HAD passed him coming up the dingy corridor that led to Bob's law-office, and knew at once that he was one of Bob's tramps.
When he had squeezed himself through the partly opened door and had closed it gently—closed it with a hand held behind his back, like one who had some favor to ask or some confidence game to play—he proved to be a man about fifty years of age, fat and short, with a round head partly bald, and hair quite gray. His face had not known a razor for days. He was dressed in dark clothes, once good, showing a white shirt, and he wore a collar without a cravat. Down his cheeks were uneven furrows, beginning at his spilling, watery eyes, and losing themselves in the stubble-covered cheeks—like old rain-courses dried up—while on his flat nose were perched a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles, over which he looked at us in a dazed, half-bewildered, half-frightened way. In one hand he held his shapeless slouch hat; the other grasped an old violin wrapped in a grimy red silk handkerchief.
For an instant he stood before the door, bent low with unspoken apologies; then placing his hat on the floor, he fumbled nervously in the breast pocket of his coat, from which he drew a letter, penned in an unknown hand and signed with an unknown name. Bob read it, and passed it to me.
"Please buy this violin," the note ran. "It is a good instrument, and the man needs the money. The price is sixty dollars."
"Who gave you this note?" said Bob. He never turns a beggar from his door if he can help it. This reputation makes him the target for half the tramps in town.
"Te leader of te orchestra at te theatre. He say he not know you, but dat you loafe good violin. I come von time before, but vas nobody here." Then, after a pause, his wavering eye seeking Bob's, "Blease you buy him?"
"Is it yours?" I asked, anxious to get rid of him. The note trick had been played that winter by half the tramps in town.
"Yes. Mine vor veefteen year," he answered, slowly, in an unemotional way.
"Why do you want to sell it?" said Bob, his interest increasing, as he caught the pleading look in the man's eyes.
"I don't vant to sell it—I vant to keep it; but I haf notting," his hands opening wide. "Ve vas in Phildelphy, ant ten Scranton, ant ten we get here to Peetsburgh, and all te scenery is by te shereef, ant te manager haf notting. Vor vourteen tays I valk te streets, virst it is te ofercoat ant vatch, and yestertay te ledder case vor veefty cents. If you ton't buy him I must keep valking till I come by New York."
"I've got a good violin," said Bob, softening.
"Ten you don't buy him?" and a look as of a returning pain crossed his hopeless, impassive face. "Vell, I go vay, ten," he said, with a sigh that seemed to empty his heart.
We both looked on in silence as he slowly wrapped the silk rag around it, winding the ends automatically about the bridge and strings, as he had no doubt done a dozen times before that day in his hunt for a customer. Suddenly as he reached the neck he stopped, turned the violin in his hand, and unwound the handkerchief again.
"Tid you oxamine te neck? See how it lays in te hand! Tid you ever see neck like dat? No, you don't see it, never," in a positive tone, looking at us again over the silver rims of his spectacles.
Bob took the violin in his hand. It was evidently an old one and of peculiar shape. The swells and curves of the sides and back were delicately rounded and highly finished. The neck, too, to which the man pointed, was smooth and remarkably graceful, like the stem of an old meerschaum pipe, and as richly colored.
Bob handled it critically, scrutinizing every inch of its surface—he adores a Cremona as some souls do a Madonna—then he walked with it to the window.
"Why, this has been mended!" he exclaimed in surprise and with a trace of anger in his voice. "This is a new neck put on!"
I knew by the tone that Bob was beginning now to see through the game.
"Ah, you vind day oud, do you? Tat is a new neck, sure, ant a goot von, put on py Simon Corunden—not Auguste!—Simon! It is better as efer."
I looked for the guileless, innocent expression with the regulation smile that distinguishes most vagabonds on an errand like this, but his lifeless face was unlit by any visible emotion.
Drawing the old red handkerchief from his pocket in a tired, hopeless way, he began twisting it about the violin again.
"Play something on it," said Bob. He evidently believed every word of the impromptu explanation, and was weakening again. Harrowing sighs—chronic for years—or trickling tears shed at the right moment by some grief-stricken woman never failed to deceive him.