When he saw Jethro Fawe enter the shop he did not stop playing, but his eyes searched the newcomer. Following his glance, Ingolby turned round and saw the Romany. His first impression was one of admiration, but suspicion was quickly added. He was a good judge of men, and there was something secluded about the man which repelled him. Yet he was interested. The dark face had a striking racial peculiarity.
The music died away, and old Berry lowered the fiddle from his chin and gave his attention to the Romany.
"Yeth-"ir?" he said questioningly.
For an instant Jethro was confused. When he entered the shop he had not made up his mind what he should do. It had been mere impulse and the fever of his brain. As old Berry spoke, however, his course opened out.
"I heard. I am a stranger. My fiddle is not here. My fingers itch for the cat-gut. Eh?"
The look in old Berry"s face softened a little. His instinct had been against his visitor, and he had been prepared to send him to another shop-besides, not every day could he talk to the greatest man in the West.
"If you can play, there it is," he said after a slight pause, and handed the fiddle over.
It was true that Jethro Fawe loved the fiddle. He had played it in many lands. Twice, in order to get inside the palace of a monarch for a purpose--once in Berlin and once in London--he had played the second violin in a Tzigany orchestra. He turned the fiddle slowly round, looking at it with mechanical intentness. Through the pa.s.sion of emotion the sure sense of the musician was burning. His fingers smoothed the oval brown breast of the instrument with affection. His eyes found joy in the colour of the wood, which had all the graded, merging tints of Autumn leaves.
"It is old--and strange," he said, his eyes going from Berry to Ingolby and back again with a veiled look, as though he had drawn down blinds before his inmost thoughts. "It was not made by a professional."
"It was made in the cotton-field by a slave," observed old Berry sharply, yet with a content which overrode antipathy to his visitor.
Jethro put the fiddle to his chin, and drew the bow twice or thrice sweepingly across the strings. Such a sound had never come from Berry"s violin before. It was the touch of a born musician who certainly had skill, but who had infinitely more of musical pa.s.sion.
"Made by a slave in the cotton-fields!" Jethro said with a veiled look, and as though he was thinking of something else: ""Dordi", I"d like to meet a slave like that!"
At the Romany exclamation Ingolby swept the man with a searching look.
He had heard the Romany wife of Ruliff Zaphe use the word many years ago when he and Charley Long visited the big white house on the hill. Was the man a Romany, and, if so, what was he doing here? Had it anything to do with Gabriel Druse and his daughter? But no--what was there strange in the man being a Romany and playing the fiddle? Here and there in the West during the last two years, he had seen what he took to be Romany faces. He looked to see the effect of the stranger"s remark on old Berry.
"I was a slave, and I was like that. My father made that fiddle in the cotton-fields of Georgia," the aged barber said.
The son of a race which for centuries had never known country or flag or any habitat, whose freedom was the soul of its existence, if it had a soul; a freedom defying all the usual laws of social order--the son of that race looked at the negro barber with something akin to awe. Here was a man who had lived a life which was the staring ant.i.thesis of his own, under the whip as a boy, confined to compounds; whose vision was constricted to the limits of an estate; who was at the will of one man, to be sold and trafficked with like a barrel of herrings, to be worked at another"s will--and at no price! This was beyond the understanding of Jethro Fawe. But awe has the outward look of respect, and old Berry who had his own form of vanity, saw that he had had a rare effect on the fellow, who evidently knew all about fiddles. Certainly that was a wonderful sound he had produced from his own cotton-field fiddle.
In the pause Ingolby said to Jethro Fawe, "Play something, won"t you?
I"ve got business here with Mr. Berry, but five minutes of good music won"t matter. We"d like to hear him play--wouldn"t we, Berry?"
The old man nodded a.s.sent. "There"s plenty of music in the thing," he said, "and a lot could come out in five minutes, if the right man played it."
His words were almost like a challenge, and it reached to Jethro"s innermost nature. He would show this Gorgio robber what a Romany could do, and do as easily as the birds sing. The Gorgio was a money-master, they said, but he would find that a Romany was a master, too, in his own way. He thought of one of the first pieces he had ever heard, a rhapsody which had grown and grown, since it was first improvised by a Tzigany in Hungary. He had once played it to an English lady at the Amphitryon Club in London, and she had swooned in the arms of her husband"s best friend.
He had seen men and women avert their heads when he had played it, daring not to look into each other"s eyes. He would play it now--a little of it. He would play it to her--to the girl who had set him free in the Sagalac woods, to the ravishing deserter from her people, to the only woman who had told him the truth in all his life, and who insulated his magnetism as a ground-wire insulates lightning. He would summon her here by his imagination, and tell her to note how his soul had caught the music of the spheres. He would surround himself with an atmosphere of his own. His rage, his love, and his malignant hate, his tenderness and his l.u.s.t should fill the barber"s shop with a flood which would drown the Gorgio raider. He laughed to himself, almost unconsciously.
Then suddenly he leaned his cheek to the instrument and drew the bow across the strings with a savage softness. The old cottonfield fiddle cried out with a thrilling, exquisite pain, but m.u.f.fled, as a hand at the lips turns agony into a tender moan. Some one--some spirit--in the fiddle was calling for its own.
Five minutes later-a five minutes in which people gathered at the door of the shop, and heads were thrust inside in ravished wonder--the palpitating Romany lowered the fiddle from his chin, and stood for a minute looking into s.p.a.ce, as though he saw a vision.
