“The dear little thing!” cooed Aunt Eunice over her coffee machine. “If she isn’t practicing her scales.”
She cast an appealing look at Penelope, but Penelope in the window looked unplacated.
Caroline found the pedals with her feet. She could just reach them. She could make the piano talk, now loud, now low. She played very softly a lullaby that her mother had made up, just for her—a very simple thing—one of the first that she had ever learned. The stiffness was going from her fingers. She and this beautiful, wonder working, deep throated piano were friends. She began to play the last thing that her mother had taught her, a rhapsody of Brahms.
In the library Aunt Eunice paused in her placid sipping of her coffee, and looked amazed, for Penelope had sat up in her chair, with a quick, passionate movement that was not like Penelope.
“Mother!” There was something like awe in Penelope’s voice. “That child can play.”
“Quite so, dear.”
“But it isn’t parrot-playing, Mother—there’s more than her funny little bit of ragged technique—there’s feeling—listen now!”
They listened, while their coffee cooled. Full, round golden notes sang through the old dim house, now loud, now low. Night winds blew—bells tolled—echoes wakened in a vast cathedral aisle beneath a myriad jewel-like stained windows.
“Why, Penelope! Don’t!” Aunt Eunice soothed suddenly, as if the Penelope who swallowed her hard sobs was again a little child.
“I can’t help it, Mother. Don’t you see? There is something after all in the power of the soul. That Delane woman—that horsy, tangoing California girl——”