“What you say is very true, and I will remember it. But have you no words of equal wisdom for your own case—although they say that doctors are always better able to treat cholera in an alien body than a fit of indigestion in themselves.”
“I could say much, but I could not be sure of finding an attentive audience in myself. You see I am a poor devil. Not so long ago I had the musical world at my feet—only two names above me, and the second Rubinstein, not so far away. Like this we were crowned,” she explained, making a dot on the cover of her book, and calling it Liszt, with a second lower down, on the right hand side, which represented Rubinstein, and the last, on the left, hardly more than a thought below the second—“there! the Natzelhuber. And turn from my fame to reality. An ugly old woman without a sou, alone, friendless, ill, the only companions of my solitude these cats and dogs, and that,” she added, pointing to a bottle of brandy.
“Is that not a very bad companion in solitude?” asked Rudolph, pained.
“Not so very bad when it keeps you from cutting your throat in a morbid moment.”
“Mademoiselle, command me—command all your true friends, for surely it is impossible that genius such as yours has gathered no honest friendship along its path, as well as empty honours. Whatever my shortcomings may be in the way of entertaining, I will prove a better counsellor than your present one,” he urged, forgetting all about himself in his anxiety to save her from the approach of certain degradation.
She looked at him sharply, and then a curious softened light came into the yellow eyes, making them once again beautiful and fascinating with their old charm. She placed her two powerful little hands on his shoulders, and seemed to gaze down into his very soul.
“My dear boy, I believe you are sincere. You are as good as you look, and that is saying much. A tired old woman thanks you with all her heart, but it is too late. Some demon fixed himself in that old woman’s head when she was born, and never could manage to find its way out ever since.”
Rudolph was on the point of protesting, when the door opened, and a woman in black, followed by a young girl entered. The Natzelhuber wheeled round brusquely, and demanded:
“Who are you, madame? and what brings you here, pray?”
The woman, who was stout and hot, stared anxiously, gasped, clutched in vain at her scattered ideas, and murmured something relative to the great honour the illustrious Mademoiselle Natzelhuber had done her in consenting to teach her daughter Andromache, the interview having been arranged for to-day.