The Ruling Passion | Page 7

was so good-humoured, so obliging, so pleasant in his way of whistling and singing about his work, that all unfriendliness soon died out.
He had literally played his way into the affections of the village. The winter seemed to pass more swiftly and merrily than it had done before the violin was there. He was always ready to bring it out, and draw all kinds of music from its strings, as long as any one wanted to listen or to dance.
It made no difference whether there was a roomful of listeners, or only a couple, Fiddlin' Jack was just as glad to play. With a little, quiet audience, he loved to try the quaint, plaintive airs of the old French songs--"A la Claire Fontaine," "Un Canadien Errant," and "Isabeau s'y Promene"--and bits of simple melody from the great composers, and familiar Scotch and English ballads--things that he had picked up heaven knows where, and into which he put a world of meaning, sad and sweet.
He was at his best in this vein when he was alone with Serena in the kitchen--she with a piece of sewing in her lap, sitting beside the lamp; he in the corner by the stove, with the brown violin tucked under his chin, wandering on from one air to another, and perfectly content if she looked up now and then from her work and told him that she liked the tune.
Serena was a pretty girl, with smooth, silky hair, end eyes of the colour of the nodding harebells that blossom on the edge of the woods. She was slight and delicate. The neighbours called her sickly; and a great doctor from Philadelphia who had spent a summer at Bytown had put his ear to her chest, and looked grave, and said that she ought to winter in a mild climate. That was before people had discovered the Adirondacks as a sanitarium for consumptives.
But the inhabitants of Bytown were not in the way of paying much attention to the theories of physicians in regard to climate. They held that if you were rugged, it was a great advantage, almost a virtue; but if you were sickly, you just had to make the best of it, and get along with the weather as well as you could.
So Serena stayed at home and adapted herself very cheerfully to the situation. She kept indoors in winter more than the other girls, and had a quieter way about her; but you would never have called her an invalid. There was only a clearer blue in her eyes, and a smoother lustre on her brown hair, and a brighter spot of red on her cheek. She was particularly fond of reading and of music. It was this that made her so glad of the arrival of the violin. The violin's master knew it, and turned to her as a sympathetic soul. I think he liked her eyes too, and the soft tones of her voice. He was a sentimentalist, this little Canadian, for all he was so merry; and love--but that comes later.
"Where'd you get your fiddle, Jack? said Serena, one night as they sat together in the kitchen.
"Ah'll get heem in Kebeck," answered Jacques, passing his hand lightly over the instrument, as he always did when any one spoke of it. "Vair' nice VIOLON, hein? W'at you t'ink? Ma h'ole teacher, to de College, he was gif' me dat VIOLON, w'en Ah was gone away to de woods."
"I want to know! Were you in the College? What'd you go off to the woods for?"
"Ah'll get tire' fraum dat teachin'--read, read, read, h'all taim'. Ah'll not lak' dat so moch. Rader be out-door--run aroun'--paddle de CANOT--go wid de boys in de woods--mek' dem dance at ma MUSIQUE. A-a-ah! Dat was fon! P'raps you t'ink dat not good, hem? You t'ink Jacques one beeg fool, Ah suppose?"
"I dunno," said Serena, declining to commit herself, but pressing on gently, as women do, to the point she had in view when she began the talk. "Dunno's you're any more foolish than a man that keeps on doin' what he don't like. But what made you come away from the boys in the woods and travel down this way?"
A shade passed over the face of Jacques. He turned away from the lamp and bent over the violin on his knees, fingering the strings nervously. Then he spoke, in a changed, shaken voice.
"Ah'l tole you somet'ing, Ma'amselle Serene. You ma frien'. Don' you h'ask me dat reason of it no more. Dat's somet'ing vair' bad, bad, bad. Ah can't nevair tole dat--nevair."
There was something in the way he said it that gave a check to her gentle curiosity and turned it into pity. A man with a secret in his life? It was a new element in