Miss Dasomma came to spend a few days with Hester and help celebrate her birthday: she was struck with improvement where she would have been loath to allow it either necessary or possible. Compelled to admit its presence, she loved her yet more—for the one a fact, the other was a necessity.
Her birthday was the sweetest of summer days, and she looked a perfect summer-born woman. She dressed herself in white, but not so much for her own birthday as for Mark's into the heavenly kingdom.
After breakfast all except the mother went out. Hester was little inclined to talk, and the major was in a thoughtful, brooding mood. Miss Dasomma and Mr. Raymount alone conversed. When the rest reached a certain spot whither Mr. Raymount had led them for the sake of the view, Hester had fallen a little behind, and Christopher went back to meet her.
"You are thinking of your brother," he said, in a tone that made her feel grateful.
"Yes," she answered.
"I knew by your eyes," he returned. "I wish I could talk to you about him. The right way of getting used to death is to go nearer the dead. Suppose you tell me something about him! Such children are rare! They are prophets to whose word we have to listen."
He went on like this, drawing her from sadness with gentle speech about children and death, and the look and reality of things; and so they wandered about the moor for a little while before joining the rest.
Mr. Raymount was much pleased with Christopher, and even Corney found himself drawn to his side, feeling, though he did not know it, a strength in him that offered protection.
The day went on in the simplest, pleasantest intercourse. After lunch, Hester opened her piano, and asked Miss Dasomma, gifted in her art even to the pitch prophetic, to sit down and play—-"upon us" she said. And in truth she did: for what the hammers were to the strings, such were the sounds she drew from them to the human chords stretched expectant before her. Vibrating souls responded in the music that is unheard. A rosy conscious silence pervaded the summer afternoon and the ancient drawing-room, in which the listeners were one here and one there, all apart—except Corney and "Mrs. Corney," as for love of Mark she liked to be called, on a sofa side by side, and Saffy playing with a white kitten, neither attending to the music, which may have been doing something for both notwithstanding. Mr. Raymount sat in a great soft chair with a book in his hand, listening more than reading: his wife lay on a couch, and soon passed into dreams of pleasant sounds; the major stood erect by Miss Dasomma, a little behind her, with his arms folded across his chest; and Christopher sat on a low window-seat in an oriel, where the balmiest of perfumed airs freely entered. Between him and all the rest hung the heavy folds of a curtain, which every now and then swelled out like the sail of Cleopatra's barge "upon the river Cydnus."
He sat with the tears rolling down his face, for the music to which he listened seemed such as he had only dreamed of before. It was the music of climes where sorrow is but the memory of that which has been turned into joy. He thought no one saw him, and no one would have seen him but for the traitor wind seeming only to play with the curtain but every now and then blowing it wide out, as if the sheet of the sail had been let go, and revealing him to Hester where she sat on a stool beside her mother and held her sleeping hand. It was to her the revelation of a heart, and she saw with reverence.