The Master's Violin Part 29

"Ah--h!"

The Doctor roused himself. "What have I done!" he cried, in genuine distress. "I have violated my friend's confidence, unthinking! My friend, for whom I would make any sacrifice--I have betrayed him!"

"No," replied Margaret, with a great effort at self-control. "You have not told me her name."

"It is because I do not know it," said the Doctor, ruefully. "If I had known, I should have bleated it out, fool that I am!"

"Please do not be troubled--you have done no harm. Herr Kaufmann and I are practically strangers."

"That is so," replied the Doctor, evidently rea.s.sured; "and I did not mean it. It is not the same thing as if I had done it purposely."

"Not at all the same thing."

At times, we put something aside in memory to be meditated upon later.

The mind registers the exact words, the train of circ.u.mstances that caused their utterance, all the swift interplay of opposing thought, and, for the time being, forgets. Hours afterward, in solitude, it is recalled; studied from every point of view, searched, a.n.a.lysed, questioned, until it is made to yield up its hidden meaning. It was thus that Margaret put away those four words: "He loves her still."

They are pathetic, these tiny treasure-houses of Memory, where oftentimes the jewel, so jealously guarded, by the clear light of introspection is seen to be only paste. One seizes hungrily at the impulse that caused the hiding, thinking that there must be some certain worth behind the deception. But afterward, painfully sure, one locks the door of the treasure-chamber in self-pity, and steals away, as from a casket that enshrines the dead.

They talked of other things, and at half-past ten the Doctor went home, leaving a farewell message for Lynn, and begging that his kind remembrances be sent to Iris, when she should write.

"Thank you," said Mrs. Irving. "I shall surely tell her, and she will be glad."

The door closed, and almost immediately Lynn came in from the library, rubbing his eyes. "I think I've been asleep," he said.

"It was rude, dear," returned Margaret, in gentle rebuke. "It is ill-bred to leave a guest."

"I suppose it is, but I did not intend to be gone so long."

The house seemed singularly desolate, filled, as it was, with ghostly shadows. Through the rooms moved the memory of Iris, and of that gentle mistress who slept in the churchyard, who had permeated every nook and corner of it with the sweetness of her personality. There was something in the air, as though music had just ceased--the wraith of long-gone laughter, the fall of long-shed tears.

"I miss Iris," said Margaret, dreamily. "She was like a daughter to me."

Taken off his guard, Lynn's conscious face instantly betrayed him.

"Lynn," said Margaret, suddenly, "did you have anything to do with her going away?"

The answer was scarcely audible. "Yes."

Margaret never forced a confidence, but after a pause she said very gently: "Dear, is there anything you want to tell me?"

"It's nothing," said Lynn, roughly. He rose and walked around the room nervously. "It's nothing," he repeated, with a.s.sumed carelessness. "I--I asked her to marry me, and she wouldn't. That's all. It's nothing."

Margaret's first impulse was to smile. This child, to be talking of marriage--then her heart leaped, for Lynn was twenty-three; older than she had been when the star rose upon her horizon and then set forever.

Then came a momentary awkwardness. Childish though the trouble was, she pitied Lynn, and regretted that she could not s.h.i.+eld him from it as she had s.h.i.+elded him from all else in his life.

Then resentment against Iris. What was she, a nameless outcast, to scorn the offered distinction? Any woman in the world might be proud to become Lynn's wife.

Then, smiling at her own folly, Margaret went to him, dominated solely by grat.i.tude. Not knowing what else to do, she drew his tall head down to kiss him, but Lynn swerved aside, and with his face against the softness of his mother's hair, wiped away a boyish tear.

"Lynn," she said, tenderly, "you are very young."

"How old were you when you married, mother?"

"Twenty-one."

"How old was father?"

"Twenty-three."

"Then," persisted Lynn, with remorseless logic, "I am not too young, and neither is Iris--only she doesn't care."

"She may care, son."

"No, she won't. She despises me."

"And why?"

"She said I had no heart."

"The idea!"

"Maybe I didn't have then, but I'm sure I have now."

He walked back and forth restlessly. Margaret knew that the griefs of youth are cruelly keen, because they come well in the lead of the strength to bear them. She was about to offer the usual threadbare consolation, "You will forget in time," when she remembered the stock of which Lynn came.

His mother, who had carried a secret wound for more than twenty-five years, who was she, to talk about forgetting, and, of all others, to her son?

Grat.i.tude was still dominant, though in her heart of hearts she knew that she was selfish. Lynn felt the lack of sympathy, and became conscious, for the first time in his life, that her tenderness had a limit.

"Mother," he said, suddenly, "did you love father?"

"Why do you ask, son?"

"Because I want to know."

"I respected him highly," said Margaret, at length. "He was a good man, Lynn."

"You have answered," he returned. "You don't know--you don't understand."

"But I do understand," she flashed.

"You can't, if you didn't love father."

"I--I cared for someone else," said Margaret, thickly, unwilling to be convicted of shallowness.

Lynn looked at her quickly. "And you still care?"