“You have made me understand my own life....”
“So she is no happier than I am,” thought Walter, and for the moment he felt irrepressibly reconciled to his fate. Then he was ashamed of the feeling. He had no right to it. Anne was not to blame for his state of mind. She knew nothing of it.
“Do sing something....”
She looked at him with large, beaming eyes. It was a long time since anybody had said this to her.
They began to talk of music. And this changed them into their old selves; they were boy and girl again, just as on Sundays in the old days.
“Come again soon and bring your violin with you,” said Anne when they took leave of each other. Then it struck her that neither of them had mentioned Thomas.
Adam Walter and Thomas Illey never became friends. They met with courteous rigidity. Adam Walter smiled disparagingly at Illey’s views, while Illey’s mocking gaze tried to call Anne’s attention to the musician’s ill-cut clothes and shapeless heavy boots.
It mattered little to Anne. The piano stood mute no more in the sunshine room and a bright ray of light was cast on her life by the revival of music, which indifference and want of appreciation had silenced for so long. Its resurrection was her salvation. Her soul ceased to be strangled by the torture of enforced silence; it found relief and took flight on the wings of songs, attended, through many quiet evenings, by Walter’s soul cast into the music of his violin.
Christopher looked in occasionally. He patted his old school-mate on the back and whistled softly to the music while he ran through Stock Exchange reports in the papers. Soon after his uneven steps passed again through the corridor.
He could not find peace anywhere. Calculations swarmed in his head. They appeared, but before he was able to grasp them they scattered and vanished. He had no idea if he was winning or losing and he dared not look at his accounts. Money became dearer and dearer. Banks restricted their credit. Suspicious rumours from Vienna reached the Stock Exchange of Pest. Quotations fluctuated and declined slowly, but he lacked the resolution to wind up his transactions. He was still waiting, still buying. He became intoxicated with the fascination of risks and blind hopes. His nerves were in a constant state of tremulous tension. The lust for gain became the torturing passion of his soul.