“‘Alas!’ he said, ‘I am a murderer!’

“‘Nay, that cannot be,’ she replied.

“‘I say it is so,’ said my father.  ’I have murdered a child—­a little girl.  I grumbled at her yesterday.  I was annoyed and angry—­because she had done her lessons ill.  I sent her home, but instead of going home she went to the outer canal and drowned herself.  They came and told me this afternoon.  Yes, I am a murderer!’

“I howled, while my mother tried to comfort my father, pointing out to him that if he had spoken roughly to the child it was done for the child’s good, and that he could not possibly have foreseen the catastrophe.  But her words were in vain.

“We all went to bed.  In the middle of the night I heard my dear silver-gray cat mewing at the back of the house.  She had been locked out.  I rose and went down-stairs to let her in.  To do so it was necessary for me to pass through the kitchen.  It was quite dark, and I knocked against something in the darkness.  With an inarticulate scream, I raced up-stairs again to my parents’ bedroom.  I seized my mother by her night-dress and dragged her towards the door.  She stopped only to light a candle, and hand-in-hand we went down-stairs to the kitchen.  The candle threw around its fitful, shuddering glare, and my mother’s eyes followed mine.  Some strange thing happened in my throat.

“‘Mother!’ I cried, in a hoarse, uncouth, horrible voice, and, casting myself against her bosom, I clung convulsively to her.  From a hook in the ceiling beam my father’s corpse dangled.  He had hanged himself in the frenzy of his remorse.  So my speech came to me again.”

All the man’s genius for tragic acting, that genius which had made him unique in “Tristan” and in “Tannhauser,” had been displayed in this recital; and its solitary auditor was more moved by it than superficially appeared.  Neither of us spoke a word for a few minutes.  Then Alresca, taking aim, threw the end of his cigar out of the window.

“Yes,” I said at length, “that was tragedy, that was!”

He proceeded: 

“The critics are always praising me for the emotional qualities in my singing.  Well, I cannot use my voice without thinking of the dreadful circumstance under which Fate saw fit to restore that which Fate had taken away.”

And there fell a long silence, and night descended on the canal, and the swans were nothing now but pale ghosts wandering soundlessly over the water.

“Carl,” Alresca burst out with a start—­he was decidedly in a mood to be communicative that evening—­“have you ever been in love?”

In the gloom I could just distinguish that he was leaning his head on his arm.

“No,” I answered; “at least, I think not;” and I wondered if I had been, if I was, in love.

“You have that which pleases women, you know, and you will have chances, plenty of chances.  Let me advise you—­either fall in love young or not at all.  If you have a disappointment before you are twenty-five it is nothing.  If you have a disappointment after you are thirty-five, it is—­everything.”