A maid came in with the tea-things.
“Ah, the tannin!” exclaimed Gumbril with enthusiasm, and broke off his playing. “The one hope of salvation.” He poured out two cups, and picking up one of them he came over to the fireplace and stood behind her, sipping slowly at the pale brewage and looking over her shoulder at their two reflections in the mirror.
“La ci darem,” he hummed. “If only I had my beard!” He stroked his chin and with the tip of his forefinger brushed up the drooping ends of his moustache. “You’d come trembling like Zerlina, in under its golden shadow.”
Mrs. Viveash smiled. “I don’t ask for anything better,” she said. “What more delightful part! Felice, io so, sarei: Batti, batti, o bel Mazetto. Enviable Zerlina!”
The servant made another silent entry.
“A gentleman,” she said, “called Mr. Shearwater would like——”
“Tell him I’m not at home,” said Mrs. Viveash, without looking round.
There was a silence. With raised eyebrows Gumbril looked over Mrs. Viveash’s shoulder at her reflection. Her eyes were calm and without expression, she did not smile or frown. Gumbril still questioningly looked. In the end he began to laugh.
CHAPTER XV
They were playing that latest novelty from across the water, “What’s he to Hecuba?” Sweet, sweet and piercing, the saxophone pierced into the very bowels of compassion and tenderness, pierced like a revelation from heaven, pierced like the angel’s treacly dart into the holy Teresa’s quivering and ecstasiated flank. More ripely and roundly, with a kindly and less agonizing voluptuousness, the ’cello meditated those Mohammedan ecstasies that last, under the green palms of Paradise, six hundred inenarrable years apiece. Into this charged atmosphere the violin admitted refreshing draughts of fresh air, cool and thin like the breath from a still damp squirt. And the piano hammered and rattled away unmindful of the sensibilities of the other instruments, banged away all the time reminding every one concerned, in a thoroughly business-like way, that this was a cabaret where people came to dance the fox-trot; not a baroque church for female saints to go into ecstasies in, not a mild, happy valley of tumbling houris.