With the last fine chord of the Buona Notte there was a stillness broken only by the instant and ecstatic handclapping of Bina. If I ever saw the thing called Love shine forth from the human eyes, it suddenly illuminated those dusky eyes that moment.
“O Madonna! Madonna!” she cried, softly. “Encore! Encore!”
Lanagan zipped through a lustspeil, to drop back then to the Last Composition. It was truly remarkable, the manner in which he brought the encroaching blindness of the great Beethoven sobbing out of the misery of the minor base.
“Did a lot of that sort of thing when I was younger,” he said, apologetically. “Before the wanderlust hit me.”
He was through. Bina fluttered about him and Lanagan’s head was close to hers. She was a full-sexed creature but young; and I balked. I spoke to Lanagan sharply after a moment or two and we departed. She gave him a shy little glance as he left.
He laughed. “What a Covenanter you are! A psalm singer gone wrong for fair!”
“I don’t like it,” I said, stubbornly, but with the best of intentions. “She’s only a child.” I didn’t yet know all the sides of this man Lanagan.
He whirled on me: and I got a swift sense of the power that could flash from those dark eyes, and I felt, with the intimacy of personal experience, how effective they must be when working upon a guilty mind.
“Let me tell you, Howard,” he bit out, using my given name for the first time in our friendship, “Norrie” being his ordinary salutation, “that I’m working on the Ratto story. Get me? What do you take me for, anyhow? I’ve stood one welt from my own kind to-night and I don’t want another.”
Lanagan received his second apology of the night; but he didn’t appear to want it at that. His uncanny faculty of reading men’s minds seemed to tell him that my remark was in good faith.