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A Lover of Music
by
Suddenly a new music filled the room.
The right tune–the real old joyful “Money Musk,” played jubilantly, triumphantly, irresistibly–on a fiddle!
The melodion gave one final gasp of surprise and was dumb.
Every one looked up. There, in the parlour door, stood the stranger, with his coat off, his violin hugged close under his chin, his right arm making the bow fly over the strings, his black eyes sparkling, and his stockinged feet marking time to the tune.
“DANSEZ! DANSEZ,” he cried, “EN AVANT! Don’ spik’. Don’ res’! Ah’ll goin’ play de feedle fo’ yo’ jess moch yo’ lak’, eef yo’ h’only DANSE!”
The music gushed from the bow like water from the rock when Moses touched it. Tune followed tune with endless fluency and variety– polkas, galops, reels, jigs, quadrilles; fragments of airs from many lands–“The Fisher’s Hornpipe,” “Charlie is my Darling,” “Marianne s’en va-t-au Moulin,” “Petit Jean,” “Jordan is a Hard Road to Trabbel,” woven together after the strangest fashion and set to the liveliest cadence.
It was a magical performance. No one could withstand it. They all danced together, like the leaves on the shivering poplars when the wind blows through them. The gentle Serena was swept away from her stool at the organ as if she were a little canoe drawn into the rapids, and Bill Moody stepped high and cut pigeon-wings that had been forgotten for a generation. It was long after midnight when the dancers paused, breathless and exhausted.
“Waal,” said Hose Ransom, “that’s jess the hightonedest music we ever had to Bytown. You ‘re a reel player, Frenchy, that’s what you are. What’s your name? Where’d you come from? Where you goin’ to? What brought you here, anyhow?”
“MOI?” said the fiddler, dropping his bow and taking a long breath. “Mah nem Jacques Tremblay. Ah’ll ben come fraum Kebeck. W’ere goin’? Ah donno. Prob’ly Ah’ll stop dis place, eef yo’ lak’ dat feedle so moch, hein?”
His hand passed caressingly over the smooth brown wood of the violin. He drew it up close to his face again, as if he would have kissed it, while his eyes wandered timidly around the circle of listeners, and rested at last, with a question in them, on the face of the hotel-keeper. Moody was fairly warmed, for once, out of his customary temper of mistrust and indecision. He spoke up promptly.
“You kin stop here jess long’s you like. We don’ care where you come from, an’ you need n’t to go no fu’ther, less you wanter. But we ain’t got no use for French names round here. Guess we ‘ll call him Fiddlin’ Jack, hey, Sereny? He kin do the chores in the day- time, an’ play the fiddle at night.”
This was the way in which Bytown came to have a lover of music among its permanent inhabitants.
II
Jacques dropped into his place and filled it as if it had been made for him. There was something in his disposition that seemed to fit him for just the role that was vacant in the social drama of the settlement. It was not a serious, important, responsible part, like that of a farmer, or a store-keeper, or a professional hunter. It was rather an addition to the regular programme of existence, something unannounced and voluntary, and therefore not weighted with too heavy responsibilities. There was a touch of the transient and uncertain about it. He seemed like a perpetual visitor; and yet he stayed on as steadily as a native, never showing, from the first, the slightest wish or intention to leave the woodland village.
I do not mean that he was an idler. Bytown had not yet arrived at that stage of civilization in which an ornamental element is supported at the public expense.
He worked for his living, and earned it. He was full of a quick, cheerful industry; and there was nothing that needed to be done about Moody’s establishment, from the wood-pile to the ice-house, at which he did not bear a hand willingly and well.
“He kin work like a beaver,” said Bill Moody, talking the stranger over down at the post-office one day; “but I don’t b’lieve he’s got much ambition. Jess does his work and takes his wages, and then gits his fiddle out and plays.”