"Couldn't you ask her now, miss? I should like to know at what hour I might call. But perhaps the best way would be to walk about here in the evening, after my day's work is over, and then you could run down any time, and look out: that would be enough; I should be there. Sat.u.r.day nights I could just as well be there all night."

To Tom and Letty it seemed not a little peculiar that a man so much a stranger should be ready to walk about the street in order to be at hand with help for them; but Mary was only delighted, not surprised, for what the man had said to her made the thing not merely intelligible, but absolutely reasonable.

Joseph was not, however, allowed to wander the street. The arrangement made was, that, as soon as his work was over, he should come and see whether there was anything he could do for them. And he never came but there was plenty to do. He took a lodging close by, that he might be with them earlier, and stay later; and, when nothing else was wanted of him, he was always ready to discourse on his violin. Sometimes Tom enjoyed his music much, though he found no little fault with his mode of playing, for Tom knew something about everything, and could render many a reason; at other times, he preferred having Mary read to him.

On one of these latter occasions, Mary, occupied in cooking something for the invalid, asked Joseph to read for her. He consented, but read very badly--as if he had no understanding of the words, but, on the other hand, stopping every few lines, apparently to think and master what he had read. This was not good reading anyway, least of all for an invalid who required the soothing of half-thought, molten and diluted in sweet, even, monotonous sound, and it was long before Mary asked him again.

Many things showed that he had had little education, and therefore probably the more might be made of him. Mary saw that he must be what men call a genius, for his external history had been, by his own showing, of an altogether commonplace type.

His father, who was a blacksmith before him, and a local preacher, had married a second time, and Joseph was the only child of the second marriage. His father had brought him up to his own trade, and, after his death, Joseph came to work in London, whither his sister had preceded him. He was now thirty, and had from the first been saving what he could of his wages in the hope of one day having a smithy of his own, and his time more at his ordering.

Mary saw too that in his violin he possessed a grand fundamental undeveloped education; he was like a man going about the world with a ten-thousand-pound-note in his pocket, and not many sixpences to pay his way with. But there was another education working in him far deeper, and already more developed, than that which divine music even was giving him; this also Mary thoroughly recognized; this it was in him that chiefly attracted her; and the man himself knew it as underlying all his consciousness.

Though he could ill read aloud, he could read well for his inward nourishment; he could write tolerably, and, if he could not spell, that mattered a straw, and no more; he had never read a play of Shakespeare--had never seen a play; knew nothing of grammar or geography--or of history, except the one history comprising all. He knew nothing of science; but he could shoe a horse as well as any man in the three Ridings, and make his violin talk about things far beyond the ken of most men of science.

So much of a change had pa.s.sed upon Tom in his illness, that Mary saw it not unreasonable to try upon him now and then a poem of her favorite singer. Occasionally, of course, the feeling was altogether beyond him, but even then he would sometimes enter into the literary merit of the utterance.

"I had no idea there were such gems in George Herbert, Mary!" he said once. "I declare, some of them are even in their structure finer than many things that have nothing in them to admire except the structure."

"That is not to be wondered at," replied Mary.

"No," said Joseph; "it is not to be wondered at; for it's clear to me the old gentleman plied a good bow. I can see that plain enough."

"Tell us how you see it," said Mary, more interested than she would have liked to show.

"Easily," he answered. "There was one poem"--he p.r.o.nounced it _pome_--"you read just now--"

"Which? which?" interrupted Mary, eagerly.

"That I can not tell you; but, all the time you were reading it, I heard the gentleman--Mr. George Herbert, you call him--playing the tune to it."

"If you heard him so well," ventured Mary, "you could, I fancy, play the tune over again to us."

"I think I could," he answered, and, rising, went for his instrument, which he always brought, and hung on an old nail in the wall the moment he came in.

He played a few bars of a prelude, as if to get himself into harmony with the recollection of what he had heard the master play, and then began a lively melody, in which he seemed as usual to pour out his soul. Long before he reached the end of it, Mary had reached the poem.

"This is the one you mean, is it not?" she said, as soon as he had finished--and read it again.

In his turn he did not speak till she had ended.

"That's it, miss," he said then; "I can't mistake it; for, the minute you began, there was the old gentleman again with his fiddle."

"And you know now what it says, don't you?" asked Mary.

"I heard nothing but the old gentleman," answered the musician.

Mary turned to Tom.

"Would you mind if I tried to show Mr. Jasper what I see in the poem?

He can't get a hold of it himself for the master's violin in his ears; it won't let him think about it."

"I should like myself to hear what you have got to say about it, Mary!

Go on," said Tom.

