Mary insisted on clearing off the table and washing the dishes, and the soldier insisted on helping her; so Miss Marilla, much disturbed that domestic duties should interfere with the evening, put everything away, and made the task as brief as possible, looking anxiously at Mary Amber every trip back from the refrigerator and pantry to see how she was getting on with the strange soldier, and how the strange soldier was getting on with her. At first she was a little troubled lest he shouldn’t be the kind of man she would want to introduce to Mary Amber; but after she had heard him talk and express such thoroughly wholesome views on politics and national subjects she almost forgot he was not the real Dick, and her doting heart could not help wanting Mary Amber to like him. He was, in fact, the personification of the Dick she had dreamed out for her own, as different in fact from the real Dick as could have been imagined, and a great deal better. His frank eyes, his pleasant manner, his cultured voice, all pleased her; and she couldn’t help feeling that he was Dick come back as she would have liked him to be all the time.
“I’d like to have a little music, just a little before Mary has to go home,” Miss Marilla said wistfully as Mary Amber hung up the dish-towel with an air that said plainly without words that she felt her duty toward the stranger was over and she was going to depart at once.
“Sure!” said the stranger. “You sing, don’t you, Miss Mary?”
There was nothing for it, and Mary resigned herself to another half hour. They went into the parlor; and Mary sat down at the old square piano, and touched its asthmatic keys that sounded the least bit tin-panny even under such skilled fingers as hers.
“What shall I play?” questioned Mary. “‘The long, long trail’?” There was a bit of sarcasm in her tone. Mary was a real musician, and hated rag-time.
“No! Never!” said the soldier quickly. “I mean—not that, please;” and a look of such bitter pain swept over his face that Mary glanced up surprised, and forgot to be disagreeable for several minutes while she pondered his expression.
“Excuse me,” he said. “But I loathe it. Give us something else; sing something real. I’m sure you can.” There was a hidden compliment in his tone, and Mary was surprised. The soldier had almost forgotten that he did not belong there. He was acting as he might have acted in his own social sphere.
Mary struck a few chords tenderly on the piano, and then broke into the delicious melody of “The Spirit Flower;” and Lyman Gage forgot that he was playing a part in a strange home with a strange girl, forgot that he hadn’t a cent in the world, and his girl was gone, and sat watching her face as she sang. For Mary had a voice like a thrush in the summer evening, that liquid appeal that always reminds one of a silver spoon dropped into a glass of water; and Mary had a face like the spirit flower itself. As she sang she could not help living, breathing, being the words she spoke.
There was nothing, absolutely nothing, about Mary to remind him of the girl he had lost; and there was something in her sweet, serious demeanor as she sang to call to his better nature; a wholesome, serious sweetness that was in itself a kind of antiseptic against bitterness and sweeping denunciation. Lyman Gage as he listened was lifted out of himself and set in a new world where men and women thought of something besides money and position and social prestige. He seemed to be standing off apart from himself and seeing himself from a new angle, an angle in which he was not the only one that mattered in this world, and in which he got a hint that his plans might be only hindrances to a larger life for himself and every one else. Not that he exactly thought these things in so many words. It was more as if while Mary sang a wind blew freshly from a place where such thoughts were crowding, and made him seem smaller in his own conceit than he had thought he was.
“And now sing ‘Laddie,’” pleaded Miss Marilla.