The First Violin. Fothergill Jessie

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СКАЧАТЬ was one at four and one at six. I can not tell you how uneasy I have been at your non-appearance.”

      “Then – then – ” I stammered, growing hot all over. “Oh, how horrible!”

      “What is horrible?” she demanded. “And you must be starving. Merrick, go and see about something to eat for Miss Wedderburn. Now,” she added, as her maid left the room, “tell me what you have been doing.”

      I told her everything, concealing nothing.

      “Most annoying!” she remarked. “A gentleman, you say. My dear child, no gentleman would have done anything of the kind. I am very sorry for it all.”

      “Miss Hallam,” I implored, almost in tears, “please do not tell any one what has happened to me. I will never be such a fool again. I know now – and you may trust me. But do not let any one know how – stupid I have been. I told you I was stupid – I told you several times. I am sure you must remember.”

      “Oh, yes, I remember. We will say no more about it.”

      “And the gray shawl,” said I.

      “Merrick had it.”

      I lifted my hands and shrugged my shoulders. “Just my luck,” I murmured, resignedly, as Merrick came in with a tray.

      Miss Hallam, I noticed, continued to regard me now and then as I ate with but small appetite. I was too excited by what had passed, and by what I had just heard, to be hungry. I thought it kind, merciful, humane in her to promise to keep my secret and not expose my ignorance and stupidity to strangers.

      “It is evident,” she remarked, “that you must at once begin to learn German, and then if you do get lost at a railway station again, you will be able to ask your way.”

      Merrick shook her head with an inexpressibly bitter smile.

      “I’d defy any one to learn this ’ere language, ma’am. They call an accident a Unglück; if any one could tell me what that means, I’d thank them, that’s all.”

      “Don’t express your opinions, Merrick, unless you wish to seem deficient in understanding; but go and see that Miss Wedderburn has everything she wants – or rather everything that can be got – in her room. She is tired, and shall go to bed.”

      I was only too glad to comply with this mandate, but it was long ere I slept. I kept hearing the organ in the cathedral, and that voice of the invisible singer – seeing the face beside me, and hearing the words, “Then you have decided that I am to be trusted?”

      “And he was deceiving me all the time!” I thought, mournfully.

      I breakfasted by myself the following morning, in a room called the speisesaal. I found I was late. When I came into the room, about nine o’clock, there was no one but myself to be seen. There was a long table with a white cloth upon it, and rows of the thickest cups and saucers it had ever been my fate to see, with distinct evidences that the chief part of the company had already breakfasted. Baskets full of Brödchen and pots of butter, a long India-rubber pipe coming from the gas to light a theemaschine – lots of cane-bottomed chairs, an open piano, two cages with canaries in them; the kettle gently simmering above the gas-flame; for the rest, silence and solitude.

      I sat down, having found a clean cup and plate, and glanced timidly at the theemaschine, not daring to cope with its mysteries, until my doubts were relieved by the entrance of a young person with a trim little figure, a coquettishly cut and elaborately braided apron, and a white frilled morgenhaube upon her hair, surmounting her round, heavenward-aspiring visage.

      “Guten morgen, Fräulein,” she said, as she marched up to the darkly mysterious theemaschine and began deftly to prepare coffee for me, and to push the Brödchen toward me. She began to talk to me in broken English, which was very pretty, and while I ate and drank, she industriously scraped little white roots at the same table. She told me she was Clara, the niece of Frau Steinmann, and that she was very glad to see me, but was very sorry I had had so long to wait in Köln yesterday. She liked my dress, and was it echt Englisch– also, how much did it cost?

      She was a cheery little person, and I liked her. She seemed to like me too, and repeatedly said she was glad I had come. She liked dancing she said. Did I? And she had lately danced at a ball with some one who danced so well —aber, quite indescribably well. His name was Karl Linders, and he was, ach! really a remarkable person. A bright blush, and a little sigh accompanied the remark. Our eyes met, and from that moment Clara and I were very good friends.

      I went upstairs again, and found that Miss Hallam proposed, during the forenoon, to go and find the Eye Hospital, where she was to see the oculist, and arrange for him to visit her, and shortly after eleven we set out.

      The street that I had so dimly seen the night before, showed itself by daylight to be a fair, broad way. Down the middle, after the pleasant fashion of continental towns, was a broad walk, planted with two double rows of lindens, and on either side this lindenallee was the carriage road, private houses, shops, exhibitions, boarding-houses. In the middle, exactly opposite our dwelling, was the New Theater, just drawing to the close of its first season. I looked at it without thinking much about it. I had never been in a theater in my life, and the name was but a name to me.

      Turning off from the pretty allee, and from the green Hofgarten which bounded it at one end, we entered a narrow, ill-paved street, the aspect of whose gutters and inhabitants alike excited my liveliest disgust. In this street was the Eye Hospital, as was presently testified to us by a board bearing the inscription, “Städtische Augenklinik.”

      We were taken to a dimly lighted room in which many people were waiting, some with bandages over their eyes, others with all kinds of extraordinary spectacles on, which made them look like phantoms out of a bad dream – nearly all more or less blind, and the effect was surprisingly depressing.

      Presently Miss Hallam and Merrick were admitted to an inner room, and I was left to await their return. My eye strayed over the different faces, and I felt a sensation of relief when I saw some one come in without either bandage or spectacles. The new-comer was a young man of middle height, and of proportions slight without being thin. There was nothing the matter with his eyes, unless perhaps a slight short-sightedness; he had, I thought, one of the gentlest, most attractive faces I had ever seen; boyishly open and innocent at the first glance; at the second, indued with a certain reticent calm and intellectual radiance which took away from the first youthfulness of his appearance. Soft, yet luminous brown eyes, loose brown hair hanging round his face, a certain manner which for me at least had a charm, were the characteristics of this young man. He carried a violin-case, removed his hat as he came in, and being seen by one of the young men who sat at desks, took names down, and attended to people in general, was called by him:

      “Herr Helfen – Herr Friedhelm Helfen!”

      “Ja – hier!” he answered, going up to the desk, upon which there ensued a lively conversation, though carried on in a low tone, after which the young man at the desk presented a white card to “Herr Friedhelm Helfen,” and the latter, with a pleasant “Adieu,” went out of the room again.

      Miss Hallam and Merrick presently returned from the consulting-room, and we went out of the dark room into the street, which was filled with spring sunshine and warmth; a contrast something like that between Miss Hallam’s life and my own, I have thought since. Far before us, hurrying on, I saw the young man with the violin-case; he turned off by the theater, and went in at a side door.

      An hour’s wandering in the Hofgarten – my first view of the Rhine – a dull, СКАЧАТЬ