"Mind you listen to the overture, Miss Wedderburn," said Vincent, hastily, in my ear, as the first liquid, yearning, long-drawn notes sounded from the violins.
"Yes," said I, raising my face at last, looking or rather feeling a look compelled from me, to the place where he sat. This time our eyes met fully. I do not know what I felt when I saw him look at me as unrecognizingly as if I had been a wooden doll in a shop window. Was he looking past me? No. His eyes met mine direct--glance for glance; not a sign, not a quiver of the mouth, not a waver of the eyelids. I heard no more of the overture. When he was playing, and so occupied with his music, I surveyed him surreptitiously; when he was not playing, I kept my eyes fixed firmly upon my play-bill. I did not know whether to be most distressed at my own disloyalty to a kind friend, or most appalled to find that the man with whom I had spent a whole afternoon in the firm conviction that he was outwardly, as well as inwardly, my equal and a gentleman--(how the tears, half of shame, half of joy, rise to my eyes now as I think of my poor, pedantic little scruples then!) the man of whom I had assuredly thought and dreamed many and many a time and oft was--a professional musician, a man in a band, a German band, playing in the public orchestra of a provincial town. Well! well!
In our village at home, where the population consisted of clergymen's widows, daughters of deceased naval officers, and old women in general, and those old women ladies of the genteelest description--the Army and the Church (for which I had been brought up to have the deepest veneration and esteem, as the two head powers in our land--for we did not take Manchester, Birmingham, and Liverpool into account at Skernford)--the Army and the Church, I say, look down a little upon Medicine and the Law, as being perhaps more necessary, but less select factors in that great sum--the Nation, Medicine and the Law looked down very decidedly upon commercial wealth, and Commerce in her turn turned up her nose at retail establishments, while one and all--Church and Army, Law and Medicine, Commerce in the gross and Commerce in the little--united in pointing the finger at artists, musicians, literati, _et id omne genus_, considering them, with some few well-known and orthodox exceptions, as bohemians, and calling them "persons." They were a class with whom we had and could have nothing in common; so utterly outside our life that we scarcely ever gave a thought to their existence. We read of pictures, and wished to see them; heard of musical wonders, and desired to hear them--as pictures, as compositions. I do not think it ever entered our heads to remember that a man with a quick life throbbing in his veins, with feelings, hopes, and fears and thoughts, painted the picture, and that in seeing it we also saw him--that a consciousness, if possible, yet more keen and vivid produced the combinations of sound which brought tears to our eyes when we heard "the band"--beautiful abstraction--play them! Certainly we never considered the performers as anything more than people who could play--one who blew his breath into a brass tube; another into a wooden pipe; one who scraped a small fiddle with fine strings, another who scraped a big one with coarse strings.