There’s not an eye will weep for me.
There’s not a kind, congenial heart
Where I may claim the smallest part.
He had but one solace, and that was in his art. Music had always been a passion with him until love had become its rival. Now Cupid had fled, he turned back to his old love. Drifting to Germany, he found congenial friends, and for some years made a meager living for himself and child, sending all he could spare to America for his golden-haired darling.
Then came that long, long illness that swallowed up almost a year of his life in a hospital—that strange illness that baffled the learned physicians, some declaring it was melancholy madness, others an unaccountable loss of memory, but all agreeing that it must have been brought about by long brooding over something that had become almost a monomania.
The whirlwind followed upon my brain and beat my thoughts to rack,
Who knows how many a month I lay ere memory floated back?
When strength slowly returned and with it some glimmerings of painful memory, a clever man, the wisest physician at the hospital, said to him:
“You have been strangely ill, and the wisest among us could not rightly name your disease, but it was next door to madness. I have studied your case with keen interest, and I learn that you are a lonely man much given to brooding and moping. Am I right in suspecting that you have a hopeless sorrow hidden in your past?”
Leon Dalrymple could only bend his blond, curly head in silent assent.