, but Royal and I have been hours and hours closing in on him, getting him into the runway, so that, when I did drop him, it would be near home, for I could never pack his carca.s.s all that way. He must weigh two hundred and fifty pounds. Oh, but he"s a fat one. And here are some mountain grouse Roy and I got. Daddy will have all the broth he can drink, and you and old Roy here and I will have some venison steaks for supper!"
So, breathless and proud and excited, Maurice chattered on, preparing a huge knife to quarter the deer, the more easily to pack it home.
There was great rejoicing in the log shack that night. Old Maurice swallowed his bowl of hot grouse soup with relish, and clasped his son"s hand with the firm grip one man gives to another. The anxious lines left Mrs. Delorme"s face, as she laughed and praised young Maurice"s prowess as a bread-winner. Royal stretched his long, lithe legs, yawning audibly with weariness and content as he lay beside the stove sniffing the appetizing smells of broiling steaks, knowing well his share would be generous after his long and faithful hunt and obedience to his young master. And so the little mountain home was well supplied with fresh meat, hot soups, smoked venison hams and dried flitches, until the day of fresh supplies, when the primitive steamer tooted its shrill whistle far down the lake, and Mrs. Delorme, young Maurice and Royal all went down to greet the first fellow-beings they had seen for a month, and to receive and care for seven bags of His Majesty"s mails, bound for the distant gold mines.
"Why seven bags?" asked Mrs. Delorme of the captain. "We never get more than six."
"The extra is a large consignment of registered mail, madam," he replied. "Big money for the mines, they tell me. You want to keep an eye on that extra bag. Old Maurice doesn"t want to lose that."
Then he was told the story of the old driver"s accident, and forthwith climbed the steep trail from the landing to the shack to see how things really were. He saw at a glance that Delorme would not be about for some weeks to come; so, after an encouraging word and a kindly good-bye, the captain turned, as he left the door, and, slapping young Maurice on the shoulder in his bluff, hearty way, said:
"Well, kid, I guess you"ll have to carry the mails this time. Start good and early to-morrow. I"m a day late bringing them, as it is. The managers of the mines are not the waiting sort, and there"s money--money that they need--in that extra bag. Better take a gun with you, boy, and keep a sharp lookout for that registered stuff--mind!"
"Yes, captain," answered young Maurice, very quietly. "I"ll land the mail at the mines all right."
And, a few minutes later, the departing whistle of the little steamer was heard far down the lake, as night fell softly and silently on the solitary little mountain home of the Delormes.