Her brilliant, black eyes were flashing with something more than excitement. The joy, the realization of power glowed in their depths, welling up from fires that would never die. Waldemar de Bosky nodded his head in the most matter-of-fact way. He was not enthralled. All this was very simple and quite undebatable to him.
"I take it, therefore, that you retract all that you said about its being poppycock," he said, turning up his coat collar and fastening it close to his throat with a long and formidable looking safety pin.
"It may be poppycock," she said, "but we can't help liking it—not to save our lives."
"And I shall not have to kill you as if you were a snake, eh?"
"Not on your life," said Mrs. Moses Jacobs in English, opening the door for him.
He passed out into the cold and windy street and she went back to her dingy nook at the end of the store, pausing on the way to inform an assistant that she was not to be disturbed, no matter who came in to see her.
While she sat behind her glittering show-case and gazed pensively at the ceiling of her ugly storehouse, Waldemar de Bosky went shivering through the streets to his cold little backroom many blocks away. While she was for the moment living in the dim but unforgotten past, a kindly memory leading her out of the maze of other people's poverty and her own avarice into broad marble halls and vaulted rooms, he was thinking only of the bitter present with its foodless noon and of pockets that were empty. While maudlin tears ran down her oily cheeks and spilled aimlessly upon a greasy sweater with the spur of memory behind them, tears wrought by the sharp winds of the street glistened in his squinting eyes.
Memory carried him back no farther than the week before and he was distressed only by its exceeding frailty. He could not, for the life of him, remember the address of J. Bramble, bookseller,—a most exasperating lapse in view of the fact that J. Bramble himself had urged him to come up some evening soon and have dinner with him, and to bring his Stradivarius along if he didn't mind. Mind? Why, he would have played his heart out for a good square meal. The more he tried to remember J. Bramble's address, the less he thought of the overcoat with the fur collar and the soft leather lining. He couldn't eat that, you know.
In his bleak little room in the hall of the whistling winds, he took from its case with cold-benumbed fingers the cherished violin. Presently, as he played, the shivering flesh of him grew warm with the heat of an inward fire; the stiff, red fingers became limp and pliable; the misty eyes grew bright and feverish. Fire,—the fires of love and genius and hope combined,—burnt away the chill of despair; he was as warm as toast!
And hours after the foodless noon had passed, he put the treasure back into its case and wiped the sweat from his marble brow. Something flashed across his mind. He shouted aloud as he caught at what the flash of memory revealed.