The first low note of the violin fell upon the silence like a faint, far voice, heard across a wide reach of calm water, and, as the marvelous melody swelled into the fullness of its motif, something new and strange stirred in Pépin's heart, mounted and tightened in his throat, ran tingling to his finger-tips. Through his half parted lips the breath tiptoed in and out, and his deep eyes grew every instant, could he have known it, more like those of the picture that he loved. So he stood entranced, seeing, hearing nothing but Pazzini and Pazzini's violin, till the sonata drew imperceptibly toward its close. Like the child, the great violinist seemed to be unconscious of all that surrounded him. Slowly, tenderly, he led his music through the last phrases, until he paused before the supreme high sweetness of the final note. How it was he could never have told, but, in that infinitesimal fraction of time, the training of years played him false. He knew that his finger-tip slipped an incalculable atom of space, but it was too late. The bow was on the string, and the imperceptibly flatted note swelled, sank, and died away, unrecognized, he thought, with a throb of thankfulness, by any save his master ear. And then—
"Ah-h!" said Pépin.
The long ripple of applause drowned the child's whisper, and for an instant the terror in his heart grew still, believing his exclamation unheard. Then it leaped to life again, for Pazzini was looking at him, his bow hovering above the instrument like his mother's in the picture. In the mysterious solitude of the crowded room the eyes of these two met, each reading the other's as they had been an open book, and in Pépin's was the pain of a wounded animal, and in Pazzini's a great wonder and sorrow, as of one who has hurt without intention, and mutely pleads for pardon.
As the applause ceased, the violinist turned to the Comte, and pointed to Pépin with his bow.
"Who is that child?" he asked.
The thaw in the de Villersexel's "academic manner" had been but momentary. With the renewed hum of conversation he was himself again, pale, proud, and immovable.
"It is my son, Pépin," he replied, with stiff courtesy. "How shall I thank you for your playing? It was the essence of perfection, as it has ever been, and ever will be."
But he could not know, as he turned away with Pépin, that in his heart the violinist said, "Her boy! I understand!"
The miracle of his summons to the salon that night was not, as it appeared, the actual climax of existence, for a new marvel awaited Pépin on the morrow. The doors of the dining-room had barely slid together behind them when the Comte turned to him.
"Yesterday was Christmas," he said.