The Burial of the Guns | Page 7

have to tell her that he was just "fooling her".
She used to make him do a good deal of waiting on her in return, and
he was the one she used to get to dress old Fashion's back when it was
raw, and to put drops in her eyes. He got quite expert at it. She said it
was a penalty for his worrying her so.
She was the great musician of the connection. This is in itself no mean
praise; for it was the fashion for every musical gift among the girls to
be cultivated, and every girl played or sang more or less, some of them
very well. But Cousin Fanny was not only this. She had a way of
playing that used to make the old piano sound different from itself; and
her voice was almost the sweetest I ever heard except one or two on the
stage. It was particularly sweet in the evenings, when she sat down at
the piano and played. She would not always do it; she either felt "not in
the mood", or "not sympathetic", or some such thing. None of the
others were that way; the rest could play just as well in the glare of day
as in the twilight, and before one person as another; it was, we all knew,
just one of Cousin Fanny's old-maid crotchets. When she sat down at
the piano and played, her fussiness was all forgotten; her first notes
used to be recognized through the house, and people used to stop what
they were doing, and come in. Even the children would leave off
playing, and come straggling in, tiptoeing as they crossed the floor.
Some of the other performers used to play a great deal louder, but we
never tiptoed when they played. Cousin Fanny would sit at the piano
looking either up or right straight ahead of her, or often with her eyes
closed (she never looked at the keys), and the sound used to rise from
under her long, thin fingers, sometimes rushing and pouring forth like a
deep roar, sometimes ringing out clear like a band of bugles, making
the hair move on the head and giving strange tinglings down the back.
Then we boys wanted to go forth in the world on fiery, black chargers,
like the olden knights, and fight giants and rescue beautiful ladies and
poor women. Then again, with her eyes shut, the sound would almost
die away, and her fingers would move softly and lingeringly as if they
loved the touch of the keys, and hated to leave them; and the sound
would come from away far off, and everything would grow quiet and

subdued, and the perfume of the roses out of doors would steal in on
the air, and the soft breezes would stir the trees, and we were all in love,
and wanted to see somebody that we didn't see. And Cousin Fanny was
not herself any longer, but we imagined some one else was there.
Sometimes she suddenly began to sing (she sang old songs, English or
French); her voice might be weak (it all depended on her whims; SHE
said, on her health), in that case she always stopped and left the piano;
or it might be "in condition". When it was, it was as velvety and
mellow as a bell far off, and the old ballads and chansons used to fill
the twilight. We used even to forget then that she was an old maid.
Now and then she sang songs that no one else had ever heard. They
were her own; she had composed both the words and the air. At other
times she sang the songs of others to her own airs. I remember the first
time I ever heard of Tennyson was when, one evening in the twilight,
she sang his echo song from "The Princess". The air was her own, and
in the refrain you heard perfectly the notes of the bugle, and the echoes
answering, "Dying, dying, dying." Boy as I was, I was entranced, and
she answered my enthusiasm by turning and repeating the poem. I have
often thought since how musical her voice was as she repeated Our
echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever.
She had a peculiarly sentimental temperament. As I look back at it all
now, she was much given to dwelling upon old-time poems and
romances, which we thought very ridiculous in any one, especially in a
spinster of forty odd. She would stop and talk about the branch of a tree
with the leaves all turning red or yellow or purple in the common way
in which, as everyone knows, leaves always turn in the fall; or even
about a tangle of briers,