Two hours after her death, De Bériot hastened away to make sure of the possession of the wealth this young woman had already heaped up. He did not wait for the funeral, and all Europe was scandalised. But it is claimed in his defence that he had been devoted to her, and during her illness had never left her side, and that his mercenary haste was due to his fear that a moment's delay might give Monsieur Malibran a chance to claim her property, and thus rob the child she had borne De Bériot of his inheritance. Those who know the peculiar attitude the French law takes toward the property of a wife, can understand the difficulty of the situation.
In any case, the child was saved from poverty or from the necessity of professionalism in later life, though he was a distinguished pianist. As for De Bériot, after the success of his mission he returned to the country home and remained in seclusion, not playing again in public for one year. Two years later he married Fräulein Huber, the daughter of a Vienna magistrate and the adopted ward of a prince. De Bériot travelled little after this, and lived to be sixty-eight years old. He died in blindness that had been creeping on him for the last eighteen years of his life.
CHAPTER V.
AN OMNIBUS CHAPTER
"Passions are like dogs: the big ones need more food than the little ones."—HENRY T. FINCK, "Romantic Love and Personal Beauty."
There is both temptation and material enough for as many musical love stories, as there are novels in the handwriting of Sir Walter Scott, but this being a limited work, the covers already begin to bulge and creak, and it will be necessary to crowd into one swift mail-coach such other composers as we can hardly afford to leave behind.
In some cases, this summary treatment is all the easier because little or nothing is known of their love affairs, while in others it will be purely a case of regretful omission. It is the chief difficulty and the chief regret, whom and what to omit. There are composers whom to neglect argues oneself ignorant, yet who composed no love affair of immortal charm. There are composers of whom few ever heard, whose magnum opus was some romance that still makes the heart-strings tingle by the acoustic law of sympathetic vibration. For example, there are two old crusading troubadours.
CERTAIN TROUBADOURS