He was roused by old Berry"s voice. "Das a fiddle I wouldn"t sell for a t"ousand dollars. If I could play like dat I wouldn"t sell it for ten t"ousand. You kin play a fiddle to make it worth a lot--you."
The Romany handed back the instrument. "It"s got something inside it that makes it better than it is. It"s not a good fiddle, but it has something--ah, man alive, it has something!" It was as though he was talking to himself.
Berry made a quick, eager gesture. "It"s got the cotton-fields and the slave days in it. It"s got the whip and the stocks in it; it"s got the cry of the old man that"d never see his children ag"in. That"s what the fiddle"s got in it."
Suddenly, in an apparent outburst of anger, he swept down on the front door and drove the gathering crowd away.
"Dis is a barber-shop," he said with an angry wave of his hand; "it ain"t a circuse."
One man protested. "I want a shave," he said. He tried to come inside, but was driven back.
"I ain"t got a razor that"d cut the bristle off your face," the old barber declared peremptorily; "and, if I had, it wouldn"t be busy on you. I got two customers, and that"s all I"m going to take befo" I have my dinner. So you git away. There ain"t goin" to be no more music."
The crowd drew off, for none of them cared to offend this autocrat of the shears and razor.
Ingolby had listened to the music with a sense of being swayed by a wind which blew from all quarters of the compa.s.s at once. He loved music; it acted as a clearing-house to his mind; and he played the piano himself with the enthusiasm of a wilful amateur, who took liberties with every piece he essayed. There was something in this fellow"s playing which the great masters, such as Paganini, must have had. As the music ceased, he did not speak, but remained leaning against the great red-plush barber"s chair looking reflectively at the Romany. Berry, however, said to the still absorbed musician: "Where did you learn to play?"
The Romany started, and a flush crossed his face. "Everywhere," he answered sullenly.
"You"ve got the thing Sarasate had," Ingolby observed. "I only heard him play but once--in London years ago: but there"s the same something in it. I bought a fiddle of Sarasate. I"ve got it now."
"Here in Lebanon?" The eyes of the Romany were burning. An idea had just come into his brain. Was it through his fiddling that he was going to find a way to deal with this Gorgio, who had come between him and his own?
"Only a week ago it came," Ingolby replied. "They actually charged me Customs duty on it. I"d seen it advertised, and I made an offer and got it at last."
"You have it here--at your house here?" asked old Berry in surprise.
"It"s the only place I"ve got. Did you think I"d put it in a museum? I can"t play it, but there it is for any one that can play. How would you like to try it?" he added to Jethro in a friendly tone. "I"d give a good deal to see it under your chin for an hour. Anyhow, I"d like to show it to you. Will you come?"
It was like him to bring matters to a head so quickly.
The Romany"s eyes glistened. "To play the Sarasate alone to you?" he asked.
"That"s it-at nine o"clock to-night, if you can."
"I will come--yes, I will come," Jethro answered, the lids drooping over his eyes in which were the shadows of the first murder of the created world.
"Here is my address, then." Ingolby wrote something on his visiting-card. "My man"ll let you in, if you show that. Well, good-bye."
The Romany took the card, and turned to leave. He had been dismissed by the swaggering Gorgio, as though he was a servant, and he had not even been asked his name, of so little account was he! He could come and play on the Sarasate to the masterful Gorgio at the hour which the masterful Gorgio fixed--think of that! He could be--a servant to the pleasure of the man who was stealing from him the wife sealed to him in the Roumelian country. But perhaps it was all for the best--yes, he would make it all for the best! As he left the shop, however, and pa.s.sed down the street his mind remained in the barber-shop. He saw in imagination the masterful Gorgio in the red-plush chair, and the negro barber bending over him, with black fingers holding the Gorgio"s chin, and an open razor in the right hand lightly grasped. A flash of malicious desire came into his eyes as the vision shaped itself in his imagination, and he saw himself, instead of the negro barber, holding the Gorgio chin and looking down at the Gorgio throat with the razor, not lightly, but firmly grasped in his right hand. How was it that more throats were not cut in that way? How was it that while the scissors pa.s.sed through the beard of a man"s face the points did not suddenly slip up and stab the light from helpless eyes? How was it that men did not use their chances? He went lightly down the street, absorbed in a vision which was not like the reality; but it was evidence that his visit to Max Ingolby"s house was not the visit of a virtuoso alone, but of an evil spirit.
As the Romany disappeared, Max Ingolby had his hand on the old barber"s shoulder. "I want one of the wigs you made for that theatrical performance of the Mounted Police, Berry," he said. "Never mind what it"s for. I want it at once--one with the long hair of a French-Canadian coureur-de-bois. Have you got one?"
"Suh, I"ll send it round-no, I"ll bring it round as I come from dinner.
Want the clothes, too?"
"No. I"m arranging for them with Osterhaut. I"ve sent word by Jowett."
"You want me to know what it"s for?"
"You can know anything I know--almost, Berry. You"re a friend of the right sort, and I can trust you."
"Yeth-"ir, I bin some use to you, onct or twict, I guess."
"You"ll have a chance to be of use more than ever presently."
"Suh, there"s gain" to be a bust-up, but I know who"s comin" out on the top. That Felix Marchand and his roughs can"t down you. I hear and see a lot, and there"s two or three things I was goin" to put befo" you; yeth-"ir."