'What is to be done?' cried Lady Greville in perplexity. 'I cannot
have the girl here as well, and I will not let my Phoenix go.'
'Send her to the Sœurs de la Misericorde,' said the young man
carelessly; 'you have a nomination.'
'Have I?' said Lady Greville, with a laugh. 'I am sure I did not know
it. It is an excellent idea; but do you think he will come without the
other? I suppose they were like brother and sister?'
'Look at him now,' said Felix, pointing to where I stood caressing the
precious wood; 'he would sell his soul for that fiddle.'
Lady Greville took the hint. 'Here, Anton,' said she, 'I cannot have
Ninette here--you understand, once and for all. But I will see that
she is sent to a kind home, where she will want for nothing and be
trained up as a servant. You need not bother about her. You will live
with me and be taught, and some day, if you are good and behave, you
shall go and see Ninette.'
I was irresolute, but I only said doggedly, feeling what would be the
end, 'I do not want to come, if Ninette may not.'
Then Lady Greville played her trump card.
'Look, Anton,' she said, 'you see that violin. I have no need, I see,
to tell you its value. If you will come with me and make no scene, you
shall have it for your very own. Ninette will be perfectly happy. Do
you agree?'
I looked at my old fiddle, lying on the floor. How yellow and trashy
it looked beside the grand old Cremona, bedded in its blue velvet.
'I will do what you like, Madame,' I said.
'Human nature is pretty much the same in geniuses and dullards,' said
Felix. 'I congratulate you, Auntie.'
And so the bargain was struck, and the new life entered upon that very
day. Lady Greville sought out Ninette at once, though I was not
allowed to accompany her.
I never saw Ninette again. She made no opposition to Lady Greville's
scheme. She let herself be taken to the Orphanage, and she never
asked, so they said, to see me again.
'She's a stupid little thing,' said Lady Greville to her nephew, on
her return, 'and as plain as possible; but I suppose she was kind to
the boy. They will forget each other now I hope. It is not as if they
were related.'
'In that case they would already be hating each other. However, I am
quite sure your protégé will forget soon enough; and, after all, you
have nothing to do with the girl.'
I suppose I did not think very much of Ninette then; but what would
you have? It was such a change from the old vagrant days, that there
is a good deal to excuse me. I was absorbed too in the new and
wonderful symmetry which music began to assume, as taught me by the
master Lady Greville procured for me. When the news was broken to me,
with great gentleness, that my little companion had run away from the
sisters with whom she had been placed--run away, and left no traces
behind her, I hardly realised how completely she would have passed
away from me. I thought of her for a little while with some regret;
then I remembered Stradivarius, and I could not be sorry long. So by
degrees I ceased to think of her.
I lived on in Lady Greville's house, going with her, wherever she
stayed--London, Paris, and Nice--until I was thirteen. Then she sent
me away to study music at a small German capital, in the house of one
of the few surviving pupils of Weber. We parted as we had lived
together, without affection.
Personally Lady Greville did not like me; if anything, she felt an
actual repugnance towards me. All the care she lavished on me was for
the sake of my talent, not for myself. She took a great deal of
trouble in superintending, not only my musical education, but my
general culture. She designed little mediæval costumes for me, and was
indefatigable in her endeavours to impart to my manners that finish
which a gutter education had denied me.
There is a charming portrait of me, by a well-known English artist,
that hangs now in her ladyship's drawing-room. A pale boy of twelve,
clad in an old-fashioned suit of ruby velvet; a boy with huge, black
eyes, and long curls of the same colour, is standing by an oak
music-stand, holding before him a Cremona violin, whose rich colouring
is relieved admirably by the beautiful old point lace with which the
boy's doublet is slashed. It is a charming picture. The famous artist
who painted it considers it his best portrait, and Lady Greville is
proud of it.
But her pride is of the same quality as that which made her value my
presence. I was in her eyes merely the complement of her famous
fiddle.
I heard her one day express a certain feeling of relief at my
approaching departure.
'You regret having taken him up?' asked her nephew curiously.
'No,' she said, 'that would be folly. He repays all one's trouble, as
soon as he touches his fiddle--but I don't like him.'
'He can play like the great Pan,' says Felix.
'Yes, and like Pan he is half a beast.'
'You may make a musician out of him,' answered the young man,
examining his pink nails with a certain admiration, 'but you will
never make him a gentleman.'
'Perhaps not,' said Lady Greville carelessly. 'Still, Felix, he is
very refined.'
