“But what will you do in the meantime?” asked the young man rather diffidently, for he felt a delicacy about inquiring too closely into the old man’s circumstances.
“My dividend falls due to-morrow,” was the reply. “There is not the smallest reason for your refusing to take this. Go home to your mother, tell her everything is decided, and take care of your voice for the next week. Shall you be at the concert next Monday? Perhaps not, if you are kept late at your work. If I do not see you there, will you come here the next day and tell me about it all?”
His young friend promised this gladly; and in order to cut short his expressions of thanks, the Professor took up the lamp and lighted him downstairs, giving him a last warning against taking cold or overtiring his throat as he let him out.
“He is a good boy,” he said to himself as he went back to his little room. “I am very glad I was able to do it. It is for the young ones to carry on the world. We old ones who have served our time must stand by and encourage the others.”
He set about preparing his frugal supper—a small loaf and a pennyworth of milk, which he took from a cupboard in one corner of the room. He put the milk into a tiny tin saucepan, and, as of course there was no fire in the grate, he lighted a little spirit lamp, set the saucepan over the flame, and sat down to watch till it boiled.
His mind was still running on Herbert Maxwell and his probable career, and from that it wandered back to his own young days. Gradually he seemed to live through the whole of his past life. He recalled the early home life in the comfortable house at Clapham; his kind Polish parents who had been driven like so many others from their own country; his childish passion for music which had caused him so often to be laughed at by his English schoolfellows, and the decision of his parents that he should adopt it as a profession. Then came those happy student days at Leipzig, with the growing consciousness of his own powers and the encouragement of his teachers and fellow students, his début at the Gewandhaus, with the applause and laurel wreaths, succeeded by his first concert tour in Germany. He remembered his return home, to his parents’ joy, and his success in London as a player and teacher, with constant tours on the Continent, during one of which he met that lovely girl he afterwards wooed and won, to spend those few happy years with him till her sudden death abroad.
Then followed a ghastly blank, with isolated memories of being in some great building with many other people, who were all waited on by kindly men and sweet-faced women, and he could remember the feeling of having been ill and not knowing how. Till one day, when he had grown stronger, the knowledge came to him that, for a time, his mind had left him.
He vividly recalled his return to England, to find himself forgotten and eclipsed by others who had sprung to fame during his long absence, his failure to obtain either engagements or pupils, and, finally, the collapse of the bank in which almost all his savings had been placed.
At this point, as if in sympathy with his thoughts, the spirit-lamp went out with a little “fuff,” and the milk, which was on the verge of boiling over, collapsed too.
This recalled him from his sad memories, and he tried, as he ate his bread and milk, to put them out of his mind and to think of the pleasanter events of the evening—of the fine concert, how splendidly Joachim played, and of his young friend, whose mother would be so glad at her boy’s good fortune.