The words of parting were short, and Edward, still tingling with music, still inflamed by that lambent fire, went back to his house. In musical matters, despite his own incompetence in matter of performance, he had an excellent judgment, and he knew that he had been listening that night to the real thing. There was no question as to the quality of Elizabeth's playing; she had authority, without which the most agile execution is no more than a mere facility of finger, acquirable like the nimble manoeuvres of a conjurer, and in itself as devoid of artistic merit. That magic, like his, is a matter of mere manipulation, and no more constitutes a pianist than does the power of pronouncing words without stammer or stumbling constitute an actor. But behind Elizabeth's playing sat the master, who understood by virtue of perception the meaning of music, and by virtue of hands co-ordinated with that burning perception, could interpret. And, above all, he felt that in music she spoke his language, uttered the idioms he understood but could not give voice to. Her soul and his were natives of the same melodious country; not foreigners to each other.
He told himself, and honestly believed it, that there was no more than this—as if this was not enough—in the hour he had spent in Mrs. Hancock's drawing-room. He was not even sure whether he liked Elizabeth or not; certainly she was as different as might well be from the type of marriageable maidenhood which had so greatly and so sanely attracted him that he rejoiced to know that his future life would be intimately and entirely bound up in hers. All through dinner Elizabeth had meant nothing at all to him, and he had noted, rather than admired, her vitality, for certainly she was like a light brought into a dusky room, dispersing the shadows that completely and somnolently brooded in the corners, and restoring colour to mere grey outlines. But he was not very sure that he desired or appreciated this unusual illumination; they had all of them got on very nicely in the dark, where if you dozed a little, there was not much probability of being detected, and of late he had sat with chair close to Edith's, so to speak, and listened with tenderness to Mrs. Hancock talking on in her sleep. Into this had Elizabeth come with her vivid bull's-eye lantern, which got in one's eyes a little, and was slightly disconcerting.
So had it been until she played, and at that moment and in that regard he found her simply and utterly adorable; and he poured out his homage for her as he would have done for some splendid Brunnhilde awaking and hailing the sun. And he knew the nature of the homage he brought, so he as yet confidently told himself, a homage as sexless and impersonal as that which prompts the presentation of wreaths to elderly and perspiring conductors at the close of an act. It needed not a Brunnhilde to evoke that, for it was merely the tribute to artistic interpretation manifested by man or woman, and responded to by those who could appreciate. Mrs. Hancock's deplorable ejaculation of "Tum-ti-ti; tum-ti-ti" was of the same nature. It was not a tribute to Elizabeth, nor was his abandonment of himself to her spell, or, at the most, it was a tribute to her fingers, for the music that flowed from them. But how he would have worshipped that gift in another; if only it had been Edith who played!
He had sat himself down in the broad window-seat of his drawing-room, which looked out into the garden and trees that a fortnight before had stood made of ebony and ivory in the blaze of the May moonlight, on the night when the house next door had been empty. To-night it was tenanted, tenanted by the girl who, within a few months, would come across so short a space of lawn and make her home with him, tenanted also by the dark, vivid presence of her who had made music to them. In his drawing-room where he sat, empty and blazing with electric light, for some unaccounted impulse had made him turn on all the switches, stood his big black piano, with inviolate top, standing open. How would Elizabeth awake the soul in it, even as Siegfried had by his kiss awakened Brunnhilde, by the magic of her comprehending fingers! Almost he could see her there, with her profile, a little defiant, a little mutinous, cut, cameo-wise, against the dark grey of his walls, with her eye kindling as she listened to the music in her brain, which flowed like some virile, tumultuous heart-beat out of her fingers. How well she understood the tramp and colour of that Novelette!—yet he knew he understood it quite as well himself—how unerringly her fingers marshalled and painted it! In her was the secret, the initiation, and—oh, how much it meant!—in her also was the mysterious power of communication. She was not one of those incomplete souls who are born dumb, as so many were. She could speak.... Others were born empty, and so their power of speech was but a bottle of senseless sounds, of flat wooden phrases.... And then, with a shock of surprise to himself, he became aware that he was thinking no longer about the music which Elizabeth made, but Elizabeth who made it.
