Read Ebook: Her country by Andrews Mary Raymond Shipman

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Ebook has 185 lines and 13569 words, and 4 pages

The voice brooded among the low notes, clearly, happily. It went on:

"An' 'twas there that Annie Laurie Gie'd me her promise true."

McIvor waited, anxious to see what would happen when the air jumped inches of scale.

"Gie'd me her promise true! Which ne'er forgot shall be! An' for bonnie Annie Laurie--"

The high notes floated to him, full and clean, and then dropped deliciously to the croon of the world-old love-song.

"I'd lay me down and dee."

McIvor, leaning on his elbow, revelling in the flooding sounds, frowned. He shook his head. "It's a pity," he murmured, and then shouted, "Henry--Henry!" He shouted at the top of his lungs.

Henry Barron, reading inside, dropped his magazine and dashed through the open door. "What in the name of heaven's the matter? You're not ill?"

McIvor did not smile. "Ill--no. Who's that singing?"

"Oh!" Barron looked relieved. "Now see here, old man--you're there to rest, not to get excited. Dr. Thomas said you were to do no talking or even thinking for two hours."

"Dr. Thomas go to the devil. That voice--who is it?"

Barron was looking into the sunlight of his drive. "Here she comes," he said.

The white, tall, thin figure was moving, facile of movement as the voice, up the broad gravel; the shallow basket, rioting color, swept casually back and forth in the girl's hand. Barron went down the steps.

"For Mr. McIvor," she called, swinging the mass of reds and pinks at him as she came. "I wish they were better. They're all we have, but they're only common roses."

"The sweetest kind," said Barron, and the girl stood gazing at him, her eyes shining with the romance of bringing flowers to a hero.

"When's he coming?" she demanded. "I'm going to stand in our garden and sing and sing till he asks me to do 'Carmen' for him. Do tell him to, Mr. Barron. When's he coming?"

"He's here," some one spoke from the gallery, back of the flower-boxes. The girl stood rooted. "And 'Carmen' has been sung by worse voices. Seldom better."

"Oh," groaned Barron, "he ought not to be stirred up; come and see him, then, but don't stay over a minute."

The girl came, breathless, shy a bit, but blissful.

"To-morrow morning, then, you'll sing for him," said Barron three minutes later. "And now go away, my dear, for he mustn't get tired."

In the Barron drawing-room, while McIvor's secretary played an accompaniment, the girl stood next morning and sang.

McIvor lay outside among his pillows and stared at the tossing pink veil clothing the broken lattice. The girl sang as confidently as any bird in a tree, taking the difficult changes and the trying high notes without any effort. Her voice was astonishing in its power. McIvor looked at her as she came smiling through the door.

"You'd do for a church organ," he said. "Where does all that noise come from, you wisp of a child? Turn sideways." She whirled, laughing. "I see. You fooled me. You've got the deep chest of a prima donna. Healthy, aren't you?"

She nodded. "As strong as my brother. Never ill since measles. I can run up-hill and not get winded."

"You're fit," said McIvor. The girl looked at him, waited.

McIvor drew his brows together. "Make money! And you seventeen!" he said as if to himself, but his eyes were stern. "Miss Mannering, you are going the wrong way to be an artist. Art is an exacting mistress. The price she asks for success is one's heart. If ye cannot give that, if ye cannot love music for music's sake"--McIvor dropped into Scotchness at odd times; it was a sign of strong feeling--"ye'll not be great. Ye certainly hae a fine organ for singin'; it's a grand machine God has gi'en ye. But I know now what's troublin' me about your voice--the soul's not there. An' gi'en ye persist in wantin' money first, the soul will not find its way in. Ye'll be no true singer. It's mechanical, that lovely big voice of ye, and it'll move no man. What the true singer wants is to stir the hearts of people and send them awa' to help the world, because his music has helped them. Would na' ye like to do that?"

Honor's soft mouth was firm. "No," she said. "I don't care. I want their money." McIvor shook his head.

Suddenly she whirled and, springing down the steps, ran full tilt across the lawn to a break in the lattice, and dropping to the ground, slid through like a rabbit.

McIvor looked up at Barron. The two men laughed a little, and then the musician sighed. "The poor baby," he said. "She's got so much, and she's likely goin' to throw it away. Money! At seventeen! An' she with the face of a seraph and a voice out of ten million!"

