inevitable, hopeless. But the thing that was eating his heart out had been unnecessary and cruel.
Where was Harmony? When it stormed, as it did almost steadily, he wondered how she was sheltered; when the occasional sun shone he hoped it was bringing her a bit of cheer. Now and then, in the night, when the lamp burned low and gusts of wind shook the old house, fearful thoughts came to him—the canal, with its filthy depths. Daylight brought reason, however. Harmony had been too rational, too sane for such an end.
McLean was Peter’s great support in those terrible days. He was young and hopeful. Also he had money. Peter could not afford to grease the machinery of the police service; McLean could and did. In Berlin Harmony could not have remained hidden for two days. In Vienna, however, it was different. Returns were made to the department, but irregularly. An American music student was missing. There were thousands of American music students in the city: one fell over them in the coffee-houses. McLean offered a reward and followed up innumerable music students.
The alternating hope and despair was most trying. Peter became old and haggard; the boy grew thin and white. But there was this difference, that with Peter the strain was cumulative, hour on hour, day on day. With McLean each night found him worn and exhausted, but each following morning he went to work with renewed strength and energy. Perhaps, after all, the iron had not struck so deep into his soul. With Peter it was a life-and-death matter.
Clinics and lectures had begun again, but he had no heart for work. The little household went on methodically. Marie remained; there had seemed nothing else to do. She cooked Peter’s food—what little he would eat; she nursed Jimmy while Peter was out on the long search; and she kept the apartment neat. She was never intrusive, never talkative. Indeed, she seemed to have lapsed into definite silence. She deferred absolutely to Peter, adored him, indeed, from afar. She never ate with him, in spite of his protests.
The little apartment was very quiet. Where formerly had been music and Harmony’s soft laughter, where Anna Gates had been wont to argue with Peter in loud, incisive tones, where even the prisms of the chandelier had once vibrated in response to Harmony’s violin, almost absolute silence now reigned. Even the gate, having been repaired, no longer creaked, and the loud altercations between the Portier and his wife had been silenced out of deference to the sick child.
On the day that Harmony, in the gold dress, had discovered Jimmy’s mother in the American dancer Peter had had an unusually bad day. McLean had sent him a note by messenger early in the morning, to the effect that a young girl answering Harmony’s description had been seen in the park at Schonbrunn and traced to an apartment near by.
Harmony had liked Schonbrunn, and it seemed possible. They had gone out together, McLean optimistic, Peter afraid to hope. And it had been as he feared—a pretty little violin student, indeed, who had been washing her hair, and only opened the door an inch or two.
McLean made a lame apology, Peter too sick with disappointment to speak. Then back to the city again.
He had taken to making a daily round, to the master’s, to the Frau Professor Bergmeister’s, along the Graben and the Karntnerstrasse, ending up at the Doctors’ Club in the faint hope of a letter. Wrath still smouldered deep in Peter; he would not enter a room at the club if Mrs. Boyer sat within. He had had a long 1 hour with Dr. Jennings, and left that cheerful person writhing in abasement. And he had held a stormy interview with the Frau Schwarz, which left her humble for a week, and exceedingly nervous, being of the impression from Peter’s manner that in the event of Harmony not turning up an American gunboat would sail up the right arm of the Danube and bombard the Pension Schwarz.
Schonbrunn having failed them, McLean and, Peter went back to the city in the street-car, neither one saying much. Even McLean’s elasticity was deserting him. His eyes, from much peering into crowds, had taken on a strained, concentrated look.
Peter was shabbier than ever beside the other man’s ultrafashionable dress. He sat, bent forward, his long arms dangling between his knees, his head down. Their common trouble had drawn the two together, or had drawn McLean close to Peter, as if he recognized that there were degrees in grief and that Peter had received almost a death-wound. His old rage at Peter had died. Harmony’s flight had proved the situation as no amount of protestation would have done. The thing now was to find the girl; then he and Peter would start even, and the battle to the best man.
They had the car almost to themselves. Peter had not spoken since he sat down. McLean was busy over a notebook, in which he jotted down from day to day such details of their search as might be worth keeping. Now and then he glanced at Peter as if he wished to say something, hesitated, fell to work again over the notebook. Finally he ventured.
“How’s the boy?”
“Not so well to-day. I’m having a couple of men in to see him to-night. He doesn’t sleep.”
“Do you sleep?”
“Not much. He’s on my mind, of course.”
That and other things, Peter.
“Don’t you think—wouldn’t it be better to have a nurse. You can’t go like this all day and be up all night, you know. And Marie has him most of the day.” McLean, of course, had known Marie before. “The boy ought to have a nurse, I think.”
“He doesn’t move without my hearing him.”
“That’s an argument for me. Do you want to get sick?”
Peter turned a white face toward McLean, a face in which exasperation struggled with fatigue.
“Good Lord, boy,” he rasped, “don’t you suppose I’d have a nurse if I could afford it?”
“Would you let me help? I’d like to do something. I’m a useless cub in a sickroom, but I could do that. Who’s the woman he liked in the hospital?”
“Nurse Elisabet. I don’t know, Mac. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t let you help, I suppose. It hurts, of course, but—if he would be happier—”
“That’s settled, then,” said McLean. “Nurse Elisabet, if she can come. And—look here, old man. I ‘ve been trying to say this for a week and haven’t had the nerve. Let me help you out for a while. You can send it back when you get it, any time, a year or ten years. I’ll not miss it.”
