“Because he makes you think something’s beautiful that he thinks rubbish, Mummy. Come along, Adrienne. You will, won’t you? I expect my voice sounds all wrong to you. I’ve had no proper training.”
“It’s a very lovely voice, Meg, used in a poor cause,” said Miss Toner smiling. “And it is badly placed. I think I could help you there. I’ve no voice at all, but I have been taught how to sing. It would be more to the point, though, if Mr. Oldmeadow were to play to us, for I hear that he is an accomplished musician.”
“I’m really anything but accomplished,” said Oldmeadow; “but I can play accompaniments cleverly. Do sing to us. I know you’ll give us something worth accompanying.”
Miss Toner rose and came to the piano with her complete and unassuming confidence. She turned the pages of the music piled there and asked him if he cared for Schubert’s songs. Yes; she was a watch wound to go accurately and she could rely on herself, always, to the last tick. Even if she knew—and he was sure she knew—that he had been undermining her, she would never show a shadow or a tremor; and she would always know what was the best music. Only, as she selected “Litanei” and placed it before him, he felt that over him, also, flowed the quiet, firm look.
“Litanei” was one of his favourites in a composer he loved, and, as she sang there above him, he found the song emerging unharmed from her interpretation. It was as she had said—no voice to speak of; the dryest, flattest little thread of sound; and no feeling, either (what a relief after Meg!), except the feeling for scrupulous accuracy. Yet her singing was what he found in her to like best. It was disciplined; it accepted its own limits; it fulfilled an order. There was no desecration of the heavenly song, for, intelligently after all, she made no attempt upon its heart.
When she had finished, she looked down at him. They were removed by half the length of the room from the fireside group. The lamps were behind them. Only the candles set in the piano-rack illumined Miss Toner; and while the white roses over her ears struck him anew as foolish, her eyes anew struck him as powerful.
“Thank you. That was a pleasure,” he said.
It was a pleasure. It was almost a link. He had found a ground to meet her on. He saw himself in the future accompanying Barney’s wife. He need, then, so seldom talk to her. But, alas! she stepped at once from the safe frame of art.
“If we can rise from loss to feel like that, if we can lift our sorrows like that, we need never turn to palliatives, need we, Mr. Oldmeadow?” she said.
Stupidity, complacency, or power, whatever it was, it completely disenchanted him. It left him also bereft of repartee. What he fell back upon, as he looked up at her and then down at the keys again, was a mere schoolboy mutter of “Come now!”