"Corney!" she cried—and the faces of the two were a contrast worth seeing—"you disgrace yourself! any one who can sing at all should be ashamed to sing no better than that!"
Then feeling that she ought not to be thus carried away, or quench with such a fierce lack of sympathy the smoking flax of any endowment, she threw her arms round his neck and kissed him. He received her embrace like the bear he was; the sole recognition he showed was a comically appealing look to Vavasor intended to say, "You see how the women use me! They trouble me, but I submit!"
"You naughty boy!" Hester went on, much excited, and speaking with great rapidity, "you never let me suspect you could sing any more than a frog—toad, I mean, for a frog does sing after his own rather monotonous fashion, and you don't sing much better! Listen to me, and I will show you how the song ought to have been sung. It's not worth a straw, and it's a shame to sing it, but if it be sung at all, it might as well be sung as well as it might!"
So saying she seated herself at the piano.
This convulsion was in Hester's being a phenomenon altogether new, for never before had she been beside herself in the presence of another.
She gazed for a moment at the song on the rest before her, then summoned as with a command the chords which Corney had seemed to pick up from among his feet, and began. The affect of her singing upon the song was as if the few poor shivering plants in the garden of March had every one blossomed at once. The words and music both were in truth as worthless as she had said; but they were words, and it was music, and words have always some meaning, and tones have always some sweetness; all the meaning and all the sweetness in the song Hester laid hold of, drew out, made the best of; while all the feeble element of the dramatic in it she forced, giving it an expression far beyond what could have been in the mind of the writer capable of such inadequate utterance—with the result that it was a different song altogether from that which Cornelius had sung. She gave the song such a second birth, indeed, that a tolerable judge might have taken it, so hearing it for the first time, for what it was not—a song with some existence of its own, some distinction from a thousand other wax flowers dipped in sugar-water for the humming-birds of society. The moment she ended, she rose ashamed, and going to the window looked out over the darkening sea.
Vavasor had not heard her sing before. He did not even know she cared for music; for Hester, who did not regard her faculty as an accomplishment but as a gift, treated it as a treasure to be hidden for the day of the Lord rather than a flag to be flaunted in a civic procession—was jealously shy over it, as a thing it would be profanation to show to any but loving eyes. To utter herself in song to any but the right persons, except indeed it was for some further and higher end justifying the sacrifice, appeared to her a kind of immodesty, a taking of her heart from its case, and holding it out at arm's length. He was astonished and yet more delighted. He was in the presence of a power! But all he knew of power was in society-relations. It was not a spirit of might he recognized, for the opening of minds and the strengthening of hearts, but an influence of pleasing for self-aggrandizement. Feeling it upon himself, he thought of it in its operation upon others, and was filled with a respect rising almost to the height of what reverence he was capable of. He followed her swiftly to the window, and through the gathering shadows of the evening she saw his eyes shine as he addressed her.
"I hardly know what I am about, Miss Raymount," he said, "except that I hear my own voice daring to address the finest non-professional singer I have ever yet heard."
Hester, to her own disgust and annoyance, felt her head give itself a toss she had never intended; but it was a true toss nevertheless, for she neither liked having attracted his admiration by such a song, nor the stress he laid on the word non-professional: did it not imply that she was not songstress enough for the profession of song?
"Excuse me, Mr. Vavasor, but how do you know I am not a professional singer?" she said with some haughtiness.