George Brotherton pretended to find resemblances in the effigies to
people about Harvey, and to the town's echoing delight he began to name
the figures after their friends, and always saluted the figures
intimately, as Maggie, or Henry, or the Captain, or John Kollander, or
Lady Herdicker. But through the wooden menagerie in the big house the
Doctor whistled and hummed and smoked and chirruped more or less
drearily. To him the Japanese screens, the huge blue vases, the
ponderous high-backed chairs crawly with meaningless carvings, the
mantels full of jars and pots and statuettes, brought no comfort. He was
forever putting his cane over his arm and clicking down the street to
the Van Dorn home; but he felt in spite of all his daughter's efforts to
welcome him--and perhaps because of them--that he was a stranger there.
So slowly and rather imperceptibly to him, certainly without any
conscious desire for it, a fondness for Kenyon Adams sprang up in the
Doctor's heart. For it was exceedingly soft in spots and those spots
were near his home. He was domestic and he was fond of home joys. So
when Mrs. Nesbit put aside the encyclopedia, from which she was getting
the awful truth about Babylonian Art for her paper to be read before the
Shakespeare Club, and going to the piano, brought from the bottom of a
pile of yellow music a tattered sheet, played a Chopin nocturne in a
rolling and rather grand style that young women affected before the
Civil War, the Doctor's joy was scarcely less keen than the child's.
Then came rare occasions when Laura, being there for the night while her
husband was away on business, would play melodies that cut the child's
heart to the quick and brought tears of joy to his big eyes. It seemed
to him at those times as if Heaven itself were opened for him, and for
days the melodies she played would come ringing through his heart. Often
he would sit absorbed at the piano when he should have been practicing
his lesson, picking out those melodies and trying with a poignant
yearning for perfection to find their proper harmonies. But at such
times after he had frittered away a few minutes, Mrs. Nesbit would call
down to him, "You, Kenyon," and he would sigh and take up his scales and
runs and arpeggios.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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