Love at Second Sight | Page 7

him quite ill--and his music mistress too,' Edith said. 'I remember she left the last time in hysterics.'
'Yes, by Jove, I remember too. Pretty girl she was. She had a nervous breakdown afterwards,' said Bruce rather proudly.
'No, dear; you're thinking of the other one--the woman who began to teach him the violin.'
'Oh, am I?'
Madame Frabelle nodded her head with a smile.
'Nothing on earth to do with it, my dear! The boy's a born composer all the same. With that face he must be a musician!'
'Really! Funny he hates it so,' said Bruce thoughtfully. 'But still, I have no doubt--'
'Believe me, you can't go by his not liking his lessons,' assured Madame Frabelle, as she ate a muffin. 'That has nothing to do with it at all. The young Mozart--'
'Mozart? I thought he played the piano when he was only three?'
'Handel, I mean--or was it Meyerbeer? At any rate you'll see I'm right.'
'You really think we ought to force him against his will to study music seriously, with the idea of his being a composer when he grows up, though he detests it?' asked his mother.
Madame Frabelle turned to Edith.
'Won't you feel proud when you see your son conducting his own opera, to the applause of thousands? Won't it be something to be the mother of the greatest English composer of the twentieth century?'
'It would be rather fun.'
'We shan't hear quite so much about Strauss, Elgar, Debussy and all those people when Archie Ottley grows up,' declared Madame Frabelle.
'I hear very little about them now,' said Bruce.
'Well, how should you at the Foreign Office, or the golf-links, or the club?' asked Edith.
Bruce ignored Edith, and went on: 'Perhaps he'll turn out to be a Lionel Monckton or a Paul Rubens. Perhaps he'll write comic opera revues or musical comedies.'
'Oh dear, no,' said their guest, shaking her head decidedly. 'It will be the very highest class, the top of the tree! The real thing!'
'Madame Frabelle may be right, you know,' said Bruce.
She leant back, smiling.
'I know I'm right! There's simply no question about it.'
'Well, what do you think we ought to do about it?' said Edith. 'He goes to a preparatory school now where they don't have any music lessons at all.'
'All the better,' she answered. 'The sort of lessons he would get at a school would be no use to him.'
'So I should think,' murmured Edith.
'Leave it, say, for the moment, and when he comes back for his next holidays put him under a good teacher--a really great man. And you'll see!'
'I daresay we shall,' said Bruce, considerably relieved at the postponement. 'Funny though, isn't it, his not knowing one tune from another, when he's a born musician?'
It flashed across Edith what an immense bond of sympathy it was between Bruce and Madame Frabelle that neither of them was burdened with the slightest sense of humour.
When he presently went out (each of them preferred talking to Her alone, and She also enjoyed a t��te-��-t��te most) Madame Frabelle drew up her chair nearer to Edith and said:
'My dear, I'm going to tell you something. Don't be angry with me, or think me impertinent, but you've been very kind to me, and I look upon you as a real friend.'
'It's very sweet of you,' said Edith, feeling hypnotised, and as if she would gladly devote her life to Madame Frabelle.
'Well, I can see something. You are not quite happy.'
'Not happy!' exclaimed Edith.
'No. You have a trouble, and I'd give anything to take it away.'
Madame Frabelle looked at her with sympathy, pressed her hand, then looked away.
Edith knew she was looking away out of delicacy. Delicacy about what? It was an effort not to laugh; but, oddly enough, it was also an effort not to feel secretly miserable. She wondered, though, what she was unhappy about. She need not have troubled, for Madame Frabelle was quite willing to tell her. She was, indeed, willing to tell anyone anything. Perhaps that was the secret of her charm.
CHAPTER IV
It was utterly impossible, literally out of the question, that Madame Frabelle could know anything about the one trouble, the one danger, that so narrowly escaped being almost a tragedy, in Edith's life.
It was three years since Bruce, always inclined to vague, mild flirtations, had been positively carried off his feet, and literally taken away by a determined young art student, with red hair, who had failed to marry a friend of his. While Edith, with the children, was passing the summer holidays at Westgate, Bruce had sent her the strangest of letters, informing her that he and Mavis Argles could not live without one another, and had gone to Australia together, and imploring her to divorce him. The complication was increased by the fact that at that particular moment the most charming man Edith had ever met,