“It is not that,” said young Purcell, shrinking a little; “you can’t think that I would leave you only for my advantage. No, master, it is not that. You must hear it all before you judge.”
“Certainly,” said the Signor. He kept the same smile rigid upon his face. “And in the meantime here is old Pick with the tea,” he added, “and we must drink it for the sake of his feelings. What, Pick, is it made already? I don’t think your mother can be so careful as usual, boy, about her brew.”
“I don’t put no faith in tea that stands long to draw, sir,” said Pick. “I like it myself with all the scent in it. Water as boils hard, and not a minute lost. That’s my maxim. It’s fresh made with plenty of tea in, and I’ll warrant it good. Smell that,” he said, taking off the lid of the teapot. The Signor listened to him quietly, taking no notice of Purcell’s impatience. He smiled on the old man and let him talk. He was wounded and offended by his pupil’s sudden change after the decision of an hour ago; and though he had a great desire to hear what reason could be given for this difference of feeling, his annoyance and disgust at the change found expression in this apparent carelessness of it. He kept Pick talking with secret malice, while Purcell fretted. The young fellow did not know how to contain himself. He collected the music-books that were on the piano, and put them back on the shelves. Then he took them down again; he shifted the candles; he roamed from corner to corner, moving the chairs about, throwing into disorder the things on the table; now and then he cast a piteous look at his master; but the Signor sat, in serene malice sounding the bass notes in his accompaniment, putting artful questions to old Pickering, and leading him on to talk. It was the old man himself at length who brought the suspense to an end by recollecting something it was necessary for him to do. “They’d have kep’ me there all night,” he said to Mrs. Purcell, with pretended impatience, as he got back to the housekeeper’s room. “Dear!” said Mrs. Purcell, astonished; she could not understand how the Signor could waste time talking to old Pick at a moment so momentous for her John.
When old Pickering was gone, the Signor still said nothing. He turned to the piano and began to play; he was like a woman offended, who will not approach the subject on which she is dying to be informed. At last Purcell, approaching humbly with wistful eyes, ventured to put one hand lightly upon his arm.
“Master,” said the young man, “let me speak to you. I cannot do anything till I have spoken to you.”
“To me, boy? Speak then, as much as you please,” said the Signor, nodding at him with an air of ingenuous wonder while he rang out the end of the melody. “’Twas in the time of roses,” he sang; then swinging himself round on his stool, “You want to speak to me? Why didn’t you say so sooner? Speak then, I am all attention,” he said.
Then Purcell began, once more breathless with agitation and excitement: “I think there seems a chance for me, sir,” he said; “my mother has just been telling me. It is such a chance as never may happen again. You know I love St. Michael’s better than anything in the world—except one thing. Master, she is in trouble; her home is about to be made impossible to her; now or never; if I had a home to offer her, she might accept it. This is why I said I would take Sturminster. St. Ermengilde is more to my mind, a thousand times more to my mind; and to be near you, to have the benefit of your advice, that would be everything for me. But, dear master,” said the young man, “must I not think of her first? and here is a chance for me, perhaps the only chance I may have in my life.”
“Has anything happened to Miss Despard?” said the Signor in great surprise. He recognised the justice of the plea, and he listened with great interest and sympathy, and a curious feeling which was neither sympathy nor interest. Lottie was to the Signor a mysterious creature, exciting an altogether different kind of feeling from that which he felt for his pupil. He was almost sentimentally attached to his pupil, and entered into the history and prospects of his love with an enthusiasm quite unlike that with which a mature Englishman generally interests himself in anybody’s love-affairs. But along with this sentiment there existed another almost directly opposite to it, an interest in Lottie as a being of a totally different class from Purcell, of whom it would be profoundly curious to know the history, and the means by which she might perhaps be brought to look favourably on—nay, to marry—Purcell; which seemed to the Signor quite “on the cards.” How she might be brought to this, in what way she would reconcile herself to be Purcell’s wife; how she would bow a spirit, evidently so proud, to the young musician’s origin and to his ways of talking, which, though refined enough, were still at the bottom those of a man whose mother was “in service:” all this was captivating as a matter of study to the Signor; he got, or expected to get, a great deal of amusement out of it, expecting that Lottie’s struggles in fitting herself for the position would be wonderful enough: so that his interest cannot be called entirely benevolent. But between this keen and half-malign interest and the sentimental interest he took in Purcell’s “happiness,” it may be imagined that the crisis was nearly as exciting to him as it was to Purcell himself. He listened to the story with the warmest interest, and agreed that there was nothing for it but to accept Sturminster. “But you must not lose a day,” he said; “you must secure the lady at once, there is not a moment to lose.”
“Secure?” Purcell said, growing red and growing white; “then you think there is a hope, a—likelihood——”
“Think? I think there is an almost certainty!” cried the Signor. He became quite excited himself for the sake of his pupil and for his own sake, for the keen intellectual interest he felt in this curious problem as to what Lottie would do. “You must go to-morrow,” he cried, with all the eagerness of a personal interest; “you must not lose a single day.”