The Tempering

by Charles Neville Buck

She finished her first song and retreated to her chair on the platform, wishing that there had been a trap-door through which she might have escaped that barrage of human sight.

Then her glance caught the elderly man with the great reputation in the music world. He had not yet fled. He was making notes on a scrap of paper and his keenly alert, finely chiselled face wore the expression of unmistakable interest. The singer glanced at the white-haired lady—the great Mrs. Ariton—and she read "well-done, my child," in a smile of moist eyes.

She could not know that there was a direct simplicity of pathos and artless humour in her ballads, borne on a bird-like sweetness of voice, to the hearts of these people. She could not know that she was bringing to the touch of their sympathy phrases and forms that had seemed as remote and unreal as lines from Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Yet, because it was all so new and strange, the air seemed heavy to her with a terrifying formality, as the incense laden atmosphere of a cathedral might have been. So she looked, as she rose to sing again, for the comforting presence of some face that might reassure her with a kin-ship of human simplicity.

Then she saw slip quietly through the entrance door, and drop into a seat near the critic, a young woman who was unaccompanied and who, at first glance, seemed to carry in her fine eyes the burthen of habitual weariness.

These eyes were deeply violet and though sadness haunted them and bespoke ghosts that stirred uneasily and often back in their depths they still held the hint of fires that had flashed, once, into gay and spontaneous whimseys. The singer had a momentary sense of looking at a face made for gracious and merry expressions, but drawn into the short and desperate outlook of one who has fallen into deep and angry waters, and who can see nothing ahead beyond the struggle to keep afloat.

The newcomer was tall and slender, even thin, but there was still an intrinsic gallantry about the swing of her shoulders that made one think of invincible qualities, though the plain severity of her clothing brought into that contrasting company the undeniable assertion of poverty.

The singer finished her ballad and once again went back to her chair. This time with a diminished diffidence. She was thinking about the other young woman at the back who looked poor and sick and who, in spite of these things, gave her an indescribable impression of distinction. The two of them, thought the mountain girl, had a bond of sympathy in that they were each set quite apart from all these others unified by the stamp of affluence.

Miss Shorte was talking now; telling the story of the school and its work; flashing before her hearers as if her words were pictures imbued with colour and form, the patriarchal conditions with which this work was surrounded. Laughter interrupted her lighter recitals, and when she spoke of graver phases there was that light clearing of throats that carries from an audience to a stage the proclamation of stirred emotion, and of tears not far from the surface.

The speaker gave a few illustrations of the sort of manhood and womanhood that is sometimes wrought out of that crude ore when the tempering of help and education is available to refine it.