Jessamine. Marion Harland
have no other. His father was my guardian, and while he lived, I scarcely felt the early loss of my parents. To Orrin personally, I owe much. He is four years my senior, and when we were at school, he fought many a battle in my behalf with boys bigger than either of us. Then, we were separated for seven years, seeing one another only in vacations and casual furloughs from business. He is one of the trustees of our college, and, although he will not admit it, I am persuaded that I am indebted to his influence, seconded as it was by my dear old friend, Dr. Baxter's advocacy of my cause—for my Professorship. You will like and esteem him when you come to know him. I hope you two will be great friends in time. As a preliminary to your better understanding, and consequently your admiration for him—I am going to ask him for some music."
Orrin obeyed the call, but not with alacrity. He seemed altogether content with his location and his companions.
"Please do not order lights!" he said to Eunice who arose with him. "No illumination can be preferable to the mountain moonlight. It is radiance clarified to purity."
It revealed to him, from his seat upon the music-stool, a picture he was artist enough to enjoy. Jessie's white dress and pillows were flecked by the irregular tracery of vine-shadows, but, through an opening in the leafy lattice, the moon poured a stream of light upon her face and bust, revealing even the gleam of the betrothal ring upon the hand supporting her cheek. Roy had opened the piano, and now stood at her feet in the shade, leaning against the wall—a dark, motionless sentinel, with folded arms and bowed head, listening to the music, or watchful of her.
The player essayed no scientific surprises; no juggling complication of fingers and keys. He began with a moonlight sonata, the original theme of which might have been rung by fairy hands upon the jessamine bells, "giving their delicious secrets out" under the weight of summer dew. From this he strayed into the "Midsummer Night's Dream,"—thence to the most beautiful of the musical paradoxes, "Songs Without Words," and there rested.
"More, please!" entreated Jessie, in dreamy delight.
Both hands were folded under her cheek now, and she had not moved since he finished the fairy sonata.
"This is Elysium!" she added, softly.
"But sing, Orrin—won't you?" asked Roy.
So long as his cousin's music brought his darling more pleasure than did conversation with himself, the generous fellow would contribute in this way to her gratification.
"You wouldn't have wondered at or blamed me, if you had ever heard him sing," said a broken-hearted wife to me once, in reviewing the circumstances of her early acquaintance with the man who had married, neglected, brutally ill-used, and finally deserted her. He was bully, ruffian, liar, cheat, and drunkard, but he sang like an angel, giving to words and music a depth and delicacy of expression that sounded to the listeners like heavenly inspiration. With the visage of a Caliban and the appetites of a satyr, he yet moved others to smiles, tears, high and holy aspirations, to solemn or wild enthusiasm, religious or patriotic. His musical genius was the talisman by which he made himself popular, courted, envied, passionately beloved. Orrin Wyllys' voice, his exquisite taste in and knowledge of music would have won him social distinction had he been awkward in carriage, boorish in manner, and an ignoramus. There was not another amateur performer in his circle who could ever hope to equal him in effective and scientific execution. In the keeping of some—of many—the gift would have been a joy and a beneficence. He had none more dangerous—and he knew it, lightly as he affected to esteem it.
If his first selection on this occasion harmonized less perfectly with the hush and chastened lustre of the evening than his unsyllabled melodies had done, he was excusable since it developed the best tones of his voice. It was Mrs. Norton's sea lyric—"The Outward Bound." His auditors felt the rush of the favoring wind that had sprung up at dawn; heard the flap of the sails as they filled, and the creak of the line that strained at the anchor; saw the knot of parting friends; the close, tight hand-clasp, that helped force back the tears from eyes that would fain smile farewell.
"It is a fine old song," said Mr. Kirke. "I heard it many years ago. I thank you, Mr. Wyllys, for reviving the memory."
"This generation has nothing that can compare worthily with the music of other days," replied Orrin's voice from his shaded corner. "The true lover of the art must turn from the potpourri of the modern opera, the unflavored whey of fashionable ballads, with the craving of him who, having tasted the mellow wine, refuses the new—for he saith, 'the old is better.'"
Jessie moved like one awaking from a trance—spoke with feigned lightness.
"'To weep is a woman's part!' I don't like that line of your song, Mr. Wyllys. If your 'Outward Bound' had admitted mothers, sisters, and wives to the parting banquet, they would have borne themselves as bravely as did their masculine comrades, and without the aid of the 'sparkling brimmer,' which is, I suppose, the poetical name for a potion known, hereabouts, as 'mountain dew' or 'Dutch courage.' But if poets of the stronger sex are to be believed, Niobe was the prototype woman."
"Your quarrel is with one of your own sex, Miss Jessie; not with me or mine," was the cool rejoinder. "Mrs. Norton wrote the offensive line."
"There is something very like it in Kingsley's 'Three Fishers,'" said Roy, to cover Jessie's trifling discomfiture. "Let us have that next."
Mr. Wyllys sang it, giving to the refrain a weary sadness, exceeding pathos. He knew how effective this was when he saw Jessie's hand steal up to her eyes. She did not plead for "more," or cavil at "Men must work and women must weep," when he left the instrument, and went back to the window where Eunice was sitting.
"If you and your father are not afraid of the dew, I should like to see the mountains in this light," he said, persuasively. "Dare you walk for a little while upon the porch?"
The three went out together.
"Don't stay here, Roy!" begged Jessie. "The view must be fine to-night. It is not fair that you should be tied to my side all the time. I feel as if I were defrauding your cousin of his share of your society."
"You must continue to upbraid yourself with the theft, then," answered Roy, reseating himself upon the ottoman, and drawing her head to his shoulder. "Or, rather, my pet, you must cease to imagine that I could prefer any society to yours, any scene to the delightful seclusion of this, our betrothal nook. Orrin knows all. He has fine tact, and comprehends how precious to me is every hour passed with you."
This was a plausible solution of the reserve which puzzled and pained her. Jessie tried to receive it in full faith, and forgot to watch the forms strolling back and forth before the two windows which opened upon the piazza. When the party broke up for the night, she extended her hand to Orrin in cousinly freedom.
"I mean to make my trial effort at sitting up, to-morrow," she said, blithely. "And we will have some music. Euna doesn't sing, but she will play our accompaniments, since Mr. Fordham disdains the piano."
"I threw a number of instrumental duets into my trunk yesterday," said Orrin to Miss Kirke. "I did not then know why I did it. I understand now that I had some intuition of coming enjoyment. May I bring them up to-morrow?"
Jessie had never been jealous of Eunice in her life. Her disposition was as generous as it was impetuous. She did not care, she said to herself, in reviewing the evening that sent her to her pillow tired but sleepless, that Mr. Wyllys had openly preferred her sister's companionship to hers; that he had scarcely noticed her proposal about the music in his desire to play with Eunice. But she was conscious of a discordant jar in memories that would else have been all brightness, whenever she reverted to her repeated efforts to scale the barriers of the strangerhood that ought not to have existed between them for a moment after he heard Roy's story—and the adroit rebuffs that had met each of these.
Eunice had helped her undress and seen her comfortably laid in bed, kissed her affectionately, and promised to be with her early in the morning. By the time the door was shut, Jessie had propped her head upon her crossed arms, and lay with wide-open eyes gazing through the unshuttered windows at the broad, straight brow of Windbeam, black and majestic in the mountain moonlight;