The old Frenchman made a hopeless gesture, and returned:
"I don't say it was that. It's only certain persons who say the thing may sometime be produced that way. Who knows? Too sensitive!—but if he hadn't been we shouldn't have had the music. These poor chaps, always balanced between joy and sorrow by a hair!" And he ground out between his teeth, "One of those Beatrices of ours. As if she had come to a harp, and had made all its strings vibrate just for the pleasure of hearing their quality, and then had gone on content——"
Lilla rose, drew her cloak around her, and departed with an appalling sensation of pity and resentment.
CHAPTER XIX
One afternoon, returning to her house on lower Fifth Avenue, as she entered the hall paved with black and white tiles she saw a shabby little man trying to rise from a settee between two consoles, by aid of a pair of crutches. For an instant she had a hazy idea that he ought to be holding a breakfast tray in his hands. Then, with a sickening leap of her heart, she realized that this was Parr, who had been Lawrence Teck's valet.
He had thought she would want to receive from him, promptly on his return, a first-hand report on that African tragedy.
"But where have you been all this time?"
He had been a long while recovering from the wound that had crippled him, and from the black-water fever. Then he had found himself penniless, dependent on the charity of traders and petty government officials in the port town lying just above the equator. He had "drifted about," a reproach, perhaps, to a certain human callousness engendered by the tropics, till finally an old friend of Lawrence Teck's had appeared from Mozambique, found him sitting in tatters on the steps of a grogshop, and paid his passage home.
"You should have let me know," she said remorsefully.