He spoke when there was occasion, and was listened to, but some time had passed before he turned to Mrs. Schuyler. “I wonder if it would be too great a liberty if I asked Miss Torrance to give us some music,” he said. “I am going away to-morrow to a desolate outpost in New Mexico, and it will be the last time for months that I shall have a treat of that kind.”
Flora Schuyler opened the piano, and Hetty smiled at Cheyne as she took her place; but the man made a little gesture of negation when Mrs. Schuyler would have rung for lights.
“Wouldn’t it be nicer as it is?” he said.
Hetty nodded, and there was silence before the first chords rang softly through the room. Though it may have been that the absence of necessity to strive and stain her daintiness amidst the press was responsible for much, Hetty Torrance’s voice had failed to win her fame; but she sang and played better than most well-trained amateurs. Thus there was no rustle of drapery or restless movements until the last low notes sank into the stillness. Then the girl glanced at the man who had unobtrusively managed to find a place close beside her.
“You know what that is?” she said.
Carolina Schuyler laughed. “Jake knows everything!”
“Yes,” said the man quietly. “A nocturne. You were thinking of something when you played it.”
“The sea,” said Flora Schuyler, “when the moon is on it. Was that it, Hetty?”
“No,” said Miss Torrance, who afterwards wondered whether it would have made a great difference if she had not chosen that nocturne. “It was the prairie when the stars are coming out over Cedar Range. Then it seems bigger and more solemn than the sea. I can see it now, wide and grey and shadowy, and so still that you feel afraid to hear yourself breathing, with the last smoky flush burning on its northern rim. Now, you may laugh at me, for you couldn’t understand. When you have been born there, you always love the prairie.”
Then with a little deprecatory gesture she touched the keys again. “It will be different this time.”