“Yes,” she says, as Angland finishes a gay description of the little concert given in his honour by the stockmen at the out-station the night before,—“yes, some of these men have naturally really splendid voices. Always in the open air, and wearing no heavy coats to confine their chests, it is not to be wondered at that they have good lungs, at any rate. Miners I know are proverbially good singers. I have heard several at different times. Your late uncle sang very well, I believe, for example. Have you heard, by-the-bye, anything of his boy Billy yet?”
“No,” replies Claude, “and I am very anxious to get on with my uncle’s——I mean, to find my uncle’s grave. But as Billy is not here, and I can’t very well get on without him, I suppose I can’t do better than wait here for a time, as Mr. Giles so kindly pressed me to do, and see if the boy turns up.”
An independent observer, noticing the looks of admiration with which Angland was regarding the young lady by the piano, would hardly have imagined that an immediate withdrawal from her company was what he chiefly desired.
“Oh, pray, Mr. Angland,” says Lileth, turning towards Claude, and concentrating upon him all the will-power that a rapid glance of her glorious eyes can convey, “do not desert us just yet. It is such a pleasure to have an agreeable, educated man to converse with again. Any one who has travelled, and who knows about something besides horses and cattle, is quite a rara avis up here, I can assure you. I shall miss you very much when you have to go,” adds Miss Mundella, with a sigh.
Claude bows his acknowledgments of the compliments paid him, and the young lady continues speaking in a low voice, looking demurely downwards, and playing pianissimo meanwhile that bewitching Cavatina love-spell of Donizetti’s:—
“Believe me, I somehow feel a very great deal of interest in your search. It is so brave, so honourable, of you to take all this trouble merely to visit the grave of your relative. I fancy few men would care to do that for an uncle nowadays.”
Now it is one of the strange things “that no fellar can understand” how most of the best men one meets in every-day life will hasten to repudiate any assertion crediting them with an honourable or unselfish motive for any action they may have performed. It is just as if such a reason for a deed was something to be really ashamed of.
It is an odd but undeniable fact that men often take considerable trouble to make themselves out to be worse than they really are. So Claude, following the general rule, immediately endeavours to prove that he is not so good-hearted—therefore, in a worldly sense, so foolish—an individual as Miss Mundella would imagine. In fact, he swallows the encomiastic bait held out to him by that young lady.
“I am really afraid,” he exclaims, “that I cannot claim that it is all affection, on my part, that brings me up this way to search for my uncle’s grave. I must confess that there are more mercenary considerations mixed up with my sublimer motives than you kindly would credit me with.” And here we have to record a serious mistake Lileth made. For, instead of keeping her quarry under the gentle thraldom of her music, and the attractive warmth of manner which was really more natural to her than her usual appearance of coldness, Miss Mundella began to excuse this “mercenary motive” of Claude’s to him in her ordinary conversational tones.
Instantly he awakes, as it were, from the sweet confidential mood into which he has drifted, for the peculiar notes (timbre) of Lileth’s voice have again called up the viaduct scene to his memory; and Miss Mundella can tell by the altered manner in which he speaks, as he rises with some feeble excuse for quitting her side, that she has somehow scared him for the nonce.