Claire gasped with relief.
“Then when he is better, he will come back?” she insisted in a firmer voice.
Mme. Petrovskey threw her pen from her in a violent gesture. The face she turned upon her niece was pale and convulsed.
“He is never coming back!” she cried with suppressed fury. “He is going to manage his own life after this. He says now that he cannot play the violin any more, he is free to live as he likes!”
She rose to her feet, shadowing the stricken girl with her enormous bulk. Her face stared stonily in front of her.
“This is what it has come to,” she muttered. “This is his gratitude for a lifetime of devotion and sacrifice. I have worked myself to the bone that his genius might have every chance to develop. Now he throws me aside, as if I were an outgrown toy, and tells me he is going to manage his own life. He who couldn’t even make out a check for himself or remember his own address!”
Paralyzed with misery, Claire watched her aunt in a stupor of surprise. This was the first time she had ever known her to reveal any emotion stronger than contempt or a cold sort of anger. And the sight was shattering. Gathering herself together through sheer force of will, she helped her aunt back into the chair and patted the large veined hand timidly.
“He can’t mean it,” she murmured. “He has been like this before, you know. He really couldn’t leave you. Why, he’d be helpless all alone, and without his music.” She choked back a sob. Alexis without his violin would be like another man bereft of all five senses. “No, no, he’ll come back,” she faltered pluckily. “Not for me. He doesn’t need me, but for you, his mother.”
Mme. Petrovskey looked up into the piteous little face with a sort of hard compassion.
“Poor Claire,” she said more gently than she had spoken to her for years, “I sacrificed you for nothing, didn’t I?”