At length he rose, still slowly, and stood for a moment in profound thought. Then, with a sudden briskness, as of a man who had made up his mind, he took the envelope, and, putting it into a drawer in his knee-hole table, turned the key upon it.
"It will be one of the very biggest deals," he remarked to himself.
A grand piano by Bechstein stood at the other side of the room, and Bach's St. Matthew Passion Music was open upon it. Mr. Alington took it up and turned over the pages with a loving reverence. He paused a moment, and hummed in his beautiful tenor voice the recitative of "And Peter went out," and then, lighting the candles, played a few crescendo chords, and plunged into the intricacies of the great double chorus of the lightnings and thunders. The sonorous and terrible fugue grew and grew under his deft hands, rising from crescendo to crescendo with its maddened, tumultuous ground-bass. A pause of a bar, and with a great burst he attacked the second part. He sang the air of "the bottomless pit" with full voice, while his hands quivered mistily in the frenzied chromatic accompaniment. The appalling terrors of the music possessed him; he seemed like a man demented. In the last six bars he doubled the bass as if written for pedals, and with the tierce de Picardy finished in a crashing chord.
Mr. Alington pushed his rather scanty hair back from his forehead and gave a great sigh full of reverential awe, the sigh of a religious artist. He was a true musician, and his own admirable performance of the wonderful text moved him; it smelled of the flames. Then after a moment he turned to the last chorus, the most perfect piece of pathos ever translated into sound, and played it through with all the reticence and sobriety of his utmost art. The wailing cadences, the simple phrases, touched him profoundly. Unlike Mrs. Murchison, he did not consider himself bound to worship Wagner, although the operas did not sound to him the least alike. He would have told you that he thought him artistically immoral, that he violated the canons of music, as binding, so he considered, on musicians as is the moral code on a civilized society. "A brilliant savage," he said once of that master; "but I know I am unfashionable."
He sat for a long minute perfectly still when he had finished the chorus, as absorbed in the thought of it as he had been in the mines half an hour before. Unaffected moisture stood in the man's eye; his face was that of a stout and rapturous saint in a stained-glass window contemplating some beatific vision. He was alone, and perfectly honest with himself. At length he shut the piano very softly, as if afraid of disturbing the exquisite sweetness and melancholy beauty of the music by any other sound, and, candle in hand, went to his bedroom. An admirable reproduction of Holman Hunt's "Lux Mundi" hung over his fireplace; the "Triumph of the Innocents" was directly above his anchorite-looking bed. They were favourite pictures of his, not only for their subject, but for the genuineness of their feeling. They seemed to him to have grasped something of the simplicity of the real pre-Raphaelite school—something of its soberness, its constant love of form, its childlike straightforwardness. There was an old oak prie-dieu by his bedside, with several well-thumbed books of devotion on it, and he knelt there a full ten minutes before he got into bed. He was thankful for many things—his health, his wealth, his perseverance, his brains, his power of appreciating beautiful things; and he prayed for their long continuance and well-being fervently.
Mr. Alington was a sound sleeper and an early riser, and neither his new and dizzy schemes nor the pathos of the Passion Music kept him awake. He had various appointments in the City on the following morning, and was going to lunch with Lord Conybeare at White's. Jack was not there when he arrived, and he had to solace his waiting moments with the inspection of the room set aside for the reception of strangers. It was furnished with a table, on which stood an empty inkstand and a carafe of stale-looking water, two horsehair chairs, a weighing-machine, and a row of hat pegs hung up inside a shelfless bookcase. He hoped, however, that he would not in the future have to confine himself to the stranger's room when he made an appointment there, since Jack had put him up for the membership of the club, got Tom Abbotsworthy to second him, and had induced a large number of members to append their noble names to his candidature.
Jack came in before long, looking as he always looked, even in the most broiling weather—perfectly cool, unharassed, and ill to quarrel with. He never seemed to get either hot or dirty, even in the underground; smuts passed him by, and settled on the noses of his less fortunate neighbours.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," he said. "Let us have lunch at once. You have not been here long, I hope."
"Only a few moments," said Alington; "and I fancy I was here before my time."