FullReads

“Very well, since you wish it, you shall be stirred up,” she answered; “but you must give me time to work out my great idea. I do not hurry about things, not even about my professional duties; for I have a strong feeling that it is vulgar to be always amassing riches! As I have neither a husband nor a brother to support, I have chosen less wealth, and more leisure to enjoy all the loveliness of life! So you see I take my time about everything. And to-morrow I shall catch butterflies at my leisure, and lie among the dear old pines, and work at my great idea.”

“I shall catch butterflies,” said her companion; “and I too shall lie among the dear old pines.”

“Just as you please,” she said; and at that moment the table d’hote bell rang.

The little girl hastened to the bureau, and spoke rapidly in German to the cashier.

“Ach, Fraulein!” he said. “You are not really serious?”

“Yes, I am,” she said. “I don’t want them to know my name. It will only worry me. Say I am the young lady who tuned the piano.”

She had scarcely given these directions and mounted to her room when Oswald Everard, who was much interested in his mysterious companion, came to the bureau, and asked for the name of the little lady.

“Es ist das Fraulein welches das Piano gestimmt hat,” answered the man, returning with unusual quickness to his account-book.

No one spoke to the little girl at table d’hote, but for all that she enjoyed her dinner, and gave her serious attention to all the courses. Being thus solidly occupied, she had not much leisure to bestow on the conversation of the other guests. Nor was it specially original; it treated of the short-comings of the chef, the tastelessness of the soup, the toughness of the beef, and all the many failings which go to complete a mountain hotel dinner. But suddenly, so it seemed to the little girl, this time-honoured talk passed into another phase; she heard the word “music” mentioned, and she became at once interested to learn what these people had to say on a subject which was dearer to her than any other.

“For my own part,” said a stern-looking old man, “I have no words to describe what a gracious comfort music has been to me all my life. It is the noblest language which man may understand and speak. And I sometimes think that those who know it, or know something of it, are able at rare moments to find an answer to life’s perplexing problems.”

The little girl looked up from her plate. Robert Browning’s words rose to her lips, but she did not give them utterance:

God has a few of us whom He whispers in the ear;
The rest may reason, and welcome; ’tis we musicians know.

“I have lived through a long life,” said another elderly man, “and have therefore had my share of trouble; but the grief of being obliged to give up music was the grief which held me longest, or which perhaps has never left me. I still crave for the gracious pleasure of touching once more the strings of the violoncello, and hearing the dear, tender voice singing and throbbing, and answering even to such poor skill as mine. I still yearn to take my part in concerted music, and be one of those privileged to play Beethoven’s string-quartettes. But that will have to be in another incarnation, I think.”

He glanced at his shrunken arm, and then, as though ashamed of this allusion to his own personal infirmity, he added hastily:

“But when the first pang of such a pain is over, there remains the comfort of being a listener. At first one does not think it is a comfort; but as time goes on there is no resisting its magic influence. And Lowell said rightly that ‘one of God’s great charities is music.'”