"I play after a fashion," he replied; "I cannot pretend to much skill."
"But you will let us judge for ourselves?" pleaded she, with a winning smile.
"Surely, mademoiselle, if it pleases you." And he went to seat himself before the instrument.
"What is this?" interrupted the pastor, turning towards them. "Why, Alide, you certainly will not ask the guest to furnish the entertainment? You must serve him first yourself, with a performance or a song."
"Indeed, I am not in the mood," remonstrated Alide, "but I will do my best." And without affectation she placed herself before the harpischord.
It was a primitive, tinkling little affair, evidently neglected by the schoolmaster, who should have tuned it long since. Alide played a couple of pieces in the ordinary mechanical style of country amateurs, and then sang with rather more sentiment a brief, tender, melancholy song. But Steck had little knowledge of the art, and if the performance had been faultless its merits would have been lost upon him. He scarcely knew how or what the girl was singing; he heard, or rather felt, the fresh clear voice ring through his brain; he watched the dainty white hands resting lightly on the old black keys, he noted the dewy, earnest eyes, the brightly flushed face, the royal little head, and at that moment for him there was nothing else in the world.
"Ah!" she cried, suddenly, "I cannot succeed. I am not in the vein." And she rose with a smile, or rather, as Steck said, "with that touch of serene joy that ever reposed on her countenance." "I cannot play; and yet it is not the fault of the harpsichord or my master. Let us go into the open air, and I will sing you one of my Alsatian songs,—they sound much better there."
He followed her with alacrity. The moist freshness of the twilight breeze, rich with the heavy fragrance of the honeysuckle overhead, blew towards them as Steck opened the door, and they stood out together in the porch. Around the wide gray meadows the mountains loomed huge and sombre against the faded sky, and the moon, still rosy from the vapors of the horizon, was slowly floating upward. Alide raised her head to see if any stars were yet shining, and all the white purity of heaven, which was neither light nor color, but something between the two, descended like a benediction upon the sweet flower-face. In her blithe, child-like voice, that vibrated with infinitely more mellowness in the large air, she began her favorite Alsatian ballad:
"I come from a forest as dark as the night,
And, believe me, I love thee, my only delight"—
caroling forth the refrain with the clear flute-notes of a bird. It had a strange, powerful effect upon the artist's impressionable temperament. When the song was ended he did not speak.