The Old Flute-Player Part 8

"Worried?"

"Yes. Always in the past have I been with you. Now you are alone and beautiful. And of life you know so little, while of love--you know--ah, nothing!"

Anna was not sure of this. She had been wondering, indeed, if she did not know much of it. It startled her to have her father speak of it.

There had been tremors in her heart, hot flushes in her cheeks, dim mists before her eyes when she had thought about young Vanderlyn, of which she was suspicious--very. No; she was by no means sure that she knew nothing about love--but she did not say this to her father.

Instead she pressed her dark head closer to his thick white mane.

"Love!" said she. "It is such a pretty word. Tell me something of it, father."

He smiled down at her. "Ah, you have some interest! Well, I tell you."

Into his old eyes there came the deep and happy glow of reminiscence of bright days. She knew the look--always was it in them when he was thinking of her mother and never was it in them at any other time.

"Love," said he, "it is life's spring-time. Ah, your mother, Anna!

Your dear mother! It is the splendor and the glory of the dawn." The old man's head was back, his eyes were closed and on his face there was a singularly sweet and simple smile, more like that of a youth than that of one whose years stretch far behind him. "It is the light that falls from heaven and turns this grim old world into a paradise.

It is the hand of fate that grips the heart till we must follow--follow. We cannot hold back, my Anna; I could not hold back, your lovely mother, she could not hold back. Ah, one must follow when Love's hand is clasped about one's heart and leads! Some day you will understand and many things will then be clear to you. It is the glow of ardor in the eyes, reflected from the flame which burns deep in the heart--the flame which melts, which welds a link, a mystic bond, to bind for all eternity." He opened his eyes, now, and smiled at her.

"That, liebschen--that is love--ah, that is love. Your mother taught me all about it. Be careful--careful, Anna--about love!"

"It sounds so splendid as you speak of it! How shall I know when it has come to me?"

The old man's caution was all gone; his fears now all forgotten. He was thinking of past days, dear days, young days.

"How shall you know?" he asked, and smiled again, this time in soft, affectionate derision. "You will not mistake. Mistake? It is impossible. When your heart leaps at the sound of his dear footsteps; when the world is empty till he comes and then is, ah, so full that you are crowded out of it into the valleys of a paradise; when little chills run over you one moment and the next the hot blood makes your cheeks into twin roses! How shall you know? Ah, there are many signs!"

"And do you think that such a love will ever come to me?"

"To you? Of course." The old man caught himself up short, just there, and lost his rapt expression. There were still hopes in his heart of realization for his daughter of all the brilliant dreams of his own youth--those dreams which had so sadly gone quite wrong. She must do nothing which would shut her from it if ever it should become possible. "Yes; it will come to you, of course; but not for a long time, and you must be very careful," he added in a greatly altered, less magnetic voice. "You must love no one until I tell you."

"Can one make love wait?"

"Ah--well--yes--one _must_!"

"But father--"

"Wait! You must not question me, mine liebschen; but, someday it may be that I shall no longer flute-play in a garden. Someday, maybe, things are better with us. You must wait a while, to see if that comes true. Then--then, when it _is_ true, I pick out for you, ach! the handsomest, the bravest gentleman that I can find. I bring him to you, and I say: 'Anna, you love him!' That is all."

She was dismayed. This was not to her taste at all! "But father--"

The old German in his worry lest the life that she must lead as the companion to the rich New Yorker might induce her to let down the barriers of the exclusiveness which that which he could not, at present name, implanted in his very soul, looked sternly at her. He wished, now, to end the talk of it. "That, Anna," he said gravely, "that is all."

"But you tell me you will pick him out and bring him to me! Must he not love me?"

This again made him forget a little. It brought back other vivid memories of those bygone days when, young and ardent, he had gone to this girl's mother with his heart aflame.

"Love you? Yah; of course he loves you. You think love is a game of solitaire? But--he _will_ love you, liebschen. To fall very much in love with you he has only once to see you. But, Anna, it is not with women as it is with men. _You_ must _conceal_ your love, until he speaks."

