"Ah, your husband, is it not?" said Monsieur Léon, turning eagerly to me. "It is he to whom I am to give my guitar?"
The doctor gave us a parting smile and went his way.
"Yes," I answered, as the door closed. "It will be a great kindness, gratefully accepted. But can you spare it, Monsieur Léon?"
"Spare it!" he repeated. "Ah, madame, do you suppose I would leave my guitar to the mercy of ignorant strangers? It is you who are doing the kindness. You are willing to shelter this beloved friend of mine, and give it a home when I am gone. More! You will let it speak to you in the sweet language which has so often soothed and comforted me. You will not condemn it to dust and silence and decay!"
"Oh, no," I said, earnestly, struck with the poor Frenchman's grace of manner and expression. "To my husband, the guitar will be as dear as it has been to you. It will always be within his reach—always taken up in his spare moments. As for me, I love to hear it played, although I am no player myself."
Monsieur Léon had remembered the doctor's injunction, and was silent for a moment. His voice sounded a little weaker when he spoke again.
"It was in India," he went on, "that I first became possessed of my guitar. When I was young I had friends, and they sent me to Bombay to be clerk in a mercantile house. But ah, madame, it was my misfortune to love music better than figures, and so I did not make the best of clerks. I saw the guitar in a bazaar one day, and bought it for a mere trifle. It is old, as you see, and of Spanish make. Look at this beautiful mosaic work of mother-o'-pearl and silver! You do not find anything like it now-a-days."
He drew the instrument towards him, and pointed out its beauties with evident pride. It was of dark wood, delicately inlaid with a quaint and fanciful pattern. But the tone? I wished he would touch the strings.
"I will not weary you with a history of myself and my doings," he continued. "It is enough to say that the guitar has been with me through many years of sorrow and misfortune. When it has spoken to me, I have forgotten my troubles. Often I have sat alone in a dreary London room, and listened to the tinkle of mule-bells on the passes. Or I have seen the southern moon rise over the walls of the Alhambra, and heard the dark-eyed gipsies sing the songs of Spain. But sometimes my guitar has said things that I cannot understand.
"Sometimes there are melodies of which I fail to find the meaning. It is strange."