Little Denise, who was soft-hearted, had seen him coming and going in his pursuit of an artistic career, and her heart was touched at the spectacle of Toni’s unhappiness. When he came home that second day, Denise was sitting on the bench under the acacia tree and was knitting industriously. Denise had all the virtues which Toni lacked. As Toni approached, his head hanging sullenly down, Denise held out her hand and in it was a little piece of stale tart. This brightened Toni up, and, sitting down by Denise, he told her a moving story of the cruelties he had suffered at Hermann’s hands, adding several atrocities to the original ones.
“Poor, poor Toni! I feel so sorry for you.”
“You ought to,” replied Toni, deeply touched by his own eloquence, and beginning to cry. “That man will beat me to death some day, I know he will, and I hope he will, too, because then even my mother will be sorry she sent me to learn the fiddle. O-o-o-o-h!”
Mademoiselle Duval interrupted this tender scene by coming out and calling to Toni:
“You good-for-nothing little boy, why don’t you go home and practise the violin and mind your mother? Oh, I warrant Madame Marcel will see trouble with you!”
Toni concluded that when he married Denise he would see as little as possible of his aunt-in-law as well as his father-in-law.
He went back the next day, and many days after. For weeks and months honest Hermann strove with the boy, but Toni simply would not learn the violin. However, a strange thing happened—he found he could talk to Hermann, and was not afraid of him, and Hermann discovered that this lazy, idle, dirty, bright-eyed, insinuating urchin, who had no ear for music, had some strangely companionable qualities. Toni even grew intimate enough with Hermann to tell him all about Jacques, and actually was courageous enough to show that redoubtable warrior to his friend. He told Hermann also of his friendships with horses and said to him:
“Do you know, I feel as if you were a horse—a great big sorrel cart-horse.”