“Are you going to be kind enough to let us hear you play, Mrs. Severing?” he asked her. “The piano is an Erard, and though it is not new, I should very much like you to try it, if you will.”
“Do,” said Lady Argent cordially.
Ludovic wondered whether the cordiality sprang from a certain weariness which he thought that he could detect in his parent’s expression. It seemed to him that one might weary rather speedily in Mrs. Severing’s company. But when she was seated before the Erard, a load of rings removed from her white supple fingers, and the sound of one of her own “Preludes” filling the room, Ludovic felt inclined to change his mind.
Nina Severing at the piano interested him. He felt that “meretricious” was still the word that he would apply to her talent, but her rendering of her own inspirations struck him as an odd bit of self-revelation.
The “Prelude” was a rapid, highly-technical tour-de-force of muscular agility, with the merest and most disconnected thread of melody possible in the treble, and in syncopated time. Ludovic divined that Nina regarded it as her masterpiece. She played with great self-confidence and an amount of force that was rather surprising.
Afterwards, at Lady Argent’s request, she played a Chopin Polonaise and the too well-known Minute-Waltz. Her rendering of neither satisfied Ludovic’s taste, but he listened with an interest that was almost profound.
“She is only sincere when she is dealing with her own compositions,” was his final verdict. “As an interpreter she fails altogether. She does not attempt to give us Chopin’s Chopin, but Nina Severing’s Chopin—the Chopin of the author of the ‘Kismet’ songs. And so the polonaise becomes trivial, almost a little vulgar—it is utterly above and beyond her personality.” He gave himself up to interested musings, and listened to Nina’s subsequent performances with his outward ear only.
But Frances and Lady Argent gave the popular musician her full meed of applause and congratulation.
“How you can ever have time to practise all those things, and learn them by heart, I can’t imagine,” said Lady Argent admiringly. “When I think what difficulty I had as a girl in memorizing a very pretty thing called ‘The Maiden’s Prayer,’ which I believe is quite out of date nowadays—but then I was never considered particularly musical. Ludovic gets it all from his father.”
“Celtic blood,” said Nina, pronouncing the C as though it had been S. “No—memorizing has never been of much difficulty to me. Things just seem to come, you know. As a child I used to spend hours and hours in an old organ-loft, just playing to myself, you know—always alone, but never lonely so long as I could make music.” Her eyes deepened and grew introspective over this pathetic sketch, which happened to be a fancy one, and it was with a perceptible effort that she presently shook off her slight appearance of absorption and once more begged to be shown the chapel.