Cruel Barbara Allen | Page 9

ambitions.
'You are getting stronger now,' said Holt. 'We shall have you in to see the piece by-and-by.'
'I shall come in a day or two,' said Christopher; and when his visitor had gone, sat down to read over and over again the reviews of his own work. How they would gladden Barbara, he thought. How proud she would be of his success! how eager to hear the music! He laid-a romantic little plot for her pleasure. He would run down when he got stronger, and compel Barbara and her uncle on a visit to town. He would convey them to the theatre and when Barbara was quite in love with the music he would tell her that he himself had written it. How well the songs would suit her voice, and how charmingly she would sing them to him! Pleasant fancies, such as lovers have, floated through his mind. He took up his violin for the first time for a month, and played through the old tune, 'Cruel Barbara Allen.' Rubach came in and found him thus employed.
'You are getting on, my boy,' said the good Bohemian. 'Can you come and see the piece to-night? Are you strong enough?'
'Not to-night,' Christopher returned. 'In a day or two.' And he went oh playing 'Cruel 'Barbara Allen' dreamily.
'What is that?' said Rubach with a wry grin. 'Is not twice or thrice of it enough?'
Christopher laid down the instrument with a smile. When Carl had left him he took it up again and played over to himself the songs Barbara used to sing. He was weak and could not play for any great length of time together, but he played every now and then a melody, and in a while he got back again to 'Cruel Barbara Allen.' Back came Carl as he played it.
'That tune again? what is it?'
'An old ballad,' answered Christopher. "Cruel Barbara Allen."'
He found a pleasure in speaking her name aloud in this veiled way.
'Let the girl alone,' said Carl. 'I am tired of her.'
'I am not,' said Christopher with a weak little chuckle, 'and I have known her since she was a child.'
He began to play the air again, and Carl took away the violin with simulated theatric anger. But Carl's treatment of the name of the ballad as though it were the name of a girl still extant gave Christopher a temptation, and he played the air once or twice again in Carl's presence.
'You are passionately attached to Miss Allen,' said Carl.
'She is the only sweetheart I ever had, responded simple Christopher with shy merriment.
Rubach sat down at the piano and sang this song:--
Through all the green glad summer-time Love told his tale in dainty rhyme, And sighed his loves out one by one, There lives no echo of his laugh, I but record his epitaph, And sigh for love worn out and gone.
For love endures for little time, But dies with every change of rhyme, And lives again with every one. And every new-born love doth laugh Above his brother's epitaph, The last light love worn out and gone.
'That is not your doctrine, mon ami,' he said as he turned round on the music-stool. 'You are faithful to Miss Allen?'
'I am faithful to Miss Allen, certainly,' said Christopher, reaching out his hand for the violin, and again chuckling weakly.
'No,' said Carl, rising and confiscating the fiddle. 'You shall sing her virtues to that tune no more. Write a new tune for her.'
Anybody who has been in love, and I do not care for any other sort of reader, may fancy for himself the peculiar enjoyment which shy Christopher extracted from this homely badinage.
Two or three days later he was almost reestablished, and had indeed begun to write a little. He would not yet go to the theatre, however, having some fear of the excitement. He sat alone in the sitting-room which he and his chum occupied in common, dreaming of Barbara over a book, and building cloud palaces. It was ten o'clock in the evening, and Carl would not be home till midnight. Then 'who was this dashing tumultuously up the stone steps after Carl's accustomed fashion? Carl himself, it seemed, but unlike himself, pale and breathless, and with an ugly scratch across his forehead which looked at first sight like a severe wound.
'What's the matter?' cried Christopher, rising hastily.
'I have had a fall,' said Carl. 'There is nothing to be alarmed at, but,' holding out his left hand, 'I have sprained my wrist and I cannot play.'
'How did it happen?' asked Christopher, following him into the bedroom, where Carl had already begun to twine a wet handkerchief round the injured wrist.
'I was crossing the stage between the acts,' said Carl; 'a plank had been moved, and I set my foot in the hole and fell--voilà tout