第4章 My Cousin Fanny(4)

Then we boys wanted to go forth in the world on fiery, black chargers, like the olden knights, and fight giants and rescue beautiful ladies and poor women.Then again, with her eyes shut, the sound would almost die away, and her fingers would move softly and lingeringly as if they loved the touch of the keys, and hated to leave them; and the sound would come from away far off, and everything would grow quiet and subdued, and the perfume of the roses out of doors would steal in on the air, and the soft breezes would stir the trees, and we were all in love, and wanted to see somebody that we didn't see.And Cousin Fanny was not herself any longer, but we imagined some one else was there.Sometimes she suddenly began to sing (she sang old songs, English or French); her voice might be weak (it all depended on her whims; SHE said, on her health), in that case she always stopped and left the piano; or it might be "in condition".

When it was, it was as velvety and mellow as a bell far off, and the old ballads and chansons used to fill the twilight.

We used even to forget then that she was an old maid.Now and then she sang songs that no one else had ever heard.They were her own;she had composed both the words and the air.At other times she sang the songs of others to her own airs.I remember the first time I ever heard of Tennyson was when, one evening in the twilight, she sang his echo song from "The Princess".The air was her own, and in the refrain you heard perfectly the notes of the bugle, and the echoes answering, "Dying, dying, dying." Boy as I was, I was entranced, and she answered my enthusiasm by turning and repeating the poem.I have often thought since how musical her voice was as she repeatedOur echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever.

She had a peculiarly sentimental temperament.As I look back at it all now, she was much given to dwelling upon old-time poems and romances, which we thought very ridiculous in any one, especially in a spinster of forty odd.She would stop and talk about the branch of a tree with the leaves all turning red or yellow or purple in the common way in which, as everyone knows, leaves always turn in the fall;or even about a tangle of briers, scarlet with frost, in a corner of an old worm-fence, keeping us waiting while she fooled around a brier patch with old Blinky, who would just as lief have been in one place as another, so it was out of doors; and even when she reached the house she would still carry on about it, worrying us by telling over again just how the boughs and leaves looked massed against the old gray fence, which she could do till you could see them precisely as they were.

She was very aggravating in this way.Sometimes she would even take a pencil or pen and a sheet of paper for old Blinky, and reproduce it.

She could not draw, of course, for she was not a painter; all she could do was to make anything look almost just like it was.

There was one thing about her which excited much talk; I suppose it was only a piece of old-maidism.Of course she was religious.She was really very good.She was considered very high church.I do not think, from my recollection of her, that she really was, or, indeed, that she could have been; but she used to talk that way, and it was said that she was.

In fact, it used to be whispered that she was in danger of becoming a Catholic.I believe she had an aunt that was one, and she had visited several times in Norfolk and Baltimore, where it was said there were a good many.I remember she used to defend them, and say she knew a great many very devout ones.And she admitted that she sometimes went to the Catholic church, and found it devotional; the choral service, she said, satisfied something in her soul.It happened to be in the evening that she was talking about this.She sat down at the piano, and played some of the Gregorian chants she had heard, and it had a soothing influence on everyone.Even Joe, the fidgetiest of all, sat quite still through it.She said that some one had said it was the music that the angels sing in heaven around the great white throne, and there was no other sacred music like it.But she played another thing that evening which she said was worthy to be played with it.

It had some chords in it that I remembered long afterward.Years afterward I heard it played the same way in the twilight by one who is a blessed saint in heaven, and may be playing it there now.It was from Chopin.

She even said that evening, under the impulse of her enthusiasm, that she did not see, except that it might be abused, why the crucifix should not be retained by all Christian churches, as it enabled some persons not gifted with strong imaginations to have a more vivid realization of the crucified Saviour.This, of course, was going too far, and it created considerable excitement in the family, and led to some very serious talk being given her, in which the second commandment figured largely.It was considered as carrying old-maidism to an extreme length.For some time afterward she was rather discountenanced.

In reality, I think what some said was true: it was simply that she was emotional, as old maids are apt to be.She once said that many women have the nun's instinct largely developed, and sigh for the peace of the cloister.

She seemed to be very fond of artists.She had the queerest tastes, and had, or had had when she was young, one or two friends who, I believe, claimed to be something of that kind; she used to talk about them to old Blinky.But it seemed to us from what she said that artists never did any work; just spent their time lounging around, doing nothing, and daubing paint on their canvas with brushes like a painter, or chiselling and chopping rocks like a mason.One of these friends of hers was a young man from Norfolk who had made a good many things.

He was killed or died in the war; so he had not been quite ruined;was worth something anyhow as a soldier.One of his things was a Psyche, and Cousin Fanny used to talk a good deal about it; she said it was fine, was a work of genius.She had even written some verses about it.