Page 247 - swanns-way

she had caused him; she could see the tortured expression
which was never absent from the old man’s face in those ter-
rible last years; she knew that he had definitely abandoned
the task of transcribing in fair copies the whole of his later
work, the poor little pieces, we imagined, of an old music-
master, a retired village organist, which, we assumed, were
of little or no value in themselves, though we did not despise
them, because they were of such great value to him and had
been the chief motive of his life before he sacrificed them to
his daughter; pieces which, being mostly not even written
down, but recorded only in his memory, while the rest were
scribbled on loose sheets of paper, and quite illegible, must
now remain unknown for ever; my mother thought, also,
of that other and still more cruel renunciation to which M.
Vinteuil had been driven, that of seeing the girl happily set-
tled, with an honest and respectable future; when she called
to mind all this utter and crushing misery that had come
upon my aunts’ old music-master, she was moved to very
real grief, and shuddered to think of that other grief, so dif-
ferent in its bitterness, which Mlle. Vinteuil must now be
feeling, tinged with remorse at having virtually killed her
father. ‘Poor M. Vinteuil,’ my mother would say, ‘he lived
for his daughter, and now he has died for her, without get-
ting his reward. Will he get it now, I wonder, and in what
form? It can only come to him from her.’
At the far end of Mlle. Vinteuil’s sitting-room, on the
mantelpiece, stood a small photograph of her father which
she went briskly to fetch, just as the sound of carriage wheels
was heard from the road outside, then flung herself down on

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