Mary had now for a long time been a student of George Herbert; and anything of a similar life-experience goes infinitely further, to make one understand another, than any amount of learning or art. Therefore, better than many a poet, Mary was able to set forth the scope and design of this one. Herself at the heart of the secret from which came all his utterance, she could fit herself into most of the convolutions of the sh.e.l.l of his expression, and was hence able also to make others perceive in his verse not a little of what they were of themselves unable to see.

"We shall have you lecturing at the Royal Inst.i.tution yet, Mary," said Tom; "only it will be long before its members care for that sort of antique."

Tom's insight had always been ahead of his character, and of late he had been growing. People do grow very fast in bed sometimes. Also he had in him plenty of material, to which a childlike desire now began to give shapes and sequences.

The musician's remark consisted in taking his violin, and once more giving his idea of the "old gentleman's" music, but this time with a richer expression and fuller harmonies. Mary had every reason to be satisfied with her experiment. From that time she talked a good deal more about her favorite writers, and interested both the critical taste of Tom and the artistic instinct of the blacksmith.

But Joseph's playing had great faults: how could it be otherwise?--and to Mary great seemed the pity that genius should not be made perfect in faculty, that it should not have that redemption of its body for which unwittingly it groaned. And the man was one of those childlike natures which may indeed go a long time without discovering this or that external fault in themselves, patent to the eye of many an inferior onlooker--for the simple soul is the last to see its own outside--but, once they become aware of it, begin that moment to set the thing right.

At the same time he had not enough of knowledge to render it easy to show him by words wherein any fault consisted--the nature, the being of the fault, that is--what it simply was; but Mary felt confident that, the moment he saw a need, he would obey its law.

She had taken for herself the rooms below, formerly occupied by the Helmers, with the hope of seeing them before long reinstated in them; and there she had a piano, the best she could afford to hire: with its aid she hoped to do something toward the breaking of the invisible bonds that tied the wings of Jasper's genius.

His great fault lay in his time. Dare I suggest that he contented himself with measuring it to his inner ear, and let his fingers, like horses which he knew he had safe in hand, play what pranks they pleased? A reader may, I think, be measuring verse correctly to himself, and yet make of it nothing but rugged prose to his hearers.

Perhaps this may be how severe masters of quant.i.ty in the abstract are so careless of it in the concrete--in the audible, namely, where alone it is of value. Shall I a.n.a.logize yet a little further, and suggest the many who admire righteousness and work iniquity; who say, "Lord, Lord,"

and seldom or never obey? Anyhow, a man may have a good enough ear, with which he holds all the time a secret understanding, and from carelessness offend grievously the ears he ought to please; and it was thus with Joseph Jasper.

Mary was too wise to hurry anything. One evening when he came as usual, and she knew he was not at the moment wanted, she asked him to take a seat while she played something to him. But she was not a little disappointed in the reception he gave her offering--a delicate morsel from Beethoven. She tried something else, but with no better result. He showed little interest: he was not a man capable of showing where nothing was, for he never meant to show anything; his expression was only the ripple of the unconscious pool to the sway and swirl of the fishes below. It seemed as if he had only a narrow entrance for the admission of music into his understanding--but a large outlet for the spring that rose within him, and was, therefore, a somewhat remarkable exception to the common run of mortals: in such, the capacity for reception far exceeds the capability of production. His dominant thoughts were in musical form, and easily found their expression in music; but, mainly no doubt from want of practice in reception, and experience of variety in embodiment, the forms in which others gave themselves utterance could not with corresponding readiness find their way to the sympathetic place in him. But pride or repulsion had no share in this defect. The man was open and inspired, and stupid as a child.

The next time she made the attempt to open this channel between them, something she played did find him, and for a few minutes he seemed lost in listening.

"How nice it would be," she said, "if we could play together sometimes!"

"Do you mean both at once, miss?" he asked.

"Yes--you on your violin, and I on the piano."

"That could hardly be, I'm afraid, miss," he answered; "for, you see, I don't know always--not exactly--what I'm going to play; and if I don't know, and you don't know, how are we to keep together?"

"n.o.body can play your own things but yourself, of course--that is, until you are able to write them down; but, if you would learn something, we could play that together."

"I don't know how to learn. I've heard tell of the notes and all that, but I don't know how to work them."

"You have heard the choir in the church--all keeping with the organ,"

said Mary.

"Scarcely since I was a child--and not very often then--though my mother took me sometimes. But I was always wanting to get out again, and gave no heed."

"Do you never go to church now?"

"No, miss--not for long. Time's too precious to waste."

"How do you spend it, then?"