The cares were many, but pleasant in their nature. Gregory was steadily, lazily kind, the children were healthy, she herself was in the beautiful full bloom of life—she found it good. She had almost forgotten the bitter taste of her beginnings, when one night, startled from a deep sleep, she lay in the dark awhile and wondered that she should dream so clearly of hearing the long, low wail of a violin. It had recreated about her in an instant the atmosphere of old days. She lay as she had lain often enough, with lead upon her heart, a dead sense of there being no escape in view from this slavery, this poverty, this succession of weary travel and third-rate inns, this nerve-racking sound of the violin penetrating through the brain as a red-hot needle—no release from this unrelenting master, this terrible added burden of baby. She shook herself free from what she thought the remaining effect of a nightmare; she had seemed for a moment to smell the very essence her first husband used on his hair, mixed with the flat odor of the small Dutch inn-chamber in which Dorastus was born. She turned over on her side to sleep again, when she became assured that she heard a violin. She listened through her thick heart-beats, a thrill of superstitious horror stiffening her skin. She knew it unreasonable, but could not dispel her fear. She rose sitting in bed, becoming at last fully awake. Still she heard the violin, sounding faintly, as if from some distant part of the house. Then she thought. It had been these long years in the garret, the treasured Amati he had made her swear to keep for his child. The child had found it.
She could not fall to sleep again, she must satisfy herself.
She slipped her feet into their shoes, got her dressing-gown about her, and crept through the shadowy corridor, up the stair, to where Dorastus slept. Since he would be the master, whoever shared his room, which was obviously unfair to his room-mate, he had been allotted a little chamber by himself in a somewhat remote part of the house.
As she approached it, the sound of the violin came more and more clear to her. She stopped and leaned against the balusters, yielding to a soul-sickness that had its rise in she scarce knew which, memory or foreboding. She listened curiously. It was strange playing, though simple, subdued to not wound the night silence; unordinary as it was, there was nothing tentative about it, the hands seemed going to it with a fine boldness, a delicate natural skill. The mother felt not a moment's joy.
She came to the door, opened it noiselessly, and stood in the doorway with her candle shining upward in her wide eyes, her solemn face.
Dorastus stopped playing, and said, with a gleeful, short laugh, "I knew it would make you come!"
As Emmie had expected, he held the Amati. He had thrown off his jacket and tie and stood in his shirt-sleeves, with his neck bare. His dark eyes were burning and dancing; his black hair was ruffled and pushed up on end; his face was hotly flushed. His whole attitude had in it something new, finely expressive of conscious power.
"I knew it would make you come!" he said, with a triumphant nod.
She entered and set down her light on the little chest of drawers. "You ought not to play at night," she said, faintly. "It disturbs people's sleep."
"It wouldn't wake them!" he exclaimed, scornfully, "and if it did I shouldn't care, as long as they didn't come and bother. I wanted to call you, to make you come to me. I was sure I could. Are you cold, little mother dear? Get into my bed."