Nancy produced the stock-in-trade of ballads, which the maestro fingered like noxious reptiles.
“E questo? Anna Lowrie o qualche nome indiavolato. Probiamolo. Avanti!”
The little man sat down at the piano and was off with the accompaniment on an instrument of the most outrageously tinny timbre before Nancy had finished deciding that he was not so much like a domino as a five-finger exercise.
“Eh, avanti!” he turned round and shouted angrily. “What for you waita, madama? Di nuovo!”
In the green twilight of this little room hanging over the precipitous cliff above the distant jangling of Naples Nancy could not feel that Maxwellton Braes had ever existed. She made a desperate effort to achieve an effect with the last lines.
“And for bonnie Annie Laurie
I would lay me down and dee.”
There was a silence.
Then the maestro grunted, twirled his moustache, rose from the piano, and sat down at his desk.
“Here I writa when you come,” he said. “A rivederla e buon giorno.”
He thrust the paper into Nancy’s hand and with the same gesture almost pushed her out of his apartment. The next thing of which she was conscious was walking slowly down the Vomero in the honey-coloured November sunshine and staring at the hours and days written down upon the half-sheet of notepaper she held in her hand.