Once more she began to play. She believed in fairies with all her heart and had no doubt but that every one else did. Under the spell of her music and her loveliness, imaginary elves stole from the solitude of the summer night, to join their tiny hands and dance to the rhythm of her song.
As she lowered her violin and looked around, she saw astonishment on the faces of the strangers about her. A deathlike hush prevailed and Jinnie could hear the feverish 141 blood as it struck at her temples. Into her eyes came an unfathomable expression, and Theodore King, attracted by their latent passion, went rapidly to her.
“It’s exquisite!” he said vehemently. “Can’t you see how much every one likes it?”
“Do you?” queried Jinnie, looking up at him.
“I love it, child; I love it.... Will you play again, please?”
A flame of joy suffused her as again she turned to the open-eyed crowd.
“Once,” she informed them, “a big lion was hurt in the forest by lightning.... This—is—how he died.”
She slowly raised the instrument, and sounded a vibrant, resonant, minor tone, measured, full and magnificent. Each listener sank back with a sigh.
Jinnie knew the mysteries of the forest as well as a singer knows his song, and she had not presented ten notes to the imagination of Theodore’s friends before they were carried away from the dainty room in which they sat—away into a dense woodland where, for a few minutes, she demonstrated the witching wonders of it. Then she slipped the bow between her teeth and struck the violin strings with the backs of her fingers. The vibrations of impetuous harmony swept softly through the lighted room. Louder and louder was heard the awful fury of approaching thunder, while twinkling string-touches flashed forth the lightning between the sonorous peals.
Jinnie never knew how the fiddle was capable of expressing the cautious tread of the terrified king of beasts in his isolated kingdom, but her listeners beheld him steal cautiously from the underbrush. They saw him crouch in abject terror at the foot of a wide-spreading, gigantic tree, lashing his tail in elemental rage. Then another scintillating flash of lightning, and the beast caught it 142 full in the face. The slender hand of the little player was poised above the strings for a single vibrating moment, during which she stood in a listening attitude. Then, with the sweep of three slender fingers, the lion’s scream cut the air like a two-edged sword.