And now it was the anniversary of Marie's death. That made the day even harder to bear; for in some subtle way the remembrance of certain hours or moments in a dear dead past is always more bitter when we say to ourselves with a sigh, "It was just a year ago." Nature was in no buoyant mood. A cold, drizzling rain, which ought to have been snow, fell from time to time. The chill dampness made people draw their wraps closer, and look drearily at the sky. Even the children appeared less joyous than usual. Men turned up the bottoms of their trousers and the collars of their coats, and hurried past one another with a gruff nod that would have been a smile on a sunny day. The bare branches of the trees shivered in the wind, and a few snowbirds huddled themselves together cheerlessly here and there, as if even they wished themselves farther south.
Pierre took out the rubber-cloth to cover his piano, and as he did so he saw two children at the second story of a fine house near by. He expected to be ordered away by a butler in livery at the moment he disclosed the limitations of his musical instrument, but one could never tell, the butler might be wooing the parlour-maid, so he drew up in front of the drive-way. Fleur-de-lis had just walked several blocks, and, on being lifted into her carriage, hoisted the dilapidated cotton umbrella and wrapped her doll in an extra bit of calico. Pierre turned the crank; the piano began on "Love's Young Dream." It seemed to him that, with every revolution of the handle, he twisted the chords of his aching heart, and that presently it would break, as the battered old cylinders threatened to do, and for the same reason; because, alas! too many tunes had been played upon them. When ill-fortune descends too thick and fast upon the human spirit, unless it can draw fresh accessions of strength from within, from without, from above, it sinks inevitably into despair. Man may be conscious that he is made in the image of God, fitted to endure, to conquer, all things, but for the time he is common human clay, he faints and dies, or falls into a cowardly lethargy that is worse than death. Such a moment had come to Pierre Dupont. In his first crushing blow he had had a wife to stand shoulder to shoulder with him. He had now his passionate devotion to his child; but in cold and weariness, in hunger and friendlessness, ill-fortune and despair, would love be able to keep itself pure, noble, self-denying, hopeful? There were ways of forgetting, of dulling one's self, of blotting out memory for hours together.
His wants were comparatively simple; but, since he could not realise them, why not give up the struggle? He did not wish for a carriage or a palace; he wished to give up his vagrant life for some labour by which he could maintain himself and give his child a start towards honest womanhood. That was not extravagant, surely, and if God were indeed in His heaven, and all were indeed right with the world, it seemed to Pierre that it was none too much to ask.
He finished "Love's Young Dream," and began the "Boulanger March." A young girl of eighteen or nineteen, with an open book in her hand, joined the children at the window. She had a beautiful, rather serious face, and it brightened into amusement, and then into earnestness, as she caught sight of the quaint vehicle, of the child under the faded umbrella, and of the empty sleeve of the musician. Pierre ground on mechanically; it was "I dreamt that I dwelt in Marble Halls" now, and he hoped that a dime would be flung from the window before he came to "Within a Mile of Edinboro' Town," for that was the weakest part of his repertoire. The group still stayed at the window, and the crisis could not be delayed. The piano jerked through several bars, stopped and repeated, wheezed and returned to the "Boulanger March," then bounded again to "Edinboro' Town," and, after several ineffectual attempts to finish it, made an asthmatic dash into "No One to Love." Pierre looked anxiously under the porte-cochère for the resentful butler; but the children shrieked with renewed delight, and the young girl, going away from the window, presently appeared, running down the drive-way, and slipping on her jacket as she came. She approached the edge of the side-walk, for there was no group about the piano, and, after a brief interview with Pierre, she left a piece of silver with him, and went upstairs to her mother.
Janet Gordon was a great anxiety to her family. She was possessed of the most extraordinary ideas, and no one could tell whence they came, unless she became infected by them in some mysterious fashion, as one is by microbes; at all events, she had never inherited them in the legitimate way. At present, it is true, she had not been introduced to society, but unless a great change of heart should make itself apparent in a few months, she threatened to be no ornament to her set, and no source of pride to an ambitious mother.
"Please look out of the window, mama," she said, bringing a breath of raw air into her mother's flower-scented sitting-room.
Mrs. Gordon rose languidly, her tea-gown trailing behind her. "What is it? Anything more than an organ-grinder who has been rasping my nerves for five minutes? Oh, I see what you mean; what an extraordinary combination—a child in one end of the machine! Tell Héloise to give the man a dime, dear."
"I have given him a quarter myself, and have had a little talk with him; he is quite different from the ordinary organ-grinder, mama."