CHAPTER VIII. AT THE GATE OF EDEN
When Eric went to the old Connors orchard the next evening he
found Kilmeny waiting for him on the bench under the white lilac
tree, with the violin in her lap. As soon as she saw him she
caught it up and began to play an airy delicate little melody
that sounded like the laughter of daisies.
When it was finished she dropped her bow, and looked up at him
with flushed cheeks and questioning eyes.
"What did that say to you?" she wrote.
"It said something like this," answered Eric, falling into her
humour smilingly. "Welcome, my friend. It is a very beautiful
evening. The sky is so blue and the apple blossoms so sweet.
The wind and I have been here alone together and the wind is a
good companion, but still I am glad to see you. It is an evening
on which it is good to be alive and to wander in an orchard that
is fine and white. Welcome, my friend."
She clapped her hands, looking like a pleased child.
"You are very quick to understand," she wrote. "That was just
what I meant. Of course I did not think it in just those words,
but that was the FEELING of it. I felt that I was so glad I was
alive, and that the apple blossoms and the white lilacs and the
trees and I were all pleased together to see you come. You are
quicker than Neil. He is almost always puzzled to understand my
music, and I am puzzled to understand his. Sometimes it
frightens me. It seems as if there were something in it trying
to take hold of me--something I do not like and want to run away
from."
Somehow Eric did not like her references to Neil. The idea of
that handsome, low-born boy seeing Kilmeny every day, talking to
her, sitting at the same table with her, dwelling under the same
roof, meeting her in the hundred intimacies of daily life, was
distasteful to him. He put the thought away from him, and flung
himself down on the long grass at her feet.
"Now play for me, please," he said. "I want to lie here and
listen to you."
"And look at you," he might have added. He could not tell which
was the greater pleasure. Her beauty, more wonderful than any
pictured loveliness he had ever seen, delighted him. Every tint
and curve and outline of her face was flawless. Her music
enthralled him. This child, he told himself as he listened, had
genius. But it was being wholly wasted. He found himself
thinking resentfully of the people who were her guardians, and
who were responsible for her strange life. They had done her a
great and irremediable wrong. How dared they doom her to such an
existence? If her defect of utterance had been attended to in
time, who knew but that it might have been cured? Now it was
probably too late. Nature had given her a royal birthright of
beauty and talent, but their selfish and unpardonable neglect had
made it of no account.
What divine music she lured out of the old violin--merry and sad,
gay and sorrowful by turns, music such as the stars of morning
might have made singing together, music that the fairies might
have danced to in their revels among the green hills or on yellow
sands, music that might have mourned over the grave of a dead
hope. Then she drifted into a still sweeter strain. As he
listened to it he realized that the whole soul and nature of the
girl were revealing themselves to him through her music--the
beauty and purity of her thoughts, her childhood dreams and her
maiden reveries. There was no thought of concealment about her;
she could not help the revelation she was unconscious of making.
At last she laid her violin aside and wrote,
"I have done my best to give you pleasure. It is your turn now.
Do you remember a promise you made me last night? Have you kept
it?"
He gave her the two books he had brought for her--a modern novel
and a volume of poetry unknown to her. He had hesitated a little
over the former; but the book was so fine and full of beauty that
he thought it could not bruise the bloom of her innocence ever so
slightly. He had no doubts about the poetry. It was the
utterance of one of those great inspired souls whose passing
tread has made the kingdom of their birth and labour a veritable
Holy Land.
He read her some of the poems. Then he talked to her of his
college days and friends. The minutes passed very swiftly.
There was just then no world for him outside of that old orchard
with its falling blossoms and its shadows and its crooning winds.
Once, when he told her the story of some college pranks wherein
the endless feuds of freshmen and sophomores figured, she clapped
her hands together according to her habit, and laughed aloud--a
clear, musical, silvery peal. It fell on Eric's ear with a shock
of surprise. He thought it strange that she could laugh like
that when she could not speak. Wherein lay the defect that
closed for her the gates of speech? Was it possible that it
could be removed?
"Kilmeny," he said gravely after a moment's reflection, during
which he had looked up as she sat with the ruddy sunlight falling
through the lilac branches on her bare, silky head like a shower
of red jewels, "do you mind if I ask you something about your
inability to speak? Will it hurt you to talk of the matter with
me?"
She shook her head.
"Oh, no," she wrote, "I do not mind at all. Of course I am sorry
I cannot speak, but I am quite used to the thought and it never
hurts me at all."
"Then, Kilmeny, tell me this. Do you know why it is that you are
unable to speak, when all your other faculties are so perfect?"
"No, I do not know at all why I cannot speak. I asked mother once
and she told me it was a judgment on her for a great sin she had
committed, and she looked so strangely that I was frightened, and
I never spoke of it to her or anyone else again."
"Were you ever taken to a doctor to have your tongue and organs
of speech examined?"
"No. I remember when I was a very little girl that Uncle Thomas
wanted to take me to a doctor in Charlottetown and see if
anything could be done for me, but mother would not let him. She
said it would be no use. And I do not think Uncle Thomas thought
it would be, either."
"You can laugh very naturally. Can you make any other sound?"
"Yes, sometimes. When I am pleased or frightened I have made
little cries. But it is only when I am not thinking of it at all
that I can do that. If I TRY to make a sound I cannot do it at
all."
This seemed to Eric more mysterious than ever.
"Do you ever try to speak--to utter words?" he persisted.
"Oh yes, very often. All the time I am saying the words in my
head, just as I hear other people saying them, but I never can
make my tongue say them. Do not look so sorry, my friend. I am
very happy and I do not mind so very much not being able to
speak--only sometimes when I have so many thoughts and it seems
so slow to write them out, some of them get away from me. I must
play to you again. You look too sober."
She laughed again, picked up her violin, and played a tinkling,
roguish little melody as if she were trying to tease him, looking
at Eric over her violin with luminous eyes that dared him to be
merry.
Eric smiled; but the puzzled look returned to his face many times
that evening. He walked home in a brown study. Kilmeny's case
certainly seemed a strange one, and the more he thought of it the
stranger it seemed.
"It strikes me as something very peculiar that she should be able
to make sounds only when she is not thinking about it," he
reflected. "I wish David Baker could examine her. But I suppose
that is out of the question. That grim pair who have charge of
her would never consent."
