But when she handed it to Max her face was serene and her voice steady. “Try it. Mine father’s it was; I have many years ago played the piano for him. When he died they sent it to me mit much music ant mine fine dresses I wore in Germany.”
Max took the violin with a reverence that pleased her, and tried the strings with delicate, accustomed fingers. “It is a fine one, a Cremona!” he added with an excitement Sydney saw no reason for; he didn’t know one fiddle from another.
But Mrs. Schmitz did. She knew much about music, instruments, and composers. And here was some one else who could speak the same language, and with his instrument too, as Sydney could see by the way he tuned it and played little snatches of this or that, while she nodded and beamed.
“Ach, goot! Your hant ant head ant heart sind all one mit music!”
From under the shelf of the cabinet she drew a pile of violin music and began to run it over rapidly, pronouncing the foreign names with no more ease than Max, who caught a passage from one, or hummed a snatch from another; and presently they were speaking in German, both excited, gesticulating, happy.
Sydney was as much out of it as if the language were Hindoo. In school he had done well. Through the interest of Mr. Streeter, a young man recently come into a fortune, who devoted it and his time to assisting boys who were otherwise on the way to being “down and out,” and through the kindness of Mrs. Schmitz, Sydney had been able to press on in his grades. Now at the beginning of the winter semester he stood with Billy Bennett, “Sis” Jones, Queen Bess, and all the others who made his world, seniors in the “Fifth Avenue High,” side by side, respected and liked.
But suddenly Sydney realized in the presence of this stranger, so sinisterly introduced into that quiet life, that there was a great area of culture for which no public school can issue diplomas. As a child speaks its native tongue nor knows when he learns it, so Max spoke the language of refined society, of an early home environment that comes only from generations of good breeding and comfortable income.
Sydney’s eyes were opened in another quarter. He had always found kindness and understanding in Mrs. Schmitz, and that exquisite neatness that is the mark of a gentlewoman; but he had not seen behind her eccentricities. It had never occurred to him that the industrious woman who spent her days with pots and flowers had once lived differently. Though her fingers had brought marvelous music from the ivory keys, he had not seen far beyond the split nails—marks of her toil.
Now he saw! And he suddenly knew she had met a kindred spirit.
“Come, Seedney,” she called half an hour later; “we’ll sing now our songs.”