"Ah, you are everything--everything, only---- Heavens, if I were to absent myself my prospects would be ruined!"
"Ah, 'tis the old story!" sighed the lady,--there was more indignation in her sigh than Mr. Burke could incorporate in one of his speeches on the Marriage Act,--"the old story: a man's ambition against a woman's affection! Go to your concert, sir, but never let me see your face again."
"Dear child!" he cried,--he sometimes called her "dear child," because she was not (he thought) more than two years older than himself,--"cannot you see that when my name is printed----"
"Do you presume to instruct me on these points, sir?" she cried. "Does not all the world know that my name is down in every playbill that Mr. Colman prints, as a member of his company? and yet---- But you have taught me my duty. I shall go back to London to-morrow. I thank you, sir, for having given me a lesson. O man, man! always cruel!--always ready to slight the poor, trustful creature who gives up all for your sake."
She dissolved into tears, and he was kneeling by her side, trying to catch the hand which she withheld from him, and all the time swearing that she was everything to him--his life, his soul, his hope, his future....
And so the pieces in which Tom Linley was to take part at the concert were omitted from the performance, and the manager assured Mr. Linley that his son's career, so far as Bath was concerned, was at an end.
Mr. Linley that evening--at one moment weeping in the arms of his daughter, at another pacing the room declaring passionately that Tom need never again look near his house, that he would turn him out neck and crop into the street--said some severely accurate things about Mrs. Abington and the stage generally, and the Linley household was in a condition bordering on distraction.
But Mrs. Abington, sitting in an attitude of inimitable grace upon her little gilded sofa, passing her fingers through Tom's curls as he sat on a stool at her feet, was in no way disturbed by the condition of things in Pierrepont Street, the fact being that she was just at that moment thinking more of Mrs. Abington than of any one else in the world. She knew that the next day every one in Bath would be talking about the completeness of her conquest of the ardent young musical genius who, it was well known, held the theory that there was nothing in the world worth living for save only music. She wondered what Dick Sheridan would think now. And she was quite right so far as her speculations in regard to Bath were concerned. Every one was talking of how she had been the ruin of Tom Linley, and most of the men who talked of it, envied Tom most heartily; all the women who talked of it, envied Mrs. Abington her taste in dress.