Fergus too was getting a little tired of lying alone while his mother
and Gratian made the tour of the gallery. So Andrew was called to wheel
him back again to the other door of the library, from whence he could
best hear the organ. It stood at one side of the large hall, in a recess
which had probably been made on purpose. It was dark in the recess even
at mid-day, and now the dusk was fast increasing, so the lady lit the
candles fixed at each side of the music-desk, and when she sat down to
play the light sparkled and glowed on her fair hair, making it look like
gold.
Gratian touched Fergus.
"Doesn't it look pretty?" he said, pointing to the little island of
light in the gloomy hall.
Fergus nodded.
"I always think mother turns into an angel when she plays," he said.
"Now, let's listen, Gratian, and afterwards you can tell me what
pictures the music makes to you, and I'll tell you what it makes to me."
The organ was old and rather out of repair, and Andrew was not very well
used to blowing. That made it, I think, all the more wonderful that the
lady could bring such music out of it. It was not so fine and perfect,
doubtless, as what Gratian had heard from her in church on the Sunday
afternoon, but still it was beautiful enough for him to think of nothing
but his delight in listening. She played several pieces--some sad and
plaintive, some joyful and triumphant, and then Gratian begged her to
play the last he had heard at church.
"That is a good choice for our good-night one," she said. "It is a
favourite of Fergus's too. He calls it his good-night hymn."
Fergus did not speak--he was lying with his eyes shut, in quiet
happiness, and as the last notes died away, "Don't speak yet, Gratian,"
he said, "you don't know what I am seeing--flocks of birds are slowly
flying out of sight, the sun has set, and one hears a bell in the
distance ringing very faintly; one by one the lights are going out in
the cottages that I see at the foot of the hill, and the night is
creeping up. That is what _I_ see when mother plays the good-night.
What do you see, Gratian?"
"The moor, I think," said the boy, "our own moor, up, far up, behind our
house. It must be looking just as I see it now, at this very minute;
only the music is coming from some place--a church, I think, _very_ far
away. The wind is bringing it--the south wind, not the one from the sea.
And you know that when the music is being played in the church there are
lots of people all kneeling so that you can't see their faces, and I
think some are crying softly."
"Yes," said Fergus, "that isn't so bad. I can see it too. You'll soon
get into the way, Gratian," he went on, with his funny little
patronising tone, "of making music-pictures if we practice it together.
That's the best of music, you see. It makes itself and pictures too. Now
pictures never make you music."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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