He had come to her, in the long Spring twilight, to show with naive pride an invitation he had just received. An invitation to the musicale-dinner at the Standishes’, three nights hence. He volunteered no information as to how it had been obtained; but evaded the girl’s wondering queries with the guilty embarrassment that was always his when she chanced to corner him in a fault. From Conover’s manner Desirée gathered that the invitation was in a way an effort on Standish’s part to repay the courtesy of the various large loans she knew Caleb had made to the banker. Nor would she spoil the Fighter’s very evident delight by closer cross-questioning. Caleb had said, days ago, that he was going to be invited to the dinner. And, despite her invariable scoffs at his boasts, she had long since learned that such vaunts had an odd way of coming true.
The June dusk lay velvet-like over the little music room. From the yard outside came the bitter-sweet breath of syringas. Far off sounded the yells of Billy Shevlin and some of his fellow street-boys; their racket mellowed by distance.
Talk had languished. At last Desirée had crossed to the piano. She sat, playing scraps of music, as was her wont; pausing now and then to speak; then letting her fingers run into a new air or a series of soft improvised chords. She had scant technique and played almost wholly by ear; using the piano only as the amateur music-worshipper’s medium for recalling and reproducing some cherished fragments of song.
But to Caleb, lolling at her side, the performance was sublime. That anyone could talk while playing the piano was to him nothing short of marvelous. He was firmly convinced it was a gift vouchsafed to Desirée alone. Music itself was wholly unintelligible to him. Except from Desirée’s lips or fingers, he found it actively distasteful. But all she did was perfect. And if her playing fell upon his ear as a meaningless jumble of sounds, he at least found the sounds sweet.
“What’s that thing you just did with one hand and then rumbled down on the low notes with the other?” he asked, after a spell of watching the busy white fingers shining through the dusk.
“That?” queried Desirée. “It’s just the Vanderdecken motive from The Flying Dutchman. And I used to be able to play the whole Spinning Song; but I’ve forgotten most of it.”
“H’m!” murmured Caleb, who found her words as unmeaning as her music. “I thought I remembered that one. ‘Spinning Song,’ hey?”
“Yes,” she said absently. “It starts out with lots of bizzy, purry little notes too fast for me to play. I never could learn the piano.”
“You bet you could!” cried Caleb, at once afire with contradiction. “I’ve heard a lot of crackajack piano players an’ never one of ’em could hold a candle to you. Why, there was Blink Snesham—the feller they called Ragtime King,—down to Kerrigan’s. You’ve got him beat a block.”
“You dear old loyal idiot!” laughed Desirée, lifting one hand from the keys to rumple his stiff red hair with a gesture as affectionate as it was discomfiting. “I believe you think I’m the wonderfullest person on earth.”