It was so lonely, too—so very lonely. Used to the pleasant uproar and friendliness and excitement of cities, this little clearing in the great silent bush oppressed her intolerably after a week or two.
She had been a little ill before leaving Sydney. The doctors had said her nervous system was completely run down—a shocking thing in a child! They advised complete rest for several months, and expressed their opinion that the quiet bush life at Wilgandra and roughing it with children, who would take her out of herself, would be the best possible thing for her, and the triumphal career could be resumed later on.
So there were to be no concerts yet, no happy strivings to interpret Chopin's varying moods to a breathless audience, to reach up with Mendelssohn to his pleasant sunlit heights, to go down with Wagner to strange depths that stirred her soul. She was to practise very little, to appear in public not at all. The papers expressed their regret at her illness, and said a kind thing or two. After that her name had no mention in them.
One paragraph she had read had touched her to the quick. Some interviewer who had been to see her in Sydney wrote in his paper, 'Thank Heaven, she is not pretty! Her chances are hereby much greater.'
Poor little Fifteen! Her pillow was wet that night. She felt she had much rather he had said, 'She has no genius, but she is very pretty.' She longed for Hermie's shining wavy hair, for the sweet blue of her eyes, the pink that pulsed about her cheeks. Who cared if you could interpret the waves and storms of Lizst's rhapsodies, and let the keen little rifts of melody in between the thunder until the almost intolerable sweetness made the heart ache? Who cared that Leschetizky himself had taught you and had tears in his eyes once, when you had played to him the wind in the trees just as he himself heard it? What did all these things matter? Every one went home from your concerts and forgot all about you. Oh, surely it were better to be so exquisitely pretty that all who saw you loved you on the spot!
She looked at herself again and again in the glass that night. Until that wounding paragraph, she had never given one thought to her looks; the sensitive small face, the grey eyes drenched with this new tragedy, the fair straight hair falling over her shoulders—not pretty, not pretty, and all the world knew it now!
She drifted in from the verandah to the living-room, where the piano stood open as Hermie had left it, when, imagining Challis out of hearing an hour or two ago, she had sat down to it for a few minutes. But the cheap tinkling stuff that comprised poor Hermie's repertoire—the jingling waltzes, the pretty-pretty compositions of Gustave Lange and Brindley Richards, 'Edelweiss' and 'Longing,' 'Warblings at Eve,' and such—they set her ear horribly on edge, though she would rather have died than have said so. It were less torture to hear Flossie thumping conscientiously away at 'The Blue Bells of Scotland' and 'We're a' Noddin'.'
The very piano was a heartache; it was seven years since it had been tuned, and despite the careful dusting of Miss Browne, the silverfish led a gay existence in its interior, and ate all the softness and depth from the notes.
But this afternoon the girl, with that vague misery tugging at her heart, was driven to it; nothing else could ease her. She put her foot down on the soft pedal, to keep the discordant jangle away, and avoiding as much as she could the B that was flat, and the D that was dumb, and the F sharp that Roly had torn off bodily, she worked off the gloom that oppressed her with Beethoven and Bach.
Roly came in. He was arming himself for a new attack on Ladysmith; he had the kitchen poker and the stove-brush, the tin-opener, a knife from a broken plough, a genuine boomerang, the corkscrew, the gravy-strainer, and the carving-knife, disposed about his person, and he came into the living-room, his eye roving about in search of fresh implements of warfare. Nothing seemed to appeal to him, however, and he was going out again discontentedly when he noticed his new sister had dropped her hands from the keyboard, and was resting her forehead there instead.