_Dame!_ I think he would own himself mistaken now. Mr. Felix
Leominster himself is not a greater social success than the Baron
Antonio Antonelli, of the Legion of Honour. I am as sensitive as any
one to the smallest spot on my linen, and Duchesses rave about my
charming manners.
For the rest my souvenirs are not very numerous. I lived in Germany
until I made my _début_, and I never heard anything more of Ninette.
The history of my life is very much the history of my art: and that
you know. I have always been an art-concentrated
man--self-concentrated, my friend Felix Leominster tells me
frankly--and since I was a boy nothing has ever troubled the serene
repose of my egoism.
It is strange considering the way people rant about the 'passionate
sympathy' of my playing, the 'enormous potentiality of suffering'
revealed in my music, how singularly free from passion and disturbance
my life has been.
I have never let myself be troubled by what is commonly called 'love.'
To be frank with you, I do not much believe in it. Of the two
principal elements of which it is composed, vanity and egoism, I have
too little of the former, too much of the latter, too much coldness
withal in my character to suffer from it. My life has been notoriously
irreproachable. I figure in polemical literature as an instance of a
man who has lived in contact with the demoralising influence of the
stage, and will yet go to Heaven. _A la bonne heure!_
I am coming to the end of my souvenirs and of my cigar at the same
time. I must convey a coin somehow to that dreary person outside, who
is grinding now half-way down the street.
On consideration, I decide emphatically against opening the window and
presenting it that way. If the fog once gets in, it will utterly spoil
me for any work this evening. I feel myself in travail also of two
charming little _Lieder_ that all this thinking about Ninette has
suggested. How would 'Chansons de Gamine' do for a title? I think it
best, on second thoughts, to ring for Giacomo, my man, and send him
out with the half-crown I propose to sacrifice on the altar of
sentiment. Doubtless the musician is a country-woman of his, and if he
pockets the coin, that is his look out.
Now if I was writing a romance, what a chance I have got. I should
tell you how my organ-grinder turned out to be no other than Ninette.
Of course she would not be spoilt or changed by the years--just the
same Ninette. Then what scope for a pathetic scene of reconciliation
and forgiveness--the whole to conclude with a peal of marriage bells,
two people living together 'happy ever after.' But I am not writing a
romance, and I am a musician, not a poet.
Sometimes, however, it strikes me that I should like to see Ninette
again, and I find myself seeking traces of her in childish faces in
the street.
The absurdity of such an expectation strikes me very forcibly
afterwards, when I look at my reflection in the glass, and tell myself
that I must be careful in the disposition of my parting.
Ninette, too, was my contemporary. Still I cannot conceive of her as a
woman. To me she is always a child. Ninette grown up, with a draggled
dress and squalling babies, is an incongruous thing that shocks my
sense of artistic fitness. My fiddle is my only mistress, and while I
can summon its consolation at command, I may not be troubled by the
pettiness of a merely human love. But once when I was down with Roman
fever, and tossed on a hotel bed, all the long, hot night, while
Giacomo drowsed in a corner over 'Il Diavolo Rosa,' I seemed to miss
Ninette.
Remembering that time, I sometimes fancy that when the inevitable hour
strikes, and this hand is too weak to raise the soul of melody out of
Stradivarius--when, my brief dream of life and music over, I go down
into the dark land, where there is no more music, and no Ninette, into
the sleep from which there comes no awaking, I should like to see her
again, not the woman but the child. I should like to look into the
wonderful eyes of the old Ninette, to feel the soft cheek laid against
mine, to hold the little brown hands, as in the old _gamin_ days.
It is a foolish thought, because I am not forty yet, and with the
moderate life I lead I may live to play Stradivarius for another
thirty years.
There is always the hope, too, that it, when it comes, may seize me
suddenly. To see it coming, that is the horrible part. I should like
to be struck by lightning, with you in my arms, Stradivarius, oh, my
beloved--to die playing.
The literary gentleman over my head is stamping viciously about his
room. What would his language be if he knew how I have rewarded his
tormentress--he whose principles are so strict that he would bear the
agony for hours, sooner than give a barrel-organ sixpence to go to
another street. He would be capable of giving Giacomo a sovereign to
pocket my coin, if he only knew. Yet I owe that unmusical old organ a
charming evening, tinged with the faint _soupçon_ of melancholy which
is necessary to and enhances the highest pleasure. Over the memories
it has excited I have smoked a pleasant cigar--peace to its ashes!