When he reached his solitary apartments, however, he was sorry the faithful old beef-eaters were not there to give him welcome, for the place was dark and cheerless. He lighted his candle and looked about the room with melancholy interest.
Presently his attention was attracted to a number of bright spots on the floor, irregular patches, from which the light was reflected somewhat dully. Candle in hand he walked toward the corner where these glittering objects were strewn about. With a sudden misgiving he noted that his violin case had been brought out from the place of concealment in which he had carefully kept it.
Bending forward, with one hand poised in an attitude of arrested action, he stared at the litter on the floor, his face becoming colorless as he stood there, numbed. A low moan came from between his lips—such a sound as he had made in his sleep, as he once lay curled up at the foot of the stake on which King Philip’s head was impaled.
The fragments on the floor were the scraps and litter of his violin. There was not one piece as large as three of his fingers. Isaiah Pinchbecker and Psalms Higgler had taken their revenge.
Slowly Adam knelt down and gathered the bits of wood in a little heap, lovingly. He was not enraged. A lover who finds his sweetheart murdered cannot at first be filled with anger. Adam gathered every little scrap and splinter. He tried to fit little fragments together; he tried to efface heel-marks and bits of boot-grime from some of the pieces, as if he searched for features which he loved.
It seemed as if he could not realize that the violin was actually destroyed. He looked away from it and then back at the small heap beneath his hands, like one half expecting to wake from a dream and find everything as it had been before something unthinkable occurred.
Perhaps a woman who had given to her child, willingly and absolutely, the mastery over her every emotion, thought and hope, and who had come upon the body of that child, slain and mutilated, could have understood what lonely Adam Rust underwent.
For like such a woman, conceiving a fear that the despoilers might return and rob her even of the body of her child, the man presently, in a fever of excitement, took every patch, shred and chip of the red wood and hiding it carefully inside his waistcoat, dropped himself down from the window to the earth and went away in the darkness, like a wild thing pursued.