Читать книгу Time's Door - Esther Meynell - Страница 10

Nicolo Paganini’s life was as strange as his fame. To the truth had been added many legends, for the human mind tried thus to explain what it could not understand but only continually gape at. Gerda’s Italian friends were astounded and alarmed when they heard that Paganini was taking Giovanni away with him. Envy may have added an edge to their comments, for some of them had also sons.

“He is not a man to be entrusted with a child, he will neglect him, he is cruel and dangerous.”

“They say that he has sold himself to the Evil One and that it is the Devil who teaches him how to excel all other violinists.”

“You know what he has been called?—a Vampire with a Violin—and you let your son go with him?”

Gerda’s heart sank a little under these comments, but she had made her decision, and these stories sprang, she knew, from jealousy and ignorance. Also, deep in her mind she realised that were she to attempt to come between Giovanni and his idol Paganini she would lose him more completely than she could lose him by any physical absence. It was destiny that had taken him away. Her people had been musicians for several generations, and she knew the sacrifices that music demanded from those who embraced that career. In her heart was the thought that Giovanni might have genius—surely that Paganini should take him was an indication that her thought was not a mere mother’s dream?—and if that should be so then everything must yield to that inescapable claim. Luigi, who had just missed genius, would have said the same without a shadow of hesitation. There could be no denial.

Paganini’s mother had dreamed the same dreamDREAMS about her son, had Gerda but known it, many years earlier, and lived to see her dream come true. When Nicolo was a small boy she had dreamed that an angel appeared to her and told her that her son would be the greatest violinist who had ever appeared in the world. Gerda’s dream did not take so definite a form as Signora Paganini’s—it was but a faint roseate colouring on the grey mist of Giovanni’s departure.

To Giovanni at this time the world contained really only one person. The tragedy of his father had shocked him greatly, but he had not properly understood it, and his father’s disappearance from his horizon had obliterated much to the young mind living so urgently in its immediate day. His mother was to him one of the permanent facts of his life, he could no more imagine his existence without her than without air or light. He accepted her with the same simplicity. But Paganini had burst upon his world with all the astonishment of a great meteor in the sky—he could not cease to gaze, he could not think of any other.

Gerda knew that his thoughts were gone beyond her even while his arms were clinging about her neck in ardent childish farewells. The young have no past, only a future.

When he had departed with Paganini to a destiny of which she had not any knowledge save Paganini’s solemnly spoken words to her, “I will care for him, I too have a son I love,” Gerda flung herself down in an abandonment of tears. “I am as mad as my poor Luigi to let him go. I may never see him again, my little son gone out alone into the world.”

Fears of all sorts pressed upon her. How should a person so strange as Paganini take thought to the needs of a child, his food and his sleep? He would most likely keep Giovanni up in the night hours, take him to late concerts, perhaps forget altogether about him. She leapt up in anguished agitation—she would go after them, she would fetch back her little Giovanni. Then she stopped. She might fetch back his body, but she could not fetch back his spirit, that was with Paganini. It was destiny. Gerda suddenly felt that everything had been taken out of her hands, she could do nothing. Prayer was left to her, but she felt that even her powers of praying were stilled into a helpless waiting.