Merely Mary Ann | Page 4

young man with a big nose lowered the dripping umbrella he
had been holding over Lancelot, and stepped from the gloom of the
street into the fuscous cheerfulness of the ill-lit passage.
By this time Beethoven, who had been left at home, was in full
ebullition upstairs, and darted at the intruder the moment his calves
appeared. Beethoven barked with short, sharp snaps, as became a
bilious liver-coloured Blenheim spaniel.
"Like master like dog," said the swarthy young man, defending himself
at the point of the umbrella. "Really your animal is more intelligent
than the overrated common or garden dog, which makes no distinction
between people calling in the small hours and people calling in broad
daylight under the obvious patronage of its own master. This beast of
yours is evidently more in sympathy with its liege lord. Down, Fido,
down! I wonder they allow you to keep such noisy creatures--but stay!
I was forgetting you keep a piano. After that, I suppose, nothing
matters."
Lancelot made no reply, but surprised Beethoven into silence by
kicking him out of the way. He lit the gas with a neatly written sheet of
music which he rammed into the fire Mary Ann had been keeping up,
then as silently he indicated the easy-chair.
"Thank you," said the swarthy young man, taking it. "I would rather see
you in it, but as there's only one, I know you wouldn't be feeling a
gentleman; and that would make us both uncomfortable."

"'Pon my word, Peter," Lancelot burst forth, "you're enough to provoke
a saint."
"'Pon my word, Lancelot," replied Peter imperturbably, "you're more
than enough to provoke a sinner. Why, what have you to be ashamed of?
You've got one of the cosiest dens in London and one of the
comfortablest chairs. Why, it's twice as jolly as the garret we shared at
Leipsic--up the ninety stairs."
"We're not in Germany now. I don't want to receive visitors," answered
Lancelot sulkily.
"A visitor! you call me a visitor! Lancelot, it's plain you were not
telling the truth when you said just now you had forgiven me."
"I had forgiven--and forgotten you."
"Come, that's unkind. It's scarcely three years since I threw up my
career as a genius, and you know why I left you, old man. When the
first fever of youthful revolt was over, I woke to see things in their true
light. I saw how mean it was of me to help to eat up your wretched
thousand pounds. Neither of us saw the situation nakedly at first--it was
sicklied o'er with Quixotic foolishness. You see, you had the advantage
of me. Your governor was a gentleman. He says, 'Very well, if you
won't go to Cambridge, if you refuse to enter the Church as the younger
son of a blue-blooded but impecunious baronet should, and to step into
the living which is fattening for you, then I must refuse to take any
further responsibility for your future. Here is a thousand pounds; it is
the money I had set aside for your college course. Use it for your
musical tomfoolery if you insist, and then--get what living you can.'
Which was severe but dignified, unpaternal yet patrician. But what
does my governor do? That cantankerous, pig-headed old
Philistine--God bless him!--he's got no sense of the respect a father
owes to his offspring. Not an atom. You're simply a branch to be run on
the lines of the old business, or be shut up altogether. And, by the way,
Lancelot, he hasn't altered a jot since those days when--as you
remember--the City or starvation was his pleasant alternative. Of
course, I preferred starvation--one usually does at nineteen; especially

if one knows there's a scion of aristocracy waiting outside to elope with
him to Leipsic."
"But you told me you were going back to your dad, because you found
you had mistaken your vocation."
"Gospel truth also! My heavens, shall I ever forget the blank horror that
grew upon me when I came to understand that music was a science
more barbarous than the mathematics that floored me at school, that the
life of a musical student, instead of being a delicious whirl of waltz
tunes, was 'one dem'd grind,' that seemed to grind out all the soul of the
divine art and leave nothing but horrid technicalities about consecutive
fifths and suspensions on the dominant? I dare say most people still
think of the musician as a being who lives in an enchanted world of
sound, rather than as a person greatly occupied with tedious feats of
penmanship; just as I myself still think of a prima ballerina not as a
hard-working gymnast, but as a fairy, whose existence is all bouquets
and lime-light."
"But you had a pretty talent for the piano," said