“Oh, father,” she cried, “that is too good to be true! When can I go?”
“This very week, I hope. You see now how everything depends on the point of view.”
CHAPTER XIX.
With the words “starved to death” ringing in his ears, Langly walked to Chelsea. Bitterly he accused himself for his stupid blindness; all this had been going on for days, and he had had no suspicion of it. She had from the first undoubtedly stinted herself so that her father might not go hungry, and when, at last, the real pinch came, she was too weak to resist it. Her father, isolated by his temper from any friends who might have seen what was happening and given warning in time, had also been unconscious of what was passing before his eyes. His gruff independence had slowly famished his own daughter.
“Starved to death!” in the richest city in the world,—the granary of the nations, into whose ample lap pours the golden wheat from every country under the sun that ripens it.
At last Langly reached the studio, and might have known, had he been conversant with the habits of the great world, that a notable function was in progress thereabout by the numerous carriages, with fine horses and resplendent coachmen and footmen, that waited near by. In his earlier days Langly had hoped for pupils to instruct and thus increase his scanty income. He had cards printed—“Albert Langly,” in the centre, and “Teacher of Music”, in smaller type in the corner. These were never used, Langly not having the courage to push his inquiries for pupils and secure them. He, knowing Barney to be a fashionable man, had put some of these cards in his pocket, and, when the boy in buttons swung open the door, the bit of pasteboard was handed to him. The boy glanced at the card, dropped it into the receptacle that contained many others, and shouted the name up his stairway, wafting its ascent with a wave of his hand. The man who held aside the heavy drapery which covered the doorway bawled the name into the room, from which a confused murmur of conversation came, mingled now and then with a pleasing ripple of laughter. The ornamental living statue at the top of the stair gazed dreamily over Langly’s head as he mounted.
Taking another card, the organist gave it to the man at the door.
“I have not come to the ‘At Home,’” he said. “Would you give this to Mr. Hope and ask if he will see me for a moment. Tell him I called last night, and could not come earlier to-day.”