Читать книгу Time's Door - Esther Meynell - Страница 4

The memory was curiously clear to his mind. It hung, like a delicately coloured aquatint, on the wall of half-forgotten days—things round it, events that came before or after, were dim, confused, or vanished clean away. But this picture remained: his mother, in her spreading silken skirts which billowed about her, seated at a small spidery rosewood table, on the table a little black lacquer casket with a domed lid, inlaid with Chinese designs in gold, mother-of-pearl, and a soft green. The casket was lined with a green velvet, somewhat rubbed and faded—he still could see the little patch near the keyhole that was worn bare with use—and it held a collection of trifling trinkets, a pierced gold hair dagger with a chased gold ball dangling from a chain, little fretted works in ivory, a brooch set with a mosaic of St. Peter’s. But the valuable contents of the casket was not these things, but a parcel of old letters which lay, untied from their ribbon, on his mother’s lap. She was turning them over, reading here and there to herself, a remote dreamy look in her eyes, quite unconscious that her small son, lying full length on the floor at her feet, his dark head propped in his hands, was no longer absorbed in his book, but had become aware of her, of her mood. After a minute she felt his gaze, and the blue eyes and the tawny brown eyes—so like, his mother often thought, to those of a small lion—met in a smile.

“Why do you look at me like that, Giovanni?” she questioned gently.

“Because of the way you look, Mütterchen, you have a little dream?—it is an old letter of love?”

She shook her head, so that her pale ringlets swayed slightly, “No, foolish one, not as you mean it, though indeed they are letters of love, of a love dead so young, of a love for one so great—and all the music that might have been!”

A little sigh caught at her breath.

Giovanni sat up. Music was a word of meaning to his mind.

“Have they then to do with music, those letters? May I read them?”

“Not yet, Giovanni, you are too young. They are a treasure for the time when you have more years. When that time comes then they will mean to you so much, they will lift you up into a great world. Now, you are not of an age to understand.”

This view of things did not appeal to Giovanni. “But if it is music I would understand,” he said, with a look half protesting, half appealing.

“No, not yet,” his mother repeated. “The letters are not for you now. But I will tell you somewhat of him who wrote them—he was your ancestor, he is worthy to be your inspirer. He was a pupil of the greatest of all the musicians.”

Giovanni had no need to be told who that was.MIXED INHERITANCE He nodded gravely, his eyes shone.

“A pupil of his?—and an ancestor of mine?” For a moment of silence he let those two facts sink into his eager mind.

“Tell me all about it, tell me now, quickly.”

His long, unchildish fingers clutched excitedly at her knees.

She told him.