  However, of all the Sunrise Camp Fire club it was Esther Clark who actually had the strangest Christmas eve experience. Betty had rather opposed her going over to the orphan asylum for a last rehearsal of her song with Herr Crippen. It was not really necessary, for Esther knew her song as well as she ever would be able to learn it and could only fail in her singing of it on Christmas night should her audience happen to frighten her voice away. Nevertheless, Esther had a kind of sentiment in seeing her old friends at the asylum on Christmas eve, since this was the first year that she could remember when her Christmas had not been spent with them, and there would be no opportunity for visiting the next day. For some reason or other, which Esther had never had satisfactorily explained to her, she had been kept longer at the orphan asylum than any of the other children. Indeed she was sixteen, almost seventeen, in the spring before when Mrs. Ashton had persuaded the superintendent to let her try the experiment of having Esther as her daughter Betty’s companion. Ordinarily the children were sent away to live and work in other people’s homes when they were thirteen or fourteen; many of them were adopted by the farmers in the surrounding neighborhood when they were almost babies, so that Esther naturally felt her obligation to be the deeper. Notwithstanding she was not thinking a great deal about her former lonely life at the asylum, nor even of the queer German violinist’s interest in her voice, as she drove Fire Star over the now familiar road. Both her mind and heart were heavy with the news Dick Ashton had been able to whisper to her in a few hurried moments when they had been alone in the cabin that morning soon after Dick’s arrival. Mr. Ashton had lost not merely a small sum of money which might cause him temporary inconvenience, as Betty imagined. He had had such serious losses that Dick’s mother had written begging him and Betty to cut down their living expenses as closely as possible. And some one had to tell Betty. Dick was not a coward; in making his confidence he simply wondered if Esther would not be able to console his sister afterwards and to explain conditions to her better than he could, because Betty never had seemed able to understand any question of money matters however much she seemed to try. The actual facts he himself would tell her as soon as the holiday season had passed. There was one way in which Betty could save money, Esther decided. She should no longer pay for her singing lessons. Indeed she would ask the German violinist that morning if there were not some way by which she could help him, by playing his accompaniments, perhaps, if he succeeded in getting up a violin class in Woodford. Anyhow she would earn the money for her own lessons in some way, for, unselfish as Esther was, her music lessons meant too much to her, were too important to her future, even to think of giving them up altogether. The professor was waiting for her in the big, bare, ugly parlor of the asylum which, however, possessed the glory of a not utterly impossible piano. Nevertheless, Esther only waved her hand to him as she passed the door on the way to her older friends. She was thinking that he looked older, poorer and homelier than ever with his red hair, his spectacled, pale blue eyes and his worn clothes. He had a little sprig of holly in his buttonhole, in a determined German effort to be a part of the prevailing Christmas cheerfulness. Then, half an hour later, Esther sang her song straight through without hesitation or a single mistake to the elderly German’s way of thinking. For when she had finished he looked at her speechless for a moment, and then taking off his spectacles wiped away a kind of mist from his glasses. “Ach, my dear young FrÄulein, you haf the great thing I hoped for through all my youth and then gave up when the years found me—an almost big violinist—das Talent! Was ist es in English, genius, nicht wahr?” And then, with Esther blushing until the burning in her throat and cheeks was almost painful, and twisting her big hands together in the ungainly fashion Betty had almost broken her of, he went on, seemingly unconscious of her presence. “I am that thing you call a failure, but I used to dream I might haf a child who some day would go farther than I was able and then when I had to gif up this also—Ach, Himmel!” To Esther’s great embarrassment Herr Crippen then began sobbing in a most un-American fashion. “It was my own fault. I should never haf gone away, I——” But whatever else he may have poured forth in his present state of emotion was heard only by the four walls of the room, for Esther, in utter consternation, slipped out, hurrying toward the small study in the rear of the house where she knew she would find her old friend, the superintendent, at work. She told him rather shyly of her unceremonious leave taking, asking him to make her apologies to Herr Crippen and to beg him to come early to their Christmas entertainment the next night. Then, when she had put out her hand for farewell, quite unexpectedly the superintendent asked her to sit down again, saying that he would like to tell her Herr Crippen’s story and the reason he had come into their neighborhood, since possibly she might be able to assist him. Afterwards for more than an hour Esther listened to a most surprising narrative and later on drove back to Sunrise cabin puzzled, thoughtful and just the least shade frightened and unhappy. However, she made up her mind not to let anything trouble her until after their wonderful Christmas had passed. |
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