“We will try then, as you say, my dear Annie Laurie, to help the aunts find a new and interesting occupation. We will give them—some dolls to play with,” smiled Mr. Carson.
For he knew, and Annie Laurie knew, that the poor fretted old ladies needed them as much as any heart-starved mountain child.
CHAPTER XIII
THE LONG RED ROAD
There was music after dinner, and Mrs. Carson asked Annie Laurie to sing. It was a great moment in its way—that in which the shy girl with the oriole’s voice went out before all the company to sing to Mrs. Carson’s accompaniment. For a second or two she thought that she really could not. Then it came over her that it was a chance—that she who had lived that plain drab life was standing now where beautiful colors played about her. She was, she said to herself, in the heart of a rainbow. And a song was a song, just as a piece of furniture was a piece of furniture. She had already decided that she was not to be afraid of upholstering and silver and fine glass. Very well, then, why should she be afraid of a song, since she really had a voice and could sing? Her music lessons had been stopped since her father’s death, but Mrs. Carson often invited her to sing with her in the schoolroom where Carin’s piano stood, and she was quite aware that she had learned more from Mrs. Carson with her taste and her beautiful, delicate fashion of expression than she could from her teacher. So now, full, free, sad and deep, her young voice arose in:
“All are sleeping, weary heart,
Thou, thou only sleepless art.”
She thought of Sam away in his bare room, bending over those puzzling accounts of hers, working for her without pay, to redeem so far as he could his father’s terrible wrong. And as she thought of him, and the beauty of the song opened the doors of her heart, it seemed as if all that distrust of mankind which had come to her so bitterly when she first realized the great wrong that had been done her, went drifting out on the tide of song. So the lovely words to their noble setting poured from her lips with a sort of splendor, and when she had ceased, and had stood for a moment, motionless, her slender straight body tense with the rapture of it, she had the great happiness of hearing sincere and enthusiastic applause break from all the company in the drawing room.
Mrs. Carson and Carin were hardly less happy than she. They made her sing again and again; then Mrs. Carson forbade more.
“We’ll not have our singing bird excited so that she’ll lose her sleep the first night she stays under this roof,” she said. And then she herself, at the solicitation of her guests, sang some of those wonderful songs of hers. Annie Laurie could not understand the words, for they were now in one tongue and now another; but as the music rose and fell, shifting in its beauty as a sunset shifts its colors, or as water ripples in the wind, a great happiness flooded her. She sat thrilling to it, moved to the core of her being by its rhythm, and Mrs. Carson, arising from the piano, came straight to her.
“Annie Laurie Pace,” she said in her charming way, “I could feel all the strings of the piano vibrating again in you. You are a true musician. Sometime you and I will sit together night after night and listen to opera.”
“Oh!” Annie Laurie gasped. “It—it couldn’t be!”