The Baritone's Parish; or, "All Things to All Men"Ludlow, James M. (James Meeker)
General
The Baritone's Parish; or, "All Things to All Men"
Ludlow, James M. (James Meeker)
Alcoholics -- Fiction; Christian life -- Fiction; Clergy -- Fiction; Singers -- Fiction
He then related what the reader knows. Having worked off the steam of
his extra emotion, he accompanied the doctor to the study. Here Vox
gave a description of his new friend: "a well-educated man, a splendid
all-round musician, a fine business man; has a wife who won't live with
him, nor even let him see her--he has treated her so outrageously; but
he loves her tenderly. He was once employed by Silver & Co., who
thought so much of him that they were making proposals for his entering
the firm when they began to suspect his rum habit. His name is Downs."
"Downs? With Silver & Co.?" The names set the doctor thinking. At
length, coming out of his reverie, he picked up from the study-table a
piece of marble, a bit of a fluted column he had found amid the ruins
of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. He traced on it with the pen the
word D-o-w-n-s. Then he rubbed the word out with his finger; but a
black spot was left that he could not get off the marble.
"There! that's the way I would spoil the job if I should try to restore
the ruins of Downs. Phil, stick to that man. I'll leave him to you.
He's your parish. With your voice and his love of music, you ought to
make him follow you as the rocks followed Orpheus. That's the meaning
of the old legend--you can sing the hardest wretch into heaven. Try
it, Phil."
The doctor spent a half-hour next day in Silver & Co.'s office. Just
what he and Silver talked about we cannot say; but Silver was overheard
to remark, as the doctor was leaving, "My wife thinks the world of the
little woman, and when those two women are satisfied with his
reformation, all right."
There never was a finer program for a musicale than that which, some
six months later, packed the upper Carnegie Hall with the elite of the
music-lovers of New York. Vox was the drawing card, for he had become,
if not the celebrity, at least the fad, of the season. "Oh, Vox! he's
just splendid!" was as familiarly heard as the clicking of afternoon
tea-cups everywhere between Flushing and Orange Mountain. On the
occasion referred to he had achieved a sevenfold encore for one
performance. To the surprise of everybody, however, when he appeared
to acknowledge the ovation, he led another man with him to the
footlights; one who might have been his twin brother, for there was
just that sort of difference between them that ought to exist between a
tenor and a baritone--the former a little slighter in form and
features. Curiosity was not allowed to get to the whispering-point
when they rendered the Graben-Hoffman duet, "I feel thy angel spirit."
The applause was furious. Nothing like it had been heard for six
months outside of Brady's Harbor. Vox gracefully stepped a little to
the rear. The audience caught his meaning, and the room rang with the
cry of "Tenor! tenor!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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