Nor did Miss St. John dare to make any advances to the dreadful old
lady. She would wait. For Mrs. Forsyth, she cared nothing about
the whole affair. It only gave her fresh opportunity for smiling
condescensions about 'poor Mrs. Falconer.' So Paradise was over and
gone.
But though the loss of Miss St. John and the piano was the last
blow, his sorrow did not rest there, but returned to brood over his
bonny lady. She was scattered to the winds. Would any of her ashes
ever rise in the corn, and moan in the ripening wind of autumn?
Might not some atoms of the bonny leddy creep into the pines on the
hill, whose 'soft and soul-like sounds' had taught him to play the
Flowers of the Forest on those strings which, like the nerves of an
amputated limb, yet thrilled through his being? Or might not some
particle find its way by winds and waters to sycamore forest of
Italy, there creep up through the channels of its life to some
finely-rounded curve of noble tree, on the side that ever looks
sunwards, and be chosen once again by the violin-hunter, to be
wrought into a new and fame-gathering instrument?
Could it be that his bonny lady had learned her wondrous music in
those forests, from the shine of the sun, and the sighing of the
winds through the sycamores and pines? For Robert knew that the
broad-leaved sycamore, and the sharp, needle-leaved pine, had each
its share in the violin. Only as the wild innocence of human
nature, uncorrupted by wrong, untaught by suffering, is to that
nature struggling out of darkness into light, such and so different
is the living wood, with its sweetest tones of obedient impulse,
answering only to the wind which bloweth where it listeth, to that
wood, chosen, separated, individualized, tortured into strange,
almost vital shape, after a law to us nearly unknown, strung with
strings from animal organizations, and put into the hands of man to
utter the feelings of a soul that has passed through a like history.
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