[CHAPTER VII]
THE INTERMEZZO
Business on the Stock Exchange had been, as was not uncommon, somewhat slack during this month of June, and Edward found it easy to get down to Heathmoor by the train that arrived soon after five instead of that which started an hour later. It was natural for him, after getting rid of the habiliments of town, to come round next door, where he would find Mrs. Hancock and Edith ready to give him a slightly belated cup of tea in the garden-house that adjoined the croquet-lawn. As a rule Elizabeth was not there, but her whereabouts was indicated by the sound of the piano, for she was practising with the energy of the enthusiast, and found this hour, when the house was empty and she could escape from the sense of disturbing or being disturbed, the most congenial time in which to make as much noise as she chose, or to practise a particular bar in endless repetition. Mrs. Hancock continued to believe—and to reiterate—that Edward was the maestro and that Elizabeth followed, faint but pursuing, in the wake of his victorious fingers, and she often asked him how he thought she was getting on. He frequently dined there, and, with the regularity that characterized her, she insisted on his playing one or more of his "pieces" when he had smoked the cigarette that detained him in the dining-room. And on these occasions his eye was wont to seek Elizabeth's in tacit apology, and though no word had passed between them on the subject the situation was quite clear to them both. More than once he had attempted to convince Mrs. Hancock that while he could only strum abominably her niece played, and she, perfectly incredulous, thought it was nice of him to be so modest himself and to encourage Elizabeth. So, protest being utterly useless, he played, with Elizabeth in his confidence. But the sense of this secret between them—for Edith shared her mother's belief in the maestro—gave him a peculiar and, so he still told himself, an inexplicable satisfaction. With that knowledge he enjoyed, rather than otherwise, his own long-drawn murders of the classical authors, and he completely understood the dimpling smile that fluttered, light-winged, over Elizabeth's face as he performed his ruthless deeds.
During this last fortnight life at Arundel had pursued, to all outward appearance, the regulated and emotionless course that characterized existence at Heathmoor. The time of strawberries had come, and therefore also the time of garden parties; and a quarter of an hour after the arrival of the evening train from town the well-laid roads were thick with hurrying flannelled figures, carrying lawn-tennis racquets or croquet mallets, for this latter game was taken with extreme seriousness, and nobody among the regular players would have dreamed of trusting to a mallet of the house. Elizabeth naturally had her share in these invitations, and it was a source of never-ending surprise to see young and athletically limbed men, of the same species apparently as those who in India spent their leisure in polo and pig-sticking, pursuing their laborious way through hoop after hoop, and talking about the game afterwards with greater gusto and minuteness than if they had been tiger-shooting. Chief amongst those heroes of the lawn was Edward, but he, as she did him the justice to observe, preserved the reticence of the accustomed conqueror and sat silent when the Vicar and Mr. Dale "lived their triumphs o'er again." Elizabeth felt that to be like him, but she made the admission grudgingly.
The fact that she grudged him such credit was symptomatic of her feelings towards him, and in especial of those feelings which she did not admit. Though she would honestly have denied it, she was fighting him. Again and again, not knowing why, she assured herself that he was a very ordinary young man, that Edith must be blind, so to speak, to see anything in him. Except in one point, she told herself that there was nothing there, that a lanky frame—it was beyond her power to deny his inches—crowned by a vacant face, was the harbourage of an insignificant soul. He spent his day among the money-bags, his evening on the croquet-lawn, and found that sufficient for him. He was not nearly worthy of Edith or of Edith's inexplicable adoration; he was not even, so he appeared to Elizabeth's eye, in love with her, which would have been a foundation for worthiness. He seemed indulgent of her, kind to her, sometimes a little impatient of her. There Elizabeth did not wholly acquit her cousin of blame; she set him, willy-nilly, on a pedestal, and those on pedestals, for he did not deprecate the plinth, are bound to stoop. But he should have stepped down from the pedestal, he should not have consented to be edified into the statuesque; here was the ground of Elizabeth's censure of him. In fine, she reminded herself twenty times a day of some reason for belittling to her own mind her cousin's betrothed, and concealed from herself that she belittled him. That was an affair of her instinct, and instinctively she knew, though she whispered it not to herself, why she did it, for she feared to give rein to her liking for him.