“You both play and sing, do you not, Miss Heartwell?” said Maria, addressing herself to Julia.
Julia, of course, said “very little,” that she hardly ever played, “excepting at home;” and that, moreover, she was just then haunted by the vocalist’s malific genius, a cold.
The facetious collector now seated himself near a very lovely young woman, who, I learnt from Tom, was the adjutant’s lady; a pleasant tête-à-tête followed; the lady seemed highly amused; the adjutant himself, who was a friend of Dilkhoob, soon joined them.
“Well, sir, here you find me,” said the old gentleman, “flirting with your wife. Sir, I love your wife.” The adjutant smiled (it was almost a mauvaise plaisanterie). “Yes, I’ve a right to love her, sir; I’m not forbidden to love her as long as I don’t covet her; and so I will love her, sir.”
The gentlemen laughed—the ladies looked into their fans—but it was only honest Dilkhoob, the privileged man.
Miss Heartwell now sat down to sing, Tom, in the most exemplary and obsequious manner, selecting her book and turning over the leaves.
Julia then drew off, deliberately, first from one hand and then from the other, her silk gloves, of a texture almost as light and delicate as gossamer or a spider’s web (which she placed on the piano), displaying two of the whitest, softest, and most beautifully turned little hands that I think I ever beheld; I doubt if Sir Roger de Coverley’s widow’s could have equalled them.
Having run these delicate fingers—like a bevy of white mice—rapidly over the keys, as if to ascertain the force and tone of the instrument, she paused, looked up, and, with a sort of girlish waywardness, said,—
“Well, now, what am I to sing?”
Tom, with infinite obsequiousness, pointed with his finger to an air he had selected—it was Moore’s exquisite song, “Those Evening Bells,” a song which will endure as long as man retains a right perception of the touching and the beautiful, and which expresses, in the happiest language, what thousands have felt, when that inexplicably sad and sadly pleasing music, the chime of distant bells floating softly over hill and dale, falls on the listening ear.