Eve sat with
flashing eyes; Lucy's twinkled with sly fun: this made Eve angrier.
She tried another tack.
"You asked David to bring his fiddle," said she, sharply, "but I
suppose now--"
"Has he brought it?" asked Mr. Fountain, eagerly.
"Yes, he has; I made him" (with a glance of defiance at Talboys).
Mr. Fountain rang the bell directly and sent for the fiddle. It came.
David took it and tuned it, and made it discourse. Lucy leaned a
little back in her chair, wore her "_tout m'est egal_ face," and
Eve watched her like a cat. First her eyes opened with a mild
astonishment, then her lips parted in a smile; after a while a faint
color came and went, and. her eyes deepened and deepened in color, and
glistened with the dewy light of sensibility.
A fiddle wrought this, or rather genius, in whose hand a jews-harp is
the lyre of Orpheus, a fiddle the harp of David, a chisel a hewer of
heroic forms, a brush or a pen the scepter of souls, and, alas! a nail
a picklock.
Inside every fiddle is a soul, but a coy one. The nine hundred and
ninety-nine never win it. They play rapid tunes, but the soul of
beautiful gayety is not there; slow tunes, very slow ones, wherein the
spirit of whining is mighty, but the sweet soul of pathos is absent;
doleful, not nice and tearful. Then comes the Heaven-born fiddler,*
who can make himself cry. with his own fiddle. David had a touch of
this witchcraft. Though a sound musician and reasonably master of his
instrument, he could not fly in a second up and down it, tickling the
fingerboard and scratching the strings without an atom of tone, as the
mechanical monkeys do that boobies call fine players.
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