Arnold said nothing. He had fallen back a step and now looked at the new-comer with a fixed, dazzled gaze.
CHAPTER XXIV
ANOTHER BRAND OF MODERN TALK
"Where's Judith?" said Arnold for sole greeting, as he saw Morrison at the piano and Sylvia sitting near it, cool and clear in a lacy white dress. Morrison lifted long fingers from the keys and said gravely, "She came through a moment ago, saying, 'Where's Arnold?' and went out through that door." His fingers dropped and Chopin's voice once more rose plaintively.
The sound of Arnold's precipitate rush across the room and out of the door was followed by a tinkle of laughter from Sylvia. Morrison looked around at her over his shoulder, with a flashing smile of mutual understanding, but he finished the prelude before he spoke. Then, without turning around, as he pulled out another sheet from the music heaped on the piano, he remarked: "If that French philosopher was right when he said no disease is as contagious as love-making, we may expect soon to find the very chairs and tables in this house clasped in each other's arms. Old as I am, I feel it going to my head, like a bed of full-blooming valerian."
Sylvia made no answer. She felt herself flushing, and could not trust her voice to be casual. He continued for a moment to thumb over the music aimlessly, as though waiting for her to speak.
The beautiful room, darkened against the midsummer heat, shimmered dimly in a transparent half-light, the vivid life of its bright chintz, its occasional brass, its clean, daring spots of crimson and purple flowers, subdued into a fabulous, half-seen richness. There was not a sound. The splendid heat of the early August afternoon flamed, and paused, and held its breath.
Into this silence, like a bird murmuring a drowsy note over a still pool, there floated the beginning of Am Meer. Sylvia sat, passive to her finger-tips, a vase filled to the brim with melody. She stared with unseeing eyes at the back of the man at the piano. She was not thinking of him, she was not aware that she was conscious of him at all; but hours afterward wherever she looked, she saw for an instant again in miniature the slender, vigorous, swaying figure; the thick brown hair, streaked with white and curling slightly at the ends; the brooding head….
When the last note was still, the man stood up and moved away from the piano. He dropped into an arm-chair near Sylvia, and leaning his fine, ugly head back against the brilliant chintz, he looked at her meditatively. His great bodily suavity gave his every action a curious significance and grace. Sylvia, still under the spell of his singing, did not stir, returning his look out of wide, dreaming eyes.
When he spoke, his voice blended with the silence almost as harmoniously as the music…. "Do you know what I wish you would do, Miss Sylvia Marshall? I wish you would tell me something about yourself. Now that I'm no longer forbidden to look at you, or think about you…."