The Camden chronicle. (Camden, Tenn.) 1890-current, 1908-09-04
The Husband of
the Organist
BY VIRGINIA M. CORNELL


o.
John Trenton was at first sight an
misunderstanding man, with hair
and beard of no particular color. He
was a self-made man who, from an
orphaned country boy, had risen by
arduous struggles to be a city man of
attluence; but unlike most of those
who have made themselves, he had
never been quite satisfied with his
handiwork Notwithstanding it's mu-
n1tcent rewards, he felt in the busting
business world a lack of that harmony
which had filled his boyish soul at the
whispering of the trees and the muir
muir of the brook in those days when
everything in nature made for him in
expressible music.
In the course of years, John Tren-
ton, the successful man of business,
with harmony hidden in his soul, mar
ried the organist Of ST. Adams cathe-
dral, woman with harmony always at
her fingers ends She was one of
those strikingly ethereal-looking wo-
men who, nine times out of ten, re-
ceive more of some mans devotion
than they deserve, and Mrs Trenton
was not the exception to prove this
rule, She had been no more than a
comfortably poor girl when he married
her. Her marriage, indeed, had been
to her but an avenue of escape from
that poverty, for he was not man she
would have dreamed of marrying other
wise. Had she married for love, it is
quite possible that she might have
been more than an ordinarily loving
woman; but married without it, she
had never been able to forgive John
Trenton the fact that he had not been
able to inspire love in her
But since he had not, she wrapped
herself in her one earthly joy, the
sounds she evoked from her organ.
Under their spell, her eyes glowed and
her pulses thrilled as they never did
to her husbands voice or touch, nor, it
is but just to her to add, to the voice
or touch of any other man. If she had
yearning for that greater and more
satisfying emotion-love-thoug she
looked at John Trenton with hopeless
eyes, she looked at no other.
He came gradually to look at her
also with hopeless eyes, but in diff
ferent sense. She still seemed to him
the living embodiment of all perfec-
ton. He had felt Immediately after
the ceremony which had made them
man and wife that there was not room
enough in the earth, nor in the waters
under it, to contain his happiness and
exaltation. Afterwards something rose
like sob in his throat when he
thought of that moment.
A few months after their marriage
they went to Europe, where she could
better satisfy the cravings of that pas
sion which, while not for himself, was
yet, he felt, tie between them. Not
only because that, save for him, such
opportunity might have always been
lacking to her, but because sometimes
he thought he really did understand
her music. AS it absorbed her more
and more, her playing grew to him
more wonderful and divine. He could
not renounce the pleasure of watching
her fingers as they moved over the
keys, and he had sometimes a sudden,
intense desire to sit at her place at the
organ, and feel it obey his touch as it
did hers. Once, indeed, when she had
left the room, he laid his hands upon
the keyboard, and sudden flashing
insight came to him Of the joy of pres
sing the keys upon which his hands in
ertly rested, and Of feeling them obey
the impulse of his brain, translating
the strange thoughts that had thrilled
him since his earliest boyhood. A wild
desire to pour forth in sounds which
she would understand the passion and
pain of his yearning toward her surged |
through him. All, that he could make |
the organ cry to her what he had
never dared to cry: Love me; love
me; love me-" For a moment he sat |
in imagination, holding her. willingly |
won, in his arms. Then he turned from
his flashing vision as from tempta- /
ton.
It was after their return from abroad
that the man who timidly called Mrs.
Trenton wife came into his title of
husband of the organist," for, despite .
his wealth, she clung to her bench in
the organ loft on Sundays. She had
grown farther than ever away from
him, yet, as he sat each week with the
crowd of worshipers at st. Adams ca
thedral, while at her will the roll of
the great organ filled the edifce, she
still looked to him as in the days when
he had first dreamt of winning her-as
pure and beautiful and serene as a far
off star. But he had ceased to dream
that he could put out his arms and