"She was a queen too,--a queen of song," added Delileo after a pause.
"And did you know her?" asked Gesa, still absorbed in staring at the romantically costumed lady.
"She was my wife," answered Delileo with emphasis, and an eloquent gesture.
"Ah! then she must have loved you very much," observed Gesa, seriously, wishing to say something pleasant. But Delileo shrank and turned away his head.
Beneath this portrait, day after day, on a shabby black marble-top table, stood fresh flowers in a crumbling blue delft pitcher.
V
Immediately upon the beginning of their life together, Delileo made a correct estimate of his protégé's musical gifts, and thanks to some artist connections that still remained to him, he procured instruction for Gesa from one of the most famous violinists at that time established in the Brussels Conservatory. He cared for the rest of Gesa's education himself. A curious education, truly! "Correct spelling and an extensive knowledge of literature," he would assert, "are two absolute necessities of a gentleman's culture, further than that he needs nothing." Gesa's orthography, in spite of his instructor's praiseworthy efforts, remained somewhat uncertain, his knowledge of literature on the contrary made astonishing progress, and soon reached from the "Essais de Montaigne," Delileo's first hobby, to Delileo's own romance--his second hobby.
This romance, which was called "The Twilight of the Gods," and had been waiting ten years in vain for a publisher, formed a striking counterpart to Delileo's Carbonari cloak. Like that romantic article of apparel it smelled of mould, and the breath of superannuated philanthropic theories hovered about it. It began with a legend and ended with an ode. Many an evening the elder spent in reading this nondescript production to his protégé, Gesa always attending with the devout fervor which believing natures bring to mysteries they do not understand.
An odd couple they made, the broken man with his nervous restlessness, the restlessness of one who has accomplished nothing, and who sees the grave before him--and the vigorous young fellow, with his healthy laziness, the self-confident laziness of one who feels a great talent within him and to whom life seems as if it could never end. The weary spirit of one strayed constantly back, from the hopeless insipidity of his present, to an Utopia of the year thirty: the other's imagination, meanwhile, crippled by no sort of experience, galloped confidently out into the future, behind a double team of fresh young chimeras! Enthusiasts were they both,--Delileo the more unpractical of the two.
Poor Gaston Delileo! He belonged in the category of universal geniuses; for which reason he had brought his genius to the attainment of absolutely nothing in the universe! Music, painting, literature, political economy,--he had pursued them all, one after the other or simultaneously, just as it happened, and all with the greatest zeal. He had believed with devout idealism in the capacity of society for improvement. He had adopted the theories of St. Simon, and had worn with enthusiasm the vest laced up behind of that brotherhood, and a headband on which his name was embroidered. History relates that the St. Simonian Brotherhood, with their practical division of labor, limited his activity in the beginning to the contribution of money and the brushing of boots! Later they enrolled him the memorable "Three hundred," who set forth to seek the mother of the sect in foreign lands, after Madame de Stael had declined that post of honor.