"Perhaps she'll grow up. She's only a baby," Barron considered, and went on to explain a bit to the other how things were at the Mannerings, and the influences that had shaped the motherless girl.

"If," said McIvor, "she has the right stuff, life will come along some day with a big emotion, and money and such trash will go smash. And the world will get one of its great music-makers. But a singer without a soul is no good."

Two years after the McIvor episode the Mannering household had changed little outwardly. But young Eric had been now for a year a practising lawyer, with a beginning of a reputation already, and Honor, secretary to Henry Barron, president of the Empire Knitting Mills, was a capitalist. She had fifteen hundred dollars salted away in a savings-bank.

"When it's two thousand I'll bolt for New York," she told Barron, "and in six months from that I'll be a success. You'll see. Stroble says my voice is better and better."

About that time she awoke with a start to a huge movement in the world; the world was swaying on its foundations, and she in her self-centred little orbit suddenly was shaken. America was at war. On a day it came to her what war meant. It was Eric, chafing at his lameness, his helplessness to fight, Eric burning with patriotism, who roused her. The boy had developed into a speaker of promise, and was being used at a variety of meetings. One day an older speechmaker said to him:

"Make them sing something before you begin. It limbers an audience and focusses its attention. It does your first five minutes' work for you."

"Honor, do you want to go with me and sing at a factory meeting to-morrow at noon? I want a verse of 'America' to stir the meeting up before I speak."

"Why, yes," the girl agreed easily. "I can get off. And it's good advertisement. My voice will be known a bit."

"Young pig!" The brother apostrophized her. "Isn't it in you to consider your flag?"

Honor reflected. "I don't think so," she decided with honesty. "Lots of people are doing things for the flag. I'm glad to have 'em. Me, I've got my voice and my career; that's all I can attend to. I'm like a horse, capable of only one idea at a time."

"Isn't it in you," interjected her father, unhurried, soft-voiced, "to consider your breeding? Your family traditions? A daughter of the Mannerings of Garden Court--singing to factory-hands! My word! the race is degenerating."

"Not at all, dad. It's improving. Family traditions don't cut any ice," remarked Honor tersely. "If Eric and I bothered with them we'd get nowhere."

"For Eric it's permissible," Mannering stated. "It's a statesmanlike accomplishment to make speeches. But you--entertaining workmen! Hideous! I suppose if I definitely objected it wouldn't make any difference."

"Don't definitely object, dear child," Honor adjured her father. "You know you're not fitted to handle Eric and me. But we do hate to go bang into your theories. So put 'em on a high shelf out of our reach, beautiful one. They don't go with us at all, but they're simply lovely on you."

Eric Mannering laughed, not ill-pleased. It was comfortable to be assured that it was of no use trying to influence these handsome and unmanageable children of his. It would have disturbed his placid laziness to argue. "I can't understand," he considered, "how people in general control their young. I never could." And with entire amiability he let it go at that.

"Your brother makes a corking speech, Miss Mannering." She was driving next day with Eric and three other men, politicians, across the city to the great motor-factory.

"He told me he did," Honor answered, her gray eyes dancing. And the men laughed in a big chorus.

"She's a young infidel," Eric asserted, laughing, too, "and has no respect for age or genius. If I could once stir her with a speech I'd consider I'd made a real hit. I don't believe she knows what the Liberty Loan means, and as for the country, she takes no more responsibility for it than a squirrel up a tree."

"Not a patriot, Miss Mannering?" asked one of the men. "I'm surprised, with your family record--your grandfather the ambassador, and your great-grandfather the governor."

"I don't believe I particularly belong to my family," the girl reflected. "I don't care about their record. If I can make my own way with my voice--make money--that's all I want. I'm too busy with that to bother much about the country, you see."

And the men laughed again, not disapprovingly, because of her beauty and her youth, and thought Mannering's young sister charmingly democratic.

The car sped along miles of city, through streets which Honor had never known existed, and came to the Black-Lewis Factory, and turned into a large bare yard between buildings. Around the walls stood hundreds of men, marshalled compactly. The men in the car got out and shook hands with two or three who seemed to be in charge.

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