Martin half shrugged his shoulders, as if to say, “There we are again.”
“That is quite true,” he said. “But what can I do when music, which to me is the greatest joy and pleasure in life, seems to you just a waste of time. You have often told me so. You don’t know one bit what it means to me; and as it seems to you a waste of time, how can I confide in you about a thing you don’t really approve of and of which, you will pardon me, you are absolutely ignorant? In the middle of the Brahms, or whatever it was, you come in and interrupt by saying that I am wasting my time, as usual. I might as well come in in the middle of prayers and say you were wasting—there I go again. I am sorry. That will show you how hopeless it all is.”
Mr. Challoner was silent a moment, really too much pained to speak. But he was wise enough to recognise that to say anything just then would be to effectually stop the only confidence that Martin had reposed in him for years.
“Well, Martin,” he said, after a moment.
“Ah, it’s no use,” he said. “Even at the very instant when I am consciously trying to be careful, I say something like that, and you are shocked at it. But I meant it: it exactly expressed what I meant. Music is to me like that. You never thought that possible. All these years you have been thinking that I was very fond of music—just that—and wasted a great deal of time at the piano. Whereas it seems to me that I am wasting time when I am reading ‘Thucydides.’”
“That is what Lady Sunningdale said. She talked to me about it after you went away. You know her well, do you not?”
“Yes; she has been tremendously kind to me.”
His father rose.
“You must go now, dear lad,” he said. “I have got some work to do before to-morrow. And let us try, both of us, to find more of a friend in each other. I shall never have another son, and you will never have another father. It would be very sad, would it not, if we did not, each of us, make the best of that relation?”
There came into his beautiful brown eyes the shadow of tears, and Martin wondered.