He opened his eyes. The grey pallor passed from his face; he lifted his head and smiled.
“So! There you are, Pequita!” he said gently; “Dear little one! So brave and cheerful in your hard life!”
He lifted her small brown hand, and kissed it. The feverish tension of his brain relaxed,—and two large tears welled up in his eyes, and rolled down his cheeks. “Poor little girl!” he murmured weakly; “Poor little hard-working girl!”
All the men sat silent, watching the gradual softening of Zouche’s drunken delirium by the mere gentle caress of the child; and Pasquin Leroy was conscious of a curious tightening of the muscles of his throat, and a straining compassion at his heart, which was more like acute sympathy with the griefs and sins of humanity than any emotion he had ever known. He saw that the thoughtful, pitiful eyes of Lotys were full of tears, and he longed, in quite a foolish, almost boyish fashion, to take her in his arms and by a whispered word of tenderness, persuade those tears away. Yet he was a man of the world, and had seen and known enough. But had he known them humanly? Or only from the usual standpoint of masculine egotism? As he thought this, a strain of sweet and solemn music stole through the room,—Louis Valdor had risen to his feet, and holding the violin tenderly against his heart, was coaxing out of its wooden cavity a plaintive request for sympathy and attention. Such delicious music thrilled upon the dead silence as might have fitted Shelley’s exquisite lines.
“There the voluptuous nightingales,
Are awake through all the broad noon-day,
When one with bliss or sadness fails,
And through the windless ivy-boughs
Sick with sweet love, droops dying away
On its mate’s music-panting bosom;
Another from the swinging blossom,
Watching to catch the languid close
Of the last strain; then lifts on high
The wings of the weak melody,
Till some new strain of feeling bear
The song, and all the woods are mute;
When there is heard through the dim air
The rush of wings, and rising there
Like many a lake-surrounded flute
Sounds overflow the listener’s brain,
So sweet that joy is almost pain.”
“Thank God for music!” said Sergius Thord, as Valdor laid aside his bow; “It exorcises the evil spirit from every modern Saul!”
“Sometimes!” responded Valdor; “But I have known cases where the evil spirit has been roused by music instead of suppressed. Art, like virtue, has two sides!”
Zouche was still holding Pequita’s hand. He looked ill and exhausted, like a man who had passed through a violent paroxysm of fever.
“You are a good child, Pequita!” he was saying softly; “Try to be always so!—it is difficult—but it is easier to a woman than to a man! Women have more of good in them than men!”
“How about the dance?” suggested Thord; “The hour is late,—close on midnight—and Lotys must be tired.”