Maria, with great tact, drew Tom away from the window on some pretext. Her heart was beating in the excitement of the moment. If Tom had chanced to see that sight it would, she felt, have been impossible to predict what might happen. Tom was a man of spirit--so much was certain--and he had brought home with him from Italy a stiletto with beautiful jewels and pieces of coral set in the haft....
Mr. Linley only smiled when he was alone, and repeated in whispers those words, "God bless Dick Sheridan!" He felt truly grateful to Dick, but not quite so grateful as to make the attempt to force him upon the family as their benefactor; and as for his flaunting it with Mrs. Abington--well, that was Dick's own affair. He was not in the least offended at his triumph. It was better for Dick Sheridan to make a fool of himself than for Tom Linley to be made a fool of. That was what Mr. Linley thought; and he helped Tom to mend his violin. Tom was ready to begin the work just two days after his breaking of the instrument, and when the glue had properly dried--before the touch of varnish that he gave to the fractured part had ceased to perfume the room, he was improvising that "Elegy to a Dead Love" which, later on, caused some of his audience (women) at a concert to be moved to bitter tears. Love was dead, and a musical elegy had been played over its grave, because Tom Linley had been jilted by Mrs. Abington! And when Mr. Linley declared that nothing more classical than that composition had been produced by an English musician, Tom began to recover from the effects of his wound as speedily as his violin had done. Only once did his sister Maria hear him murmur, while he breathed hard and his eyes were alight with the true fire of genius:
"A jig--an Irish jig! O heavens! an Irish jig!"
The expression on his face was one of bitterness--bitterness tempered by the thought that he had produced an immortal work: the mortality of his love had given him immortality.
But Betsy did not speak a word. Tom was too full of himself and of setting his sorrow to rhythm to notice how often during every day her eyes filled with tears. But one of her sisters who occupied the same bedroom, had awakened once in the night hearing Betsy sob on her pillow, and had asked her what was the matter--was it toothache? "Ah, the ache! the ache!" Betsy had answered. The little girl had expressed her sympathy with her sister's suffering, and had straightway fallen asleep, forgetting in the morning that she had ever been awakened.