“Because you were jealous? What a fool you were! She never cared a brass farthing for me—except as she, does now. She would like to nurse me—and give me back my music. But she can’t—and you can’t.”
There was silence again. Otto’s chest heaved. As far as he could with his one hand, he hid the tears in his eyes from his companion. And at last he shook off emotion—with a laugh in which there was no mirth.
“Well, at least, I shouldn’t make such a row now as I used to do—practising.”
Falloden understood his reference to the soda-water bottle fusillade, by which the “bloods,” in their first attack upon him, had tried to silence his piano.
“Can’t you play at all?” he said at last, choosing the easiest of several remarks that presented themselves.
“I get about somehow on the keys. It’s better than nothing. And I’m writing something for my degree. It’s rather good. If I could only keep well!” said the boy impatiently. “It’s this damned health that gets in the way.”
Then he threw himself back in his chair, all the melancholy of his face suddenly breaking up, the eyes sparkling.
“Suppose I set up one of those automatic pianos they’re now talking about—could you stand that?”
“I would have a room where I didn’t hear it. That would be all right.”
“There’s a wonderful idea I heard of from Paris a week or two ago,” said Otto excitedly—“a marvellous electric invention a man’s at work on, where you only turn a handle, or press a button, and you get Rubinstein—or Madame Schumann or my country-man, Paderewski, who’s going to beat everybody. It isn’t finished yet. But it won’t be for the likes of me. It’ll cost at least a thousand pounds.”