"Maxwelton's braes are bonnie, where early fa's the dew,
And it's there that Annie Laurie gi'ed me her promise true."
"But it's a white woman," said the lady in the yellow lava-lava, who had expected only the islanders to shock her, "a white woman gone native! How disgustin'!"
"Ssh!" said somebody else, "she's going to give us more."
The old witch hardly seemed conscious of their presence now. The slumbering sea of music within her was breaking up the ice which had sealed and silenced it for so long. She nodded at them, with shining eyes, and muttered thickly, an almost childlike boast:
"Oh, but I could do better than that once. My fingers are stiff. Wait!"
She went into her hut, and returned with the violin. Tremblingly, she opened a little packet of violin strings.
"It's my last," she said. "I've kept it very carefully; but it won't be as good as it used to be."
The throng watched her breathlessly, as she made ready, and the trade-wind hushed itself to sleep among the palms.
"When I was in Europe last," she said, "it seemed to me there was darkness coming. People had forgotten the meaning of music like this. They wanted discord and blood and wickedness. I didn't understand it. But you could see it coming everywhere. Horrible pictures. Women like snakes. Books like lumps of poison. Hatred everywhere. Even the musicians hated each other; and if they thought any one had genius, O ever so little of that—do you know—I think they wanted to kill. Of course, I chose wrong. I ought to have stayed and fought them. It's too late now. But you know the meaning of this? It's the cry over the lost city, before the windows were darkened and the daughters of music brought low."
"Crazy as a loon!" whispered the lady in the yellow lava-lava.