THE STOLEN STRADIVARIUS
In a low chair, drawn up to secure the full light of a Welsbach burner, a little woman sat darning stockings. Although full forty years of age, she was astonishingly young and fresh. Her dark hair, twisted in a shining coil at the back of a small, well-shaped head, her rosy lips and white teeth, the look of alert interest in her hazel eyes, the plain but becomingly arranged dress, all suggested that her present condition of solitude was incidental rather than habitual.
The room in which Mrs. Blair’s deft needle repaired the havoc of stalwart feet in their daily walks to and from the money-getting haunts of men, was clearly the resort of culture untainted by vulgarity. On the second floor of a small three-story dwelling in a street unknown to modern fashion, years of use as a family gathering place had toned its modest belongings into harmonious attractiveness. If the furniture was worn, it better accorded with the russet and dun hues of the old books covering half the walls; and the drawn curtains of faded crimson stuff did not rebuke the faint odor of tobacco that lingered in their folds. Above the books hung numerous good engravings, photographs, and etchings that lifted thought and piqued imagination with suggestions of the wide world’s beauty and romantic history. In the most isolated corner a substantial table, littered with papers, a letter-press, a stray pipe or two, a big common-sense inkstand and writing pad, with a rack of books of reference, betrayed the snug harbor of a male brain-worker; while a stand of blossoming plants in a south window, a tea-table set with bits of quaint silver, and a couple of becushioned wicker chairs indicated a woman’s idea of dulce domum.
This room was, in fact, the common property of a busy married pair and their busy children, who rightly considered their reunions in its pleasant precincts to be a fair equivalent for other things denied them by Dame Fortune.
The house and its furniture, with a small sum of ready money, had been the portion given to Molly Christian on her marriage, two-and-twenty years before, with Terence Blair. He was a good-looking, well-bred, clever Irishman, who, coming over to the New World to make a living out of journalism, had at once anchored himself happily by falling in love with and winning the prettiest and best-balanced girl of his acquaintance in New York.
Mr. Christian, Molly’s father, after so contributing to his daughter’s needs, had wisely put what remained of his fortune into an annuity that supported the amiable but unpractical gentleman until his death two years before our story opens. This disposition of his funds had been indorsed by Mr. Christian’s family and friends with more satisfaction because of his previous persistency of faith in certain silver and copper mines that had given him every facility for cultivating the process known as throwing good money after bad.
Although Molly’s handsome Terence had not, according to her expectation of him, quite set the world of his craft on fire, he had made a respectable livelihood; and she and their children adored him for his sweet, cheery temper and easy-going ways. Late in her life he had imported to live with them a lively little old Irish mother—styled by the juniors “Granny”—who proved to be just the dash of flavor needful to complete their family salad. Petulant, affectionate, witty, and light-hearted, Granny had bravely helped her daughter-in-law to bear the increasing burden of domestic life on a limited income in a community where upon working people there is a call for every dollar before it is well in hand.