But to-day he was not looking
at the sky, instead, he was staring at the black, dusty rafters
of his kitchen, where hung dried meats and strings of onions
and bunches of herbs and fishing tackle and guns and skins.
But old Abel saw not these things; his face was the face of a man
who beholds visions, compact of heavenly pleasure and hellish pain,
for old Abel was seeing what he might have been--and what he was;
as he always saw when Felix Moore played to him on the violin.
And the awful joy of dreaming that he was young again, with unspoiled
life before him, was so great and compelling that it counterbalanced
the agony in the realization of a dishonoured old age, following years
in which he had squandered the wealth of his soul in ways where Wisdom
lifted not her voice.
Felix Moore was standing opposite to him, before an untidy stove,
where the noon fire had died down into pallid, scattered ashes.
Under his chin he held old Abel's brown, battered fiddle;
his eyes, too, were fixed on the ceiling; and he, too, saw things
not lawful to be uttered in any language save that of music;
and of all music, only that given forth by the anguished,
enraptured spirit of the violin. And yet this Felix was little more
than twelve years old, and his face was still the face of a child
who knows nothing of either sorrow or sin or failure or remorse.
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