CHAPTER IV.
The door was thrown wide open, and Atlung came lounging in. This tall, slender man, in these capacious clothes that showed many a trace of the factories he had been visiting, bore in his face, his movements, his bearing, the unconcerned ease of several generations.
The gray eyes, beneath the invisible eyebrows, blinked a little when he saw me, and then the long face broadened into a smile. His superb teeth glittered between the full, short lips, as he exclaimed: "Is that you!" He took both my hands between his hard, freckled ones, then dropping one of them threw his arm around his wife's waist. "Was not that delightful, Amalie? What? Those days in Dresden, my dear?"
When he had relaxed his hold, he made eager inquiries about myself and my journey,—he knew I was to make a short trip abroad. Then he began to tell me what occupied him the most, and meanwhile he strolled up and down the room, took up one article between his fingers, handled it, then took up another. He did not hold any little thing as others do with the extreme tips of his fingers; he firmly grasped it in his hand so that his fingers closed over it. In conversation, too, it was just the same: there was a certain fullness in the way he took up each subject and flung it away again at once for something else.
His wife had left the room, but returned very soon and invited us to dinner. Just at that moment Atlung was sauntering past the piano, on which was open a new musical composition, whose character he described in a few words. Then he began to play and sing verse after verse of a long song. When he was through, his wife again reminded him of the meal. This probably first called his attention to her presence in the room.
"See here, Amalie, let us try this duet!" he cried, and struck up the accompaniment.
Looking at me with a smile, she took her place at his side and joined in the song. Her somewhat veiled, sweet soprano blended with his rich baritone, just as I had heard it nine years before. The voices of both had acquired that deeper, fuller meaning which life gives when it has meaning itself; their skill, on the other hand, was about the same as of old.
Any one who but a moment before might perhaps have found it difficult to understand how these two had come together, only needed to be near them while they sang. A lyric abandonment of feeling was common to both, and where there was any difference of sentiment they were perfectly content to waive it. They floated onward like two children in a boat, leaving the dinner behind them to grow cold, the servants to become impatient, the guest to think what he pleased, and the order of the house and their own plans for the day to be upset.
In their singing there was no energy, no school, no delicate finish of style of this simple number, which, moreover, they were doubtless singing for the first time; but there was a smooth, lazy, happy gliding over the melody. The light coloring of the voices blended together like a caress; and there was a charm in the way it was done.