The Halo.

by Bettina von Hutten.

PROLOGUE

A straight stretch of dusty Norman road dappled with grotesque shadows of the ancient apple-trees that, bent as if in patient endurance of the weight of their thick-set scarlet fruit, edged it on both sides.

Under one of the trees, his back against its gnarled trunk, sat an old man playing a cracked fiddle.

He played horribly, wrenching discords from the poor instrument, grinning with a kind of vacant malice as it shrieked aloud in agony, and rolling in their scarred sockets his long-blind eyes.

Beside him, his tongue hanging out, his head bent, sat a yellow dog with a lead to his collar. Far and wide there was to be seen no other living thing, and in the apple-scented heat the screeching of the violin was like the resentful cries of some invisible creature being tortured.

"Papillon, _mon ami_," said the old man, ceasing playing for a moment, "we are wasting time; the shadows are coming. See the baby shadow apple-trees creeping across the road."

The yellow dog c.o.c.ked an ear and said nothing.

"Time should never be lost, _pet.i.t chien jaune_--never be lost."

Then with a shrill laugh he ground his bow deep into the roughened strings, and the painful music began again.

The yellow dog closed his eyes....

Suddenly far down the road appeared a low cloud of white dust, advancing rapidly, and until it was nearly abreast of the fiddler, noiselessly, and then, with the cessation of a quick padding sound of bare feet, appeared a small, black-smocked boy, his sabots under his arm, his face white with anger.

"Stop it!" he cried, "stop it!"

The old man turned. "Stop what, little seigneur," he asked with surly amus.e.m.e.nt. "Does the high road belong to you?"

"You must stop it, I say, I cannot bear it."

The fiddler rose and danced about sc.r.a.ping more hideously than before.

"Ho, ho," he laughed, "ho, ho, ho, ho!"

The child threw his arms over his head in a gesture of unconscious melodrama. "I cannot bear it--you are hurting it--I--I will kill you if you do not stop." And he flew at his enemy, using his close-cropped bullet-head as a battering ram.

For some seconds the absurd battle continued, and then, as unexpectedly as he had begun it, the boy gave it up, and as the fiddler laughed harshly, and the fiddle screeched, threw himself on the warm, dusty gra.s.s and cried aloud.

There was a pause, after which, in silence, the old man groped his way to the boy and knelt by him. "Hush, _mon pet.i.t_," he beseeched, "old Luc-Ange is a monster to tease you. Do not cry, do not cry."

A curious apple, leaning over to listen, fell from its bough and dropped with a thud into the gra.s.s.

The little Norman sat up. "I am not crying," he declared, turning a brown, pugnacious face towards his late foe, "see, there are no tears."

The man touched his cheeks and eyelids delicately with his dirty fingers. "True--no tears. But--why, why did you----"

"I was screaming because that noise was so horrible."

"And--that noise gave you pain?"

Bullet-Head frowned. Like all Normans, he resented his mental privacy being intruded on by questions.

"Not pain; it gives me a horrible, hollow feeling in my inside," he admitted grudgingly, "just under the belt."

After a moment he added, his dark eyes fixed angrily on the violin, "I hate violins; they are dreadful things. M. Chalumeau had one. I broke it."

The blind man laughed gratingly. "Because it made such a horrible noise?"

"Yes."

Another pause, and then the man's expression of vacant malice turned to one pitiful to see, one of indistinct yearning. "Give it to me," he muttered, "they say I am half mad, and perhaps I am, but--I think I could play once----" The yellow dog snapped at a fly, and his master turned towards him, adding, "Before your time, Papillon, long before."

The bow touched the strings once or twice gently and ineffectively, and then, his lips twitching, his eyelids as much closed as the scars on their lids allowed them to be, he began to play.

It was the playing of one who had forgotten nearly everything of his art, but it was sweet and true and strangely touching. To the boy it was a miracle. He listened with the muscles of his face drawn tight in an effort at self-control unusual in such a child, his square, brown hands digging convulsively into the dry earth under the gra.s.s beside him. And as the shadows of the trees crept over the road, and the oppressive heat began to relent a little, the plaintive music went on and on, and scant, painful tears stood on the player's face.

At last he stopped, and frowning in a puzzled way, said hoa.r.s.ely, "What is the matter, Papillon, where have we got to?"

The dog's tail stirred in answer, and at the same moment the other listener burst into loud, emotional sobs, and the old man remembered.

"That's it, that's it. It's the boy who made me remember--'_Te rappelles tu, te rappelles--tu, ma Toinon?_' Why do you cry, little boy? Why do you cry?"

The boy dried his eyes on his smock sleeve.

"It--I am ten, too big to cry," he returned, with the evasion born in him of his race, adding with the frankness peculiar to his own personality, "but I did cry. It was beautiful."

The old man rose, and took up the dog's lead.

"Beautiful. Yes. There was a time----" He paused for a second. "What is your name, little one?"

"Victor-Marie Joyselle."

"_Eh b'en_, Victor-Marie Joyselle, listen to me. When you have learned to play the violin----" but Bullet-Head interrupted him.

"How do you know that I mean to learn to play the violin?" he queried, drooping the outer corners of his eyelids in quick suspicion, "I did not say so."

"I know. And when you have learned, remember me. And never let anything--come here that I may put my hand on your head that you do not forget--never let anything--duty, pleasure, money, or--or a _woman_--come between you and your music."

The boy stared seriously into the strange face bent over him, the face from which so much that was bad seemed for the moment to have been swept away by the luminousness of the idea that had come to the half-idiotic brain.

"'Duty, pleasure, money or--'"

"Or a _woman_" cried the fiddler, his face contorting with anger. "G.o.d curse them all!" Muttering and frowning he jerked at his dog. "Come, Papillon, come; we must be getting on, it is late. _Pet.i.t chien jaune, pet.i.t chien jaune._"

The dog trotting discreetly at the end of the taut lead, the old man slouched up the road, brandishing his violin aimlessly and talking aloud as he went.

"I ask myself," said the little Norman, "how he _knew_."