If she had not gone and taken his hand he would not have stirred, so foreign to them did he feel. But she must have divined that, for she pulled him forward, and not without pride in her tone, said, “This iss mine only pupil. Some day he will make me very proud.”
They sang a number of simple songs, ending with some hymns, Max adding a rather thin voice while he played the air, or again, some delicate obligato.
“You have a splendid voice,” he said heartily to Sydney when Mrs. Schmitz finally left them together. “Four or five years’ work would put you on the stage—if you care for that.”
“I never thought of it. Something else would fit me better, I guess.”
“Gee! She’s great, isn’t she?” Max said under his breath, nodding toward the door where Mrs. Schmitz had disappeared. “How is it she is just drudging—cooking, washing dishes? She should never use her hands but to play.”
Sydney looked again at the stranger. Some vague notion he, too, had had in regard to Mrs. Schmitz’s past, when she must have been taught by masters and spent long hours at the piano; but it never occurred to him that she was out of place in a new city, “running” a greenhouse and working twice as many hours as her men did. But this boy who had crept in at her pantry window to steal from her, through one half hour’s music, understood her better than Sydney in half a year’s sojourn in her house. The discovery gave him a feeling of inadequacy, as if he had been unkind to her, had failed in fealty to her.
Max toyed with the violin a little longer; looked over the music, now and then drawing a breath of sweetness from the strings, and speaking a running accompaniment all the while, so easy in word and movement, so fluent, that each moment he became more and more an enigma to the other.
Sydney found himself telling freely the little he knew of Mrs. Schmitz, her kindness to him, her generosity, her many eccentricities, one of which was her aversion to girls. “She can’t bear even to hear about them.”
“Did she ever have a daughter? And where’s her husband?”