40+ Adventure Novels & Lost World Mysteries in One Premium Edition. Henry Rider Haggard

felt in his pocket without answering, and found five shillings.

      "If you will accept this?" he said.

      "Thank you, sir, very much. I am gladder of five shillings now than I once was of as many pounds;" and he rose to go.

      "A man of your talent should not be wandering about like this."

      "I must earn a living somehow, for all Talleyrand's witticism to the contrary," was the curious answer.

      "Have you no friends?"

      "No, sir, this is my only friend; all the rest have deserted me," and he tapped his violin and was gone.

      "Lord, sir," said a farmer, who was standing by, "he's gone to get drunk; he is the biggest old drunkard in the countryside, and yet they do say he was gentleman once, and the best fiddler in London; but he can't be depended on, so no one will hire him now."

      "How sad," said Angela, as they moved homewards.

      "Yes, and what music that was; I never heard any with such imagination before. You have a turn that way, Angela; you should try to put it into words, it would make a poem."

      "I complain like the old man, that you set a difficult subject," she said; "but I will try, if you will promise not to laugh at the result."

      "If you succeed on paper only half so well as he did on the violin, your verses will be worth listening to, and I certainly shall not laugh."

      CHAPTER XXV

       Table of Content

      On the following day the somewhat curious religious conversation between Arthur and Angela—a conversation which, begun on Arthur's part out of curiosity, had ended on both sides very much in earnest— the weather broke up and the grand old English climate reasserted its treacherous supremacy. From summer weather the inhabitants of the county of Marlshire suddenly found themselves plunged into a spell of cold that was by contrast almost Arctic. Storms of sleet drove against the window-panes, and there was even a very damaging night-frost, while that dreadful scourge, which nobody in his senses except Kingsley can ever have liked, the east wind, literally pervaded the whole place, and went whistling through the surrounding trees and ruins in a way calculated to make even a Laplander shiver.

      Under these cheerless circumstances our pair of companions—for as yet they were, ostensibly at any rate, nothing more—gave up their outdoor excursions and took to rambling over the disused rooms in the old house, and hunting up many a record, some of them valuable and curious enough, of long-forgotten Caresfoots, and even of the old priors before them; a splendidly illuminated missal being amongst the latter prizes. When this amusement was exhausted, they sat together over the fire in the nursery, and Angela translated to him from her favourite classical authors, especially Homer, with an ease and fluency of expression that, to Arthur, was little short of miraculous. Or, when they got tired of that, he read to her from standard writers, which, elaborate as her education had been, in certain respects, she had scarcely yet even opened, notably Shakespeare and Milton. Needless to say, herself imbued with a strong poetic feeling, these immortal writers were a source of intense delight to her.

      "How is it that Mr. Fraser never gave you Shakespeare to read?" asked

       Arthur one day, as he shut up the volume, having come to the end of

       "Hamlet."

      "He said that I should be better able to appreciate it when my mind had been prepared to do so by the help of a classical and mathematical education, and that it would be 'a mistake to cloy my mental palate with sweets before I had learnt to appreciate their flavours.'"

      "There is some sense in that," remarked Arthur. "By the way, how are the verses you promised to write me getting on? Have you done them yet?"

      "I have done something," she answered, modestly, "but I really do not think that they are worth producing. It is very tiresome of you to have remembered about them."

      Arthur, however, by this time knew enough of Angela's abilities to be sure that her "something" would be something more or less worth hearing, and mildly insisted on their production, and then, to her confusion, on her reading them aloud. They ran as follows, and whatever Angela's opinion of them may have been, the reader shall judge of them for himself:

      A STORM ON THE STRINGS

      "The minstrel sat in his lonely room,

       Its walls were bare, and the twilight grey

       Fell and crept and gathered to gloom;

       It came like the ghost of the dying day,

       And the chords fell hushed and low.

       Pianissimo!

      "His arm was raised, and the violin

       Quivered and shook with the strain it bore,

       While the swelling forth of the sounds within

       Rose with a sweetness unknown before,

       And the chords fell soft and low.

       Piano!

      "The first cold flap of the tempest's wings

       Clashed with the silence before the storm,

       The raindrops pattered across the strings

       As the gathering thunder-clouds took form—

       Drip, drop, high and low.

       Staccato!

      "Heavily rolling the thunder roared,

       Sudden and jagged the lightning played,

       Faster and faster the raindrops poured,

       Sobbing and surging the tree-crests swayed,

       Cracking and crashing above, below.

       Crescendo!

      "The wind tore howling across the wold,

       And tangled his train in the groaning trees,

       Wrapped the dense clouds in his mantle cold,

       Then shivered and died in a wailing breeze,

       Whistling and weeping high and low,

       Sostenuto!

      "A pale sun broke from the driving cloud,

       And flashed in the raindrops serenely cool:

       At the touch of his finger the forest bowed,

       As it shimmered and glanced in the ruffled pool,

       While the rustling leaves soughed soft and low.

       Gracioso!

      "It was only a dream on the throbbing strings,

       An echo of Nature in phantasy wrought,

       A breath of her breath and a touch of her wings

       From a kingdom outspread in the regions of thought.

       Below rolled the sound of the city's din,

       And the fading day, as the night drew in,

       Showed the quaint old face and the pointed chin,

       And the arm that was raised o'er the violin,

       As the old man whispered his hope's dead tale,

       To the friend who could comfort, though others might fail,

       And the chords stole hushed and low.

       Pianissimo!"

      He stopped, and the sheet of paper fell from his hands.

      "Well," she said, with all the eagerness of a new-born writer, "tell me, do you think them very bad?"

      "Well, Angela, you know——"

      "Ah! go on now; I am ready to be crushed. Pray don't spare my feelings."

      "I