She smiled. "And, father, what shall I do then?"

"Do when he speaks? When comes the right man and tells you that he loves you, asking you to be his wife, mine Anna, you must answer: 'For this so great honor, sir, I thank you, and I give you in return my heart and hand.'"

Ah, the visions in his mind as he said this, of the far-off German village, of the dainty maiden standing there before a gallant youthful gentleman, trying to be as formal, when she placed her hand in his, as lifelong training in the stiff formalities of life had made him, in his embarra.s.sment, while he told his great devotion to her! Thinking back along the path of years that led to that bright garden, how Herr Kreutzer smiled!

"How beautiful that sounds!" said Anna, softly. "'For this so great honor, I thank you, and I give you in return my heart and hand.'"

It brought the old flute-player back from the far garden.

"Do not practice on it yet," he said, without unkindness, but with a firm tone which gave his words almost the stern significance of a real order. "There is no hurry, liebschen, but, when the time is ripe for it, ah, it will come. Yah; it will come."

Her thoughts were full of all this talk of love and marriage as she went to Mrs. Vanderlyn's next morning, to take up again her routine of companion and instructor to the lady in the German language. She was not so very fond of Mrs. Vanderlyn. That lady was too much absorbed in her ambition to gain real importance in the social world to leave much time for being lovable to anybody but her son. That she was fond of him no one could doubt, but he was winning his own way, and did not need her mother care. It left her free for other things; it made the other things essential to her happiness. How empty is a mother's life when from it, out into the world, her only son goes venturing, none but a mother knows. Mrs. Vanderlyn had striven to fill hers with social episodes and had not done so to her satisfaction. There were things, she had discovered, which money, by itself, cannot accomplish and the learning had astonished her. She had thought a golden key would certainly unlock all gates. It had come to her as inspiration that the easy way for an American to gain social favor in New York, where, hitherto, gates have been closed to her, might be to purchase social favor, first, in England or in Germany and then come back with the distinction of it clinging like a perfume to her garments. But the purchase had not been an easy matter. Abroad, to her amazement, money had its mighty value, but only as a superstructure. There must be firmer stuff for the foundation--family. Her family was traced too easily--for the tracing was too brief. It ended with abruptness which was startling, two generations back, in a far western mining camp.

Beyond that all the cutest experts in false genealogies had failed to carry it convincingly.

"Anna," she said to the attentive girl, "tell me about your family in Germany."

"My family?" said Anna. "There is no family of mine, now, left in Germany. My father--he is here with me, my mother died when I was very young. I can remember her a little, but _so_ little that it makes my heart ache, for it is so ver-ry little."

"I mean about your grandfather and grandmother. Who were they and what were they? You are certainly well educated."

"My father and an old woman whom he hired, in London, have taught me what they could. I studied hard because I had so little else to do.

It helped me in my loneliness. Ah, I was ver-ry lonely, ach! in London!"

"Had you no friends?"

"I had my father and my M'riarrr."

"Did no one ever visit you from Germany?"

"No one ever visited from anywhere."

"What did your father do, there?"

"He played first-flute in an orchestra--a theatre."

"Did he never go back to his home--his native land--to Germany, you know, to see his relatives?"

"I think he has no relatives alive."

"Did you never ask him about that?"

"If he had wish to tell me--if there had been some for to tell about--he would have told me without asking. I never thought of asking questions about such a thing."

"It's very funny!" Mrs. Vanderlyn said somewhat pettishly. "I could have sworn, from the first time I saw your father on the steamer, that he was a man of family."

"Of family? No; Mrs. Vanderlyn, I think not so."

"And he has never told you anything?"

"He has told me, sometimes, that by and by, when something happens which he never will explain, we would go back to Germany."

The daily lesson in court German then went on. Mrs. Vanderlyn was plainly disappointed at the meagreness of Anna's family history, and did badly with her lesson; but she could not possibly complain. Anna had made no claims. She had accepted her purely of her own--she did not realize how much it, really, had been her son's--volition. Anna had not asked for the position.